Big Brother is Watching You

[rstrong]

The estimate is that a head-on computer attack to break 128-bit encryption would take longer than the age of the universe.

"The magic words are squeamish ossifrage"
- RSA message encoded in 1977 by Ron Rivest. Rivest estimated that breaking this message by factoring the 125-digit number would require 40 quadrillion years. It was broken using idle times on machines connected to the internet.

Granted, a mathematical shortcut was also found that reduced the computing cycles needed. But the age of quantum computing has arrived:

In May, NASA and Google co-purchased a quantum computer from a D-Wave in Canada. D-Wave's 2007 demonstration used a 16-qubit device. By 2011, the D-Wave One machine purchased by Lockheed Martin had 128 qubits. This year's D-Wave Two, the model acquired by Google and collaborators including NASA, has 512 qubits. They expect to have a 2048 qubit chip sometime in 2014 for running Google image classifier and Lockheed Martin bug free software proving algorithm.

D-Wave is not a large company. I'd be surprised if the NSA wasn't way ahead of them.

Also, it would be really stupid to spend that much money on a building and have to build a new one in five or ten years. By 2015, global internet traffic is supposed to reach about a thousand exabytes a year.

Keep in mind: That increase in traffic doesn't so much reflect the increase in users as it reflects the increase in the usage of streaming video services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, BBC iPlayer and other commercial Internet TV services. The vast majority of it can be ignored.

What do you estimate the chances of terrorists getting a dirty bomb or a suitcase nuke?

I'm actually quite surprised that terrorists haven't popped a dirty bomb yet. Say, purchase a few hundred smoke detectors, remove the americium-241 isotopes from them, grind them into dust and wrap it around a few bottle rockets to make a small cloud of the stuff. It would have no significant health effects, but that's not the point: People will FREAK. People will avoid the area for decades like there IS a health problem. Property values will plummet there. The sale and disposal of smoke detectors will suddenly be VERY tightly controlled. And a great many people, suddenly finding out that there's a radiation source - however harmless - in their smoke detectors will rip them out.

For 99.?%, all that grand unified database has is call received, location, time, recipient, email sent, subject line, time, recipient, log on, time, etc.

...Says the "person of interest" talking to a foreign national about dirty bombs. Welcome to the 0.? percent!

Any guesses as to how long they'll be listening to your phone calls and reading your email, before switching back to just meta-data?

I don't know who you think the majority of us is. Facebook has 150 million users in the U.S. Over a billion worldwide. The majority of computer users aren't as careful as you.

I expect that most aren't filling in all their personal information. Either through being careful about identity theft, or simply not bothering.

In any case it's their choice. We should have the right to make that choice.

[bannination]

Speaking of facebook:

http://www.zdnet.com/anger-mounts-after ... 000017167/

You'll never convince me facebook isn't a government operation.

Facebook said Friday it fixed a bug that exposed contact info for over six million accounts. The admission revealed its 'shadow profile' data collection activities, and users are furious.

Users are naive.

[Dryer Vent]

Speaking of facebook:

http://www.zdnet.com/anger-mounts-after ... 000017167/

You'll never convince me facebook isn't a government operation.

Facebook said Friday it fixed a bug that exposed contact info for over six million accounts. The admission revealed its 'shadow profile' data collection activities, and users are furious.

Users are naive.

If you ever watched Social Network, you'd understand that Zuckerberg is controlled by NO ONE and NOTHING, not even his money. Almost to a fault. And, he's friends with Billie Joe Armstrong which tells you where his politics fall.

I decided to google, "how to kill my spouse and get away with it." After visiting several murder "how to" web sites, I hope I'm targeted by the feds. Then, when they falsely accuse me after my spouse falls down the stairs at midnight on the 4th of July, I'll sue and make big bucks for wrongful prosecution. Yep, that's what I'm gonna do.

[Stinger]

The estimate is that a head-on computer attack to break 128-bit encryption would take longer than the age of the universe.

"The magic words are squeamish ossifrage"
- RSA message encoded in 1977 by Ron Rivest. Rivest estimated that breaking this message by factoring the 125-digit number would require 40 quadrillion years. It was broken using idle times on machines connected to the internet.

Granted, a mathematical shortcut was also found that reduced the computing cycles needed. But the age of quantum computing has arrived:

While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. “Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you’ll find out a lot more of what you didn’t know—stuff we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous amount of information still in there.”

...

But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed is everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can break codes. The Data Encryption Standard, the 56-bit predecessor to the AES, debuted in 1976 and lasted about 25 years. The AES made its first appearance in 2001 and is expected to remain strong and durable for at least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly built a computer that is considerably faster than machines in the unclassified arena, then the agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time. And with Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes along.

WIRED

In May, NASA and Google co-purchased a quantum computer from a D-Wave in Canada. D-Wave's 2007 demonstration used a 16-qubit device. By 2011, the D-Wave One machine purchased by Lockheed Martin had 128 qubits. This year's D-Wave Two, the model acquired by Google and collaborators including NASA, has 512 qubits. They expect to have a 2048 qubit chip sometime in 2014 for running Google image classifier and Lockheed Martin bug free software proving algorithm.

D-Wave is not a large company. I'd be surprised if the NSA wasn't way ahead of them.

No doubt.

But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energy’s exascale computing initiative (the NSA’s budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. “The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities,” the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan’s “K Computer,” with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.

...

In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.

Also, it would be really stupid to spend that much money on a building and have to build a new one in five or ten years. By 2015, global internet traffic is supposed to reach about a thousand exabytes a year.

Keep in mind: That increase in traffic doesn't so much reflect the increase in users as it reflects the increase in the usage of streaming video services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, BBC iPlayer and other commercial Internet TV services. The vast majority of it can be ignored.

Significantly more users, more devices, more use, more data to monitor.

A fifty percent increase in users in three or four years is a pretty hefty increase. In September 2010, there were not quite two billion users. By March 2013, there were about 2.8 billion and climbing. Internet World Stats

Cisco predicts that the number of network-connected devices will be more than 15 billion, twice the world's population, by 2015. In the fifth annual Cisco® Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast (2010-2015) released today, the company also said the total amount of global Internet traffic will quadruple by 2015 and reach 966 exabytes per year.

Cisco Press

Plus, there's all the old data that they move to the new center.

Any way you look at it, more content to monitor is more content to monitor.

What do you estimate the chances of terrorists getting a dirty bomb or a suitcase nuke?

I'm actually quite surprised that terrorists haven't popped a dirty bomb yet. Say, purchase a few hundred smoke detectors, remove the americium-241 isotopes from them, grind them into dust and wrap it around a few bottle rockets to make a small cloud of the stuff. It would have no significant health effects, but that's not the point: People will FREAK. People will avoid the area for decades like there IS a health problem. Property values will plummet there. The sale and disposal of smoke detectors will suddenly be VERY tightly controlled. And a great many people, suddenly finding out that there's a radiation source - however harmless - in their smoke detectors will rip them out.

Which says nothing about an effective dirty bomb that does cause death, significant health effects, and long term radiation problems.

And there's still the suitcase nukes.

For 99.?%, all that grand unified database has is call received, location, time, recipient, email sent, subject line, time, recipient, log on, time, etc.

...Says the "person of interest" talking to a foreign national about dirty bombs. Welcome to the 0.? percent!

Any guesses as to how long they'll be listening to your phone calls and reading your email, before switching back to just meta-data?

About a nanosecond. And I'm not talking to a foreign national. I'm posting on a forum that has a server somewhere in the dear old U.S. of A. Now, if you think they're reading this forum to see who's talking to the foreign national, that's stretching it a mite. Quite a bit. Tons.

In case you haven't been paying attention, content's not really big. It slows them down too much. One person has to actually stop and listen to every phone call, physically read every e-mail. Why do that when the supercomputers can fly through the metadata.

There is much confusion about the NSA’s secret surveillance program Prism. It doesn’t record the content of all of our private phone and other digital communications. Rather, it stores so-called “metadata” about them for future reference, in perpetuity. [For Vrede] By its own admission, the federal government is collecting massive amounts of ‘metadata’ on every single American.

Metadata can actually reveal more about you than the actual content of your phone calls. The data points that are collected and stored in perpetuity are: call duration, call location, the number of both parties involved, time of the call, date of the call and other “unique identifiers.” Nowadays a private citizen can easily look up a number and find to whom it belongs. Don’t you think the NSA has a more effective listing system than the Yellow Pages that we have access to?

Integrated together, the collected metadata forms a very rich and informative pattern of communication. The content or purpose of calls can easily be deduced. Truly, the metadata the NSA is collecting should cause far more concern than if the government was simply recording every single phone call “for quality assurance purposes.”

...

Metadata helps the NSA create a map or network of associations for every citizen. All the agency has to do is open its data storage tanks and run some analysis. And the metadata is being stored forever. After all, why would the government throw away such a treasure trove? Why would it invest billions in hyper-advanced data storage facilities just to delete it all every year or so?

So, while Big Brother might not have the time to sort through all your information right now, that’s little comfort. If Big Brother ever wants to strip away your privacy and delve deep into your personal life, ALL the information he needs is right there at his fingertips.

FreedomWorks

There's more than enough to be pissed about and concerned about with this enormous, permanent metadata haul to forego getting all excited about the possibility of a really bush NSA agent taking time out of his day to read all my boring emails and listen to my boring phone calls.[/color][/b]

I don't know who you think the majority of us is. Facebook has 150 million users in the U.S. Over a billion worldwide. The majority of computer users aren't as careful as you.[

I expect that most aren't filling in all their personal information. Either through being careful about identity theft, or simply not bothering.

In any case it's their choice. We should have the right to make that choice.

It's not just filling in blanks in your profile. It's the likes, your friends, your friends' likes, etc.

Facebook. A billion strong and still growing.

[rstrong]

...Says the "person of interest" talking to a foreign national about dirty bombs. Welcome to the 0.? percent!

Any guesses as to how long they'll be listening to your phone calls and reading your email, before switching back to just meta-data?

About a nanosecond. And I'm not talking to a foreign national. I'm posting on a forum that has a server somewhere in the dear old U.S. of A. Now, if you think they're reading this forum to see who's talking to the foreign national, that's stretching it a mite. Quite a bit. Tons.

So if a terrorist organization wants to send instructions to an agent inside the US, setting up a free or cheap US-hosted forum will make the NSA ignore them. No wonder GoDaddy is popular the world over.

[bannination]

I was wondering why we had all those increased visits from .gov domains.

;-)

[Stinger]

I was wondering why we had all those increased visits from .gov domains.

;-)

You think No Such Agency visits from .gov domains?

[bannination]

I was wondering why we had all those increased visits from .gov domains.

;-)

You think No Such Agency visits from .gov domains?

I must have forgotten the <sarcasm> tag.

[Stinger]

I was wondering why we had all those increased visits from .gov domains.

;-)

You think No Such Agency visits from .gov domains?

I must have forgotten the <sarcasm> tag.

I must have been half asleep.

[Stinger]

...They need the room at Bluffdale. If they succeed, they tackle that mountain of backlogged data, and it will probably be foreign data, not your emails.

...It's big and it has to store lots of data, just not necessarily the data you think...

"probably...not necessarily" - Do I detect some backtracking?

Not unless your superpowers are on the fritz? What am I thinking now?

[Stinger]

WIRED

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

...messages...

...capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images...

...including the complete contents of private emails...

...financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications...

...potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.

Classic Vrede assumption and overreach -- in spite of several programs the NSA runs, this MUST be PRISM ... because that's what Vrede wants it to be.

In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net...

...The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email.

During the Bush administration, before PRISM.

In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail.

...Stellar Wind has been succeeded by the NSA program known as PRISM.

...billions of private phone calls and email messages...

...Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email...

...keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA...

...Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters...

...Any way you look at it, more content to monitor is more content to monitor.

"According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.

Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.”"

Yeppers. A billion and a half calls a day, just with AT&T and Verizon. And those agents are in there listening to every one.

"content...content" :!: :!: :!:

Really? ROTFLMAO!!!

"Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life."

There's your "content."

...The content or purpose of calls can easily be deduced...

Deduced, not listened to. You want to look up "deduce"? That's why they roll the metadata -- to "deduce" the content. It beats listening in on the billions of phone calls and reading those billions of emails everyday.

So, while Big Brother might not have the time to sort through all your information right now, that’s little comfort. If Big Brother ever wants to strip away your privacy and delve deep into your personal life, ALL the information he needs is right there at his fingertips.

FreedomWorks

Multiple sources, several of them Stinger's, have now linked PRISM and "content". For argument's sake let's say he's right that they're discussing other NSA activities

Multiple posters, one of them Vrede, have confused and conflated the totality of NSA surveillance with the PRISM program, just like I talked about on page 8.

Is there anyone in the world besides him that cares?

You mean, besides you? Probably not. But here you are, 10 pages or so later, still going at it.

[Stinger]

I think it's hilarious that Stinger skipped over this:

I think it's hilarious that the Queen of Minutiae is going back to datamine more distractions that have nothing to do with PRISM.

Sure sign of desperation.

I also think it's hilarious that the Queen of I'm-not-responsible tries to fault me for breaking the Vrede rule.

I seem to remember you posting Thorn's as well. I guess people's privacy just isn't that important to you after all.

[Stinger]

WIRED

Opps, you "missed" this:

In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail.

...Stellar Wind has been succeeded by the NSA program known as PRISM.

Clearly, Stinger is one of those 'Shrub snooping bad, Obama snooping good' partisans that the polls describe.

No, I didn't miss it. I just didn't close my eyes once I read it. I kept reading about what they actually did, what Binney said PRISM did. I even quoted it.

"According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.

Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.”"

WIRED

Guess you missed it.

I've also read other sources commenting on Stellar Wind and PRISM.

CBS reports that the PRISM program is an arm of the Stellar Wind program.

It culls metadata from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple and will soon include Dropbox.

LINK

Here's another:

a secret wiretapping system called the PRISM / US-984XN. This system ties into virtually every major email and social media provider, allowing NSA officials to view every electronic transaction a user engages in through those social media systems.

Libertarian News

And another:

The defenses of the National Security Agency's program to collect and store records of every phone call and every email have not been very impressive. The NSA defenders point to a secret court that rarely says no. They point out congressional oversight, even though it's clear intelligence agencies have misled Congress. And some even dismiss the information being collected on Americans as unimportant, it seems because they do not know what "metadata" is. With the revelation of domestic surveillance on a scale that's hard for the human brain to conceive of — a Library of Congress's worth of data every six hours — you'd expect something more stirring than Trust us and Who cares about metadata anyway?

On Wednesday night, The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald reported a secret court order to give the NSA metadata on every Verizon call made over three months. Subsequent reporting and statements from senators revealed that it's a regular, quarterly thing to collect the data from several major telecom companies.

The Atlantic Wire


No one ever said they were, but you've been foolishly arguing all along that they're not looking at content at all. Kill that strawman, Stinger.

Perhaps you should try a reading class. I never said the NSA is not looking at content. In fact, I think I've said several times, including back on page 8, that the warrantless wiretapping (and other programs) examine content.

I've also said (quoted) that the NSA can get a more complete picture from gigabytes of data than it can get from the content of a few emails and phone calls. In that sense, metadata is more invasive than monitoring content.

Perhaps you should go back and reread the entire discussion ... especially the part where I said PRISM was about data and not content.

I'm not responsible for your inability to follow an argument. Maybe it's all that extraneous BS you drag in to try to bolster your case.

...Deduced, not listened to...

You're the only one that thinks the distinction matters.

Yeah, using correct terminology matters. Otherwise, you get sloppy, shoddy, inaccurate work ... kind of like that ThinkProgress article that misquoted its own source.

So, while Big Brother might not have the time to sort through all your information right now, that’s little comfort. If Big Brother ever wants to strip away your privacy and delve deep into your personal life, ALL the information he needs is right there at his fingertips.

FreedomWorks

Stinger's source says that the only constraint is time, not ability, selective practice or intent.

Multiple sources, several of them Stinger's, have now linked PRISM and "content". For argument's sake let's say he's right that they're discussing other NSA activities


Multiple posters, one of them Vrede, have confused and conflated the totality of NSA surveillance with the PRISM program, just like I talked about on page 8.

Whoosh.

Double whoosh!

Is there anyone in the world besides him that cares?

You mean, besides you? Probably not. But here you are, 10 pages or so later, still going at it.

I care about the bigger issue, one you've been ducking all along. I also enjoy that you've gotten the facts wrong, as your sources keep saying. So sue me.

I see your psycho mind-reading powers are back in full swing. I also enjoy that you think you've proven what you're not even close to proving . . . again.[/quote]

[Stinger]

You nonsensically accused me of infringing upon civil liberties and "intimidation". When I pointed out how stupid that was you selectively cited (a Stinger habit, ignoring words that make him look bad) banni's rule to back it up out of your desperation. Now you're so desperate when it backfires on you that you're calling it a distraction. That's pathetic.

You cravenly run from the fact that you posted personal information about another poster on an anonymous forum.

Not a distraction? You mean, this is the topic we've been discussing for 12 pages?

Lies, again. I took responsibility for exactly what I did - demonstrating that two aliases were the same poster. You otoh, are now whining about me breaking a rule that didn't exist when you continued to break it - "LOCATION, IP ADDRESSES, NAMES" - long after it did. Man-up about your hypocrisy already. Unlike you and Ombudsman, and only you and Ombudsman, I have adhered to the new rule since the moment it was posted.

"I love it. It's okay to betray a person's more-than-reasonable expectation of privacy as long as there's not a rule, but, once there's a rule, you can't discuss what I betrayed." The epitome of integrity and personal responsibility

Delusions, again. It's far more the Ombudsman rule that "the Vrede rule." Don't believe me? Ask banni, then see which of us has to eat crow.

Run to the nanny. You sure you don't want to hang at CPF?

Yes, last year, months before the rule.

ROTFLMAO!!! "It's okay to reveal personal information. There was no rule then."

Is that you're that stupid or just that desperate? How is saying that one poster uses multiple aliases an invasion of their privacy?

I don't know. Maybe it's a betrayal of a reasonable expectation of privacy to post someone's IP address and other personal information on what should be an anonymous forum. Maybe that's why Banni made the rule. Maybe it's intimidating to track someone down and post that they're posting from a government server. Maybe it's just not an ethical act.

[Ombudsman]

Whatever one thinks of the new rule the fact is that Stinger brought it into this chat, I have not violated it since it was imposed and he and Ombudsman, and only he and Ombudsman, have broken it - "LOCATION, IP ADDRESSES, NAMES" - for page after page since it was posted.

Vrede what the hell kind of drugs are you on? I haven't posted anyone's IP, location or their name since he put that banner up.

[Ombudsman]

That's a lie re "NAMES", as I linked above:

Poor old MrX. If there was any doubt before it was him (Leo Lyons), there sure isn't now.

I don't know what's going on with you, but you aren't making a damn bit of sense. Mr X was a screen name, not his real name. Do you think that banner means you can't call someone by a screen name?

Then, you and Stinger went on to discuss his alleged "LOCATION" for page after page based on his non-AZ "IP ADDRESS". What the hell kind of drugs are you on or should you be on, Ombudsman?

As in Hendersonville, not his home address. What's wrong with you?

So, what do you think about Stinger's whining about his own tangent being a "distraction" and his griping about my actions before the rule was posted, ones he explicitly endorsed, while accusing me and thus you and banni of infringing upon "civil liberties", "intimidation", betrayal of "person's more-than-reasonable expectation of privacy", and revealing of "personal information"?

What I think is that something is very wrong with you. You aren't thinking clearly. If you want to suddenly adhere to Banni's somewhat sarcastic forum rule banner, how about paying more attention to this part, "DEBATE THE ISSUES NOT THE PEOPLE." But first make an appointment with Wneglia because something isn't firing correctly between your ears.

[Ombudsman]

So you believe if I call you Vrede, that's a violation of the non-enforced rule, but you posting private PM's and IP addresses that you thought were only available to you as moderator was peachy keen.

Perhaps Wneglia can recommend someone. Oops, there I go calling someone by their name.

[Ombudsman]

You're still having trouble making sense.

[Ombudsman]

Are you autistic?

[Ombudsman]

Interesting dodge. Speaks volumes.

You made this statement: "it's any other names that a poster may have, like your "Poor old MrX", that banni was clearly referring to. "

Why would a screen name like "Mr. X" be considered "personal information" by any clear thinking person?