Coob: переводы

→After this whole ordeal, it had changed Charlie into a very anti-authoritarian person, he had started putting tape up over the cameras, and fighting (to a degree some would consider excess) for the rights of other students, even ones he didn't know. Charlie would tell the other students, "I thought that as long as I would go with the system, I would never have to worry about rights, or any of that stuff, I was wrong. Even the innocent are treated as guilty in a system that takes away rights. If the system wants to treat innocent people like criminals, well then I am going to be a criminal."

→Think about what you depend on privacy for. When you go to vote on election day, you vote for the person you want to vote for because you know the ballot is secret. Nobody will know who got your vote, and it doesn't get traced back to you. When you are with your partner, you know that what goes on behind closed doors is your own business. You hope that when you send an email, text or other form of instant message, your intended recipient will receive that message in confidence, allowing you to express yourself freely and openly. Government and corporate whistle-blowers depend on privacy and confidentiality to protect themselves after exposing wrong-doing. Without privacy, your entire world can be flipped upside down, and chances are you may not even notice.

→Sounds like a scary place from an Orwell novel or some dark third-world corner of the planet, doesn't it? Many of us can't actually imagine living in a world where privacy is just a word. Luckily for those people, they don't have to imagine such a dystopia. They just have to wake up in the morning. We experience this world every day. Data retention laws exist, GPS tracking devices have been installed and used by intelligence agencies, and the average person is recorded by CCTV and other surveillance equipment over 300 times a day. This is all happening right here, in the developed world, and it doesn't seem to bother people in the slightest.

→Charles and Denise aren’t so lucky; their company is only a partnership, which is an agreement between two people, and as such, they are responsible for the debts. Once the van and the stock has been sold off to pay what they owe, they'll have to cover any shortfall out of their own pockets. That means they could lose their house, car, savings, even their own bed, all because they didn’t incorporate.

→Anne and Bob incorporated, so their business is a legal entity. It holds the debt. The store’s lease belongs to the company, as does the loan on the delivery truck, and the money owed to their suppliers for the stock. These creditors can only pursue the company for the money. Anne and Bob’s house, their car, bank accounts, etc. are all safe. All they’ve lost, or put at risk, is what they’ve put into the company.

→That’s the benefit of a corporation. It becomes a legal entity that can operate as a party to contracts, including financial ones. The problem is that some people have taken that “legal entity” status, and expanded it, claiming that since people are legal entities, legal entities are therefore people. After all, companies can marry (mergers) split (spin-off), grow, sign contracts, sue, even file taxes (and maybe even pay them); they must be people, and hence we have the term “corporate personhood.”

→The problem is, companies are not people. They never have been. If a person dies, that person is dead. They can’t be brought back to life, a corporation can. A person has a fixed lifespan, a company doesn’t (The Japanese hotel company Nisiyama Onsen Keiunkan is over 1300 years old, for instance). If the company breaks the law, does the company go to jail? No. At worst, it would be shut down, and very little stops the people behind that old company from just starting a new company.

→When talking about loss of privacy, governments and people in power are usually the first to be blamed, and rightfully so. However, you can either knowingly or inadvertently volunteer more information to surveillance-friendly corporations who will pass it along to Big Brother than Big Brother himself could reasonably take from you. Companies like Google and Facebook have voluntarily turned over personal information about criminal suspects and activists, without ever so much as asking for a warrant, and without the targeted people being notified of the leak. It's pointless to demand the end of surveillance without demanding the end of corporate cooperation.

→"We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking."
-Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, Inc.

→So what does this all mean? Are we doomed to a future where there are cameras in your dashboard and your email comes with a 3kb attachment stating your message is "Department of Homeland Security Approved"? It depends. The ordinary citizen may view a bad privacy policy or a new airport screening measure as a small sacrifice. The future will lie in just how much the masses are willing to sacrifice.

→RYAN MOFFITT

→PRIVACY NOW, NOTHING LATER

→That ploy has been used with the Social Security monies, as patriots say it’s a shame to just have that money sit there; let’s use it for things we need now; we’ll even stick in IOU’s each time we take out some cash.

→The Truman Committee revealed that they were jacking up the prices. Suddenly it was costing twice what they normally charged to build a barracks or a PX. Senator Harry and Bess hopped into their old Dodge and drove to these military sites to see if building materials were actually there, if workers were sawing two-by-fours and installing plumbing or foundations. Truman also looked into the dollar-a-year moguls who were supposedly helping in the war effort. Often they weren’t; instead, they were trashing competitors and trying to use the feds to weaken or destroy employees’ union.

→The main point, is that it's very important for people to understand exactly what is happening with their information. Read through the privacy agreement, and if it's in legalese I encourage you to email the website, company, etc. and ask them to explain your rights, and what steps you can do to protect your privacy, and what steps they take to protect it. Twitter does a very good job of explaining each line of legalese in plain English if you read their privacy policy.

→Remind your friends how important it is to protect their privacy, and when you hear people spouting off about "national security" ask them if they mind if you go look through their underwear drawer due to "national security." It's your patriotic duty to stand up against a government who treats its citizens as the enemy, and say that you will not accept it anymore.

→Fight the fight, be a patriot of our digital revolution.

→[This story was originally published on the author's website at http://travismccrea.com.]

→I, myself, could be viewed as someone who treats his privacy with little regard online. You can do a quick Google search of "Travis McCrea" and find my phone number, full name, background, and if you search hard enough, some of my previous addresses. I also have a Gmail account which is operated by the "evil" Google Inc., hell I even have a Facebook page that lets almost anyone view my information. I do this because it was already out there, if I give my phone number to even a couple people onlineВ I have pretty much committed it to the public domain. Since I already know that at that point someone who wants to harm me by obtaining my phone number, can already get it, I might as well make it easier for the good people who want to call me as well.

→Privacy is a funny issue for a lot of people, they are so willing to yield so much of their privacy to people who tell them it's for "their safety," yet will squawk like a chicken if they find out that their public posts to Twitter are being indexed by a company (or a government entity). I have found (and I think many already know this) that the general public is highly susceptible to fear mongers, and when they are told that something is bad or out to get them, they listen intently and then throw their arms up in the air not knowing exactly what is wrong, but that it is wrong and that they are against it. The government says that Homeland Security has to do full body scans of people as they try to board an airplane because it will protect from bad people getting on an aircraft and blowing it up, what they don't tell you is that now every time you want to board an aircraft, someone gets to look at you naked.