Which is easy provided online encryption works anything like it does on anything else. All you need is for the client and server to both operate on the same cipher or key (whatever you want to call it) that could be relatively simple or extraordinarily complex depending upon the needs of the user, then the client would run it through there on the way out, then once it arrived server side the same one would be used to decode it.

Encryption is not a difficult thing, especially considering I was first taught how to do it by hand in a math class. It would not require any revolutionary changes to the client or server. It is as simple as making the client encrypt the data before it is sent (not hard), and then have it decrypted on the other side (not hard).

Again I do not know how this relates to computer programming but considering all it takes is a bit of simple math (something which computers excel at) to do it by hand it cannot be difficult to use a computer (again, really fucking good at math) for the same end.

CurveCP by Danial J. Berstien, small fast Elliptical Curve Crypto free op
ensourced and vetted, curvecp.org, as a bonus its already included in the NaCl library, and designed for UDP, should be a simple addition to both the client and server.

OpenSSL, this is an ugly beast of of a code set but there are easy to use api's that sit on top of it to make life easier for developers.

Why are we still talking about landswimmer's comment? He's so used to derailing threads he derailed his own lmao! xD

that doesnt cover the things that politicians do after they're elected, which are often the things most of interest to voters.



as stated above, we're talking about it because you intentionally diverted the thread towards it, putting in effort to discuss it, while putting absolutely no effort whatsoever into discussing the original topic of the thread.

and thats hardly suprising, because my original point is that abuses of the NSA system are possible, and that those abuses represent a very real threat to the functioning of democracy.

you conceded those points, and now you're trying to bury them by refocusing the thread on "LANDSWIMMER SAID HE WOULD SAY SOMETHING RACIST!!!"

and now you're trying to ridicule me, saying that I was the one who derailed the thread, when you KNOW that you were the one who derailed it.

the worst thing of all, is that you're arguing for the wrong side.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/bu ... ted=2&_r=2



you continue to say the things i talk about are absurd, but they have happened in the past.

i'm reposting this bit so i know for sure that you've read it. i really want you to consider it IN CONTEXT.

the context is that MLK was assassinated.



thanks to the NSA, government agencies now have information on EVERYONE.

the DOJ has admitted that it is spying on elected officials.

if they can threaten MLK, who cant they threaten?

So that's me being an asshole to a cop? Are you serious? That was my second post in the thread, that is far from being an asshole. Who and what was that post directed at?



Oh. Yeah. Not even directed to you. Not even directed at all.

Within 10 seconds of reading the fucking post you would have seen that and realized I wasn't responding to you in that post. You are becoming more and more irrational, and I don't understand why.

I'll admit, for about 5 minutes you had me thinking I really did commit some sort of mistake or do something assholish, and I thoroughly scoured through my posts in an attempt to try and figure out what I may have done improperly. I looked through my posts and realized I didn't say anything to give you the impression I was being an asshole. Its all in your head man.

Landswimmer, in the post I made devoted to responding to you, I made reference to the post I previously made to Klestiko. I told you that everything I had to say about what you said could be summed up in the post I made in response to Klestiko.



I didn't call you a racist, and to claim such reeks of desperation in an attempt to try to discredit me.



I got RIGHT back on topic IMMEDIATELY afterwards. And then I brought something up which I wanted to know the answer to. If you aren't a citizen of a particular country I don't understand why you would be angry about their domestic issues if they do not directly affect you. Klestiko explained why that would be the case, and I in turn responded to that with an argument of my own as to why the NSA can't just divulge the information you wanted. I didn't continue the argument about you not being from the USA because it would have been a retarded thing to do once I was given a reason as to why you had cause to be concerned.

And you seriously think I don't care about having a discussion because YOU didn't care about having a discussion in the past? What the fuck is wrong with you dude? Everyone doesn't have the same modus operandi you do. I could care less about "trolling" you. If you seriously believe that to be true then you really need to reflect for a moment on the fact that everyone in the world is not like you (neither now or in the past), therefore its possible to meet people who actually care about discourse for the sake of discourse.



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Exactly what you said, with context as well. You CONTRADICTED YOURSELF. There is no explaining that contradiction. In order to UN-CONTRADICT yourself, you have to RESTATE your thesis OR change your argument. If your thesis is that the NSA needs to do a certain thing, your argument CANNOT undermine the thesis in ANYWAY, SHAPE or FORM.

You can't explain away two things that are contradictory. If they are contradictory, they are contradictory. No amount of explanation or wand waving is going to do that. You are asking the NSA to basically throw out information that POSSIBLY may not have ANYTHING to do with the public issues at hand (John McCain has a black child, great example of a needless piece of drivel thrown to the masses by someone seeking to undermine his campaign). You are asking them to destroy the IRRATIONAL peoples faith in their leadership. You contradicted yourself, and denying that you contradicted yourself is making you seem irrational. Why not simply restate your argument so I can throw this argument out the window and you can make an argument that is easily defensible.

I do not wish to discuss this with you anymore if you are going to continue to retroactively tweak what you said, you can take that as an admission of defeat if you'd like, but I don't have time to try to argue with someone who isn't even willing to stick by exactly what they said instead of what was in their mind. I can't read your fucking mind, you have to tell me what you think and I'm going to respond to what you tell me, not what you think.

Reasonable argument, I'll admit I don't have an iron clad answer to it. At that time they thought MLK's connection with Stanley Levison was a connection to the Communist Party, and they severely overstepped their bounds in doing something like that. Not once did I argue that they would not abuse their powers, but I did argue that any abuse of powers would be corrected by the Judicial and Legislative branches.

Except that it hasn't. It has only gotten worse

im also gonna throw this out there: the NSA is more than likely another bureaucratic boob agency, there might be more than meets the eye

but some things no one will ever know 100% about it, but oh well

Blackmail's illegal in the US, anyways. The only advantage the NSA has is their ability to make anonymous communiques to the people on discrediting statements, which can be said of anyone who wants to blackmail other people with their porn habits.

Making the NSA transparent ... They will simply disband it and form a new "NSA", or merge it into another agency. That's how it's done in governments and business.

Instead of specifically targeting the NSA, we should be trying to:

A. Make laws against whatever crap the NSA is trying to pull on us so they and any successor agencies cannot do it again.

B. Make a very specific and under threat of serious punishment that they cannot escape and cannot change law-wise (even if they leave country and renounce citizenship) agency that looks for NSA-like activities and bring them to justice.



Also, US Senators can be born overseas without any issues if they're 20(30) years of age or older, a citizen for 9+ years, and a resident of whatever state they're representing. US Presidents cannot be from any country but the US, and the only one who has been really scrutinized for seemingly not born in US is Obama.

you have no idea what you're talking about.

i'm gonna explain this really slow for you, because its the last time i'm gonna explain it;

the reason the NSA must expose all the information it holds on US elected representatives, is not in spite of the divisive power of a leader's irrelevant personal information, it is BECAUSE OF the divisive power of a leader's irrelevant personal information.

the NSA holds potentially career-killing information on several US elected representatives. if those elected representatives know that the NSA has this information, they will do ANYTHING to avoid having that information become public knowledge.

because of that, those elected representatives are already compromised. they no longer serve the people who elected them because they're too busy representing the NSA's interests, out of fear that if they become a threat to the NSA, the NSA will release the sensitive information.

the harm those elected representatives do to their own movements by being controlled by NSA blackmail potential, is much, much worse than the harm that would come to those movements by having their leader/reps disgraced and booted from office.

tl;dr - losing a leader is harmful to a movement. having a movement split over political differences reduces the chances of the members of those movements ever acheiving the political changes that the movement is devoted to.

being betrayed by a leader is far worse than either of those things could ever be.

the division of a group will set it back, as will the loss of a leader. but being betrayed by their leader and not knowing it, can paralyze a movement.

the compromised leaders can then, at the instruction of the people who are blackmailing them, lead the party to focus its efforts on irrelevant bullshit that doesnt matter. and if two of the major parties in any one area are both compromised, those parties can be used to drive a false conflict to distract the supporters of both movements, while legislation gets passed that both groups would have vehmently opposed otherwise.

its the kind of thing that could drive an illinois senator to backflip on issues like the patriot act and guantanamo bay, despite the fact that one of his election promises was to repeal the patriot act and shut down guantanamo.



again with the "its contradictory!!!" claim. its not contradictory. i dont know if its a flaw in my writing, or a flaw in your reading, but you're not understanding what i am saying.

the leader of a political group being blackmailed and doing what the blackmailers want, is far more harmful to that group than the potential fallout from the blackmail information being made public.

that is why, despite the damage to the movements, the information must be made public.

in order to understand what i am saying, you need to be able to quantify the harm done by three different scenarios:

1) (enslavement/possession) - the efforts of a movement being intentionally misdirected by a compromised leader
2) (beheading) - a movement being temporarily leaderless because the members want a new leader
3) (schism) - half the members of a movement being temporarily leaderless because of disagreements with the leader of the movement.

.

the first one is so harmful to a movement, that the US government specifies term limits upon the office of the president.

they willingly behead their organisation every 8 years, soely to prevent the possibility of being stuck with a leader who does not represent the people's best interests.

tl;dr - the first possibility (1) is so bad that democratic governments all over the world intentionally subject themselves to the second possibility (2) on a regular basis.

The judicial branch has tried cases involving the NSA over the years to determine the legality of what the NSA is doing, and have found the NSA is not in the wrong legally. IMO the framework they are using needs to be redefined, because using this case (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/1 ... snatching/) as a reference point for their decisions doesn't fully encompass the scope of what is going on today. The courts are doing their job. Are they doing it quickly enough? Probably not. Are they making decisions that I agree with? No. But they're doing their job.

Its up to the members of the legislative branch to listen to what their constituents have to say about it, and if enough of their constituents do not want what the NSA does to be legal, said member will have to listen to their constituents or risk not being elected again. But, that requires that enough people within the United States consider this to be a big issue.

An uninformed and uneducated populace is unable to pick a side when it comes to an issue, if they don't know what's going on then they can't pick a side. Once people understand what's happening, and the facts behind the arguments of all sides are made plain to them, they will be able to pick a side. And there are always more than 2 sides.

Basically, what I'm saying is that we have too many ignorant people to actually affect change upon the branches. Too many people think voting is useless, or don't understand why they should.

I say all of this to say:

The judicial branch is doing its job, the legislative branch will do its job when the populace requires them to do their job. Divisiveness and ignorance causes some people to focus on issues that you and I may not deem important, while others could care less about something that you and I consider to be extremely important.

If it should come to light that an intelligence agency is abusing its powers, it will be challenged. Does that stop them from doing it? I don't know. Probably not.

I understand perfectly what you are trying to say now. Thank you for restating your argument.

I agree wholeheartedly with you about the fact that a compromised leader is no longer a leader. In situations like that it makes 100% sense that the NSA provides that information (should it exist) to the general public to remove the possibility of blackmail.

However:



He came into office demanding that Guantanamo was shutdown. Logistical problems made it very difficult to do that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo ... _the_camps

As to the Patriot Act, again I don't know everything there is to know about it and I'd have to look further into it. For now, I'll have to accept your assertion that he back flipped on that issue.

P.S. - I'm not like you when you were younger landswimmer, you are misinterpreting my intentions. I used to argue for you very closely all those years ago on this forum, I agreed with almost everything you are saying now. In fact, I thought the way you trolled people was fucking awesome and I started adopting your form of sarcasm. I, quite honestly, looked up to you at that time.

I don't hold the same views anymore however, so even though I agree with the way you argue, I don't exactly agree with a lot of the things you say. Instead of dismissing you entirely I instead choose to have a debate with you, mostly because I figured it would be interesting to be on the other side of an issue.

I don't know why you feel I'm being an asshole, and I honestly don't care. Just because I attack an argument you made directly and look at its literal meaning (I.E. the way you typed and phrased it) doesn't mean I don't care about the discussion. I'm a stickler for details, and that's just how I am.