Re: Wherein I argue for the inclusion of libnettle in Emacs 24.5

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> Ted Zlatanov writes:
>
>  > Realistically speaking, attacks against Emacs are extremely unlikely
>  > unless specific people are targeted.
>
> Exactly.

    Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the FBI to order any person or
    entity to turn over "any tangible things," so long as the FBI
    "specif[ies]" that the order is "for an authorized investigation
    . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine
    intelligence activities."

This is what the _NSA_ uses as justification for a drag net collection
of the complete Internet traffic without authorization or an ongoing
investigation.

Now in several lawsuits, the EFF has been pictured as an anti-American
organization that is easily closer associated with international
terrorism as the average American, and the average American is
associated enough with international terrorism (probably because he
voted for a government using drone strikes against Yemen marriage
parties and similar on the ground of sovereign countries) to warrant an
"authorized investigation" into his communication.

As the EFF has probably a significant penetration of Emacs users, it
would be negligent of the NSA to ignore low-hanging fruit like that.

Seriously: the most relevant enemy of private communication nowadays is
the U.S. government, followed by other governments.  Emacs users tend to
have some loose correlation to people who care about politics, and thus
are suspicious.

While the GNU project focuses on not having people screwed over the
government's idea of copyright applied on software, that does not mean
that we should make it easier for the government to screw over the
people over other travesties of rights that would have been unthinkable
to the republic's founders.

Of course, the U.S. is not alone in trying to disown their citizens, but
they do take a leadership role currently.

-- 
David Kastrup