Who owns our stuff? The answer used to be obvious. Now, with electronics integrated into just about everything we buy, the answer has changed. The issue goes beyond cellphone unlocking, because once we buy an object — any object — we should own it. But we really don’t own our stuff anymore; the manufacturers do. Because modifying modern objects requires access to information.
Source: Forget the Cellphone Fight — We Should Be Allowed to Unlock Everything We Own | WIRED
You have a right to an attorney in a criminal case, even if you cannot afford one. The Supreme Court said so half a century ago. But today that precious right is systematically ignored or undermined.
Source: How Americans Lost the Right to Counsel, 50 Years After ‘Gideon’ – The Atlantic
When is it acceptable to use the military, or military-grade {weapons, equipment, training, hardware, etc.} domestically? Is there legal due-process in place to ensure that assassinating American citizens in America [who are a clear and present danger] is not a step onto a slippery slope towards cowing our own populace with drone warfare?
RE:
From comments:
One MAJOR point being left out of those headlines are that there are not armed drones….they are not the “predator” versions the news always shows bristling with missiles.
They are surveillance drones, and if used in a man-hunt, how are they any different than a bunch of guys flying around in helicopters doing the same thing?
— anonymous
True, the ones in use right now in this case are not armed, but I think that makes “now” all the more important a time to ask the question in case we as a public wish to decide that the correct answer should be “never”, just like it is basically never okay for the state to use main battle tanks for the purpose of law enforcement.
What the ban on unlocking phones means (worse than you think)
Source: What the ban on unlocking phones means (worse than you think) / Boing Boing
RE:
If a court rules in favor of the carriers, penalties can be stiff – up to $2,500 per unlocked phone in a civil suit, and $500,000 or five years in prison in a criminal case where the unlocking is done for “commercial advantage.” And this could happen even for phones that are no longer under contract. So we’re really not free to do as we want with devices that we own.
You should know that the hacker, programmer, writer and activist Aaron Swartz has died of suicide at age 26. His body was found in his apartment on Friday.
at the time of his death Aaron was being prosecuted by the federal government and threatened with up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for the crime of — and I’m not exaggerating here — downloading too many free articles from the online database of scholarly work JSTOR
Source: The brilliant mind, righteous heart of Aaron Swartz will be missed | MSNBC