> this could easily lead people to re-evalute their life choices in a more permanent manner than normal
What if more people would realize that they're constantly being controlled by fear created by commercial and governmental interests? This loss of power probably contributes to the fact that such substances are mostly banned.
I think there's some validity to that. During the Vietnam War, LSD was associated with the same groups of people that were trying to stop the US from being involved, something that was pretty annoying to American military interests. While do think that that's part of the reason LSD got banned, I don't think that really contributes to why it's still banned.
I've been on the anarchist side of things for a lot longer than I've been doing psychedelics, but certainly on psychedelics you are more aware of the things constraining you. I remember being in a convenience store on 300ug of LSD, and seeing rows and rows of products. And my mind would look at a box of food and think "wow! that food says it's healthy for my family - I want to buy it", and looking at the next box of food and thinking "wow! this reduces heart risk - I want to buy it", and then being able to also take a step back and realize that this was all processed food and utter garbage, yet in my vulnerable state I was completely being manipulated by the branding. And I was horrified that this was considered a 'normal' way to shop. Misleading information (even if technically true) was being thrown at me left and right.
What if was simply a choice to face your (own) fears, and the 'loss of power' issue you mention is simply opportunists taking opportunity? Cognitive dissonance in those who make laws banning substances is more likely to be at cause here for the banning of substances.
I don't want to believe people want to keep others from their own choices, but I also know they exist.
At the same time, no EU country has the courage to do what Switzerland is discussing now (Germany's Merkel has even publicly refused to even discuss the matter). This is one reason why it is also a good thing to NOT have every country join the EU - centralize power and it becomes very interesting as a target for corruption.
Perhaps off-topic with regards to the contents of this article, but as someone who wants to see information like this disseminated to a large audience, I think that decisions like this that may hurt that effort are relevant.
In building an audience on the web, we claw after increased traffic by playing with anything that could change user behavior. Domain names have an effect.
Maybe I'm wrong, and the specific issue I'm raising doesn't have any bearing on anything at all. But if I'm right, I think it matters. Most of the Snowden leaks are now being disseminated through The Intercept; if you care about this story you should care about the medium through which it is delivered. If you want to see these stories lead to change, you should want as many people to read them as possible.
Profit may be a strong driver however safety and security are equal if not paramount, while not negating privacy of the innocent while preventing abuse.
> On top of the browser I use these add-ons to reduce tracking further; also, note that private browsing mode and the do not track setting will not stop you from being tracked.
Google's/Facebook's/Twitter's JS scripts are literally on every site. Fingerprinting allows them to increase their ROI since it builds more precise profiles on you. The advertising industry is happy and the government is happy. So forget about them not fingerprinting you.
Oh yes, I'm aware of that stuff. If somebody reasonably competent wanted to resolve my real name from this dummy account, I have no doubt that they'd be able to do it. My concern, however, is not that malign people reading Hacker News will try to discover who poke53281 really is (surely I'm not that interesting); rather, it's that I don't want clients Googling for my real name to easily turn up accounts of my drug-taking exploits. It is probably still possible to start with my real name and find this account, but that would be a vastly harder task -- a much smaller needle in a much larger haystack -- and again I can't actually imagine anybody being sufficiently motivated to do so.
Remember all the "act-surprised-and-disgusted" posts of these involved companies, right after Snowden had started his revelations? Personally, I remember Zuckerberg's "What the F#ck" post very well.
They were right to be surprised and deny it. The initial reporting in the Guardian and Washington Post all said that NSA had "direct access" to the servers of all of these companies. After a few days, it was revealed that the NSA did not, in fact, have direct access to their networks, but instead had a system in place to retrieve data provided by these companies under court order.[1]
The Washington Post quietly revised its article without issuing a formal correction[2], but to date Glenn Greenwald has yet to retract his statement the NSA has direct access to their networks.
None of these individual companies would have known about the NSA end of the webservice NSA calls PRISM.
Does the Zuck have a TOP SECRET clearance with read-ins to all the special access programs that would be needed to know about PRISM? Somehow I doubt it.
There was acting going on with those responses alright, but the acting more about pretending they didn't understand how powerful automating warrant compliance was, instead simply playing along to the crowd of hacktivists.
But none of these companies would have known about the NSA side, all they'd have seen would be the company's end of the operation, which would be nothing more than an archival tool of a user's data within a certain filter set followed by an upload tool to some NSA-controlled server. They wouldn't have even known what NSA calls the whole operation.
Weren't they justified in that reaction? As best I have been told and can recall, the CEOs recognised neither the "PRISM" name (presumably because it was an internal label which the government hadn't shared with the webcos?) nor the initial description in the press of the PRISM program (apparently because it was highly inaccurate). In that case it's easy to see how their reaction could be genuine.
The UK spends $12 million [0] of tax payer money just to monitor this 1 person. I do think that's stupid, but they are probably not stupid enough to let him slip through, after all this.
I dunno, there's been much more controversial and 'risky' subjects with plenty of comments. At least to my mind. I mean, people haven't been exactly signing the praises of the NSA, have they?
What if more people would realize that they're constantly being controlled by fear created by commercial and governmental interests? This loss of power probably contributes to the fact that such substances are mostly banned.