Saturday, January 25, 2014

property rights: I absolutely own my mind, my body, and root prompt on any system I can see...,


wired |  Before Edward Snowden showed up, 2013 was shaping up as the year of reckoning for the much criticized federal anti-hacking statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”). The suicide of Aaron Swartz in January 2013 brought the CFAA into mainstream consciousness, so Congress held hearings about the case, and legislative fixes were introduced to change the law.

Finally, there seemed to be a newfound scrutiny of CFAA prosecutions and punishment for accessing computer data without or in excess of “authorization” — which affected everyone from Chelsea Manning to Jeremy Hammond to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer (disclosure: I’m one of his lawyers on appeal). Not to mention less illustrious personalities and everyday users, such as people who delete cookies from their browsers.

But unfortunately, not much has changed; if anything, the growing recognition of the powerful capabilities of modern computing and networking has resulted in a “cyber panic” in legislatures and prosecutor offices across the country. Instead of reexamination, we’ve seen aggressive charges and excessive punishment.

This cyber panic isn’t just a CFAA problem. In the zeal to crack down on cyberbullying, legislatures have passed overbroad laws criminalizing speech clearly protected by the First Amendment. This comes after one effort to use the CFAA to criminalize cyberbullying — built on the premise that violating a website’s terms of service was unauthorized access, or the equivalent of hacking – was thrown out as unconstitutionally vague.

The panic has even spread to how crime is investigated. To prevent digital contraband from coming into the United States, border officials can now search electronic devices without any suspicion of wrongdoing. To get to illicit files on a seized computer, the government can force you to decrypt your computer and threaten you with jail for noncompliance. To get information about one customer, the FBI can demand a service provider turn over the key that unlocks communications from all of the service’s customers. And let’s not even get started on what the NSA has been up to. Fist tap Dale.

18 comments:

DD said...

So is this piece sort of the counterpoint to Moldbug? As I understand it, Moldbug is making (or pretending to make) a utilitarian argument that codifying the explicit ownership of everything that is now owned by proxy will lead to better results for all. Rothbard and the Paul's (at least in this piece) seem to be making the same argument from a moral perspective. This piece seems to be stating ( and I think I agree) that the moral argument for this ownership, these property rights, is fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.

So what about the practical argument of codifying their ownership? I haven't really wrapped my head around that one yet. Am I making sense here? Help me out.

CNu said...

When was this mythological "once did"? D'Souza has been a greasy, smarmy, opportunistic sack of pus from the day he first set foot on the public stage. The only people he ever fooled were those wedded to erroneous concepts of ascriptive hierarchy and delighted to have a brown sock puppet, and, those too congenitally stupid to tell the difference.

CNu said...

Nothing presented at this blog is the counterpoint to Moldbug, because I don't know enough about a Moldbug to address myself thereto. The full extent of my overlap with these pasty nerds is that I dislike the thought and speech policing of political correctness and have identified that with a complex I understand him to refer to as the Cathedral. That I like. Nakajima Kikka referred my attention to the Cathedral in the context of some persistent ranting I was doing about political correctness and it stuck.

So, what I'm on about with Reed this past week is a celebratory orgy of self-congratulation that my suspicions about the political correctness establishment are correct. Reed is a fairly blunt and devastating living memory critic of political correctness and the Cathedral (without ever referring to it as such). A part of his thesis addresses the contrived nature of this phenomenon in the academy, in corporations, and in the administrative beauracracies set up to defuse organic black political oppositionality.

I fully agree with Reed that organic black political negativity has been defused and supplanted with a fake enterprise whose only aim is esteem engineering and which does not and never will question the status quo economic and political order. IOW, the multi-culti apparatus of the Cathedral is a propaganda arm of the ruling sectionalist establishment.

Reed is fairly obviously a dedicated Marxist. There ends our common ground. I excerpted the self-validating parts of Reed's awkward foray into critiquing cultural production, but the real meat and potatoes of Reed for me are to be found here http://libcom.org/library/black-particularity-reconsidered-adolph-l-reed-jr and here http://libcom.org/files/ReedWhatAreTheDrumsSayingBooker.pdf

Nakajima Kikka said...

He seems to be having more and more difficulty controlling his impulses.

Nakajima Kikka said...

Leaving aside his flawed conception of human beings as independent agents for a moment, it's painfully clear that, on a personal level, Murray Rothbard had real trust issues.

CNu said...

To what specifically do you refer?

Nakajima Kikka said...

The flawed conception?

If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life...

Such a "man" (a sentient being having an independent "self") does not exist, and cannot exist. Recognizing this is the mark of ceasing to be a teenager, and becoming an adult.

The trust issues?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard
Both his life story and his entire ideological structure betray a profound suspicion of people on a very deep psychological level. I suspect that he was a "sensitive child" as a boy, and so harassment by schoolyard bullies in the neighborhood NYC public school he attended was the initial trauma, with a few follow-on traumas completing the psychological destruction.
The two, the inability to trust and the deep hunger to be a totally independent individual, impervious to harm from anyone or anything, are linked, of course.
It's too bad, really. If he had only been able to trust others, even a little, he could have been so much more. Instead, he became little more than a crank. He reminds me of Rushdoony.
Sad. Very sad.

Constructive_Feedback said...

From the movie those nude pictures of Barack Obama's "moms" taken by Frank Marshall Davis in Hawaii were pretty compelling REGARDLESS of what you think of the man and his motives.


President Obama has done a far more effective job at compelling otherwise intelligent people to FORGET what happened the last series of times they chose to yield their "COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT HOPES" into PROGRESSIVE PUBLIC POLICY. I am not mad at him and the machine who convinced them more recently to look past the local failures and agree to redirect any grievances about their present condition out against the right-wing enemy that is now blocking their NATIONALIZED SOCIAL JUSTICE scheme.

CNu said...

that machine would be nothing less than the elite neoliberal capitalist hegemony and the only thing standing between it and total domination is the former confederate states of America. But then, the CSA artificial negativity is a construct of neoliberal capitalism, as well, serving the same control agenda but for a different two-legged livestock demography.

ken said...

I think my longest look at D'Souza was "the God debate" with Hitchens. I considered it pretty strong performance, he showed intelligence, and articulated well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V85OykSDT8

Vic78 said...

He should've went to that program growing up. It could've been prevented. Now look at what he has to deal with.

http://youtu.be/2io9vZokQsw
http://youtu.be/jpJ_tpxyPCI

CNu said...

Vic, you and Bro. Makheru are probably a whole lot more hip than me when it comes to the florentine knife-fighting that takes place in American electoral politics, but I had no idea that D'Souza had made an Obama Conspiranoid film and has another one on the way and that what Bro.ConFeed is on about below is part of that whole frame of reference http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/obamas-goal-quash-targeted-filmmakers-upcoming-movie/

CNu said...

This some straight up X-Files binnis I didn't know anything about. If you send me some of your source links, I'll go right up to the top with this material. It doesn't get any more liminal than this imoho....,

Vic78 said...

Here's what D'Souza's arguing for.

http://youtu.be/fgN9wFNOV_g

makheru bradley said...

Speaking of impulse control. The Re-thugs are getting a tad testy about the exposure of their corruption.

http://www.cbs12.com/news/top-stories/stories/vid_12831.shtml

John Kurman said...

Yeah, what's with him wanting to break in a little boy?

CNu said...

lol, I ain't hear no "in" in that epithet "fleece" kurman...,

John Kurman said...

Must have misread that...

Master Arbitrageur Nancy Pelosi Is At It Again....,

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