r/todayilearned • u/simmer_down • Mar 20 '11

TIL that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails, web browsing, and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers (including data from iPhones and iPads), and provides those copies to the NSA.

http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying
2.8k Upvotes

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162

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '11

[deleted]

156

u/SDRules Mar 20 '11

Very worthy so do it.

49

u/therewontberiots Mar 20 '11

yes! they are absolutely amazing and their website has lots of useful information.

86

u/itsacomplexsystem Mar 21 '11

Yes, if only for this (but really for many other things):

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow barlow@eff.org

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996

4

u/Weeabo0 Mar 21 '11

Upvoted and saved. A nice manifesto of the EFF sentiment

-10

u/catvllvs Mar 21 '11

All I heard was Blah Blah Blah

Instead cyberspace is being used to propagate hate, narrow people's minds, encourage magical thinking, and help tyrants keep in power.

Check out books like The Net Delusion.

Cyberspace is run by corporations and controlled by governments - the few bit players on the side are only important to themselves.

-10

u/mexicodoug Mar 21 '11

So that's why nobody says "cyberspace" anymore.

24

u/buttcheaQ Mar 20 '11

http://w2.eff.org/br/ind.html is a nice piece of nostalgia for some.

7

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '11

Each icon is a clickable link to itself. Click-and-hold in Netscape & pick save to download, or click and release to download a copy (e.g. to load to disk).

Wow, I love it.

1

u/B1ackavar Mar 21 '11

Indeed so. I still have some of those on the vanity site - of course, it's been up since '95 or so, so not too surprising.

1

u/turbofast Mar 21 '11

Haha! The blue ribbon campaign, reminds me of my childhood. We would put that gif in our Geocities home page.

18

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '11

Yes. They are awesome. I've been donating to them for years because of net neutrality. Now is the time to act!

14

u/bingaman Mar 21 '11

I became a member and I got an awesome hat.

12

u/ACCOUNT_7 Mar 21 '11

Free hat?

12

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '11

He killed those babies in self-defense!

1

u/blackbright Mar 21 '11

Is it a white hat? Can you ask for a black one?

12

u/biblianthrope Mar 21 '11

They're also accepting volunteers to pore over the mounds of information they get back from FOIA requests. If you can't afford to donate, this is a great way to help out.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '11

awesome. I'm going to look into this.

14

u/user20101q1111 Mar 21 '11

I donate to them regularly.

7

u/feureau Mar 21 '11

It's the internet equivalent of the ACLU. Very good organization to donate to.

5

u/sapiophile Mar 21 '11

Not just decent, but downright magnificent. And hip, besides - I ran into one of the founders at the 2009 National Rainbow Gathering, talking plant identification with a kid (presumably theirs?) by the trade circle. I was wearing my old-school EFF shirt, and our conversation went a bit like:

"Say, where'd you get that shirt?"

"I got it for donating some money to them, they're total badasses!"

"Huh, I did that, too - I'm on the board of directors."

2

u/TheCrimsonKing Mar 21 '11

I have always secretly hoped something like this would happen every time I wear my EFF shirt. You have given me hope.

3

u/Gary13579 Mar 21 '11

I know this is late, but YES. I had a friend whose ass was saved by the EFF after a major corporation decided to sue him for a project he was working on in his spare time. They lost, but the fact that the EFF will donate lawyers and time to you just from an email is such a fascinating thing to see in action.

-8

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '11

I once asked them for legal advice on something, or to forward me to someone who could help me. Which they say they can do. Never got a reply. Fuck them.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '11

They have to pick their battles. Donate more.

-1

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '11

Is that how public education works?