Topic: Net neutrality just went through, opinions? (Read 3079 times)

That's correct. Net neutrality is a great thing,  this was a huge victory for the free flow of information,  and a major loss for the greedy Internet Service Parasites that sought to profit from throttling some information while favoring those who bribe tbem.

Basically. If a website like Netflix wanted their website to load at a decent speed or be available at all they would potentially have to pay the ISP's to let their websites work through that ISP's services. Because of this vote, that is illegal now.

So I should have to bribe the government to respect my right to make contracts with all my customers that specify they are to use separate dedicated lines for high bandwidth uses and not interfere with other customers who contracted to receive specific speeds for their non-high bandwidth uses?

Poitras convinces Greenwald to listen to Snowden. Snowden joins Booz Allen Hamilton on work for NSA [link added 2].  [2] Reuters says this was in April, with training sessions for “a week or two” at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Late March or early April, 2013: Greenwald begins communicating directly with Snowden.

April 2013: Snowden is assigned to an NSA facility in Hawaii.  [2]

May 1, 2013: Snowden leaves his house in Hawaii, “shortly before Snowden became known globally for his whistleblowing”: Gives interview to Der Spiegel via encrypted e-mails with Laura Poitras and Jacob Applebaum.  [7]

Snowden then contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in January 2013.

Greenwald began working with Snowden in either February or April 2013, after Poitras asked Greenwald to meet her in New York City, at which point Snowden began providing documents to them.

March 31, 2013

Edward Snowden begins work as an infrastructure analyst of the NSA with Booz, Allen Hamilton. He takes a week or longer business trip to unknown location (Maui? to meet Appelbaum and other hackers gathered for the Spring Break of Coders in Hawaii?).

LAURA POITRAS: Yeah, I mean, I was actually very shocked. I was contacted in January, and we had email correspondence for a long time. And for all of—for the first three months, I assumed he would remain an anonymous source. He wouldn’t tell me any details about his—you know, where he worked or where he lived. And I thought that I was talking to somebody, at some point I’d receive documents, and then, you know, he would disappear and I would never know who the person was. And then, in April, he revealed to me—he said, "You know, you should know that I actually intend to come forward and say that I’m the source of this information," and that he didn’t want to hide, and he didn’t want others to take responsibility and that he didn’t—if there was a leak investigation, etc.

SNOWDEN AND APPELBAUM IN HAWAII

Naturally, since Jacob Appelbaum went to Hawaii in April 2012 and again in April 2013 to celebrate his birthday, right when Edward Snowden was also there, we're all wondering. LibertyLynx broke this story from a reliable source who had noticed the "alibi video" Jake desperately made in Berlin trying to explain the reason for something he feared NSA analysts might have noticed -- that he was in Hawaii in April 2013 when Snowden was also there (and I could add - in April 2012 when Snowden was already there, too).

And it's important to know (because some newspapers are muddled on this and Pincus tripped on this and then Greenwald whacked him) that Snowden goes back to March 2012 in Hawaii. Talking Points Memo fetched that out of his girlfriend's blog -- and I saw her blog before she deleted it and it was definitely there as a timeline she described (and you can still find her blog in the Wayback Machine).

Snowden first came to Hawaii to work for Dell. Then he left Dell to go to Booz Allen Hamilton where he worked less than three months as BAH tells us in a terse statement on their web site after these events.

The Times is the only source I've seen (correct me if I'm wrong) that posits a segue between Dell and BAH where his hacking for the ultimate great revelation starts at Dell, and gives him reason then to move to BAH.

In what may have been his last job for Dell in Hawaii, he was responsible for the security of “Windows infrastructure” in the Pacific, he wrote, according to people who have seen his résumé. He had enough access there to start making contacts with journalists in January and February about disclosing delicate information. His work for Dell may also have enabled him to see that he would have even more access at Booz Allen

Somewhere in the numerous Appelbaum videos online, somebody might someday find some "windows infrastructure" help-desking (naturally Appelbaum loathes Windows) or some clue that will tie them together more intimately in Hawaii. For now, it's only same state, same time, but we don't know if Jake passed through Honolulu to talk to his future WikiLeaks protege Ed in April 2012 or April 2013.

Of course, the essence of hackers is to be online and be anonymous and "exist in cyberspace". But for virtual worlders, they do in fact spend a lot of time in meet-ups and conferences and hackathons and teach-ins and whatnot, and that's what has to be studied. December 2012 at 29c3 (the Chaos Communications Club conference) is when Appelbaum openly recruited government programmers to "leave the dark side" and come join his chaos club...

From Snowden's girlfriend's now-deleted blog, we also have an indication that Edward flew somewhere in March 2013 for a week or so "on business". To Maui, 100 miles away, to see Jacob Appelbaum and other hackers at the Spring Break of Code? An even that Appelbaum first described as a birthday gift for a vacation that he spent with 20 of his friends, but is described by other people at the Spring Break of Code as an event they organized in January to encourage young coders intereset in privacy encryption. If they are separate events, they intersect, but maybe they aren't. Snowden may have also flown to the mainland, possibly for BHA training at this time -- this is March-April 2013 before he fled Hawaii to Hong Kong.

The partial time-line that Joshua Foust has produced on the Snowden affair is incomplete and misleading. And he has published it without giving any of bloggers credit (including myself) who found various key parts of this time-line, i.e. LibertyLynx who revealed Jacob Appelbaum's June 25 speech containing his admission of travel to Hawaii in April 2013 at the same time Snowden was there; Streetwise Professor who put it into further context; and my further round-up of Appelbaum's data trail and my long-time analysis of his antics.

Jacob Appelbaum's Data Trail

As noted, LibertyLynx received a link to a video of Jacob Appelbaum speaking in Germany at Digitale Gesellschaft on June 25, 2013 in which he admits that he was in Hawaii in April 2013 -- which as we know was the same time Edward Snowden was -- and then goes on to paint a picture of this as some kind of fantastic coincidence, i.e. that he hasn't now been caught out in a lie claiming he hadn't heard of Snowden before he was contacted by him in May over encrypted email with Laura Poitras' help.

Naturally, I don't believe him, for all sorts of reasons. One, because in my first encounters with him, I found him to be such a liar and such a thug, whistling for Anonymous to harass me because I kept calling out the propagandistic lies of WikiLeaks in the "Collateral Murder" video. Appelbaum, like so many WikiLeaks propagandists on day-old accounts on Twitter assigned to heckle bloggers, claimed falsely that American soldiers deliberately shot the children in the van in Iraq. I continued to challenge this as false, as they couldn't possibly see that the van had children in it, and there was absolutely nothing to support this narrative, which was concocted.

Then when I saw Appelbaum's other performances, either in person or on videos on Youtube, I saw what a fabulist and paranoic racconteur he was, and I really was skeptical.

On this story, he makes it sound as if the trip to Hawaii -- paid for by friends unknown -- was some kind of "dream come true" as if it were the fulfillment of a long-held wish.

But he was in Hawaii the year before doing the same thing, so it sounds odd to speak of the second (or next) trip as being this long-awaited wish fulfillment.