I spend a decent amount of time on the streets of Trenton, mowing the grass, picking up trash, talking with neighbors, biking around, harassing squirrels etc.  I manage to collect some interesting stories and meet weirdos (probably because I am one).  Anyway here are two such stories that occured in the past three days:

I have a neighbor that walks his pitbull past my house every couple of days.  He’s a large white man who grew up not liking black people but kept it to himself mostly.  He went to prison and became an evangelical racist.  I think he may be affiliated with a prison group, such as Aryan Nation, but I’m not sure and I don’t really want to ask.  Anyway he walked past the house a proceeded to ask:

“Ready for school to start again?”

I responded, “Yeah, time to fight the good fight once more.”

His reply, “You know they keep taking my money but it seems all the kids end up behind the courthouse or under the ground.”

My reply, “Yeah, we’re undergoing an education crisis.  The kids don’t want to be there and they don’t want to learn what we’re teaching.  It’s unfortunate.”

His reply, “I know why that is.”

My reply, knowing what he thinks the problem is, “It’s systemic.  There’s tons of reasons.  The problem is you can’t just fix one and expect it to go away.  Personally I think compulsory education is stupid and the way we fund the schools is an affront to people who disagree with our schooling methods.”

His reply, “No it’s because…” <racist rant concerning evolution and certain people who “never made it out of africa”.  Also there was something in there about BET>

So hopefully my neighbor got something out of it before he launched into his rehearsed diatribe.  It’s almost as if everyone, even the most screwed up people, can clearly see the problems.  It’s the causes that people disagree about.

OK, second story.  I’m biking home from the post office when I roll up next to a car with a Ron Paul sticker.  I look in the car and yell, “Woo hoo Ron Paul”.  The guy looks me up and down, mind you I need a haircut so bad my hair sticks out of my helmet and I was wearing a T-shirt with a vomiting clown on it, and then proceeds to say, “Yo” and stare straight ahead.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/…

The government is pressing ahead with plans to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a massive central silo for all UK communications data, The Register has learned.

Home Office civil servants are working on plans for the database under the banner of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). The team has recently been expanded and a director-level official appointed to run the project, which is not yet official policy in public.

The project has been pushed hard at Whitehall by the intelligence agencies MI6 and GCHQ. One ISP source described their demands as “science fiction”. It’s envisaged that the one-stop-shop database will retain details of all calls, texts, emails, instant messenger conversations and websites accessed in the UK for up to two years.

Others have countered in Communications Data Bill discussions that a central, searchable database will not “maintain capability”, but grant investigators unprecedented power to cross-reference data sources (including location data from mobile phone triangulation), go on “fishing trips”, and infringe privacy.

The Information Commissioner’s Office voiced such opposition when early details of the IMP were reported in May. But according to our sources, public resistance to the überdatabase has so far had no significant impact on policy.

I reported on this in May. Doesn’t look like much has really changed but it seems that there has been some outrage over it. As expected the government doesn’t care what the subjects say and are continuing more or less full steam (as inefficiently as that is).

I think that if I were over in the UK I’d work to start a movement to fill the database. Generate huge amounts of bogus data. Modify email servers to throw in randomly sized file attachments from /dev/urandom into every message sent and the receive end can remove it. Either the government starts filtering everything which would increase necessary cpu power, they’d start dropping messages, or they log lots of completely bogus data. I think each scenario is a win. Push TOR and other anonymous/encrypted forms of communication and you render their efforts mute.