People are citizens in the internet too

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Yet many governments like to pretend that's not the case.

Just recently, FBI destroyed megaupload in its entirety. Oh yes, record companies and hollywood were crying because it allowed people to pirate their stuff. But there is a humongous amount of legal content that was hosted in megaupload and was owned by the people who submitted. I have lost a lot of educational material and I am not again. This is the equivalent of burning libraries, for god's sake. And it happened without a trial.

But this topic is about infiltrating your user data without any warrant.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/m ... t-pressure

This is a big issue in Canada right now. There is a bill that could basically give the police access everyone's Internet data without a warrant. The Public Safety Minister has tried to frame the choice as between this or supporting child pornographers. The media, which has been pretty complacent on this government in general, has not taken this lying down and even Conservatives (who currently form government) are criticizing the bill, so I'm pretty sure it will be changed.

The FBI did not even try to keep legally uploaded files and just destroyed the whole site? As abysmal as this is, there is nothing surprising. Some banks have gotten away with illegally accessing their clients' medical files and yet only average citizens are attacked by this government that increasingly fails at preserving security and only works against them. The monitoring of people's internet activity is also inevitable. Let's hope that only pornography and terrorism are fought against because it is easy to imagine the internet ruined by the multiple forces of totalitarianism. If someone in charge knows everything about IT, think about how easy, quick, and tempting it would be to monitor what everyone writes?

Last edited by petitesouris on 24 Feb 2012, 12:02 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Another reason that I can never run for public office: I say things like,
'We'll be better off when all of these people die of old age and we can start getting internet regulations from people who actually use (or even understand!) the internet.'

QFT

in denmark the judge admitted he "didnt understand computer stuff" just before anouncing the start of internet censorship in denmark (pirate bay and allofmp3 only though)

No, they didn't destroy the whole site (evidence, for one thing) - but because Megaupload was frozen the people who actually stored the users' data on their servers weren't being paid for their services and so, quite reasonably, were no longer happy to provide them.
The last I heard was that they'd agreed to hold out for a while in the hope of reaching some sort of agreement which would allow users to retrieve their data - and of course there were many perfectly legal users wanting access to their data.