Taking A Swipe At Skype

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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No, it’s not me who is taking a swipe at Skype. I use Skype a lot for communicating with people. I find it particularly good for contacting friends in foreign lands, which you can do for free, but also for making paid telephone calls too.

I have been using it for over a decade, almost from it started, and long before it was bought by Microsoft. Although other flavors have arrived on the scene I stick with Skype.

It’s the comfort of familiarity, something I wish the nerds at WordPress would pay attention to instead of continually making smart-ass changes that no one has asked for or wants. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it guys!

But getting back to Skype, it has now become a victim of the snoopers – again!

This time it has been told it has to appear before a court in Belgium because it refused to hand over customer data following a request for assistance by the Federal Computer Crime Unit of the Federal Judicial Police (FCCU) in a ‘criminal investigation’.

Microsoft has been very sensitive to appearing to buckle under when requested to release information about its Skype users ever since it was alleged that it had changed the architecture of the communications software to make it more “wiretap friendly”, something which it has always denied.

Despite Microsoft releasing transparency reports stating that it had not handed over the content of any Skype conversations in response to regular law enforcement requests, privacy and security analysts remain unconvinced.

Unfortunately, as usually happens when the lawyers get to work, the fundamental importance of this case – which is government’s mania for trying to remove the right to privacy of its citizens – gets lost in spurious legal arguments.

Now, instead of defending the right to privacy, the court’s time is being taken up with deciding whether or not a VoIP service like Skype should be treated as a telecoms operator in Belgium. If it is then it would have to comply with Belgian regulatory requirements for telecoms operators and release data to the snoopers.

I said earlier that the request by the Belgian snoopers is in regard to a ‘criminal investigation’ but the alleged crimes under investigation have not been specified, nor has the identity of the suspect or suspects.

It’s another one of those government catch-all phrases like ‘terrorist activity’ or ‘national security’ that are used as a cover for intrusions into people’s privacy whenever they feel like it.

The result of this Belgian case will be an interesting marker for future attacks on the privacy of Skype users. My guess is that if the snoopers win their case then Skype should brace itself for a multitude of similar requests from governments all over the world. If on the other hand the courts rules in favor of the privacy of Skype users then the government will simply put their hackers to work and try to get the information illegally as they have done and are doing.

So it’s another one of those ‘heads’ privacy loses and ‘tails’ the snoopers win.

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Democracy Or Idiocracy?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Have you ever wondered how the United States of America has managed to accumulate debt of $18 trillion and rising?

Part of the answer is pretty easy really.

The country is being run by people who can’t count. By people who do not realize that you cannot indefinitely live beyond your means.

Try doing what the government does at home and see how far you get? You can’t print money (legally) as a short-stop measure so the effect on you will be immediate. You’ll go broke!

The government and has been printing billions and billions of dollars, but all this has done is to postpone the inevitable and pass on the problem to future generations.

But not being able to count is just one part of what’s wrong. It’s a big part, but it does not tell the whole story.

What is also wrong is the amount of money that the government and their stupid minions waste.

A small, but good, example of this was accidentally uncovered during the 2014 investigation into the handling of interrogations of terrorists by American intelligence agencies.

Here we discovered that $81 million of taxpayer money had been paid to a pair of so-called ‘psychologists’ who were at the head of these interrogations.

Not only that, but it turned out that neither of these two people had any prior knowledge of al-Qaeda, no experience in interrogation techniques and no background in counter terrorism.

That’s zero experience on all three counts!

To add insult to injury, they were also promised an additional $5 million in indemnity costs to cover all legal expenses for any potential criminal investigation and prosecution through 2021 as well as paid more than $1 million individually.

This sort of idiocy permeates all sections of government. The waste is colossal. So colossal that the tax paying public very seldom, if ever, gets to hear about it. And if and when they do it is invariably too late to do anything about it. The money is gone. Wasted!

That’s part of the reason the United States imposes the world’s highest corporate tax rates and why it is one of the few countries in the world to impose a “worldwide tax” on domestic firms and on its citizens.

America likes to try to impose ‘democracy’ on other nations in the world, especially the ones that don’t understand it and don’t want it.

But with ‘democracy’ should come ‘accountability’.

Clearly is does not.

Therefore the system we really have is an ‘idiocracy’, not a ‘democracy’.

Let’s start and call it what it is. It’s a much more appropriate name for what is going on!

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