[Trerro]

http://gizmodo.com/5395095/the-nsa-to-store-a-yottabyte-of-your-phone-calls-emails-and-other-big-brothery-stuff

Sheesh. I don't think the amount of data this thing is built to store even physically exists. The ENTIRE internet as of 7 years ago was ~1/2,000,000th of that size (Source: http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm, and I can't imagine it's grown more than 10-fold since then.

(For those not from the US, the 4th amendment is the one that says the police can't search your stuff without a valid reason and a search warrant, and the warrant has to be presented to you before they do the search.)

[The_Black_Assalant]

That is some shit,they want to analize my phone call's emails and that ill over load it in under a week with porn,and treeosim site's as well as serch's on gwb "george w bush" the men in black and anything other i can think up. Ill build a bot to run web site's 24/7 and just button mash search's. i swear im tired of this country's bull shit like this

[Trerro]

The only thing that's going to stop this is them being forced - legally - to actually respect the citizens of this country again, and that's not going to happen until this gets coverage outside of tech sites, and the general public actually starts to care again. It's the same crap that happened with McCarthyism, just with more modern technology driving it. The other key difference though is that in the 60s, there were ENORMOUS protests and activist movements, and the government was forced to listen to the people. Here, we've got plenty of website coverage and people writing posts about it, but no real organized protests, and virtually no attention being paid at all to this outside of the internet. That needs to change, but the problem of course, is figuring out how to change it. What finally got the people to care last time was the huge body count in Vietnam, and there's nothing like that this time around.

The "overload the system with crap" approach SOUNDS great, and HAS been tried before, but with limited success. The 2600 guys tried to crash Carnivore (one of the older systems for this) by chain forwarding an email with a huge pile of flag words in it. I THINK it actually worked, but sadly, they've improved their code since then so that won't work in the future - or at least that exact approach. Of course, the activists can then improve their algorithm so it's less obviously fake, forcing the NSA to improve theirs, and so on. The result is an arms race of competing code. The problem is that the people trying to stop this are a small group of activist hackers working in their spare time, while the NSA making the system has a multibillion dollar programming team. There's also the obvious problem that building a system that's knowingly designed to interfere with this is - to say the least - rather questionable legally. Normally this wouldn't be a problem - every activist movement has those few willing to go to jail for a few years to stand up for what they believe in. The problem here is that the general public doesn't understand the concept of an activist hacker, and they aren't going to see an activist getting locked up for defending civil rights. They're going to see a "dangerous criminal" being caught for "the good of society", and actually believe that.

[Galeesa]

unfortunately... as per the patriot act... i'm fairly (not completely) certain that we no longer have rights. we just have what congress says we have and unless something drastic happens, they're going to continue tightening their grasp until we're all brain dead commie zombies.  oh, and if you remove all the recorded phone calls... they get around the computer tracking using the same reason as the hackers they're always arresting if it's online it's public access... hack into a high security site and use that excuse and see what happens<_<  it's just a case of it's ok if we do it but if you do it to me i'll ruin you. Big government is the reason this is happening in the first place our founders would have a heart attack if they saw how much of a hand the government has in our daily lives

[Bman21212]

Hey Trerro, this isn't slashdot, you are allowed to RTFA

To be fair, the yottabyte figure is just one estimate generated by a Pentagon think tank. The facility could hold a mere hundreds of petabytes.

A couple hundred petabytes is a lot, but reasonable.  A yottabyte is just extreme, that would just take too many harddrives and electricity to be practical.


That being said, the government is yet again pissing on the constitution and trampling our rights.  We really need some strong third party candidates to stick up for us...

[oarsof6]

I thought Obama was supposed to change all of this? By the way, why am I sill paying for my gas and rent?

[Trerro]

He did get the FCC to demand net neutrality, so that's at least a step in the right direction, but yeah, overall, I'm not terribly impressed with his record, especially on the wiretapping thing.

It's a hell of a lot better than McCain's would've been, however, and unfortunately, those were the only 2 choices when casting a vote. If you have a way to get new, viable parties established, I'd love to hear it.

As for the video clip, I'm not sure what the statement of a random moron has to do with well... anything.

[oarsof6]

During the 2004 elections, my (liberal) roommate swore up and down that if someone like McCain was running on the Republican ticket, he would vote for him over Kerry. He didn't think the Republicans would ever nominate a moderate though. Then when we had the choice between a true bi-partisan moderate and a left wing unexperienced empty suit with nice speeches, everyone flocks to the suite. We are getting exactly what we voted for: an empty suit who loves himself and does nothing but campaign. McCain would have certainly done MUCH better, and would have developed and lead bipartisan solutions to this mess that we are in.

And what did the video have to do with anything? It just personifies the unrealistic expectations everyone had of Obama when they gave millions to him and voted for him

[iggy]

It would certainly be nice if people aknowledged the general crapiness of the current time without pointing the finger to Obama. He didn't cause the current situation, and for as far as I've seen he's taking steps to solve most of the present problems. Pretending like his presidency has failed already just because YOU don't see immediate short term results clearly indicates the problem with our elections everyone likes complaining about.

Give him a couple more years, and then cast your vote based on what he's acheived while in the meanwhile let the man do his job?

[Trerro]

If McCain was trying to present himself as a moderate, Palin was just about the worst possible running mate he could have chosen... and considering McCain's age, the chances she would have ended up president at some point if he won were scarily high.

Even more than the Palin thing though, what really scared me about McCain though is that every time I saw a terrible censorship bill proposed in Congress, it always had 2 names introducing it - McCain and Lieberman. When you support censorship that heavily, you aren't getting my vote. Period. A republic cannot function without freedom of speech.

I do agree that following up Obama's policies with those of a moderate conservative could get us a good balance to fix things, but if that's going to happen, the Republicans need to actually present us with a moderate candidate. Right now I see names like Palin, Huckabee, and Romney thrown around for 2012, none of which are remotely close to what the Republican party was originally supposed to stand for, and while I can think of a lot words to describe each of them, 'moderate' is most definitely not one of them.

As far as the economic stuff goes, it took a decade to wreck our economy, and it's not going to be fixed overnight. While I certainly don't agree with everything Obama's doing (especially with the bailouts), what I do see is a call for serious reform, and he's already successfully pushed a bill through that bans a lot of predatory credit practices, especially changing interest rates on existing debt without cause. He's also working on forcing better regulation of Wall St, which is sorely needed. Both are huge steps in the right direction.