The FBI targets people for long-term (in some cases years[1]) entrapment based only on their social circles, like being involved in environmentalism or being a Muslim[2].
This is pretty much the definition of the government investigating people and groups solely on the basis of disagreeing with their speech. This has probably been loosely the case for the entirety of America's existence (Jefferson passed the Sedition laws), but it was only in Hoover's FBI and the Second Red Scare's explicit ban on certain ideologies in government that this process became mechanized and effective. This was a project in the FBI you may have heard of called COINTELPRO.
COINTELPRO effectively never ended, and the project's strategy and tactics have advanced over the years and been buttressed by the vast amount of surveillance an American resident is subject to. But, through it all, the whole point was to investigate people solely because the government disagreed with their speech, whether that was communist speech, pacifist speech, feminist speech, pan-africanist speech, etc..
If you want to make arguments like "those uppity negros really were a threat! Look at Huey Newton!" or "all communist groups had the potential to be foreign intelligence front groups!", consider that these arguments can be applied universally, to any ideology. The alt-right could be "investigated" under the same argument used to justify investigating the CPUSA, which is, "the russians could be there."
So, you can believe what you want about the legality or illegality of this practice, but the fact is that it's been continuing unabated for a long time, and it doesn't show any sign of stopping soon.
As a formerly ardent software freedom lifestylist I hear this criticism and have embraced it myself. I don't encourage the "designers" I know in my life to use GIMP anymore. Much like social revolution can be tragically violent, in 2016 it sometimes falls to us to surrender our computing integrity for a shorter-term tactical gain. This isn't good, but it's not good to avoid either.
That said, I think this essay paints an overly narrow view of Stallmanism. Stallman would much prefer systematic change, even though he is a self-identifying liberal; you see this less in the blessed FSF essays and more on stallman.org and similar because he doesn't get so speculative to talk about policy in most of the exhaustively-edited technical specifications on the finer points of software freedom theory.
Stallman is I think overly pragmatic. He lives in a society where individualist liberal political action, voting with one's dollar, etc., is the only acceptable method of political change, so he only ever expresses change in these terms. This makes for a weak praxis, because liberalism always makes for a weak praxis. But this isn't Stallmanism; it's just the overpragmatism of rms. Marx thought that electoralism was a good idea, for example, but that doesn't mean communism is inherently electoralist.
I think the best thing to do is to explicitly approach software freedom from a collective liberation stance and be ready and willing to point out the contradictions between the totality and the underlying ideological motivations of software freedom. Stallman doesn't need to do this; I think he's contributed quite enough honestly, and that if you want a better praxis, you should provide it yourself, because it isn't hard.
I don't actually know who the second-in-command (if there is such a position, the FSF seems very flat) is. But the first-in-command is John Sullivan and has been for like, ten years? A long time at least.
I don't think anyone will ever replace rms. You can't necessarily teach vision like he has. Honestly, maybe nobody will replace rms because free software will be illegal in the surveillance dystopia of the future. Everything else in The Right to Read has born out. But, the management of the FSF has been out of his hands for a long time. He's just the theorist; a role that's utterly critical, but not business-critical. When rms dies, it'll be like Marx dying.
I have no idea what computing will look like in 30 years but I think the fundamental premise of the FSF is that software is an extension of thought, so the sanctity of your software is the sanctity of your mind and should be regarded as such. That is an easy thing to continue on.
"""
David Eden Lane (November 2, 1938 – May 28, 2007) was an American white supremacist leader and convicted felon.[2][3][4] A member of The Order, he was convicted and sentenced to 190 years in prison for racketeering, conspiracy, and for violating the civil rights of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio talk show host, who was murdered on June 18, 1984. He died while incarcerated in the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.[4][5]
Lane coined the best-known slogan of the U.S. white supremacist movement, the Fourteen Words. He has been described by the SPLC as "one of the most important ideologues of contemporary white supremacy."[2]
"""
'Blurted' (thinking this is how a diplomatic reception works is straining) utterances don't end up on Wikileaks, and the united states isn't different now, for better or worse, than it was any number of years ago. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with this. If you don't personally agree with Assange that's one thing, but I think it's irrational to think that accepting his goals, you should still be forgiving of collaborators.
> You're welcome to suggest measures I should undertake to be more effective at getting to the truth in these matters.
I notice you don't mention double blinding any of these interventions. Have you tried that? How would you try that for something crypto-religious like meditation?
I would say Temporal is not far off in saying "commitment to the truth," but I would go further and say that the core of humanity, of being human, is striving towards bettering ourselves through the application of intelligence. Intelligence is the human superpower and when harnessed it can create incredible things.
Doing the reverse of empowering your intelligence, and empowering your confirmation bias (as comment parent), tribalism (as Donald Trump/neo-nationalists everywhere), or credulity (as meditationists/"everything is connected maaaaaan" types), is worse than suicide. You're using the power of your brain to enhance its flaws and create a perverted version of a human, progressing, but in the opposite direction; becoming stronger, but in a domain that should be avoided at all costs.
This is somewhat like the process of building a good military sniper by progressively dehumanizing them, stripping them of their empathy and agency in order to use them as an efficient killing machine. But worse, because you can think yourself out of that -- you can't think yourself out of a totally broken mind, and the more intelligent you are, the better you are at keeping yourself broken.
>All this stuff draws contempt from curmudgeonly skeptics (of which I used to be the worst kind), but from painful experience I've found these techniques to be far more effective than any of the more conventional approaches I'd tried previously.
Yes, throwing away your critical eye towards the world in favor of starry-eyed credulity can certainly kick the placebo effect into overdrive. If you're constantly questioning whether something is working, it will probably not feel like it's working, whereas if you wholeheartedly believe, you will likely carry that through into your perceptions. This of course has nothing to do with the actual efficacy, it's just that you're selectively perceiving so as to confirm your pre-existing notions; when the object of all of this effort is your own mental state this can be confused with the technique itself being effective. In reality, people like being successful, and feeling like you are winning at one thing makes you more likely to think you can win at other things. Rinse repeat. Confirmation bias is lovely when you can weaponize it like this. The sad thing is you have to kill the most valuable part of your human self in the process. RIP.
The web interface does show some of these things, but I think with Wikileaks you can always get a torrent of the raw files they've obtained. At least, that was usually the case. The DKIM information is verifiable, and if Wikileaks was overtly fabricating something, people would love to be able to attest to that fact. Hillary Clinton could say that Wikileaks is overtly lying, but doesn't, because there are multiple ways of verifying this particular leak and it would be nonsensical to try to outright deny it. Instead, she tries to Putin her way out of any discussion involving this. Do you think she would do that if she could just deny?
The thing is that it takes a significant amount of time and bandwidth to get flagged as an exit and included on circuits. So your set of hosts is going to be pretty limited to start; most hosts are pretty hostile to Tor exits as it is, and are going to shut down an exit hosted in their IP space because they don't want to deal with the abuse complaints. In contrast, the exit scanner can be part of the first users of an exit node. You could try to detect the scanner, but the nature of Tor is that this isn't feasible.
In any case, you can solve the problem of distributing software over Tor by setting up a hidden service. The Tor devs have been making noise for a while about creating an "onion service" that isn't hidden, but has the same guarantees as a hidden service (an improved version of exit enclaving).
Did you check prior to the multiple years of work on the exit scanner? Just lurking on tor-relays and tor-talk shows a lot of responsiveness on the part of the dirauths.
Tor Project runs several scanners for this behavior. Arguably, unless your ISP, ISP's ISP, coffee shop, etc., are all 100% on top of their game, this could happen in any one of those environments too.
Reddit tends towards sanitization because it's so easy to kill something on /new and so hard to break into /hot on bigger subreddits. On any subreddit where new posts aren't immediately on /hot, only the cadre that browses /new is going to influence what is allowed, and only the things that pass that cadre and are massively palatable are going to become popular.
On /r/nosleep, I think this plays out just as somewhat more tame stories becoming popular. People are going to downvote stories that actually make them uncomfortable. The demographic on reddit is older and so a lot of the stories are family-centric which I think takes away from the horror (there aren't many Lovecraft stories where his adorable 3 year old is actually something else, because Lovecraft wouldn't want to write about an adorable 3 year old in the first place).
To see this in the large, you can check out the top post on /r/nosleep of all time, which is this ama-style bag of short anecdotes told from the point of view of a search and rescue ranger: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/3iex1h/im_a_search...
It's very much in the style of a usual reddit post, making it accessible to redditors. It has many short, shallow anecdotes, which is good for upvotes because if someone likes at least one, they'll upvote it, but it's bad for the horror, because rather than something longer-form that expands on a single theme, you get these little snippets that aren't very immersive. It's creepy, but not horrific.
Well, Slenderman had the video game Slender popularize the meme, so I would expect the trend to be dominated by people who came to the meme via that game rather than the organic growth. From that chart it looks to me like creepy started spiking around the same time creepypasta did. To be fair, creepypasta is the name of a genre at its origin source, whereas most people are going to see stories downstream of the origin and search for them with queries like "creepy black eye kids" or something.
I guess I would qualify that I think this meme is probably what caused the 2007 spike. Later growth in the creepy space is probably more due to online dating becoming popularized; this would allow creeps to be creepy with virtually no possibility of retribution.
This is pretty much the definition of the government investigating people and groups solely on the basis of disagreeing with their speech. This has probably been loosely the case for the entirety of America's existence (Jefferson passed the Sedition laws), but it was only in Hoover's FBI and the Second Red Scare's explicit ban on certain ideologies in government that this process became mechanized and effective. This was a project in the FBI you may have heard of called COINTELPRO.
COINTELPRO effectively never ended, and the project's strategy and tactics have advanced over the years and been buttressed by the vast amount of surveillance an American resident is subject to. But, through it all, the whole point was to investigate people solely because the government disagreed with their speech, whether that was communist speech, pacifist speech, feminist speech, pan-africanist speech, etc..
If you want to make arguments like "those uppity negros really were a threat! Look at Huey Newton!" or "all communist groups had the potential to be foreign intelligence front groups!", consider that these arguments can be applied universally, to any ideology. The alt-right could be "investigated" under the same argument used to justify investigating the CPUSA, which is, "the russians could be there."
So, you can believe what you want about the legality or illegality of this practice, but the fact is that it's been continuing unabated for a long time, and it doesn't show any sign of stopping soon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_McDavid
[2] https://theintercept.com/2015/02/26/fbi-manufacture-plots-te...