A key promise of Obama's campaign for the presidency was to run the “most transparent” government- however the only person to really deliver on that promise was a whistleblower.
Secret courts, secret domestic spying, and now calls for weakening of the digital equivalent of the safe shows that he either was not honest about transparency, or has radically changed his opinion since becoming POTUS.
Maybe it's that he decided to use his political clout to pick healthcare as his signature in American history, not wage war against the NSA, but either way it saddens me to have campaigned for someone who has empowered a surveillance state instead of fight against it.
Liberty literally means "freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control", and freedom in the information age means the liberty to communicate and store information. Anything to compromise that makes us all more vulnerable to control in all parts of our lives, not just those stored in zeros and ones. I believe America can be "Land of the free, home of the brave", but not without digital liberty.
While not directly connected to the NSA, it's plausible the prosecution of Aaron Swartz amounted to suppressing dissent. It's hard to say what the root cause was prosecutorial overreach or a real effort to suppress a powerful political organizer. Either way, he became a target for his ideas and activism.
The extra work needed to do this pretty makes it very unlikely to be implemented much. Additionally the DOM level obfuscating is just bad for performance.
if you're looking to prevent Ad Blockers, this is not your solution.
> The group also apparently gained access to a number of government Web portals and applications, including the Joint Automated Booking System (a portal that provides law enforcement with data on any person's arrest records, regardless of whether the cases are ordered sealed by courts) and government employee personnel records
Why is it that sealed arrest records are not actually sealed?
"We can't talk about Pi."