Yandex Mail(mail.yandex.com) |
Yandex Mail(mail.yandex.com) |
Imagine the McCarthyism mindset combined with today's surveillance culture and the disaster that would be.
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/04/30/baby-taken-from-par...
As for the OP comment about the grandkids and child porn - that was a front page story a few days ago on HN.
The "secret law" part is the one that really floors me. The FISA court orders are themselves secret. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. But knowledge of secret law is itself a crime.
America is now watched by secret police.
If your country is spying on you, it can use the data it gathers against you in a court, etc. If it's a foreign country, what could they possibly do?
Since you're not a citizen of that country, use the information in your email in far less scrupulous ways? Perhaps they could blackmail you into being a foreign intelligence asset. Perhaps a corrupt employee could slip your information to a criminal organization who will then steal your identity.
All of these things seem rather unlikely, and chances are you're equally boring to both governments. But your assumption that the government of a country you're not a citizen of will treat you better than the government of a country you are a citizen of seems pretty odd to me.
More generally, anything that nobody has ever seen happen is unlikely.
I have heard of many occurrences of a government profiling, targeting or even suing their citizens over national security. I have never heard of anyone having their identity stolen by a criminal organization who got it from a foreign nation's government.
If you are in danger from a foreign government reading your email, you are an employee of your own government.
Dulce et...
Yandex Mail is a great competitor to gmail, some things even work better -- you've got a separate list of thread's attachments, ability to unsubscribe from whole spam categories in one click, SMS (maybe only in russia) and so on
EDIT: How do we do it? By saving money on counter-intelligence! it's a win-win!
http://www.agentura.ru/english/experts/safranchuk/
That seems like a very healthy budget to me.
All jokes aside it's interesting to observe politics and technology interplay. But I'm not too excited I have to take part in some of the events.
I live in Russia and I don't think taxes here are low.
It bothers me as a progressive that many liberals don't see how we are a hop, skip and jump away from that mentality.
From birth to death there is going to be a record of your child's phone calls, friends, dates, etc. It will never be deleted.
Erich Mielke's mania for information: the long-time head of the Stasi, Mielke believed that "you have to know everything in order to be completely safe"
But in all seriousness... it seems to be a rather unfortunate reality of using FREE email service, that the actual level of privacy afforded to you is minimal. Russia has a very stringent set of anti-extremism laws that curb free speech big time. If your content is labeled extremist, it has to be taken down by an ISP via a swift court order. Note that the "court" is either a single judge or a small panel of judges making the decision. Under that set of laws.
The hosted paid services like Google Apps is another matter all together. There the privacy expectation should be extremely high... but who knows if that's really true.
Because, you know, routine software updates is just what the doctor ordered for on-demand installation of backdoors.
Remember how Google complained loudly about Chinese hackers breaking into a few Chinese dissidents' gmail accounts?
How pedestrian of them. The NSA is apparently far more efficient at that game.
I used to like it because it still had a lean, plain HTML no-frills interface, but I see they've added some JS interactivity to it (not much, though).
I thought they had an English version, but I can't find the link :) So all I'm seeing is Russian, which I cannot read.
Russia doesn't drone 'suspected' terrorists based on their meta data.
These are not photoshopped:
http://cdn.trinixy.ru/pics5/20121123/mail_01.jpg
Plus, it is a Russian tradition to wrap things in plastic before putting them in the parcel postal boxes.
That said, it's quite likely that such malicious behavior would be detected by somebody.
2. Sad to hear.
3. From what I gather, the corruption in the construction industry extremely bad there.
4. Are they really worse than any other country? Starting off of the base of the previous regime, there's obviously going to be a lot of work to do.
The problem is that processing centers are overloaded. As a result, more and more boxes and parcels pile up. Sometimes it gets even more ridiculous, like recently in Moscow, when some boxes caught fire.
Besides, the whole processing system is so ineffective, that you could send a box from China to Far Eastern Russia (relatively small distance), which would first land to be processed in Moscow (great distance) and then be sent back to Far East.
Also, there is a queueing problem in the goddamn post offices, I won't even get started on that, it is so infuriating.
The NSA, as secretive and as evil as it may become, is still a US government agency run by Americans with a moral code. The same cannot be said for the KGB (colloquial for FSB), Russian government, or Russian organized crime (all three of which are pretty much inseparable).
It's far less likely that they'll care about you but if they do notice something that they want, you're fucked.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cables...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinen...
When I hear someone who works for the USG talk about how we should turn some supposed adversary of the US into glass with a barrage of nuclear missiles, I do not immediately fear for the future of the planet.
I hope the people Clemens overheard are identified.
See links to primary sources, including David Kravets:
I feel the same way about NSA surveillance at this point, on Tuesday June 11, as I do about airport security: it's ineffective and offensive, but not the start of the decline of the Republic.
From Wikipedia's article on the Second Chechen War: > According to the 2001 annual report by Amnesty International:
>> There were frequent reports that Russian forces indiscriminately bombed and shelled civilian areas. Chechen civilians, including medical personnel, continued to be the target of military attacks by Russian forces. Hundreds of Chechen civilians and prisoners of war were extra judicially executed. Journalists and independent monitors continued to be refused access to Chechnya.
Have a read: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/230215.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1215350.stm
So, yeah, I am fairly familiar with it.
And let me tell you, you are not even slightly comparing the same things.
Better comparison to drone attacks on terrorists is killing of Dzhokhar Dudaev by laser-guided missiles in 1996 and, possibly, killing of Shamil Basayev in 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Death_and_leg... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamil_Basayev#Death
“In America, you can always find a party.
In Soviet Russia, Party always finds you!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Smirnoff#Russian_reversa...
Oh, wait-.
Oh, wait-.
http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/unde...
Let's vote this gal/guy into office so we can have our rights suppressed in the name of freedom, said no one ever.
