The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and
enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the
US government. In the process of writing my book Surveillance Valley, I
was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence —
including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates —
between the Tor Project and its main funder, a CIA spinoff now known as
the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). These files show incredible
cooperation between Tor and the regime change wing of the US
government. The files are released to the public here. —Yasha Levine
surveillancevalley | I obtained the documents in 2015. By then I had already spent a
couple of years doing extensive reporting on Tor's deeply conflicted
ties to the regime change wing of the U.S. government. By following the
money, I discovered that Tor was not grassroots. I was able to show that
despite its radical anti-government cred, Tor was almost 100% funded by
three U.S. national security agencies: the Navy, the State Department
and the BBG. Tor was military contractor with its own government
contractor number — a privatized extension of the very same government
that it claimed to be fighting.
This was a shocking revelation.
For years, the Tor Project — along with other government-funded
crypto tools like Signal — has been seen in almost religious terms by
the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government
spying online.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital
equivalent of the First Amendment. The ACLU backed it. Fight for the
Future, the hip Silicon Valley activist group, declared Tor to be
“NSA-proof.” Edward Snowden held it up as an example of the kind of
grassroots privacy technology that could defeat government surveillance
online, and told his followers to use it. Prominent award-winning
journalists from Wired, Vice, The Intercept, The Guardian and Rolling
Stone — including Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Andy Greenberg
— all helped pump up Tor's mythical anti-state rebel status. Even Daniel
Ellsberg, the legendary whistleblower, was convinced that Tor was vital
to the future of democracy. Anyone who questioned this narrative and
pointed to Tor's lavish government support was attacked, ridiculed,
smeared and hounded into silence. I know because that's what Tor
supporters tried to do to me.
But the facts wouldn't go away.
The initial evidence that I had gathered in my reporting left little
room for doubt about Tor's true nature as foreign policy weapon of the
U.S. government. But the box of FOIA documents I received from the BBG
took that evidence to a whole new level.
Why would the U.S. government fund a tool that limited its own power?
The answer, as I discovered, was that Tor didn't threaten American
power. It enhanced it.
The FOIA documents showed collaboration between the federal
government, the Tor Project and key members of the privacy and Internet
Freedom movement on a level that was hard to believe:
The documents showed Tor employees taking orders from their handlers
in the federal government, including hatching plans to deploy their
anonymity tool in countries that the U.S. was working to destabilize:
China, Iran, Vietnam, Russia. They showed discussions about the need to
influence news coverage and to control bad press. They featured monthly
updates that described meetings and trainings with the CIA, NSA, FBI,
DOJ and State Department. They also revealed plans to funnel government
funds to run "independent" Tor nodes. Most shockingly, the FOIA
documents put under question Tor's pledge that it would never put in any
backdoors into their software. (See below.)
twitlonger | The founder of Freedom Hosting has been arrested in Ireland and is awaiting extradition to USA.
In a crackdown that FBI claims to be about hunting down pedophiles, half
of the onion sites in the TOR network has been compromised, including
the e-mail counterpart of TOR deep web, TORmail.
This is undoubtedly a big blow to the TOR community, Crypto Anarchists,
and more generally, to Internet anonymity. All of this happening during
DEFCON.
If you happen to use and account name and or password combinations that you have re used in the TOR deep web, change them NOW.
Eric Eoin Marques who was arrested runs a company called Host Ultra Limited.
"Down for Maintenance
Sorry, This server is currently offline for maintenance. Please try again in a few hours."
If you saw this while browsing Tor you went to an onion hosted by
Freedom Hosting. The javascript exploit was injected into your browser
if you had javascript enabled. Fist tap Arnach.
Logical outcomes from this?
1. FBI/NSA just shut down the #1 biggest hosting site and #1 most wanted person on Tor
2. Silkroad is next on their list, being the #2 most wanted (#1 was Child Porn, #2 is drugs)
3. Bitcoin and all crypto currenecies set to absolutely CRASH as a
result since the feds can not completely control this currency as they
please.
I don't always call the Feds agenda transparent, but when i do, I say they can be trying harder.
pastebin | This is a guide with which even a total noob can get high class security for his system and complete anonymity online. But its not only for noobs, it contains a lot of tips most people will find pretty helpful. It is explained so detailed even the biggest noobs can do it^^ :
=== The Ultimate Guide for Anonymous and Secure Internet Usage v1.0.1 ===
Table of Contents:
1. Obtaining Tor Browser 2. Using and Testing Tor Browser for the first time 3. Securing Your Hard Drive 4. Setting up TrueCrypt, Encrypted Hidden Volumes 5. Testing TrueCrypt Volumes 6. Securing your Hard Disk 7. Temporarily Securing Your Disk, Shredding Free Space 8. Installing VirtualBox 9. Installing a Firewall 10. Firewall Configuration 11. Installing Ubuntu 12. Ubuntu Initial Setup 13. Installing Guest Additions 14. Installing IRC (Optional) 15. Installing Torchat (Optional) 16. Creating TOR-Only Internet Environment 17. General Daily Usage
By the time you are finished reading and implementing this guide, you will be able to securely and anonymously browse any website and to do so anonymously. No one not even your ISP or a government agent will be able to see what you are doing online. If privacy and anonymity is important to you, then you owe it to yourself to follow the instructions that are presented here.
In order to prepare this guide for you, I have used a computer that is running Windows Vista. This guide will work equally well for other versions of Windows. If you use a different operating system, you may need to have someone fluent in that operating system guide you through this process. However, most parts of the process are easily duplicated in other operating systems.
I have written this guide to be as newbie friendly as possible. Every step is fully detailed and explained. I have tried to keep instructions explicit as possible. This way, so long as you patiently follow each step, you will be just fine. In this guide from time to time you will be instructed to go to certain URLs to download files. You do NOT need TOR to get these files, and using TOR (while possible) will make these downloads very slow. This guide may appear overwhelming. Every single step is explained thoroughly and it is just a matter of following along until you are done. Once you are finished, you will have a very secure setup and it will be well worth the effort.
Even though the guide appears huge, this whole process should take at the most a few hours. You can finish it in phases over the course of several days. Fist tap Arnach.
slate | Using the dead-drop tactic can
certainly reduce the chances that sweeping surveillance dragnets will
gobble up your communications—but it is not exactly secure. The method was used by the planners of the Madrid train bombings
in 2004, which killed 191 people, helping them to operate below the
radar of Big Brother. However, law enforcement agencies over the years
have grown accustomed to terrorists using the dead drop, and
technologies have been developed to help counter it.
An interception tool developed by the networking company Zimbra, for
instance, was specifically designed to help combat email dead drops. Zimbra’s “legal Intercept” technology allows law enforcement agencies to obtain “copies of email messages
that are sent, received, or saved as drafts from targeted accounts.” An
account that is under surveillance, with the help of Zimbra’s
technology, will secretly forward all of its messages, including drafts,
to a “shadow account” used by law enforcement. This may have been how
the FBI was able to keep track of all correspondence being exchanged
between Petraeus and Broadwell.
(It’s also worth noting that archived draft emails stored alongside
sent and received messages on Google’s servers can actually be obtained
by law enforcement with very little effort. Due to the outdated Electronic and Communications and Privacy Act, any content stored in the cloud can be obtained by the government without a warrant if it’s older than six months, as Wiredreported last year.)
What this means is that if Petraeus and Broadwell had been savvy
enough to use encryption and anonymity tools, their affair would
probably never have been exposed. If they had taken advantage of PGP encryption,
the FBI would have been able to decipher their randy interactions only
after deploying Trojan-style spyware onto Broadwell’s computer. Further
still, if the lovers had only ever logged into their pseudonymous Gmail
accounts using anonymity tools like Tor, their real IP addresses would have been masked and their identities extremely difficult to uncover.
But then it is unlikely that they ever expected to come under FBI
surveillance. Their crime was a moral one, not a felony, so there was no
real reason to take extra precautions. In any other adulterous
relationship a pseudonym and a dead drop would be more than enough to
keep it clandestine, as my Slate colleague Farhad Manjoo noted in an email.
Broadwell slipped up when she sent the harassing emails—as that, as
far as we know, is what ended up exposing her and Petraeus to
surveillance. Whether the harassment was serious enough to merit email
monitoring is still to be established, as Emily Bazelon writes on “XX Factor.” It goes without saying, however, that the real error
here was ultimately made by Petraeus. If he had stayed faithful to his
wife of 38 years in the first place, he’d still be in charge at the
CIA—and I wouldn’t be writing about how he could have kept his adultery
secret more effectively by using encryption.
racket |Today you’ll find two new #TwitterFiles threads out, one by longtime Racket contributor Matt Orfalea, and another
by Andrew Lowenthal, who worked for 18 years defending digital rights
at EngageMedia and watched activists in his space slowly be absorbed by
what we’re now calling “The Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
The
two new threads collectively show the wide political range of
revelations in the #TwitterFiles material, which have been slandered —
absurdly — as a partisan exercise. Lowenthal, who in his “Insider’s
Guide to ‘Anti-Disinformation’” describes himself as a
“progressive-minded Australian,” printed a series of exchanges between
journalists who attended a summer “tabletop exercise” at the Aspen
Institute about a hack-and-leak operation involving Burisma and Hunter
Biden, weeks before the actual event. When the actual scandal broke not
long after, the existence of that tabletop exercise clearly become
newsworthy, but none of the journalists present, who included David
Sanger of the New York Times and current Rolling Stone editor
Noah Schactman — said a word. Perhaps, as was common with anti-disinfo
conferences, the event was off the record. (We asked, and none of the
reporters commented). It doesn’t matter. Lowenthal showed how another
“anti-disinformation” conference featured the headline speaker Anthony
Blinken. He’s currently suspected of having “triggered” the infamous
letter signed by 50 intelligence officers saying the Hunter Biden laptop
story had the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
As Lowenthal writes: “See how it works? The people accusing others of “disinformation” run the biggest disinformation campaigns themselves.”
On
the flip side, Orfalea found a document showing that both the Wikileaks
account and that of Dr. Jill Stein were algorithmically added by
Twitter to a list given the creepy name is_russian.
This was one of two buckets of “Russians” Twitter was collecting, one
called “A Priori Russians” (usually, accounts identified as Russian by
3rd party researchers), the other “Inferred Russians” (accounts that had
“strong,” “medium,” or “weak” “signals” of Russianness, involving
language, type of email account, location of IP address, tweet time,
etc). Even Twitter’s own analysts noted that any system that “captured”
Jill Stein as “Russian” spoke to the “overly broad nature of
is_russian.” It was just such a “signals” or “marker”-based methodology
that Twitter and other researchers used to identify “Russians” on the
Internet, a methodology Twitter internally called one of “educated
guesses,” concealing a company secret about identifying accounts linked
to Russia’s Internet Research Agency: “We have no realistic way of
knowing this on a Twitter-centric basis.”
As Stein
noted when I spoke to her yesterday, these unseen algorithmic tweaks to
the political landscape have the effect of decreasing the visibility of
political independents during a time of “record hunger for political
alternatives.” Stein noted a Gallup poll just showed
“identification with the Democratic and Republican parties is at an
all-time low,” and said such digital meddling is “an outrageous excuse
for political repression,” and “more that Joe McCarthy would be proud
of.”
When Stella Assange was told about the is_russian
list, she first speculated that any algorithm that demerited users based
on location might produce false positives if account holders used, say,
the Tor Browser, which could “randomly result in an RU exit node.”
Since “Tor is an essential tool for civil liberties and privacy
communities,” you could have people being tossed in a “Russian” bucket
for the crime of trying to evade surveillance.
In another part of
his thread, Orfalea notes that a Clemson University researcher hailed as
a “troll hunter” in the press and used as a source by major media
outlets, speculated that an account called @drkwarlord that was sharing a
hashtag, #BloombergisRacist because the account was tweeting at odd
hours:
That’s the “expert” opinion. Orfalea just called @drkwarlord, who laughed, “I’m a nurse at a hospital in Indiana. In 2020, I worked the night shift.”
Whether it’s suppression of a news story conservatives care about like the Hunter Biden laptop tale, or deamplification of a left-leaning Green Party candidate like Jill Stein, the #TwitterFiles consistently hit at the same theme, but it’s not partisan.
It’s really summed up by something Stella Assange said, about the difference between Wikileaks and the “anti-disinformation” facsimile, Bellingcat. “Wikileaks coined ‘intelligence agency of the people.’ Bellingcat went with ‘for the people.’”
Civil society institutions, the media, politicians, and government are supposed to maintain distance from one another in democracy.
The Censorship-Industrial Complex shows an opposite instinct, for all of these groups to act in concert, essentially as one giant, incestuous intelligence operation — not of the people, but paternalistically “for” the people, or so they believe. Journalists attend conferences where news happens and do not report it, breaking ranks neither with conference organizers, nor with each other. The Trump era has birthed a new brand of paranoid politics, where once-liberalizing institutions like the press and NGOs are encouraged to absorb into a larger whole, creating a single political cartel to protect against the “contagion” of mass movements. As Lowenthal notes, this explains why so many “anti-disinformation” campaigns describe language as a kind of disease, e.g. “infodemic,” “information pollution,” and “information disorder.”
It took a minute to figure out that TOR is the antithesis of what it claims to be - and is in fact nothing other than a surveillance honeypot. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me....,
anonhq | To some Bitcoin is the Free Market’s answer to crony capitalism, communism, the endless inflation of fiat currencies and all that is wrong with the world. To others, it is a worthless digital creation – numbers on a screen with no backing, a bubble with no value beyond what arbitrarily imagined number a savvy Crypto “Expert” would tell you.
In between, you have those that view Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme – but one worth cashing in on while the getting is good; those who use it as a deflationary store of wealth, akin to a prized Picasso but more liquid; and those who see the rise of other cryptos that could do what Bitcoin does – but better, and dethrone Bitcoin with a one true cryptocurrency to break the banks.
There is one last school of thought, the conspiracy theorist of conspiracy theories so to speak; What if Bitcoin is, in fact, a creation of the NSA?
It would seem that Satoshi cannot claim credit for being the first to come up with the idea; a document titled “How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash” was written in 1997 and authored by none other than Laurie Law, Susan Sabett and Jerry Solinas of the “National Security Agency Office of Information Security Research and Technology”.
Satoshi mined the genesis block of the bitcoin blockchain in January 2009, some 12 years after the paper was written. Interestingly, Tatsuaki Okamoto is cited frequently in the paper, though beyond the apparent similarity to Satoshi Nakamoto it probably doesn’t mean anything.
The paper describes signature authentication techniques, methods to prevent the counterfeiting of cryptocurrencies via transaction authentication, and mentions terminology common to current cryptocurrencies such as “tokens”, “coins”, “Secure Hashing” and “digital signatures” years before Bitcoin.
It should be noted that the paper appears to be directed towards banks, and that it does not include mining or a p2p blockchain authentication system, but given the decade between conceptualization and implementation these features may have evolved. If nothing else Satoshi must have gotten some inspiration from the paper.
The NSA also invented the hash function that Bitcoin is predicated on, SHA-256. Thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaks, we also know that the NSA has inserted backdoors into its encryption standards before. With so many poring over the open-source code though, it is unknown if the NSA could really get away with a backdoor.If the NSA came up with the idea years before Satoshi did, and Bitcoin is dependent on an NSA hash, the theory goes that at the very least the NSA has some stake/ control over/ ulterior motive regarding Bitcoin. On the other hand, the US government created TOR and the Internet; if the NSA had a finger in its creation, perhaps this is another experiment that “got away” from the government…
YaCy | YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world's users.
Decentralization Imagine if, rather than relying on the proprietary software of a large professional search engine operator, your search engine was run by many private computers which aren't under the control of any one company or individual. Well, that's what YaCy does! The resulting decentralized web search currently has about 1.4 billion documents in its index (and growing - download and install YaCy to help out!) and more than 600 peer operators contribute each month. About 130,000 search queries are performed with this network each day.
There are already several search networks based on YaCy: the two major networks are the 'freeworld' network (which is the default public network that you join when you load the standard installation of YaCy) and the Sciencenet of the Karlsruhe Institut of Technology which focuses on scientific content. Other YaCy networks exist as TOR hidden services, local intranet services and on WiFi networks too. Installation is easy!
The installation takes only three minutes. Just download the release, decompress the package and run the start script. On linux you need OpenJDK6. You don't need to install external databases or a web server, everything is already included in YaCy. Fist tap Dale.
Motherboard |Tuesday, the federal government continued its offensive against default consumer encryption enabled by Apple and Google and anonymity tools like Tor, saying that greater privacy and security has created a “zone of lawlessness” that law enforcement is having trouble cracking.
Leslie Caldwell, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, said that the department is “very concerned” by the Google’s and Apple’s decision to automatically encrypt all data on Android and iOS devices. Her comments aren’t entirely surprising, considering that FBI Director James Comey previously said that the agency would push Congress to make automatic encryption illegal, and President Obama has also expressed concern with the development.
The problem that privacy and security advocates have pointed out is that the US government doesn’t really seem to understand what it’s asking for. Caldwell was being interviewed as a part of the annual State of the Net Conference in Washington, DC. One minute, she was vilifying encryption; the next, she was sending a message to the country’s citizens and companies that they need to be “more conscious of cybersecurity.”
“They need to be assuming they are vulnerable, assuming their data can be taken,” she said.
NOBODY would deny that being ostracized on the playground, mocked in a sales meeting or broken up with over Twitter feels bad. But the sting of social rejection may be more like the ouch! of physical pain than previously understood.
New research suggests that the same areas in the brain that signify physical pain are activated at moments of intense social loss. “When we sat around and thought about the most difficult emotional experiences, we all agreed that it doesn’t get any worse than social rejection,” said the study’s lead author, Ethan F. Kross, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.
WaPo | Sam Greenlee was underappreciated, disgruntled, professionally disemboweled and perpetually agitated.
His sudden death at the age of 83
offers opportunity for reflection on a man trapped in the suspended
animation of one great work that briefly elevated, then haunted, him
into his last days. An apprehensive and highly educated foreign service
officer who abruptly quit the business of American global dominance in
anguished pursuit of a lifetime in written word, Greenlee spawned like a
lost child of Ralph Ellison.
He will not be forgotten, but he will also be remembered in the
starting lineup of a tortured lineage of creative black literary minds
way ahead of their time. From George Schulyer (Black Empire) to Ellison (Invisible Man) to Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go), hard shift to Greenlee and then John Edgar Wideman (Philadelphia Fire), to Brent Wade (the Company Man genius who just … went missing) and now Todd Craig (Tor’cha),
they and others are temporary flashes of a fire of brilliant black
men’s acrimony shared through risky, genre-bending books.
For Greenlee, risky was an understatement. To write, screenplay and
release a film adaptation of a novel deconstructing the global white
supremacy pyramid scheme was dangerous at that time, and he invited his
own ostracism from the social grid. Few in this day and age of grainy,
elevator-security-camera fight videos, overpriced designer headphones
and LeBron James Android apps will celebrate the name, much less recall
it. But Greenlee was the godfather of black rage long before The Boondocks’ creator, Aaron McGruder, became his stylish stepson—merely channeling select nuggets of Greenlee’s seminal The Spook Who Sat by the Door because, against the visceral boom bap and fading Africa emblems of Generation X, it was cool like that.
There were those of us who spoke of Spook as if speaking in a
special, uniquely branded tongue of black revolutionary cryptography.
You did not understand the rugged totality of modern black existence
unless you were schooled in it, and suddenly we were all aspiring Dan
Freemans in training. Greenlee’s semiautobiographical tour de force
managed to tap into dark, revenge-filled fantasies of bold, brainy
brothers outwitting The Man.
Mr. Greenlee joined the U.S. Information Agency in 1957 and was among
the its first black officials to serve overseas. He was stationed in
Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia and Greece before quitting in 1965 to focus on
writing.
In his novel, Mr. Greenlee drew on his work with USIA
but transformed the central character in “The Spook Who Sat by the
Door,” Dan Freeman, into a black CIA officer who quits the spy agency in
disgust. Freeman returns to his native Chicago, where he puts his CIA
training to use by organizing street gangs into a paramilitary black
revolutionary movement that spreads nationwide.
“My experiences
were identical to those of Freeman in the CIA,” Mr. Greenlee told The
Washington Post in 1973. “Everything in that book is an actual quote. If
it wasn’t said to me, I overheard it.”
Mr. Greenlee’s novel was
first published in England in 1969, after, he said, it was rejected by
dozens of mainstream publishers in the United States.
1. FBI/NSA just shut down the #1 biggest hosting site and #1 most wanted person on Tor
2. Silkroad is next on their list, being the #2 most wanted (#1 was Child Porn, #2 is drugs)
3. Bitcoin and all crypto currenecies set to absolutely CRASH as a
result since the feds can not completely control this currency as they
please.
I don't always call the Feds agenda transparent, but when i do, I say they can be trying harder.
Once you grok the fact that the bankster $$ system is the ultimate technology for governance and control, then you can easily understand why they're fitna loosen up their 80 year weed prohibition (cause people will transact for weed in traceable dollars and schmoking is likely to blunt a little bit of the riotous reaction to continuing economic contraction and malaise). Genuine anonymization and well-established virtual currencies are a response to the ever-tightening grip of the "top which lives off the yield of the bottom." Matter fact, they're the only pure genius games in progress at this moment in time - and constitute a genuine and growing threat to unilateral top-down governance and the system of 1% global supremacy. (psychedelics do too, but they'll be easy enough to track and monitor as they'll be an epiphenomenal component of the larger ebb and flow of legalized weed)
NYTimes | State and federal officials are starting broad investigations into
shortcomings in the oversight of upstart virtual currencies like
bitcoin.
The Senate’s committee on homeland security sent a letter this week
to the major financial regulators and law enforcement agencies asking
about the “threats and risks related to virtual currency.” These
currencies, whose popularity has grown in recent years, are often used
in online transactions that are not monitored by traditional financial
institutions.
“This is something that is clearly not going away, and it demands a
whole government response,” said a person involved in the Senate
committee’s investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because the inquiry is continuing.
The Senate letter went out the same day that New York’s top financial
regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky, sent subpoenas to 22 companies that have
had some involvement with bitcoin, according to a person briefed on the
investigation.
Previously, there have been isolated efforts to crack down on those
who took advantage of virtual currencies. But the two investigations
made public this week appear to be the most wide-ranging government
efforts to exert more coordinated control over what has been a largely
faceless and borderless phenomenon.
Bitcoin, the most well-known digital currency, was started by
anonymous Japanese computer programmers in 2009 and was intended to
serve as an alternative to national currencies. Only a limited number of
bitcoins can be created. And an online community has bid up the price
of individual bitcoins, which are stored digitally on a decentralized
network of computers. On Tuesday, a bitcoin was being sold for about
$108 online.
Lawmakers are worried that bitcoin and other alternative forms of
money can be used to evade taxes, defraud investors and assist trade in
illegal products like drugs and pornography.
themonetaryfuture | To stand up and fight to protect lawful online activity from legal threats isn’t for the faint of heart… it takes big ones.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a two decade history of taking on cases that set important precedents to protect rights in cyberspace. This is an organisation which has not been afraid to file lawsuits against the CIA, the US Department of Defence, the Department of Justice and other agencies, as well as major corporations like Apple and AT&T.
Recently, however, the EFF seems to be blowing some chilly air of its own and their source of gumption seems to have shrunk a little. They are no strangers to the pernicious effects of ‘self-censorship’; this is the ‘chilling effect’ where discussion, debate and activities are effectively destroyed before they even get started. It is the fear to speak freely or the fear to participate, because of vague legal threats or ill-defined laws. It is the uncertainty about where one’s rights begin and end, and the fear of crossing an invisible line. It is the providers closing or restricting customer accounts; not based on specific legal requests but based on some fuzzy margin even less well defined than the law itself.
Let’s see how the EFF explains its retreat from using one specific technology: Bitcoin, which is not inherently illegal and qualifies more than most as a frontier technology.
What then should we make of this statement from the EFF which reveals a primary motivator for avoiding a particular technology is legal uncertainty? At first glance this might make some sense, as ‘understanding the legal issues’ seems like a prudent first step, but you only need to step back into the EFF’s early history to see that their very birth was not just taking place in, but in a way inspired by an era of just this sort of uncertainty regarding electronic frontiers. Take this quote from ‘A Not Terribly Brief History of the EFF’.
"I realized in the course of this interview that I was seeing, in microcosm, the entire law enforcement structure of the United States.
Agent Baxter was hardly alone in his puzzlement about the legal, technical, and metaphorical nature of data crime."
This surely shows that the legal environment was not only uncertain – but positively muddy and misunderstood even by those tasked to investigate and enforce the law.
Arguably, law enforcement lags in their understanding of new technology just as much today. The ‘ambiguous nature of law in Cyberspace’ was almost a defining feature of the landscape, and back then, it didn’t stop the EFF from riding out into it; legal guns at the ready, if not blazing.
The EFF about-face regarding Bitcoin came shortly after a flurry of publicity regarding US Senators Schumer and Manchin raising their concerns about the use of bitcoins for illegal purchases on the silk road tor website. The senators mischaracterised bitcoin as “untraceable”. Senators seek crackdown on “Bitcoin” currencyFist tap Dale.
kremlin.ru | Comment Summary: Our Cause Is Just. Everything else is merely conversation...,
The parade was reviewed by Defence Minister, Army
General Sergei Shoigu. The commander of the parade was Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, Army General Oleg Salyukov.
The parade featured 11,000 servicemembers and 131 pieces of military equipment.
The column
marching through Red Square comprised
33 parade units of officers, sergeants and soldiers of all branches
of the Armed Forces, personnel of other security, defence and law
enforcement agencies,
cadets and students of military academies, Young Army members
and Cossacks. The parade column of female servicemembers included cadets
of six military educational
institutions this year: the Military University, the Military Academy
of Communications, the Military Logistics Academy, the Military-Space
Academy, the Military Air and Space Defence Academy, and the Military
Academy of Nuclear, Chemical
and Biological Protection (NBC Protection Military Academy).
The mechanised column, headed by the legendary Т-34–85
Victory Tank, featured Taifun-K, Taifun-VDV and Tigr-M armoured vehicles, BMP-2
Berezhok, BMP-3 and Kurganets-25 infantry fighting vehicles, T-72B3M, Т-90М Proryv
and the latest Т-14 Armata tanks, Tornado-G rocket systems, Iskander-M
operational tactical missile systems, S-400 Triumf, Buk-M3 and Tor-M2 air
defence systems, and Yars strategic systems driving over the cobblestone paving
of Red Square. Uran-9 strike robots were carried on truck beds.
* * *
Address by the President of Russia at the military parade
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Fellow Russian citizens,
Dear veterans,
Comrade soldiers
and seamen, sergeants and sergeant majors, midshipmen
and warrant officers,
Comrade officers,
generals and admirals,
I congratulate you on the Day of Great Victory!
The defence
of our Motherland when its destiny
was at stake has always been sacred. It was the feeling of true
patriotism that
Minin and Pozharsky’s militia stood up for the Fatherland, soldiers went
on the offensive at the Borodino Field and fought the enemy outside
Moscow and Leningrad, Kiev and Minsk, Stalingrad and Kursk, Sevastopol
and Kharkov.
Today, as in the past, you are fighting for our
people in Donbass, for the security of our Motherland, for Russia.
May 9, 1945 has been enshrined in world history
forever as a triumph of the united Soviet people, its cohesion and spiritual power,
an unparalleled feat on the front lines and on the home front.
Victory Day is intimately dear to all of us.
There is no family in Russia that was not burnt by the Great Patriotic War. Its
memory never fades. On this day, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren
of the heroes march in an endless flow of the Immortal Regiment. They carry
photos of their family members, the fallen soldiers who remained young forever,
and the veterans who are already gone.
We
take pride in the unconquered courageous generation
of the victors, we are proud of being their successors, and it is our
duty to preserve the memory of those who defeated Nazism and entrusted
us with being
vigilant and doing everything to thwart the horror of another global
war.
Therefore,
despite all controversies in international
relations, Russia has always advocated the establishment of an equal
and indivisible security system which is critically needed
for the entire
international community.
Last December we proposed signing a treaty on security guarantees. Russia urged the West to hold an honest dialogue in search
for meaningful and compromising solutions, and to take account of each other’s
interests. All in vain. NATO countries did not want to heed us, which means they
had totally different plans. And we saw it.
Another punitive operation in Donbass, an invasion of our historic lands, including Crimea, was openly in the making. Kiev
declared that it could attain nuclear weapons. The NATO bloc launched an active
military build-up on the territories adjacent to us.
Thus, an absolutely unacceptable threat to us
was steadily being created right on our borders. There was every indication that
a clash with neo-Nazis and Banderites backed by the United States and their
minions was unavoidable.
Let me repeat, we saw the military
infrastructure being built up, hundreds of foreign advisors starting work, and regular
supplies of cutting-edge weaponry being delivered from NATO countries. The threat
grew every day.
Russia
launched a pre-emptive strike at the aggression. It was a forced,
timely and the only correct decision. A decision by a sovereign, strong
and independent country.
The United
States began claiming their exceptionalism,
particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, thus denigrating
not just the entire world but also their satellites, who have to pretend
not to see anything,
and to obediently put up with it.
But we are a different country. Russia has a different character. We will never give up our love for our Motherland, our
faith and traditional values, our ancestors’ customs and respect for all
peoples and cultures.
Meanwhile, the West seems to be set to cancel
these millennia-old values. Such moral degradation underlies the cynical
falsifications of World War II history, escalating Russophobia, praising
traitors, mocking their victims’ memory and crossing out the courage of those
who won the Victory through suffering.
We
are aware that US veterans who wanted to come to the parade in Moscow
were actually forbidden to do so. But I want them to know: We are proud
of your deeds and your contribution to our common Victory.
We
honour all soldiers of the allied armies – the Americans, the English,
the French, Resistance fighters, brave soldiers and partisans
in China – all those who defeated Nazism and militarism.
Comrades,
Donbass militia alongside with the Russian Army
are fighting on their land today, where princes Svyatoslav and Vladimir Monomakh’s
retainers, solders under the command of Rumyantsev and Potemkin, Suvorov and Brusilov
crushed their enemies, where Great Patriotic War heroes Nikolai Vatutin, Sidor Kovpak
and Lyudmila Pavlichenko stood to the end.
I am addressing our Armed Forces and Donbass
militia. You are fighting for our Motherland, its future, so that nobody
forgets the lessons of World War II, so that there is no place in the world for torturers, death squads and Nazis.
Today,
we bow our heads to the sacred memory of all those who lost their lives
in the Great Patriotic War, the memories of the sons,
daughters, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, husbands, wives, brothers,
sisters,
relatives and friends.
We
bow our heads to the memory of the Odessa martyrs
who were burned alive in the House of Trade Unions in May 2014,
to the memory
of the old people, women and children of Donbass who were killed
in atrocious and barbaric shelling by neo-Nazis. We bow our heads to our
fighting comrades who died
a brave death in the righteous battle – for Russia.
I declare a minute of silence.
(A minute of silence.)
The loss
of each officer and soldier is painful
for all of us and an irretrievable loss for the families and friends.
The government,
regional authorities, enterprises and public organisations will do
everything
to wrap such families in care and help them. Special support will be
given to the children of the killed and wounded comrades-in-arms.
The Presidential Executive Order to this
effect was signed today.
I wish
a speedy recovery to the wounded
soldiers and officers, and I thank doctors, paramedics, nurses and staff
of military hospitals for their selfless work. Our deepest gratitude
goes to you for saving each life, oftentimes sparing no thought
for yourselves under shelling on the frontlines.
Comrades,
Soldiers and officers from many regions of our enormous
Motherland, including those who arrived straight from Donbass, from the combat area,
are standing now shoulder-to-shoulder here, on Red Square.
We remember how Russia’s enemies tried to use
international terrorist gangs against us, how they tried to seed inter-ethnic
and religious strife so as to weaken us from within and divide us. They failed completely.
Today, our warriors of different ethnicities
are fighting together, shielding each other from bullets and shrapnel like
brothers.
This is where the power of Russia lies, a great
invincible power of our united multi-ethnic nation.
You
are defending today what your fathers,
grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought for. The wellbeing
and security of their Motherland was their top priority in life. Loyalty
to our Fatherland is the main value and a reliable foundation
of Russia’s independence for us, their
successors, too.
Those who crushed Nazism during the Great
Patriotic War showed us an example of heroism for all ages. This is the generation
of victors, and we will always look up to them.
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