For all that I am frequently accused of being "anti-American" I hold the US Constitution up as one of the most sacred documents ever written by mankind. (The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights would be the item I consider to be the single most important document in our history as a species.)
The creation of the US Constitution was a symbol of a radically different way of thinking about our place in the world. Others had believed in the same ideals that were embedded in the Constitution long before the founding fathers, but none had ever made it stick. It was perhaps the most important turning point in the social evolution of our species since the development of agriculture.
...While I do not believe in overarching conspiracies of evil, I do believe that the structure and format of the American political system has become so damaged that the corruption of some individuals in positions of power is inevitable.
Transparency is virtually non-existent, accountability laughable and at the end of the day people unworthy of the power and responsibility they obtain are repeatedly given absolute control over the lives of millions...
...The Constitution of the United States of America is not a declaration of rights and freedoms granted to its citizens by the government. That document is a declaration of the limitations of powers granted to the government by the people that allow said government to exist.
According to the founders of the US, rights are not something that natural persons are given; that which is given can be easily taken away. Rights are innate and inalienable. All human beings are born with them and they cannot be taken from us....
Those with more to lose are far more willing to reduce the liberty of all in the vain hope of defending their monetisable assets. This is perhaps an explanation for why so many have come to associate freedom with "security at all costs".
Nowhere is this more evident than in the words of politicians themselves. Representative Xavier Becerra (D-CA) crystalises the viewpoint evidenced by those governing the US over the past few decades in just a few words: "To me, what makes us such as great country, is that we cherish freedom so much. But you can't have freedom without security. So you have to find the balance."
"You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it." - Malcolm X
As the US has spend the past 30 years going completely off the rails we've spent that same time becoming absolutely addicted to the technology and services it produces. So deeply embedded are we that disentangling ourselves from American technology providers, cloud vendors and what-have-you is a process of years, even decades.
While undertaking this difficult, painful and expensive task may not be absolutely required for pragmatic business reasons, I argue that it is a moral and ethical obligation we collectively bear to defend that which we believe. We could simply remain apathetic and allow privacy to evaporate as our laws are synchronized with those of the US, but it that what we want to have occur?
No terrorist actions, war, trade sanctions, international politics or other traditional tools of revolution and statecraft will turn America around. Americans have so deeply forgotten the concept of "liberty" that they no longer speak of their freedoms as innate but rather as rights granted them by their government. They see themselves as helpless before an unstoppable and inscrutable juggernaut and their own belief in this makes it so.
Pres. Obama was saying stuff like "this is a compromise that Americans can be happy with..."?!-TaoPhoenix (June 08, 2013, 12:47 PM)
They weren't one hit wonders... they were prophets and doomsayers!
...Too soon?-wraith808 (June 08, 2013, 09:23 PM)
It really should be an API for Prism instead of a web page. Naturally you would call it PriAPIsm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priapism) for its ability to facilitate continual invasion of our privacy and rights, and for the effect it will have on "national security" officials.
NSA Surveillance Heat Map: NSA Lied To Congress
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 09, 2013 @08:26AM
from the hey-dad-what's-up-with-that? dept.
anagama writes "NSA officials have repeatedly denied under oath to Congress that even producing an estimate of the number of Americans caught up in its surveillance is impossible. Leaked screenshots of an NSA application that does exactly that, prove that the NSA flat out lied (surprise). Glenn Greenwald continues his relentless attacks with another bombshell this time exposing Boundless Informant. Interestingly, the NSA spies more on America than China according to the heat map. Representative Wyden had sought amendments to FISA reauthorization bill that would have required the NSA to provide information like this (hence the NSA's lies), but Obama and Feinstein demanded a pure reauthorization of FISA, which they got at the end of 2012." And if you don't mind that you might have your name on yet another special list, you might enjoy this Twitter-based take on the ongoing news.
@40hz: Thanks for the OP and link. Very interesting, albeit the whole situation is confuzzling to me (looking in from the outside).
There's an interesting post at Slashdot:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)... "NSA officials have repeatedly denied under oath to Congress...-IainB (June 09, 2013, 09:09 AM)
I think this makes it even more disturbing, the idea that so many could freak out about this back in 2006 and then promptly forget that it ever happened, acting all surprised all over again when they hear about it again, years later, freaking out all over again, as if they never knew and news of this was brand spanking new.
I think the old saying about those that don't remember history being doomed to repeat it needs to be revised a bit, to include something about those that don't remember history being doomed to treating it as recent news when they hear about it again.-app103 (June 09, 2013, 05:34 PM)
... treating it as recent news when they hear about it again.-app103 (June 09, 2013, 05:34 PM)
For those suffering some form of "outrage amnesia", I'll just leave this old Bush era news story right here, so in about 7-8 years from now, when all this hits the headlines for a 3rd time (as breaking news), maybe someone with deja vu will point out the fact that it's old news and that this database of information was set up shortly after the 9-11 attacks and news of it was made public in 2006.-app103 (June 09, 2013, 05:34 PM)
I was listening to NPR yesterday. They were talking about the information the NSA was collecting on phone records. In the course of the conversation, there was an offhand remark to the following effect: “Obama is doing the same thing Bush did, although now it may be legal.”
<snip />
How far have we come? Think about it. A major news organization mentions in passing that a President has committed a crime, and it isn’t even worth a pause in the conversation.
Are you angry yet? Disgusted? Appalled? I am.
"A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor."
Mr. Snowden attributed his access to documents seemingly beyond the purview of his job to his work in network security, which would allow him to access a wide variety of secret files. Some large companies are currently lobbying the federal government to grant more of their employees security clearances, in part to fend off hackers from Iran, China and elsewhere.
Snowden claimed vast powers to both initiate surveillance and shut down the U.S. programs.
“I had full access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all around the world,” he told The Guardian. In a video posted on the website, Snowden claimed that “Any analyst at any time can target anyone … I, sitting at my desk, certainly have the authorities to wiretap anyone — from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President.”
Additionally he claimed he said he could shut down the entire system in an afternoon if he wanted to. The revelation that Snowden was a contractor with that wide-ranging access to some of the most closely guarded U.S. government programs is sure to provoke a reexamination of the explosion of contractors filling traditional government jobs in defense and intelligence agencies.
Eric Snowden 'missing' in Hong Kong (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22850901)
I'm of a mind that this is not foul play. No one would be that stupid yet, would they?
Part of me feels like there's some vague irony in the fact that his name is "Snowden", like as in the Snowden from Catch-22 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yossarian#Snowden).-wraith808 (June 10, 2013, 09:38 PM)
Well, let's hope we don't hear reports about him being seen attempting to run across the N. Korean border.-app103 (June 11, 2013, 07:16 AM)
Well, let's hope we don't hear reports about him being seen attempting to run across the N. Korean border.-app103 (June 11, 2013, 07:16 AM)
I expect him to disappear, never to be seen again. Later, there will come rumors and "high credibility" reports of him being seen in Beijing or Moscow - which will "only go to show he was working with foreign enemies all along" and that his going public was a desperate attempt to gain sympathy and protection after his original deal with "whoever he was working for" with went sour.-40hz (June 11, 2013, 08:25 AM)
New Facebook Privacy Controls
(see attachment in previous post (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=35143.msg328209#msg328209))-wraith808 (June 11, 2013, 07:51 AM)
Hm... No, they need to keep him in view as an examplewarning to others.-Stoic Joker (June 11, 2013, 11:30 AM)
Which is why whistleblowers generally get pilloried with impunity despite the so-called "protections" that are on place to prevent it. And in this case, there's very little chance of much public support since this county seems to be doing everything in it's power to not see that a very real coup took place within the government shortly after the WTC attack - and they're now living in a police state.-40hz (June 11, 2013, 01:59 PM)
Like sheep to the slaughter... 18900012-us-majority-backs-nsa-surveillance-wraith808 (June 11, 2013, 02:38 PM)
Would you stop aiming for the basement...we'll lose 40hz when it goes there. :(-Stoic Joker (June 11, 2013, 03:52 PM)
Would you stop aiming for the basement-Stoic Joker (June 11, 2013, 03:52 PM)
...we'll lose 40hz when it goes there. :(
... led the new generation to believe the US Constitution, through its government, grants it's citizens rights - when in fact, the actual wording only serves to restrict the powers given - by the people - to their own government.-40hz (June 09, 2013, 12:28 PM)
Most all of this crap started from the G.W. Bushy era-Tinman57 (June 09, 2013, 06:32 PM)
Basement? Doesn't belong there.-barney (June 11, 2013, 08:17 PM)
Maybe instead of The Basement, we need a new section called "Head in the Sand" for isolating serious political topics that might disturb some people - and probably *should* disturb them? :P ;)-40hz (June 12, 2013, 01:14 PM)
STEPANOVICH: Can you hear me now?
The surveillance state must be reined in
The Constitution assures us that the government will not intrude on our
lives without probable cause. The NSA's collection of telephone metadata is
unprecedented, illegal and very likely unconstitutional. There is simply no
way the government could have demonstrated the requisite grounds to
establish that each of the millions, perhaps billions, of telephone records
of U.S. citizens were relevant to an ongoing investigation.
The Corporate Roots of the NSA Spying Controversy
By Robert Schlesinger
I wonder, though, whether this debate is too narrowly drawn: Is the nub of
the problem too much government surveillance or too much surveillance,
period? After all, the government wouldn't be able to so easily accumulate
all this data on private citizens if private companies weren't collecting it
first.
Most all of this crap started from the G.W. Bushy era-Tinman57 (June 09, 2013, 06:32 PM)
This is quite false. The problems with invasions of our private communications began under Clinton, at least-CWuestefeld (June 12, 2013, 10:33 AM)
I wonder if it's even possible to completely avoid politics and have a "purely technical" discussion about any technology of significance in today's world?-40hz (June 12, 2013, 08:14 PM)
...the respect and consideration that DC is known for.-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:52 AM)
(Pardon the Captain Obvious bit - But I thought it needed said.)-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:52 AM)
Should anyone come forward in support of PRISM
If our government wants to record every phone call ever made, they need to make that case to the population, tell us how much it costs so we can assess the cost/benefits, have some very substantial oversight, and convince us that it's doing more good than harm and not being abused.-mouser (June 13, 2013, 07:21 AM)
I do agree that this kind of thing can have a stifling effect, I just put it low on my list of concerns about the world -- at least in the ABSTRACT.-mouser (June 13, 2013, 07:21 AM)
“The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…”
-------------------
“A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.”
-------------------
“Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.”
-------------------
“Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers. ”
-------------------
“A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted only a few minutes in the parade.
When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject. ”
-------------------
“He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall.”
Even in my own peer groups I've noticed a much greater reluctance to engage in certain wordplay and widespread self-censoring of certain words or phrases precisely because there's concern about something said being taken out of context.
Even in my own peer groups I've noticed a much greater reluctance to engage in certain wordplay and widespread self-censoring of certain words or phrases precisely because there's concern about something said being taken out of context.-40hz (June 13, 2013, 08:31 AM)
However if there truly are no supporters of that side (which I highly suspect - But have been wrong before) of the discussion ... Then A. we have in a microcosmic fashion proved my theory, and B. afforded some breathing room for the threads safety here.-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:52 AM)
More than half of Americans approve of a former intelligence contractor’s decision to leak classified details of sprawling government surveillance programs, according to the results of a new TIME poll.
Fifty-four percent of respondents said the leaker, Edward Snowden, 29, did a “good thing” in releasing information about the government programs, which collect phone, email, and Internet search records in an effort, officials say, to prevent terrorist attacks. Just 30 percent disagreed.
But an almost identical number of Americans — 53 percent — still said he should be prosecuted for the leak, compared to 28% who said he should not. Americans aged 18 to 34 break from older generations in showing far more support for Snowden’s actions. Just 41 percent of that cohort say he should face charges, while 43 percent say he should not. Just 19 percent of that age group say the leak was a “bad thing.”
Overall, Americans are sharply divided over the government’s use of surveillance programs to prevent terrorist attacks, according to the results of the poll. Forty-eight percent of Americans approve of the surveillance programs, while 44 percent disapprove, a statistical tie given the poll’s four-point margin of error.
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/06/13/new-time-poll-support-for-the-leaker-and-his-prosecution/#ixzz2W6bGw8xe
Yes, but this isn't usually regarding subversive speech,-CWuestefeld (June 13, 2013, 09:12 AM)
I wonder if it's even possible to completely avoid politics and have a "purely technical" discussion about any technology of significance in today's world?-40hz (June 12, 2013, 08:14 PM)
why did they make it top secret and deny (lie) everything up til the end?-Tinman57 (June 13, 2013, 05:37 PM)
You can only get a tap at the time of the court order.-wraith808 (June 13, 2013, 12:36 PM)
The necessary data might be gone.-wraith808 (June 13, 2013, 12:36 PM)
What they're doing is aggregating the data.-wraith808 (June 13, 2013, 12:36 PM)
It is indexed by minimally identifying information- not the content.-wraith808 (June 13, 2013, 12:36 PM)
If later, they find a person of interest, they can get a warrant for the period in time to check the database and see what the content of the intercept was.-wraith808 (June 13, 2013, 12:36 PM)
Sorry about chopping this up so much. I just wanted to share what went through my head as I read it.-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:27 PM)
The problem isn't in that. The problem is in the policing, i.e. who watches the watchers? How can we know that they can't get access without a court order. The court order isn't an encryption key- it's a standard court order. So they *always* have access... we just have to trust them not to use it unless due process has been followed.
...
I got nothing. I don't trust human nature that much. And once you do have oversight to that extent, more people have access. I just don't trust the checks and balances.-wraith808 (June 13, 2013, 12:36 PM)
Now all of a sudden this (allegedly) non-existent content just magically appears out of thin air.-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:27 PM)
“If we didn’t collect that ahead of time, we couldn’t make these connections, so what we create is a set of data and we put it out here and then only under specific times can we query that data.”
That was National Security Agency (NSA) head Gen. Keith Alexander in testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee on June 12 admitting that phone metadata on everybody is in fact being collected in real-time.
However if there truly are no supporters of that side (which I highly suspect - But have been wrong before) of the discussion ... Then A. we have in a microcosmic fashion proved my theory, and B. afforded some breathing room for the threads safety here.-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:52 AM)
Unfortunately, I have some evidence refuting your theory. It appears that public opinion overall is much less clear than within this community.-CWuestefeld (June 13, 2013, 09:12 AM)
Sorry about chopping this up so much. I just wanted to share what went through my head as I read it.-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:27 PM)
You cut out the most telling line, however... :P-wraith808 (June 13, 2013, 06:45 PM)
And one other point...Now all of a sudden this (allegedly) non-existent content just magically appears out of thin air.-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:27 PM)
From what I heard in the testimony (I was forced to watch it as it was the only thing on while waiting at the IRS office for a stupidly long time), this data isn't said to not exist, nor to just magically appear. It's just not in what they can look at without a court order.-wraith808 (June 13, 2013, 06:45 PM)
Holy crap man ... Now that's a bad day!-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:57 PM)
But as you mention it was only after suffering through the entire protracted spiel that this little detail was "clarified". None of the official 6 O'clock news (hand feedings...) ever mentioned the existence of anything other than the ~mostly harmless~ metadata.-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:57 PM)
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.-Stoic Joker (June 13, 2013, 06:27 PM)
I think it is only a truism, i.e. if you get absolute power, you will eventually be absolutely corrupt. Not that you can't become absolutely corrupt without absolute power. See: politician.-wraith808 (June 13, 2013, 11:26 PM)
While the statement is true, it is an Aristotlean statement-barney (June 13, 2013, 10:56 PM)
I can't help but think that this is a test bed for something much larger and more insidious.-Stoic Joker (June 14, 2013, 06:40 AM)
I can't help but think that this is a test bed for something much larger and more insidious.-Stoic Joker (June 14, 2013, 06:40 AM)
That's more like the SJ I know... let your cynicism flow!-wraith808 (June 14, 2013, 07:38 AM)
“What I would like to see right now is for people at these internet companies to stand up and say the truth, all of it, about their dealings with the NSA.” – Michael Arrington
Arrington, along with the rest of Libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley, is right to be wary of the way the government is able to use technology to track our every move. He’s also right to criticize the double-speak of any Valley company that prevaricates on its true level of involvement in programs like PRISM.
The only odd thing is why Arrington doesn’t go even further in connecting the dots fully between Silicon Valley and government snooping.
As the Financial Times’ April Dembosky reminds us, the relationship between the Valley and Homeland Security is nothing new. The Internet started out as a government project, designed to keep communication lines open in the event of a nuclear attack. In 1999 the CIA established In-Q-Tel, a venture capital fund to invest in technology companies that might be useful to the folks in Langley or Fort Meade.
According to CrunchBase – the technology investor database founded by Arrington himself – Cloudera, iMove, 3vr, and Mocana – all share one additional investor in common: SV Angel, one of the Valley’s most prolific “micro VC” firms. And whose name do we find on the firm’s list of limited partners? One Michael Arrington. (In a neat piece of symmetry, SV Angel’s co-founder, Ron Conway, is an investor in Arrington’s CrunchFund.)
Once you start digging into the data, the connections get really entertaining: Arrington is also an LP in Benchmark, which invested alongside In-Q-Tel in data-storage company Decru. And in Andreessen Horowitz, which co-invested with In-Q-Tel in Silver Tail Systems and Platfora. CrunchFund also invested in Facebook, which boasts Palantir’s Peter Thiel as a board member, and from where former data team leader Jeff Hammerbacher left to head up technology at Cloudera.
Data mining is fun!
The only people who love big data more, and who care about our privacy less, than the NSA are the outraged Libertarians of Silicon Valley.
Data mining, for fun, surveillance, and profit...-app103 (June 14, 2013, 07:06 PM)
if you talk about the data collection of the private sector, you're not in immediate danger of becoming a non-person-CWuestefeld (June 14, 2013, 07:52 PM)
Does your definition of "private sector" also include those companies that are contracted by-app103 (June 14, 2013, 08:01 PM)
in the private sector it's pretty much impossible to put together a database as comprehensive as what the government can gather by force-CWuestefeld (June 14, 2013, 07:52 PM)
Accused bank robber wants NSA phone records for his defense (http://boingboing.net/2013/06/13/accused-bank-robber-wants-nsa.html)
And so it begins...-wraith808 (June 14, 2013, 08:21 PM)
Accused bank robber wants NSA phone records for his defense (http://boingboing.net/2013/06/13/accused-bank-robber-wants-nsa.html)That is priceless.
And so it begins...-wraith808 (June 14, 2013, 08:21 PM)
Ron Paul apparently warned about this sort of thing in, erm, 1984...
September 6, 1984: Ron Paul Warns of Surveillance State - Don't Ever Say We Weren't Warned (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dkRu6BctHWk#!).-IainB (June 15, 2013, 06:05 AM)
Honestly, though, I’m being unfair in singling out Michael Arrington here. Really the only remarkable thing about his involvement with CIA-friendly big data companies is his hypocrisy in attacking those Valley luminaries who won’t admit to exactly the kind of spying his portfolio companies help facilitate. (In the hypocrisy stakes, though, Arrington comes a distant second to Ron Paul who this week told Fox Business, “I’m worried about, somebody in our government might kill [Edward Snowden] with a cruise missile or a drone missile,” after Snowden exposed the mass government surveillance facilitated by companies like Palantir. Last year Ron Paul received over $2.5 million in donations from his biggest single donor… Palantir’s Peter Thiel)
Uncle Sam can't demand to know where you're spending your cash. And if he does you can always refuse to answer. But your credit card company and bank are very accommodating when Uncle comes calling and asking for information.-40hz (June 14, 2013, 10:07 PM)
Nacchio alleged that the government stopped offering the company lucrative contracts after Qwest refused to cooperate with a National Security Agency surveillance program in February 2001.
That claim gains new relevance these days, amid leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden that allege widespread domestic surveillance by the NSA.
Back in 2006 Leslie Cauley of USA Today, citing multiple people with direct knowledge of the arrangement, reported that shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks America's three largest telecoms signed contracts to provide the NSA with detailed call records from hundreds of millions of people across the country.
Cauley noted that Qwest's refusal to participate "left the NSA with a hole in its database" since the company served local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states.
From USA Today (emphasis ours):The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard. ...
... the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government.
Nacchio's legal concerns about the NSA program at the time mirror those of civil liberty groups today.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-joseph-nacchio-and-the-nsa-2013-6
Accused bank robber wants NSA phone records for his defense (http://boingboing.net/2013/06/13/accused-bank-robber-wants-nsa.html)
And so it begins...-wraith808 (June 14, 2013, 08:21 PM)
Well it had already begun ...
This is just where it starts to get really really funny!
It's a brilliant defense! Especially if in fact he is innocent! (Wouldn't he be able to get them from the telco first - then purposely ask the NSA for their copy?)-TaoPhoenix (June 14, 2013, 10:21 PM)
The only cure I can see is to neuter the beast: take away its strength. And the way to do that is to shrink it, so it's no longer the 800-lb gorilla that can push everyone around.-CWuestefeld (June 15, 2013, 09:10 AM)
NYPD Sergeant Convicted of Misusing Terror Database Now "Integrity" Officer in Brooklyn Precinct:-\
By Graham Rayman Fri., Jun. 14 2013 at 11:56 AM
Five years ago, NYPD Sergeant Haytham Khalil was indicted for illegally accessing the FBI criminal records and terrorism database on behalf of a friend in a child custody dispute. He pleaded guilty in 2009.
Today, Khalil not only is still with the police department, despite his conviction, but he is an integrity control officer in a Brooklyn precinct.
In sum, an officer convicted of abusing his position to access confidential information for a private purpose is now monitoring whether other officers are following the rules.
We asked the NYPD's public information office for comment, but received no response.
The National Crime Information Center maintains a database filled with sensitive information used by law enforcement agencies across the country in investigations.
Khalil, 37, of Brooklyn was convicted of using another sergeant's password to access the NCIC database and retrieved an entry which identified an individual as being on the terrorist watch list. He then sent that document to a female friend in a child custody dispute in Canada. That dispute was with a man who was being monitored by the feds. The friend then filed the document in court records in Canada.
Khalil pleaded to accessing a computer beyond his authority, a misdemeanor. He faced a maximum of one year in jail and a $100,000 fine. He was sentenced in 2009 to one year probation and a $500 fine.
Under state law, if he had pleaded guilty to a felony, he would have been fired. But since he pleaded to a misdemeanor, the NYPD could decide to keep him on the job.
For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. When they became convinced that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional oversight committees and, finally, to the news media.
To the intelligence community, the trio are villains who compromised what the government classifies as some of its most secret, crucial and successful initiatives. They have been investigated as criminals and forced to give up careers, reputations and friendships built over a lifetime.
Today, they feel vindicated.
Edward Snowden Q and A: NSA whistleblower answers your questions
The whistleblower behind the biggest intelligence leak in NSA history answered your questions about the NSA surveillance revelations
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower
Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.
it's not a party thing. Even if Romney had gotten elected, the same would be going on.-wraith808 (June 19, 2013, 12:56 PM)
Like I said, this wasn't intended to be a GOP/DEM thing at all, but rather a "look how absurd the guy at the top is, trying to justify this nonsense with obvious double-talk". I would have said the same thing regardless of what party he came from.-CWuestefeld (June 19, 2013, 01:26 PM)
You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
- Malcolm X
I think it's reached the point where the only way to get the message across is to seriously consider impeachment proceedings and removal from office-40hz (June 20, 2013, 09:29 AM)
I think it's reached the point where the only way to get the message across is to seriously consider impeachment proceedings and removal from office-40hz (June 20, 2013, 09:29 AM)
This isn't about party. It's about the whole government. And unless we can/are willing to throw them all away and start over-wraith808 (June 20, 2013, 12:07 PM)
This isn't about party. It's about the whole government. And unless we can/are willing to throw them all away and start over-wraith808 (June 20, 2013, 12:07 PM)
wraith, I don't know your party affiliation, and it's none of my business. But whatever it is (assuming you have one), are you willing to vote entirely against that party to ensure that the jerks who perpetrated these things are kicked out?
And will you be willing to vote in that other guy even if his platform is anti-[your favorite sacred cow]?
And will you be willing to do so one year, or even three years from now, when you've cooled down a little (and maybe even forgotten)?-CWuestefeld (June 20, 2013, 01:55 PM)
In the 1980s, the Securitate launched a massive campaign to stamp out dissent in Romania, manipulating the country's population with vicious rumors (such as supposed contacts with Western intelligence agencies), machinations, frameups, public denunciations, encouraging conflict between segments of the population, public humiliation of dissidents, toughened censorship and the repression of even the smallest gestures of independence by intellectuals. Often the term "intellectual" was used by the Securitate to describe dissidents with higher education, such as college and university students, writers, directors and scientists who opposed the philosophy of the Communist party. Assassinations were also used to silence dissent, such as the attempt to kill high-ranking defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, who received two death sentences from Romania in 1978, and Ceauşescu decreed a bounty of two million US dollars for his death. Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Gaddafi set one more million dollars reward each.[5] In the 1980s, Securitate officials allegedly hired Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa.[6]
Forced entry into homes and offices and the planting of microphones was another tactic the Securitate used to extract information from the general population. Telephone conversations were routinely monitored, and all internal and international fax and telex communications were intercepted. After coal miners' unions went on strike and several leaders died prematurely, it was later discovered that Securitate doctors had subjected them to five minute long chest X-rays in an attempt to have them develop cancer.[7] After birth rates fell, Securitate agents were placed in gynecological wards while regular pregnancy tests were made mandatory for women of child-bearing age, with severe penalties for anyone who was found to have terminated a pregnancy.[7]
The Securitate's presence was so ubiquitous that it was believed one out of four Romanians was an informer. In truth, the Securitate deployed one agent or informer for every 43 Romanians, which was still large enough to make it all but impossible for dissidents to organize. The regime deliberately fostered this sense of ubiquity, believing that the fear of being watched was sufficient to bend the people to Ceausescu's will. For example, one shadow group of dissidents limited itself to only three families; any more than that would have attracted Securitate attention.[8
But here's the rub...when voting someone out...who steps in to fill the void?-40hz (June 20, 2013, 04:35 PM)
But here's the rub...when voting someone out...who steps in to fill the void?-40hz (June 20, 2013, 04:35 PM)
That is the question, is it not? And there's no way to answer it really. In our current system of politics, you have to have money in order to serve. Either yours, or someone else's. That's indicative of a larger problem. And the people that would be best for the job in general don't have any aspirations towards it. That's how you usually tell that someone would be good for the job.
So that was my point in the whole don't start talking boot people out. What fills the void will probably not be any better... and may just be worse.-wraith808 (June 20, 2013, 05:49 PM)
But here's the rub...when voting someone out...who steps in to fill the void?-40hz (June 20, 2013, 04:35 PM)
That is the question, is it not?-wraith808 (June 20, 2013, 05:49 PM)
If we just keep throwing out any bum that won't follow the rules, I hope they'd learn that *we* are the masters, and get their acts together. After just a few cycles, things would get better.-CWuestefeld (June 20, 2013, 06:42 PM)
We are appalled to learn of the unprecedented surveillance of Internet users worldwide through PRISM and similar programmes. Blanket surveillance capabilities such as these, especially when implemented without citizens' scrutiny, seriously threaten the human rights to free speech and privacy and with them the foundations of our democracies.
...
Remember that whole "Keep the FBI"?
I'm just going to leave these right here...-wraith808 (June 21, 2013, 09:27 AM)
More worth reading:
http://antiprism.eu/-CWuestefeld (June 21, 2013, 08:50 AM)
So... Idle hands being the devils workshop. The obvious solution is to pair them down to a more manageable size. This greatly enhances communication as there would only be two groups that would need to share with each other. And the best part is that with only the two groups - and such a big scary world out there.. - they would be far too busy doing their actual jobs for a F'ing change to have time to be futzing about in everyone's underwear drawers.-Stoic Joker (June 21, 2013, 11:52 AM)
They WERE smaller 15 years ago. Then they complained that they couldn't stop crime because they were understaffed. They used that as part of their marketing pitch to add more people and hardware.-TaoPhoenix (June 21, 2013, 04:45 PM)
EU commissioner wants to protect citizens from Prism
06.14.2013 9:40 AM
Europe's Justice Commission said Friday that she would not sacrifice European citizens rights for United States national security.
Or we could do what Aerosmith was/is still singing about....'Eat the rich'.-Shades (June 21, 2013, 07:40 PM)
Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders
By JAMES RISEN and NICK WINGFIELD
Published: June 19, 2013
WASHINGTON — When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.
Mr. Kelly’s move to the spy agency, which has not previously been reported, underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans.
The only difference is that the N.S.A. does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.
A Skype executive denied last year in a blog post that recent changes in the way Skype operated were made at the behest of Microsoft to make snooping easier for law enforcement. It appears, however, that Skype figured out how to cooperate with the intelligence community before Microsoft took over the company, according to documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the N.S.A. One of the documents about the Prism program made public by Mr. Snowden says Skype joined Prism on Feb. 6, 2011.
Microsoft executives are no longer willing to affirm statements, made by Skype several years ago, that Skype calls could not be wiretapped. Frank X. Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman, declined to comment.
What Does Skype's Architecture Do?
07/26/2012 in Big Blog by Mark Gillett
In the last few days we have seen reports in the media we believe are inaccurate and could mislead the Skype community about our approach to user security and privacy. I want to clear this up.
At Skype, we continue to be humbled and grateful for the commitment to our product that we see from our truly global user community. We focus every day on building the best possible product for sharing experiences whenever people are apart. We want Skype to be reliable, fast, easy to use, and in most cases – free. It works for Moms and Dads, teachers, soldiers, kids and sisters, brothers, grandparents, lovers and old friends all over the world. Our growth during the last nine years shows we are on the right path, and to our entire community, we say “thank you.” We are privileged to serve 250 million active users each month and support 115 billion minutes of person to person live communications in the last quarter alone. We believe that communication is a fundamental human need and that while we’ve been privileged with tremendous success we are just scratching the surface of the communications experiences that we plan to create.
Of course, this doesn’t happen by magic. It is no small technical challenge to make sure that people can connect whenever and wherever they wish. It requires investment, innovation and commitment to using new technology and capabilities. In addition to solving the challenges of scaling and providing reliable, dependable communications that people love, we operate globally and have an obligation to operate responsibly. We are committed to doing a great job at both – providing a phenomenal experience for all users, and acting as a responsible global citizen.
Despite these efforts, some media stories recently have suggested Skype may be acting improperly or based on ulterior motives against our users’ interests. Nothing could be more contrary to the Skype philosophy.
Let me restate some of the allegations and provide the facts.
It has been suggested that Skype made changes in its architecture at the behest of Microsoft in order to provide law enforcement with greater access to our users’ communications.
False.
Skype’s architecture decisions are based on our desire to provide the best possible product to our users. Skype was in the process of developing and moving supernodes to cloud servers significantly ahead of the Microsoft acquisition of Skype. Skype first deployed ‘mega-supernodes’ to the cloud to improve reliability of the Skype software and service in December 2010. These nodes have been deployed in Skype’s own data centres, within third-party infrastructure such as Amazon’s EC2, and most recently within Microsoft’s data-centers and cloud. The move was made in order to improve the Skype experience, primarily to improve the reliability of the platform and to increase the speed with which we can react to problems. The move also provides us with the ability to quickly introduce cool new features that allow for a fuller, richer communications experience in the future.
Early this year we completed our move of all of our supernodes into Microsoft’s global data-center footprint so we and our users can benefit from the network connectivity and support that powers Microsoft’s other global scale cloud software including Xbox Live, Bing, SkyDrive, Hotmail and Office 365. This provides a real benefit to our users and to our ability to continue to scale the Skype product.
It has been suggested that Skype has recently changed its posture and policies with regard to law enforcement.
False.
The move to supernodes was not intended to facilitate greater law enforcement access to our users’ communications. Skype has had a team of Skype employees to respond to legal demands and requests from law enforcement since 2005. While we are focused on building the best possible products and experiences for our users, we also fundamentally believe that making a great product experience also means we must act responsibly and make it safe for everyone to use. Our position has always been that when a law enforcement entity follows the appropriate procedures, we respond where legally required and technically feasible. We have a policy posted to our main website that provides additional background on our position on this matter.
It has been suggested that as a result of recent architecture changes Skype now monitors and records audio and video calls of our users.
False.
The move to in-house hosting of “supernodes” does not provide for monitoring or recording of calls. “Supernodes” help Skype clients to locate each other so that Skype calls can be made. Simply put, supernodes act as a distributed directory of Skype users. Skype to Skype calls do not flow through our data centres and the “supernodes” are not involved in passing media (audio or video) between Skype clients.
These calls continue to be established directly between participating Skype nodes (clients). In some cases, Skype has added servers to assist in the establishment, management or maintenance of calls; for example, a server is used to notify a client that a new call is being initiated to it and where the full Skype application is not running (e.g. the device is suspended, sleeping or requires notification of the incoming call), or in a group video call, where a server aggregates the media streams (video) from multiple clients and routes this to clients that might not otherwise have enough bandwidth to establish connections to all of the participants.
We believe that servers are the best way to solve these technical challenges, and provide the best possible experience to our user community.
As has always been the case, SkypeOut calls and incoming telephone calls to Skype on-line numbers (PSTN calls) do flow through gateways of our PSTN partners as this is required in order to connect them to the traditional telephone network.
It has been suggested that the changes we have made were made to facilitate law enforcement access to instant messages on Skype.
False.
The enhancements we have been making to our software and infrastructure have been to improve user experience and reliability. Period.
In order to provide for the delivery and synchronization of instant messages across multiple devices, and in order to manage the delivery of messages between clients situated behind some firewalls which prevent direct connections between clients, some messages are stored temporarily on our (Skype/Microsoft) servers for immediate or later delivery to a user.
As I have outlined above, if a law enforcement entity follows the appropriate procedures and we are asked to access messages stored temporarily on our servers, we will do so. I must reiterate we will do so only if legally required and technically feasible.
Some commentators have suggested that Skype has stopped protecting its users’ communications.
False.
Skype software autonomously applies encryption to Skype to Skype calls between computers, smartphones and other mobile devices with the capacity to carry a full version of Skype software as it always has done. This has not changed. The China-only version of the Skype software provided locally through our joint-venture partner tom.com contains a chat filter in accordance with local law.
As I described at the outset, our users and their Skype experience is our first priority.
We have an amazingly loyal and committed global user community and we believe that our users deserve the best products we can build.
Every day we focus on connecting Skype users to the people who matter to them, whether they are in Moscow, Miami or Mumbai and whether they are on PCs, iPhones, televisions, Windows Phones, Macs or Android devices. We constantly strive to design and deliver effective, safe and reliable communications software that is easy to use. We hope you will continue to love Skype.
Thank you for your continued support, use and passion about our products.
- Mark
I particularly appreciate the spin doctoring when they chose to use the weasel-worded phrase: "It has been suggested..." when it would have been far more accurate, and in keeping with the the nature of the original concerns to say: "Skype has been accused..."-40hz (June 22, 2013, 06:39 AM)
The legislation filed late yesterday would put limits on records that may be searched. Authorities would be required to establish a reasonable suspicion, based on specific information, in order to secure court approval to monitor business records related to a specific terrorism suspect.
Sanders’ bill would put an end to open-ended court orders that have resulted in wholesale data mining by the NSA and FBI. Instead, the government would be required to provide reasonable suspicion to justify searches for each record or document that it wants to examine.
The measure would eliminate a presumption in current law that anyone “known to” a suspect is relevant to the investigation. It also would increase congressional oversight by requiring the attorney general to provide reports to all members of Congress, not only members of the judiciary and intelligence committees.
British intelligence tapping fiber-optic cables for massive amounts of data
06.21.2013 3:55 PM
More secret NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden suggest that the U.S. agency's British counterpart intercepts petabytes worth of communication data daily from fiber-optic cables. The operation codenamed “Tempora” by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been going on for at least 18 months and involves the use of “intercept probes” attached directly to transatlantic fiber-optic cables landing on British shores from telephone exchanges and Internet servers in North America.
Cool, but why does the DuckDuckGo image search route through either Bing or Google?? Are they abstracting the personal info out of the query somehow...or is it/one still exposed?Hahaha. Is there no end to your skepticism?-Stoic Joker (June 23, 2013, 07:38 AM)
GW: We were close to 2 million queries a day before the NSA story broke. Since then, traffic has passed 3 million. We've broken records.
Cool, but why does the DuckDuckGo image search route through either Bing or Google?? Are they abstracting the personal info out of the query somehow...or is it/one still exposed?-Stoic Joker (June 23, 2013, 07:38 AM)
Of course this don't mean anything when Prism sits between the search engine and your ISP, or between you and your ISP.....-Tinman57 (June 24, 2013, 02:40 PM)
About Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.
Obama’s speech was delivered to a relatively small, specially selected audience of invitees. Even so, Obama spoke from behind bullet proof glass.
Obama’s speech will go down in history as the most hypocritical of all time. Little wonder that the audience was there by invitation only. A real audience would have hooted Obama out of Berlin.
This is the same Obama who promised to close the Guantanamo Torture Prison, but did not; the same Obama who promised to tell us the purpose for Washington’s decade-long war in Afghanistan, but did not; the same Obama who promised to end the wars, but started new ones; the same Obama who said he stood for the US Constitution, but shredded it; the same Obama who refused to hold the Bush regime accountable for its crimes against law and humanity; the same Obama who unleashed drones against civilian populations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen; the same Obama who claimed and exercised power to murder US citizens without due process and who continues the Bush regime’s unconstitutional practice of violating habeas corpus and detaining US citizens indefinitely; the same Obama who promised transparency but runs the most secretive government in US history.
Obama has taken hypocrisy to new heights. He has destroyed US civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. In place of a government accountable to law, he has turned law into a weapon in the hands of the government. He has intimidated a free press and prosecutes whistleblowers who reveal his government’s crimes. He makes no objection when American police brutalize peacefully protesting citizens. His government intercepts and stores in National Security Agency computers every communication of every American and also the private communications of Europeans and Canadians, including the communications of the members of the governments, the better to blackmail those with secrets. Obama sends in drones or assassins to murder people in countries with which the US is not at war, and his victims on most occasions turn out to be women, children, farmers, and village elders. Obama kept Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for nearly a year assaulting his human dignity in an effort to break him and obtain a false confession. In defiance of the US Constitution, Obama denied Manning a trial for three years.
Obama has turned America into a surveillance state that has far more in common with Stasi East Germany than with the America of the Kennedy and Reagan eras. Strange, isn’t it, that freedom was gained in East Germany and lost in America.
It is not clear to an ordinary person what Snowden has revealed that William Binney and other whistleblowers have not already revealed. Perhaps the difference is that Snowden has provided documents that prove it, thereby negating Washington’s ability to deny the facts with its usual lies.
Here we have a US Secretary of State lost in delusion along with the rest of Washington. A country that is bankrupt, a country that has allowed its corporations to destroy its economy by moving the best jobs offshore, a country whose future is in the hands of the printing press, a country that after eleven years of combat has been unable to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban is now threatening Russia and China. God save us from the utter fools who comprise our government.
The world is enjoying Washington’s humiliation at the hands of Hong Kong. A mere city state gave Washington the bird.
The stuck pig squeals from the NSA director–”Edward Snowden has caused irreversible damage to US”–are matched by the obliging squeals from members of the House and Senate, themselves victims of the NSA spying, as was the Director of the CIA who was forced to resign because of a love affair. The NSA is in position to blackmail everyone in the House and Senate, in the White House itself, in all the corporations, the universities, the media, every organization at home and abroad, who has anything to hide. You can tell who is being blackmailed by the intensity of the squeals, such as those of Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) and Mike Rogers (R, MI). With any luck, a patriot will leak what the NSA has on Feinstein and Rogers, neither of whom could possibly scrape any lower before the NSA.
The gangster government in Washington that has everything to hide is now in NSA’s hands and will follow orders. The pretense that amerika is a democracy responsible to the people has been exposed. The US is run by and for the NSA. Congress and the White House are NSA puppets.
Let’s quit calling the NSA the National Security Agency. Clearly, NSA is a threat to the security of every person in the entire world. Let’s call the NSA what it really is–the National Stasi Agency, the largest collection of Gestapo in human history. You can take for granted that every media whore, every government prostitute, every ignorant flag-waver who declares Snowden to be a traitor is either brainwashed or blackmailed. They are the protectors of NSA tyranny. They are our enemies.
The world has been growing increasingly sick of Washington for a long time. The bullying, the constant stream of lies, the gratuitous wars and destruction have destroyed the image hyped by Washington of the US as a “light unto the world.” The world sees the US as a plague upon the world.
Two mind-numbing articles by Paul Craig Roberts:-40hz (June 26, 2013, 08:49 AM)
Two mind-numbing articles by Paul Craig Roberts:-40hz (June 26, 2013, 08:49 AM)
I'm afraid you're crossing the line into partisan politics.
I agree with the overall conclusion you're presenting here. But, bad as the situation that they describe is, these articles do contain untruths and exaggerations (I won't enumerate them, because I don't want to dig deeper into the political quagmire). Presenting things in this manner undermines the effort in the long run: it gives the bad guys the opportunity to rebut trivial details while ignoring the big picture, and it robs us of (some of) the moral high ground.-CWuestefeld (June 26, 2013, 09:50 AM)
@40hz: I'm confuzzled. Do Americans really need things like the 2 articles by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts before they can see the stark reality of what has been happening and what is still happening to their country and the US Constitution?-IainB (June 26, 2013, 10:14 AM)
I find it interesting how so many are willing to concede our government's right to spin stories, send off flames, bully pulpit and dead-cat its opponents, and lie at will to the public - yet very quickly label any nose tweaking or blunt editorial characterizations in return as being "partisan politics."
Our enthroned leadership has made an art form out of using so-called "partisan" political strategies and debating techniques. That's one of the reasons they have been - and continue to be - so successful.
FWIW, I think we can have "intelligent" and "measured" and "respectful" dialog about this whole problem until the cows come home. The only way any real change will come about (or even become possible) is if the general public feels sufficient anger and disgust about what is going on to force changes. Because it isn't ever the "bright promise for the future" that stirs our public out of its chronic political llethargy. It's the hard realization that "enough is enough" and that "I am no longer willing to tolerate this behavior - starting now" that brings about social change. Something that our politicians understand and have learned to take advantage of all too well. Because they're often the first to remind you "you're better than that"; and that "you shouldn't talk that way"; and suggest you try to "exercise proper restraint and some consideration with your comments" - because they certainly aren't going to do the same with theirs.-40hz (June 26, 2013, 10:40 AM)
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We need to come together as one voice, one people... sex, creed, race, beliefs, orientation be damned and say that we stand for Truth and the Rule of Law, and we will accept nothing else. No games, no twisting of words, nor hyperbole to exaggerate the situation. And not let any of those things divide us. That is why I'm against any hint of partisan politics as usual in the phrasing of any of this. It's about something greater than that, IMO.-wraith808 (June 26, 2013, 11:50 AM)
But please remember what happens when governments really become afraid of somebody.-40hz (June 26, 2013, 01:26 PM)
People living in places like Baghdad, or who are being detained indefinitely and without charges under utterly inhumane conditions, can tell you exactly what some governments can also do when they get really nervous and pissed-off about something-40hz (June 26, 2013, 01:26 PM)
Actually I posted the graphics assuming that's what you're LOL'ing.-Stoic Joker (June 26, 2013, 01:34 PM)
That's not fearing the people...that's viewing them with contempt.-Stoic Joker (June 26, 2013, 01:34 PM)
Smith wanted Beech killed before he could do anything- but Schiano, who had compiled the Spartacus File, wanted to see how far Beech could get, and what, if anything, he'd do about the apparent conflict in his programming between pro-Americanism and the need to overthrow the government.
Schiano was beginning to suspect it wasn't that much of a conflict, actually. After all, sending assassins after him hardly reflected the highest ideals of American society, or any great respect for Constitutional rights.
Not that he'd never say anything like that to Smith. If Smith had any ideals, Schiano doubted they resembled anything in the Constitution. The entire Covert Operations Group didn't much resemble anything in the Constitution.
(15) Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate amendments to the Constitution providing (a), that the President shall have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b), that Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President and his aides and Cabinet any needed legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President so to act; and (c), that the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the President, his duly appointed aides, or Congress.
Addendum: It shall be strictly understood that, as the League of Forgotten Men and the Democratic Party, as now constituted, have no purpose nor desire to carry out any measure that shall not unqualifiedly meet with the desire of the majority of voters in these United States, the League and Party regard none of the above fifteen points as obligatory and unmodifiable except No. 15, and upon the others they will act or refrain from acting in accordance with the general desire of the Public, who shall under the new régime be again granted an individual freedom of which they have been deprived by the harsh and restrictive economic measures of former administrations, both Republican and Democratic.
In mid-August, President Windrip announced that, since all its aims were being accomplished, the League of Forgotten Men (founded by one Rev. Mr. Prang, who was mentioned in the proclamation only as a person in past history) was now terminated. So were all the older parties, Democratic, Republican, Farmer-Labor, or what not. There was to be only one: The American Corporate State and Patriotic Party--no! added the President, with something of his former good-humor: "there are two parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!"
The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary Sarason had more or less taken from Italy. All occupations were divided into six classes: agriculture, industry, commerce, transportation and communication, banking and insurance and investment, and a grab-bag class including the arts, sciences, and teaching. The American Federation of Labor, the Railway Brotherhoods, and all other labor organizations, along with the Federal Department of Labor, were supplanted by local Syndicates composed of individual workers, above which were Provincial Confederations, all under governmental guidance. Parallel to them in each occupation were Syndicates and Confederations of employers. Finally, the six Confederations of workers and the six Confederations of employers were combined in six joint federal Corporations, which elected the twenty-four members of the National Council of Corporations, which initiated or supervised all legislation relating to labor or business.
He most noticed a number of stray imitation soldiers, without side-arms or rifles, but in a uniform like that of an American cavalryman in 1870: slant-topped blue forage caps, dark blue tunics, light blue trousers, with yellow stripes at the seam, tucked into leggings of black rubberoid for what appeared to be the privates, and boots of sleek black leather for officers. Each of them had on the right side of his collar the letters "M.M." and on the left, a five-pointed star. There were so many of them; they swaggered so brazenly, shouldering civilians out of the way; and upon insignificances like Doremus they looked with frigid insolence.
He suddenly understood.
These young condottieri were the "Minute Men": the private troops of Berzelius Windrip, about which Doremus had been publishing uneasy news reports. He was thrilled and a little dismayed to see them now--the printed words made brutal flesh.
Three weeks ago Windrip had announced that Colonel Dewey Haik had founded, just for the campaign, a nationwide league of Windrip marching-clubs, to be called the Minute Men. It was probable that they had been in formation for months, since already they had three or four hundred thousand members. Doremus was afraid the M.M.'s might become a permanent organization, more menacing than the Kuklux Klan.
Their uniform suggested the pioneer America of Cold Harbor and of the Indian fighters under Miles and Custer. Their emblem, their swastika (here Doremus saw the cunning and mysticism of Lee Sarason), was a five-pointed star, because the star on the American flag was five-pointed, whereas the stars of both the Soviet banner and the Jews--the seal of Solomon--were six-pointed.
The fact that the Soviet star, actually, was also five-pointed, no one noticed, during these excited days of regeneration. Anyway, it was a nice idea to have this star simultaneously challenge the Jews and the Bolsheviks--the M.M.'s had good intentions, even if their symbolism did slip a little.
Yet the craftiest thing about the M.M.'s was that they wore no colored shirts, but only plain white when on parade, and light khaki when on outpost duty, so that Buzz Windrip could thunder, and frequently, "Black shirts? Brown shirts? Red shirts? Yes, and maybe cow-brindle shirts! All these degenerate European uniforms of tyranny! No sir! The Minute Men are not Fascist or Communist or anything at all but plain Democratic--the knight-champions of the rights of the Forgotten Men--the shock troops of Freedom!"
On a day in late October, suddenly striking in every city and village and back-hill hide-out, the Corpos ended all crime in America forever, so titanic a feat that it was mentioned in the London Times. Seventy thousand selected Minute Men, working in combination with town and state police officers, all under the chiefs of the government secret service, arrested every known or faintly suspected criminal in the country. They were tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot immediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in ten released as innocent . . . and two in ten taken into the M.M.'s as inspectors.
There were protests that at least six in ten had been innocent, but this was adequately answered by Windrip's courageous statement: "The way to stop crime is to stop it!"
December tenth was the birthday of Berzelius Windrip, though in his earlier days as a politician, before he fruitfully realized that lies sometimes get printed and unjustly remembered against you, he had been wont to tell the world that his birthday was on December twenty-fifth, like one whom he admitted to be an even greater leader, and to shout, with real tears in his eyes, that his complete name was Berzelius Noel Weinacht Windrip.
His birthday in 1937 he commemorated by the historical "Order of Regulation," which stated that though the Corporate government had proved both its stability and its good-will, there were still certain stupid or vicious "elements" who, in their foul envy of Corpo success, wanted to destroy everything that was good. The kind-hearted government was fed-up, and the country was informed that, from this day on, any person who by word or act sought to harm or discredit the State, would be executed or interned. Inasmuch as the prisons were already too full, both for these slanderous criminals and for the persons whom the kind-hearted State had to guard by "protective arrest," there were immediately to be opened, all over the country, concentration camps.
Doremus guessed that the reason for the concentration camps was not only the provision of extra room for victims but, even more, the provision of places where the livelier young M.M.'s could amuse themselves without interference from old-time professional policemen and prison-keepers, most of whom regarded their charges not as enemies, to be tortured, but just as cattle, to be kept safely.
On the eleventh, a concentration camp was enthusiastically opened, with band music, paper flowers, and speeches by District Commissioner Reek and Shad Ledue, at Trianon, nine miles north of Fort Beulah, in what had been a modern experimental school for girls. (The girls and their teachers, no sound material for Corpoism anyway, were simply sent about their business.)
And on that day and every day afterward, Doremus got from journalist friends all over the country secret news of Corpo terrorism and of the first bloody rebellions against the Corpos.
For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the World War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues. On the streets, on trains, at theaters, men looked about to see who might be listening before they dared so much as say there was a drought in the West, for someone might suppose they were blaming the drought on the Chief! They were particularly skittish about waiters, who were supposed to listen from the ambush which every waiter carries about with him anyway, and to report to the M.M.'s. People who could not resist talking politics spoke of Windrip as "Colonel Robinson" or "Dr. Brown" and of Sarason as "Judge Jones" or "my cousin Kaspar," and you would hear gossips hissing "Shhh!" at the seemingly innocent statement, "My cousin doesn't seem to be as keen on playing bridge with the Doctor as he used to--I'll bet sometime they'll quit playing."
Every moment everyone felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They were as jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any unexplained footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope, made them startle; and for months they never felt secure enough to let themselves go, in complete sleep. And with the coming of fear went out their pride.
Daily--common now as weather reports--were the rumors of people who had suddenly been carried off "under protective arrest," and daily more of them were celebrities. At first the M.M.'s had, outside of the one stroke against Congress, dared to arrest only the unknown and defenseless. Now, incredulously--for these leaders had seemed invulnerable, above the ordinary law--you heard of judges, army officers, ex-state governors, bankers who had not played in with the Corpos, Jewish lawyers who had been ambassadors, being carted off to the common stink and mud of the cells.
To the journalist Doremus and his family it was not least interesting that among these imprisoned celebrities were so many journalists..
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say today's Supreme Court rulings tangentially bear on all this. If we play with Venn diagrams, some fragment of the overlap is about "opression". So if the topic of Marriage just became "medium less" oppressive, despite people specifically calling for the Good ol' Boys club, then that's a small step towards transparency in all those other agency areas.-TaoPhoenix (June 26, 2013, 05:52 PM)
Report: NSA collected US email records, Internet use for years
06.27.2013 10:20 AM
The National Security Agency collected the email and Internet use records of some U.S. residents for about a decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to documents published Thursday by the U.K. newspaper the Guardian.
Securing your WiFi network (http://googleblog.blogspot.jp/2013/06/securing-your-wifi-network.html)It ends with a cute little narrated cartoon video, probably for people who maybe cannot read or are deaf, that gets the message across and emphasises the need for you to use WPA2 Wifi security keys.
Posted: Thursday, June 27, 2013
This post is part of a regular series of privacy and security tips to help you and your family stay safe and secure online. Privacy and security are important topics—they matter to us, and they matter to you. Building on our Good to Know site with advice for safe and savvy Internet use, we hope this information helps you understand the choices and control that you have over your online information. -Ed.
...(Read the rest at the link)
"Shadow on the Land" was from 1968? Seems remarkably prescient.
IFS = DHS/NSA/Militarily Armed Police?-IainB (June 27, 2013, 09:27 PM)
...I was sort of pleasantly surprised by the New York Times editorial
President Obama’s Dragnet (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-dragnet.html) (via NewsMax (http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/obama-nytimes-lost-credibility/2013/06/06/id/508541))
which sort of concludes that the Obama administration has lost all credibility on this issue. The surprise is nice not because I am sure that I agree with the Grey Lady – my feelings are mixed – but because I would agree that the newspaper's approach to similar questions has been consistent throughout the Bush and Obama administrations.
Some partisans who have criticized Bush for certain things suddenly get unbelievably silent when the same things are being done by Obama but the New York Times doesn't seem to belong to this hypocritical club. ...
So maybe it's time to accept, adapt, and move on - since one is generally likely to be impotent to shove these things back into Pandora's box.-IainB (July 01, 2013, 03:10 AM)
Posted Saturday 8th June 2013 12:52 GMT
by Should b Working
I did enjoy one comment I saw somewhere on the interwebs (sorry can't remember where) - that the public would be much more accepting of this behaviour if the NSA gave away a browser, search engine, provided a free mapping service and hosted email.
Non serviam.-40hz (July 01, 2013, 07:34 AM)
Philippic (44 B.C.)
(Hannibal ad portas) Hannibal at the gates: a cynical expression made when Cicero was forced by Antony to attend a Senate meeting which Cicero thought was of no major importance.
That, Senators, is what a favour from gangs amounts to. They refrain from murdering someone; then they boast that they have spared him! From the Second Philippic Against Antony.
Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.
What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
Cicero is a great philosopher- one not spoken of in the same tones as Socrates and Aristotle outside of philosophy circles...What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
You can't say it any plainer than that.-wraith808 (July 01, 2013, 12:12 PM)
"I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance."
And PRISM takes a turn. I couldn't have predicted this. Really, I couldn't.
George W. Bush Defends PRISM: 'I Put That Program In Place To Protect The Country' (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/george-bush-prism_n_3528249.html)
Holy crap... talk about blurring lines...."I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance."
If even a year ago you told me that Bush would come to Obama's defense and would justify their shared unpopular program by referring to Obama's own words, I would have laughed.-wraith808 (July 01, 2013, 08:48 PM)
Please... that's hypocrisy at work. The only thing the EU is glad about is that the NSA got caught.-wraith808 (July 01, 2013, 11:26 PM)
Please... that's hypocrisy at work. The only thing the EU is glad about is that the NSA got caught. If you don't think that countries don't run ops against their own 'partners' and 'allies', then I have a bridge to sell you in San Francisco. And I'll throw in some beach front property in New Mexico.-wraith808 (July 01, 2013, 11:26 PM)
"Non serviam."Words. Some people (not me, you understand) might say that such words have often been spoken by the impotent in futile defiance of the inevitable which has surrounded them - an inevitability arising from incremental changes that, up until recently, they may have all too unwittingly accepted/tolerated and for far too long. However, I couldn't possibly comment.
"Facit legem."
"Ægroto, dum anima est, spes est."
EU-US data-sharing deals reviewed amid Prism scandal
A European Union team will arrive in Washington, D.C. on Monday to assess how the U.S. is using data it receives from the E.U.
As part of a scheduled review, experts from the European Commission's home affairs department will conduct an examination of the Passenger Name Record (PNR) deal and the Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP).
The European Parliament gave its consent Thursday to the possibility of suspending the two data-sharing deals following allegations that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) bugged E.U. offices in New York and Washington.
..So again: Non serviam to any who expect me to just lie down.Good on yer, mate. :Thmbsup:-40hz (July 05, 2013, 08:18 PM)
...But I will say that I'm a little cynical about it....Cynical? About a charade in hypocrisy? Why? ;)-Tinman57 (July 05, 2013, 08:52 PM)
Sign of the Day: “1984” Was Not Supposed to Be an Instruction Manual (http://www.frugal-cafe.com/public_html/frugal-blog/frugal-cafe-blogzone/2013/06/30/sign-of-the-day-1984-was-not-supposed-to-be-an-instruction-manual/)
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on June 30, 2013
[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
~ Excerpt from George Orwell’s chilling futuristic novel “1984”
^ In my world, you are only as defeated as you are willing to allow yourself to be. I'm not the type who believes I can't ever be beaten. But I am absolutely certain I will never be defeated, beaten or not. So again: Non serviam to any who expect me to just lie down.
:)-40hz (July 05, 2013, 08:18 PM)
And good luck.-IainB (July 06, 2013, 03:20 AM)
And good luck.-IainB (July 06, 2013, 03:20 AM)
Thx, I expect I'll need it. But I also expect to work for it. :Thmbsup:-40hz (July 06, 2013, 06:22 AM)
A not too funny riff on what might happen someday...-40hz (July 06, 2013, 12:39 PM)
...Having used OpenDNS + DNSCrypt for a while now with no issues, I have been trialling VPN gate (http://www.vpngate.net/en/) for greater security/privacy, and have found it pretty good.
Coincidentally, I read this rather relevant post in LewRockwell.com today: Want to Defend Your Privacy? (http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/07/doug-hornig/want-to-defend-your-privacy-2/)
In the post, he discusses using VPN (Virtual Private Network) services, refers to various links (some offshore to the US) for improved security/privacy, and recommends consideration be given to the use of the likes of:
- Tor (http://www.torproject.org/)
- Cryptohippie (http://secure.cryptohippie.com/)
-IainB (July 07, 2013, 07:57 AM)
...“It means that US companies are forcing non-American companies not to allow people to protest their privacy and be anonymous, and thus the NSA can spy even more. It’s just INSANE,” Sunde says. ...How could this be? ;)
Whoops! Amerikans trying to avail themselves of offshore-from-US VPN providers may face some difficulties: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers? (https://torrentfreak.com/mastercard-and-visa-start-banning-vpn-providers-130703/)...“It means that US companies are forcing non-American companies not to allow people to protest their privacy and be anonymous, and thus the NSA can spy even more. It’s just INSANE,” Sunde says. ...How could this be? ;)-IainB (July 07, 2013, 09:22 AM)
How to hide text from NSA's automated surveillance
07.06.2013 11:50 AM
To keep supercomputers from reading your email, use a font the robots can't read.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043342/how-to-hide-text-from-nsas-automated-surveillance.html
The outrage about Prism spying is wearing off already
07.07.2013 10:20 AM
Some people are deeply upset about the latest incursions into our privacy. But as a society, we don't seem to care all that much.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043777/the-outrage-about-prism-spying-is-wearing-off-already.html
...And yes...somebody has been drinking.-Stoic Joker (July 07, 2013, 03:05 PM)
Some students and I had an exchange with NSA recruiters today. The audio and a rough transcript below.
The NSA came to recruit at a language program at the University of Wisconsin where I am spending my summer learning a language. Two recruiters, a redhead who looked more like a middle-aged 2013 NSA flyer copymother (listed as “NSA_F” below) and a portly, balding man (“NSA_M”), began to go through slides explaining the NSA and its work.
I had intended to go simply to hear how the NSA is recruiting at a moment when it’s facing severe challenges, what with the Edward Snowden and all. Dismayingly, however, a local high school teacher had thought it was good to bring 5 of his students to the session. They were smartly dressed, some of them even wearing ties as if there might be a job interview, young faces in a classroom of graduate students. They sat across from me at the roundtable. It was really their presence that goaded me–and I think a couple of other students–into an interaction with the recruiters.
Roughly half an hour into the session, the exchange below began. I began by asking them how they understood the term “adversary” since the surveillance seems to be far beyond those the American state classifies as enemies, and their understanding of that ties into the recruiters’ earlier statement that “the globe is our playground.” I ended up asking them whether being a liar was a qualification for the NSA because:
@Madi_Hatter a 2008 slideshow for college seniors considering CIA careers asked potential applicants: “Are you good at manipulating people?”
— David Mehnert (@Savants) July 2, 2013
The NSA’s instrumental understanding of language as well as its claustrophobic social world was readily apparent. One of the recruiters discussed how they tend to socialize after work, dressing up in costumes and getting drunk (referenced below). I can imagine that also exerts a lot of social pressure and works as a kind of social closure from which it would be difficult to escape. The last thing I want to point out –once again– their defense seems to be that it’s legal. What is legal is not just.
Someone else happened to record it on an iPhone, hence the audio quality. It’s been edited mainly to cut garbled audio or audio that wouldn’t have made sense and edit out questions and comments from people who didn’t explicitly say it was ok to post their audio.You’ll hear the sound drop out for a second to mark the cuts.
Rough Transcript
Me: You said earlier that the two tasks that you do: one is tracking down the communications of your adversaries and the other is protecting the communications of officials. So, do you consider Germany and the countries the US has been spying on to be adversaries or are you, right now, not speaking the truth?
Me: I mean do you consider European countries, etc, adversaries or are you, right now, not telling us the truth and lying when you say that actually you simply track – you keep focusing on that, but clearly the NSA is doing a lot more than that, as we know, so I’m just asking for a clarification.
NSA_F: I’m focusing on what our foreign intelligence requires of [garbled] so, I mean you know, You can define adversary as enemy and clearly, Germany is not our enemy but would we have foreign
national interest from an intelligence perspective on what’s going on across the globe. Yeah, we do. That’s our requirements that come to us as an intelligence community organization from the policymakers, from the military, from whoever –our global so–
Me: So adversary –adversaries you actually mean anybody and everybody. There’s nobody then by your definition that is not an adversary. Is that correct?
NSA_F: That is not correct.
Me: Who is not an adversary?
NSA_F: Well, ok. I can answer your questions but the reality is—
Me: No, I’m just trying to get a clarification because you told us what the two nodes of your work are but it’s not clear to me what that encompasses and you’re being fairly unclear at the moment. Apparently it’s somebody who’s not just an enemy. It’s something broader than that. And yet, it doesn’t seem to encompass everyone.
NSA_M: So for us, umm, our business is apolitical. Ok. We do not generate the intelligence requirements. They are levied on us so, if there is a requirement for foreign intelligence concerning this issue or this region or whatever then that is. If you wanna use the word adversary, you ca– we
This is not a tampon.
This is not a tampon.
might use the word ‘target.’ That is what we are going after. That is the intelligence target that we are going after because we were given that requirement. Whether that’s adversary in a global war on terrorism sense or adversary in terms of national security interests or whatever – that’s for policymakers, I guess to make that determination. We respond to the requirements we are given, if that helps. And there’s a separation. As language analysts, we work on the SIG INT side of the house. We don’t really work on the information assurance (?) side of the house. That’s the guy setting up, protecting our communications.
Me: I’m just surprised that for language analysts, you’re incredibly imprecise with your language. And it just doesn’t seem to be clear. So, adversary is basically what any of your so-called “customers” as you call them –which is also a strange term to use for a government agency– decide if anybody wants, any part of the government wants something about some country, suddenly they are now internally considered or termed an ‘adversary.’ That’s what you seem to be saying.
[Pause]
NSA_M: I’m saying you can think about it using that term.
NSA_F: But the reality is it’s our government’s interest in what a foreign government or foreign country is doing.
Me: Right. So adversary can be anyone.
NSA_M: As long as they levy their requirement on us thru the right vehicle that exists for this and that it is defined in terms of a foreign intelligence requirement, there’s a national framework of foreign intelligence – what’s it called?
NSA_F: nipa
NSA_M: the national prioritization of intelligence framework or whatever that determines these are the issues that we are interested in, these are how they are prioritized.
Me: Your slide said adversary. It might be a bit better to say “target” but it’s not just a word game. The problem is these countries are fairly –I think Afghanistan is probably not shocked to realize they’re on the list. I think Germany seems to be quite shocked at what has been going on. This is not just a word game and you understand that as well as I do. So, it’s very strange that you’re selling yourself here in one particular fashion when it’s absolutely not true.
NSA_F: I don’t think we’re selling ourselves in an untrue fashion.
Me: Well, this is a recruiting session and you are telling us things that aren’t true. We also know that the NSA took down brochures and fact sheets after the Snowden revelations because those brochures also had severe inaccuracies and untruths in them. So, how are we supposed to believe what you’re saying?
[pause]
Student A (female): I have a lifestyle question that you seem to be selling. It sounds more like a brochure smallercolonial expedition. You know the “globe is our playground” is the words you used, the phrasing that you used and you seem to be saying that you can do your work. You can analyze said documents for your so-called customers but then you can go and get drunk and dress up and have fun without thinking of the repercussions of the info you’re analyzing has on the rest of the world. I also want to know what are the qualifications that one needs to become a whistleblower because that sounds like a much more interesting job. And I think the Edward Snowdens and the Bradley Mannings and Julian Assanges of the world will prevail ultimately.
NSA_M: I’m not sure what the –
Me: The question here is do you actually think about the ramifications of the work that you do, which is deeply problematic, or do you just dress up in costumes and get drunk? [This is in reference to an earlier comment made by the recruiters in which NSA_F said: they do heady work and then they go down to the bar and dress up in costume and do karaoke. I tweeted it earlier.]
NSA_M: That’s why, as I was saying, reporting the info in the right context is so important because the consequences of bad political decisions by our policymakers is something we all suffer from.
Student A: And people suffer from the misinformation that you pass along so you should take responsibility as well.
NSA_M: We take it very seriously that when we give info to our policy makers that we do give it to them in the right context so that they can make the best decision with the best info available.
Student B: Is that what Clapper was doing when he perjured himself in front of Congress? Was he giving accurate information when he said we do not collect any intelligence on the US citizens that it’s only occasionally unintentionally or was he perjuring himself when he made a statement before Congress under oath that he later declared to be erroneous or at least, untruthful the least truthful answer? How do you feel personally having a boss whose comfortable perjuring himself in front of Congress?
NSA_F: Our director is not general Clapper.
Student B: General Alexander also lied in front of Congress.
NSA_F: I don’t know about that.
Student B: Probably because access to the Guardian is restricted on the NSA’s computers. I am sure they don’t encourage people like you to actually think about these things. Thank God for a man like Edward Snowden who your organization is now part of a manhunt trying to track down, trying to put him in a little hole somewhere for the rest of his life. Thank god they exist.
Student A: and why are you denigrating anything else with language? We don’t do this; we don’t do that; we don’t read cultural artifacts, poetry? There are other things to do with language other than joining this group, ok. [last line of this comment was directed at the high school students.]
NSA_M: This job is not for everybody. Academia is a great career for people with language.
Me: So is this job for liars? Is this what you’re saying? Because, clearly, you’re not able to give us forthright answers. Given the way the way the NSA has behaved, given the fact that we’ve been lied to as Americans, given the fact that fact sheets have been pulled down because they clearly had untruths in them, given the fact that Clapper and Alexander lied to Congress — is that a qualification for being in the NSA? Do you have to be a good liar?
NSA_F: I don’t consider myself to be a liar in any fashion and the reality is I mean, this was billed as if you are potentially interested in an NSA career come to our session. If you’re not, if this is your personal belief and you’re understanding of what has been presented then there is nothing that says you need to come and apply and work for us. We are not here — our role as NSA employees is not to represent NSA the things that are in the press right now about the NSA. That’s not our role at all. That’s not my area of expertise. I have not read–
Me: Right, but you’re here recruiting so you’re selling the organization. I mean I’m less interested in what your specialized role is within in the NSA. I don’t care. The fact is you’re here presenting a public face for the NSA and you’re trying to sell the organization to people that are as young as high schoolers and trying to tell us that this is an attractive option in a context in which we clearly know that the NSA has been telling us complete lies. So, I’m wondering is that a qualification?
NSA_F: I don’t believe the NSA is telling complete lies. And I do believe that you know, people can, you can read a lot of different things that are portrayed as fact and that doesn’t make them fact just because they’re in newspapers.
Student A: Or intelligence reports.
NSA_F: That’s not really our purpose here today and I think if you’re not interested in that. There are people here who are probably interested in a language career.
Me: The trouble is we can’t opt out of NSA surveillance and we don’t get answers. It’s not an option. You’re posing it as a choice like ‘oh you know people who are interested can just sit here and those of us who are not interested can just leave.’ If I could opt out of NSA surveillance and it was no longer my business, that would be fine. But it is my business because all of us are being surveilled so we’re here.
NSA_F: That is incorrect. That is not our job. That is not our business.
Me: That doesn’t seem to be incorrect given the leaks. Right, and the NSA has not been able to actually put out anything that is convincing or contrary to that.
[pause]
Student A: I don’t understand what’s wrong with having some accountability.
NSA_F: We have complete accountability and there is absolutely nothing that we can or have done without approval of the 3 branches of the government. The programs that we’re enacting–
Student B: Did you read the NY Times? Did you read about the illegal wiretapping? Why are you lying?
NSA_M: Did you read the Senate judiciary report that said there have only been 15 (?) instances, and they were all documented and done correctly by the FISA courts–
Student B: I’d love to read the opinion of the FISA court that says that this program one of the NSA’s programs was violating the 4th amendment right of massive amounts of Americans, but it’s a big ‘ol secret and only people like you who will not talk with their wives when they get home about what they do all day are able to…[garbled]…protecting us from the ‘terrorist threat’, but let’s let everyone here hear more information about karaoke.
–666–
NSA Recruitment Drive Goes Horribly Wrong (http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/07/05/1754229/nsa-recruitment-drive-goes-horribly-wrong)
Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 05, 2013 @03:08PM
from the recruitment-unsuccessful dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian is running a story about a recent recruitment session held by the NSA and attended by students from the University of Wisconsin which had an unexpected outcome for the recruiters. 'Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be 'adversaries', and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA.' Following her, others students started to put NSA employees under fire too. A recording of the session is available on Tahir's blog."
This link was amusing, too: Hello, NSA (http://nsa.motherboard.tv/)-IainB (July 07, 2013, 10:35 PM)
This is priceless: [url=http://mobandmultitude.com/2013/07/02/the-nsa-comes-recruiting/]-IainB (July 07, 2013, 10:35 PM)
PRISM v2.0 will be fun, colorful, and voluntary. (http://mashable.com/2013/07/08/mit-gmail-immersion-breakdown/) Come one, come all, and submit all your email data. We will figure out who you know and communicate with, even if you don't volunteer. We are pretty sure your friends will think the infographics are cool looking and want their own....and you'll be on it.-app103 (July 08, 2013, 08:37 PM)
PRISM v2.0 will be fun, colorful, and voluntary. (http://mashable.com/2013/07/08/mit-gmail-immersion-breakdown/) Come one, come all, and submit all your email data. We will figure out who you know and communicate with, even if you don't volunteer. We are pretty sure your friends will think the infographics are cool looking and want their own....and you'll be on it.-app103 (July 08, 2013, 08:37 PM)
First 300 to sign up get a free "I was water boarded at Gitmo for posting something stupid on FaceBook" T-Shirt!-Stoic Joker (July 08, 2013, 10:39 PM)
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces (http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas/dp/1610392116/ref=cm_cr-mr-title/177-0429100-1363429)
by Radley Balko
Edition: Hardcover
Price: $17.86
36 used & new from $11.40
46 of 46 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read!, July 1, 2013
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces (Hardcover)
In his new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, author Radley Balko provides a detailed history of our decline into a police state.
He works his way through this history in a sound way describing police raid upon police raid gone terribly wrong, resulting in a useless loss of life. He discusses police agencies that serve populations of only 1,000 people but receive federal funding for military-type weapons and tank-style vehicles. We have also seen a total disregard for "The Castle Doctrine" which has been held dear by our citizens since the colonial days. The "Castle Doctrine" is the idea that a man's home is his castle and a warrant signed by a judge is necessary to enter and search the "castle." Balko cogently explains the reason for all of this: The war on drugs and the war on terror are really wars on our own people.
A profession that I was once proud to serve in has become a militarized police state. Officers are quicker to draw their guns and use their tanks than to communicate with people to diffuse a situation. They love to use their toys and when they do, people die.
The days of the peace officer are long gone, replaced by the militarized police warrior wearing uniforms making them indistinguishable from military personnel. Once something is defined as a "war" everyone becomes a "warrior." Balko offers solutions ranging from ending the war on drugs, to halting mission creep so agencies such as the Department of Education and the FDA don't have their own SWAT teams, to enacting transparency requirements so that all raids are reported and statistics kept, to community policing, and finally to one of the toughest solutions: changing police culture.
Police culture has gone from knocking on someone's door to ask him to come to the station house, to knocking on a door to drag him to the station house, to a full SWAT raid on a home.
Two quotes from the HBO television series "The Wire" apply quite appropriately to this situation:
"This drug thing, this ain't police work. Soldiering and police, they ain't the same thing."
"You call something a war and pretty soon everyone's gonna' be running around acting like warriors. They're gonna' be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs and racking up body counts. And when you're at war you need an enemy. And pretty soon damn near everybody on every corner's your enemy. And soon the neighborhood you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory."
Detective John J. Baeza, NYPD (ret.)
Manhattan Special Victims Squad
Manhattan North Narcotics
32nd Precinct, Harlem
Some people (not me, you understand), might say that the Stasi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi) would seem to be alive and well in both countries, and that, evidently, you can't keep a "good idea" down for long.-IainB (July 10, 2013, 05:57 PM)
How Cops Became Soldiers: An Interview with Police Militarization Expert Radley Balko (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/police-militarization-an-interview-with-radley-balko)
7 Ways The Obama Administration Has Accelerated Police Militarization (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/10/obama-police-militarization_n_3566478.html)-wraith808 (July 10, 2013, 03:52 PM)
Step aside Yankee Rose - here comes Yankee Pepper.... :tellme:
Coming Soon! The New & Improved Statue of Liberty - now fully updated for post-9/11 America!
(see attachment in previous post (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=35143.msg330847#msg330847))
(Sorry. I'm having a bad day right now. :-\)-40hz (July 12, 2013, 09:56 AM)
With every new day that journalists dig through the secret files released by Edward Snowden, with every new astonishment as we discover the sheer enormity, nay, the truly pan-galactic scale of the NSA's baleen whale of surveillance, scooping up every nybble and bit of data that might contain, somewhere in its subatomic structure, the hint of an odour of a dream of a terrorist plot, the more I think that the great American writer Hunter S Thompson has already specified the only recipe that could possibly brace our minds to cope with this insanity.
"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls," said Raoul Duke, the drug-addled protagonist of Thompson's 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
"Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."
The NSA has shown that once you get locked into a serious data collection, the tendency is to push that as far as you can too.
Once the NSA was tasked with collecting international communications and data, and analysing it for foreign intelligence matters. Now it seems to be tasked with gathering well, pretty much everything about everything by everyone everywhere.
Nice analogy provided by Stilgherrian over at ZDnet. (Full article here (http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-sucked-into-ever-growing-nsa-vortex-whos-next-7000018015/))-40hz (July 13, 2013, 06:56 AM)
I turned out to have US colleagues, looking for ways to migrate to Europe .......... to get away from the US way of life, to bring their kids in safety.
...I did have US colleagues, who were looking for ways to migrate to Europe ..........-MohKraats (July 20, 2013, 07:01 AM)
Nowadays I look westwards in fear.
Scared by a police-state(https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/esmileys/gen3/1Small/policjant.gif) where there is no freedom no more,(https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/esmileys/gen3/1Small/cenzor.gif) where human-rights have no value.(https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/esmileys/gen3/1Small/CHAIR.GIF)
A state that is to scary to live in.(https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/esmileys/gen3/4Medium/087.gif)-MohKraats (July 20, 2013, 07:01 AM)
Technology is not the problem. Laws are not the problem. PEOPLE in our GOVERNMENT are the problem.-40hz (July 20, 2013, 09:21 AM)
Technology is not the problem.-40hz (July 20, 2013, 09:21 AM)
Laws are not the problem.-40hz (July 20, 2013, 09:21 AM)
PEOPLE in our GOVERNMENT are the problem.-40hz (July 20, 2013, 09:21 AM)
PEOPLE in our GOVERNMENT are the problem.-40hz (July 20, 2013, 09:21 AM)
I'm not so sure about that. I'm more inclined to say that government is the problem. It's just a silly bunch of "good intentions" that are paving the road to Hell. Does it matter whether you start with the psychotic, priviledged political class there, or is it too long to wait 6 months for the naive newbie to start down his own path to the dark side?-Renegade (July 20, 2013, 10:40 AM)
PEOPLE in our GOVERNMENT are the problem.-40hz (July 20, 2013, 09:21 AM)
I'm not so sure about that. I'm more inclined to say that government is the problem. It's just a silly bunch of "good intentions" that are paving the road to Hell. Does it matter whether you start with the psychotic, priviledged political class there, or is it too long to wait 6 months for the naive newbie to start down his own path to the dark side?-Renegade (July 20, 2013, 10:40 AM)
I think he was saying it's the actual politicians that are the problem. The "government" is nothing but a group of people running the show. That group of people have turned out to be the elite "in crowd". They are mostly people that have been groomed for their positions all their lives, like the Bush's, like father, like son....-Tinman57 (July 20, 2013, 08:31 PM)
The "government" is nothing but a group of people running the show.-Tinman57 (July 20, 2013, 08:31 PM)
The "government" is nothing but a group of people running the show. That group of people have turned out to be the elite "in crowd". They are mostly people that have been groomed for their positions all their lives, like the Bush's, like father, like son....-Tinman57 (July 20, 2013, 08:31 PM)
SO, is that an advocation for anarchy?-wraith808 (July 21, 2013, 08:09 AM)
Even when there *is* no system, the people will still gravitate towards the stronger dominating the weaker. It will just be more chaotic. It's unfortunately human nature. So at least with a codified rule of law, its less so.-wraith808 (July 21, 2013, 08:09 AM)
Blaming the system strikes me as being almost nihilistic.-Stoic Joker (July 21, 2013, 08:18 AM)
Because if all/any systems are problematic then it really doesn't leave any room for improvement.-Stoic Joker (July 21, 2013, 08:18 AM)
Some hierarchical order of responsibility is necessary if the "page" that everyone is to be on is to be kept track of. However...-Stoic Joker (July 21, 2013, 08:18 AM)
However...The "government" is nothing but a group of people running the show. That group of people have turned out to be the elite "in crowd". They are mostly people that have been groomed for their positions all their lives, like the Bush's, like father, like son....-Tinman57 (July 20, 2013, 08:31 PM)
It also strikes me that a large part of said "grooming" process consists of a deeply ingrained sense of entitlement, a disconnected and rarefied sense of reality, and a reflexive need to gravitate towards big picture thinking. You see the individual is irrelevant by design in big picture logic ... and the realities of the damage caused to real individual people by a bad decision are carefully obscured.-Stoic Joker (July 21, 2013, 08:18 AM)
These people are so distance from the realities of the life of the common that they can't help but screw up. A military example would be the difference between taking off in a plane, flying over a town, dropping a few bombs, and gong home again...and having to spend days on foot getting to a target, and then killing them face to face. Government, gets to be distances an even further degree, by merely needing to sign something that puts the wheels in motion, and then going on with their day.-Stoic Joker (July 21, 2013, 08:18 AM)
It's no wonder these people constantly screw-up ... I could almost pity them if they weren't destroying our lives in the process.-Tinman57 (July 20, 2013, 08:31 PM)
Defund NSA Surveillance: A critical vote is happening tomorrow, July 24th, on the Defense Appropriations Bill in the House of Representatives. The bill gives taxpayer money to fund defense programs, including NSA surveillance.
Defund the NSA (http://defundthensa.com/) (misnamed, but oh well), and a link to HR-2397 (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr2397rh/pdf/BILLS-113hr2397rh.pdf).-wraith808 (July 23, 2013, 08:12 AM)
^Ok...and now that it's out of the closet-40hz (July 21, 2013, 10:47 AM)
Plan to defund NSA phone collection program defeated (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/07/24/plan-to-defund-nsa-phone-collection-program-has-broad-support-sponsor-says/) :(-wraith808 (July 24, 2013, 11:52 PM)
Another article I just read states this was a good thing because it was so close of a vote. Their thinking is once the word gets out who voted against it, they will get voted out on the next election, bringing in more politicians that won't support it (or claim to anyway) and eventually getting all this invasion of the U.S. Constitution crap repealed.-Tinman57 (July 25, 2013, 08:17 PM)
Another article I just read states this was a good thing because it was so close of a vote. Their thinking is once the word gets out who voted against it, they will get voted out on the next election, bringing in more politicians that won't support it (or claim to anyway) and eventually getting all this invasion of the U.S. Constitution crap repealed.-Tinman57 (July 25, 2013, 08:17 PM)
Who wrote that? Good? Yes, because the votingpublicgoldfish has such a wonderful memory. :P :D-Renegade (July 25, 2013, 09:35 PM)
Obama Promises Disappear from Web (http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/07/25/obama-promises-disappear-from-web/)
July 25, 2013, 11:31 a.m.
Change.gov, the website created by the Obama transition team in 2008, has effectively disappeared sometime over the last month.
While the front splash page for Change.gov has linked to the main White House website for years, until recently, you could still continue on to see the materials and agenda laid out by the administration. This was a particularly helpful resource for those looking to compare Obama's performance in office against his vision for reform, laid out in detail on Change.gov.
According to the Internet Archive, the last time that content (beyond the splash page) was available was June 8th -- last month.
Why the change?
Here's one possibility, from the administration's ethics agenda:
Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.
It may be that Obama's description of the importance of whistleblowers went from being an artifact of his campaign to a political liability. It wouldn't be the first time administration positions disappear from the internet when they become inconvenient descriptions of their assurances.
Obama's vision for lobbying transparency has similarly been discarded along the way, but the timing here suggests that the heat on Obama's whistleblower prosecutions has led the administration to unceremoniously remove their previous positions.
JP Morgan to eurozone periphery: “Get rid of your pinko, anti-fascist constitutions” (http://blogs.euobserver.com/phillips/2013/06/07/jp-morgan-to-eurozone-periphery-get-rid-of-your-pinko-anti-fascist-constitutions/)
At times, I do marvel how antiseptic, bland even, that the language of the most wretchedly villainous documents can be.
Last week, the European economic research team with JP Morgan, the global financial giant, put out a 16-page paper on the state of play of euro area adjustment. This involved a totting up of what work has been done so far and what work has yet to be done in terms of sovereign, household and bank deleveraging; structural reform (reducing labour costs, making it easier to fire workers, privatisation, deregulation, liberalising ‘protected’ industries, etc.); and national political reform.
The takeaway in the small amount of coverage that I’ve seen of the paper was that its authors say the eurozone is about halfway through its period of adjustment, so austerity is still likely to be a feature of the landscape “for a very extended period.”
The bankers’ analysis probably otherwise received little attention because it is a bit ‘dog bites man‘: Big Bank Predicts Many More Years of Austerity. It’s not really as if anyone was expecting austerity to disappear any time soon, however much EU-IMF programme countries have been offered a relaxation of debt reduction commitments in return for ramping up the pace of structural adjustment.
The lack of coverage is a bit of a shame, because it’s the first public document I’ve come across where the authors are frank that the problem is not just a question of fiscal rectitude and boosting competitiveness, but that there is also an excess of democracy in some European countries that needs to be trimmed.
“In the early days of the crisis, it was thought that these national legacy problems were largely economic: over-levered sovereigns, banks and households, internal real exchange rate misalignments, and structural rigidities. But, over time it has become clear that there are also national legacy problems of a political nature. The constitutions and political settlements in the southern periphery, put in place in the aftermath of the fall of fascism, have a number of features which appear to be unsuited to further integration in the region. When German politicians and policymakers talk of a decade-long process of adjustment, they likely have in mind the need for both economic and political reform.” [Emphasis added]
Yes, you read that right. It’s in dry, banker-ese, but the authors have basically said that the laws and constitutions of southern Europe are a bit too lefty, a product of their having been written by anti-fascists. These “deep-seated political problems in the periphery,” say authors David Mackie, Malcolm Barr and friends, “in our view, need to change if EMU is going to function properly in the long run.”
You think I’m perhaps exaggerating a smidge? They go into more detail in a section describing this “journey of national political reform”:
“The political systems in the periphery were established in the aftermath of dictatorship, and were defined by that experience. Constitutions tend to show a strong socialist influence, reflecting the political strength that left-wing parties gained after the defeat of fascism.”
All this is a load of historical horse-lasagna anyway. Italy for example never went through a process akin to Germany’s denazification, and in Spain, the democratising king, Juan Carlos, played a major role in the transition. Only in Greece and Portugal were there popular socialist insurrections that resulted in or contributed to the overthrow of the regimes: the Athens Polytechnic Uprising played a key role in the Metapolitefsi or ‘polity change’ (although much, much more than the crushed student protests were involved here, including a failed coup d’etat and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus), and in Portugal a proper left-wing rebellion, the Revolução dos Cravos or Carnation Revolution, brought down the Estado Novo regime. Although it is true in the case of the latter three countries that their late-in-the-day construction of welfare states in the 70s and 80s was largely carried out by social democratic forces, the architects of the Italian post-war state were the Christian Democrats, who dominated government for 50 years.
“Political systems around the periphery typically display several of the following features: weak executives; weak central states relative to regions; constitutional protection of labour rights; consensus building systems which foster political clientalism; and the right to protest if unwelcome changes are made to the political status quo. The shortcomings of this political legacy have been revealed by the crisis. Countries around the periphery have only been partially successful in producing fiscal and economic reform agendas, with governments constrained by constitutions (Portugal), powerful regions (Spain), and the rise of populist parties (Italy and Greece).”
Let’s parse that paragraph, shall we? Weak executives means strong legislatures. That should be a good thing, no? Let us remember that it is the parliament that is sovereign. The executive in a democracy is supposed to be the body that merely carries out the bidding of the legislature. There is a reason why liberal democracy opted for parliaments and not a system of elected kings.
Oh, and we want strong central states. None of this local democracy nonsense, please.
JP Morgan, and presumably the EU powerbrokers they are ventriloquising for, finally are being honest with us: they want to do away with constitutional labour rights protections and the right to protest. And there has to be some way to prevent people electing the wrong parties.
Thankfully though, the authors note, “There is a growing recognition of the extent of this problem, both in the core and in the periphery. Change is beginning to take place.”
In particular, they highlight how Spain has begun “to address some of the contradictions of the post-Franco settlement” and rein in the regions.
But other than that, sadly, the process of de-democratization (okay – I’m calling it that. They call it “the process of political reform”) has “barely begun”.
Well, the JP Morgan paper may have been written in English, but there is a venerable Spanish phrase that that all good anti-fascists right across the eurozone periphery know and is probably the simplest and best response to such provocation: ¡No pasarán!
Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be Abolished (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/07/28/0354214/google-engineer-wins-nsa-award-then-says-nsa-should-be-abolished)
Posted by timothy on Sunday July 28, 2013 @08:29AM
from the well-if-you'd-like-my-opinion-gentleman dept.
First time accepted submitter MetalliQaZ writes "Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA's first annual "Science of Security (SoS) Competition." The competition, which aims to honor the best 'scientific papers about national security' as a way to strengthen NSA collaboration with researchers in academia, honored Bonneau for his paper on the nature of passwords. And how did Bonneau respond to being honored by the NSA? By expressing, in an honest and bittersweet blog post, his revulsion at what the NSA has become: 'Simply put, I don't think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form.'"
A Google engineer with integrity?-IainB (July 28, 2013, 10:52 AM)
I'm not sure whether the above type of process of elimination even can, or does necessarily achieve anything particularly useful. The conclusion is arguably a truism - that the act or habit of violence for the purposes of control over others leads to Totalitarianism (which manifests as deliberate, necessary and systemic violence for the purposes of control over others to oblige them to conform to a given set of rules).Technology is not the problem. Laws are not the problem. PEOPLE in our GOVERNMENT are the problem....-40hz (July 20, 2013, 09:21 AM)
...Should we be surprised that when we base our entire society on force and violence, that things always end up as force and violence?-Renegade (July 20, 2013, 10:40 AM)
I'm not sure whether the above type of process of elimination even can, or does necessarily achieve anything particularly useful. The conclusion is arguably a truism - that the act or habit of violence for the purposes of control over others leads to Totalitarianism (which manifests as deliberate, necessary and systemic violence for the purposes of control over others to oblige them to conform to a given set of rules).Technology is not the problem. Laws are not the problem. PEOPLE in our GOVERNMENT are the problem....-40hz (July 20, 2013, 09:21 AM)
...Should we be surprised that when we base our entire society on force and violence, that things always end up as force and violence?-Renegade (July 20, 2013, 10:40 AM)-IainB (July 30, 2013, 01:01 AM)
It is arguably the same for many/most of a society's religio-political ideologies - e.g., including such as Serfdom, Roman Catholicism, Islamism, Hinduism, Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, Progressivism, Anarchism, Democracy, Capitalism, Fascism.-IainB (July 30, 2013, 01:01 AM)
However we might try to disguise it or use euphemisms for it, violence is an implicit and necessary factor running through the thing's structure, giving it strength and rigidity, like the grain in a piece of wood. The most successful religio-political ideologies, in terms of power or longevity, would seem to be those whose artificial framework of reference employs the most implicit violence and has as a basis one or more of some kind of real/imaginary ruling object or master-principle - e.g., a king, an idol, a God, a dictator or a concept such as "the people", "the workers" or "the State". The more the merrier.
Whittling away at a stick, looking for "a problem", will usually result in a stub of the stick held between your finger and thumb, and some wood shavings on the ground, and no major discovery of anything particularly new/useful. It was, after all, always nothing more than just a stick of wood. The "problem" (if you can call it that) with the stick is that it was made of wood. But what was the problem really?
All this talk of "the problem", but, do we have a discernible, clear definition of what the problem actually is?-IainB (July 30, 2013, 01:01 AM)
- Is it "Technology"? It might be, I suppose, but why? - and how exactly (unless you are a Luddite) could a collective noun for a set of hardware, software and methodologies be a "problem"? It would presumably depend on your definition of the problem.
- Is it our "Laws"? It might be, I suppose, but why? - and how exactly could a collective noun for a set of rules that society has established for itself to observe be a "problem"? It would presumably depend on your definition of the problem.
- Is it the "People in our government"? It might be, I suppose, but why? - and how exactly could a collective noun for any given set of people that society has appointed into government to manage that society be a "problem"? A stigmatisation, maybe, but a "problem"? It would presumably depend on your definition of the problem.
-IainB (July 30, 2013, 01:01 AM)
I could go on, but you probably get the idea, and in any event I don't wish to labour the point too much. The missing factor in this would seem to be the necessary articulation of a clear, useful, accurate and rational definition of the problem - whatever the problem may be. Once you have defined the problem thus, you are likely to be around halfway to identifying and articulating a rational solution.-IainB (July 30, 2013, 01:01 AM)
Of course, if you don't need a clear, useful, accurate and rational definition of the problem, because you already know the solution is your preferredhammerbelief or religio-political ideology - e.g., including such as Serfdom, Roman Catholicism, Islamism, Hinduism, Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, Progressivism, Anarchism, Democracy, Capitalism, Fascism - then good luck. Go ahead and knock yourself out. If you don't study history, then you could save yourself some time by taking a leaf out of the the Egyptians' handbook on this - they seem to be really into this kind of thing at the moment.-IainB (July 30, 2013, 01:01 AM)
No problem.Yeah, right.
OK, so, if you define the problem as the necessary implicit prevalence/use of violence and coercion in a society's prevailing religio-political ideologies, and if you presuppose that Capitalism and Anarchy are the only two non-violent religio-political ideologies in that sense (just ignoring for the moment that there are probably more than two), then:
The Solution is to sweep away all the prevailing religio-political ideologies and implant Capitalism and Anarchy.
Of course, you are probably going to have to make a rule to prohibit the other bad religio-political ideologies as illegal or something, and then figure out how you will enforce that ... with violence.No problem.Yeah, right.-IainB (July 30, 2013, 06:26 AM)
(https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/esmileys/gen3/1Small/hiding.gif) dont escalate! dont escalate! :D
- it's been an interesting few posts btw.-tomos (July 30, 2013, 08:46 AM)
H. L. Mencken-40hz (July 30, 2013, 08:33 AM)
...Wot u rote.Very well put. :up:-Renegade (July 30, 2013, 08:15 AM)
OT Stuff-Renegade (July 30, 2013, 08:15 AM)
^Anarchy is great in theory. Too bad it doesn't work in practice for much the same reason communism didn't. It requires a large number of a certain type of high-minded individual that we just don't have.
If you had a world full of that sort of person you wouldn't need anything.
But if you had a world full of unicorns, I'm guessing everything would be just as cool - and just as likely.
I'm not waiting up nights. We can only work with what we've got. ;) ;D :Thmbsup:-40hz (July 30, 2013, 09:22 AM)
Doesn't that presume that those ideologies include expansion as a tenet (which none of them necessarily do)
As you said, Anarchism only talks about inflicting on the non-willing. So, and I quote, "Anarchism doesn't preclude people from associating under some set of ideologies, e.g. anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism, etc. The only thing it precludes is the initiation of force/violence."
If a group of people got together an formed a democracy, it would be a tyranny of the masses, sure. But on the masses that want the tyranny. As long as it remains in the borders and by collusion, then it does work. And they would have the defensive ability to expel anyone that didn't want to abide by that rule, correct?-wraith808 (July 30, 2013, 11:10 AM)
Basement? Nah. It's still all fun & games. Nobody is getting vehement about anything. Besides, it's more fun with 40hz in the discussion.-Renegade (July 30, 2013, 11:44 AM)
Basement? Nah. It's still all fun & games. Nobody is getting vehement about anything. Besides, it's more fun with 40hz in the discussion.-Renegade (July 30, 2013, 11:44 AM)
Your last statements bring to the fore anything that doesn't have to do with the immediate.
I don't have the resources, so I ask someone for them. If they aren't totally altruistic, the lack of the way to enforce the contract (as that would be aggression) comes into question.
I guess it could work like pure barter, but that's not always going to get you through the spots when what you're producing is either not in season, or not in demand. How do you enforce such things?-wraith808 (July 30, 2013, 12:56 PM)
If we have allowed PRISM, et. al., there are naught to blame but ourselves.-barney (July 31, 2013, 12:00 AM)
Quote from: barney on Today at 07:00:11
If we have allowed PRISM, et. al., there are naught to blame but ourselves. /quote
I have a *real* problem with that statement.-wraith808 (July 31, 2013, 09:08 AM)
Sounding the alarm: Ars speaks with vocal NSA critic Sen. Ron Wyden (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/two-years-later-senators-criticism-of-nsa-spying-sinks-in/)
The senator talks about the NSA, the FISC, and more.
by Joe Mullin - Jul 31, 2013 1:20 pm UTC
As a series of top-secret NSA documents have been leaked over the past several weeks, the issue of widespread government surveillance has been front-and-center in the public eye. For some, those documents were shocking revelations; for privacy activists and digerati who have followed cases like Jewel v. NSA, they were less surprising than they were useful. The documents leaked by a former NSA contractor offered solid confirmation of what had long been suspected—that the NSA had created a giant information vacuum, sucking up all manner of data.
Another group that couldn't have been surprised: politicians in Congress' top intelligence committees. But few had complained publicly about overbroad surveillance. Two exceptions are Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), both of whom sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"I want to deliver a warning this afternoon," Wyden said in 2011. "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry."
Two years later, in small but noticeable ways, that anger is coming to the fore. Recent polls show that more Americans see the government as going too far in restricting civil liberties. A shift is clearly happening in Congress, as well. Last week, the House of Representatives was just eight votes away from de-funding the NSA telephone program.
Last week, Ars spoke to Wyden about his longstanding critique of NSA surveillance, what has happened since the leaks began, and views of the leaker Edward Snowden himself.
Ars Technica: In the past two months, much has been revealed about what kind of surveillance the NSA is doing, largely because of leaked documents. Is there more we don't know, that we should know? And can you characterize what we don't know in any way?
Senator Ron Wyden: There is a lot more to know, particularly in terms of getting a declassified version of the legal analysis used by the FISA court. When people get that, and see it in the context of the bulk phone records program, they will see how astoundingly broad it is. We've got secret law, authorizing secret surveillance, being interpreted by a largely secret court.
The administration's legal rationale talks about something that sounds like there's a connection to terrorism. Instead, it's morphed into an arrangement where, for millions of law-abiding Americans, the government knows who they called, when they called, and where they called from. It's a treasure trove of human relationship data. In my view, that reveals so much about the lives of law-abiding Americans.
Ars: In your last speech you mentioned location a few times. Do Americans need to be worried that their location is being tracked right now?
Sen. Wyden: The government says they have the authority to do it. I can't get into anything beyond that. They have said they're not doing it today.
In public session, I have particularly pressed the intelligence community to describe what legal rights are of law-abiding Americans with regard to whether or not they can be tracked. We have 24/7 tracking devices in our pockets. I asked the head of the FBI: given that the law is unsettled with regard to protection, I'd like to have you describe here in an open setting, what are the rights of Americans today as the courts are settling this? They have been unwilling on repeated occasions to give an answer.
Ars: Why have you been one of the only members of Congress speaking out about this?
Sen. Wyden: Well, I think there have been remarkable developments in the last eight weeks. Before that, you wouldn't have had this issue debated on the floor of the House—and you wouldn't have had by a mile more than 200 members of the US Congress saying, look, we've got real problems with the status quo. I consider that huge, huge progress in our fight to show that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive.
In the Senate, more than a quarter of the US Senate has sent a very tough letter to General Clapper speaking to exactly how the intelligence community justifies the bulk phone records collection on hundreds of millions of Americans. One of the concerns we feel most strongly about is that the intel community has not been willing to show how bulk phone record collection provides unique value that they can't obtain through emergency authorities and the court order process.
Ars: What changed the minds of your fellow members?
Sen. Wyden: Members of Congress went home. In senior citizen centers, company lunchrooms, and all kinds of places where the public gathers, citizens are coming up to their legislators and saying, 'Hey—what's this deal with all this business about the government collecting my phone records? I didn't do anything wrong.'
I don't necessarily have to run hither and yon to get colleagues involved in these discussions. They are coming up to Senator [Mark] Udall and I, asking for more information, asking for staff briefings. The senators are getting asked about this when they go home. Political change doesn't start in Washington and trickle down; it's bottoms-up.
This has given us a huge, huge wave of momentum. I never conceived of the day when people would come up to me at the barber shop and ask me about the FISA court.
Ars: What are the next steps that need to be taken?
Sen. Wyden: We'll be getting the information back from the intelligence community [in response to our inquiries] very soon. We'll bring it up behind closed doors, as well as in public, on the Senate floor. Senator Udall and I are going to make some additional remarks soon, particularly regarding the fact that the intelligence community has not just kept the US in the dark, they have actually misled the American people, actively. We're going to be walking the country through those issues.
And there will certainly be other votes, you can be certain of that, after Congress breaks for the summer.
Ars: Are there particular agencies or people that need to be called out, on that front?
Sen. Wyden: When General Keith Alexander said, "we don't hold any data on US citizens"—that is, I think, one of the most false statements ever made about domestic surveillance. This is an official who's been cleared, speaking in a public forum.
Ars: What about changes on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court? All the judges on it are appointed by one person, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Does that need to change?
Sen. Wyden: There is much about the FISA court that is anachronistic, and it needs to be updated. Their work back in the 1970s was garden variety stuff: they looked at government applications for wiretaps, and made judgments about probable cause. But 9/11 changed all of that. The FISA court [today] is a result of these take-your-breath away rulings—they said the Patriot Act could be used for bulk surveillance.
I know of no other judicial body that's so one-sided. The government lawyers lay out their arguments, and the court decides just on that.
Ars: It was Edward Snowden's leaks that brought this whole debate to the fore. Do you think at the end of the day, the leaks were a good thing?
Sen. Wyden: I have two statements on that. First, when there is criminal investigation underway, as there is here, I don't comment on the specifics of it.
But I do feel very strongly that the debate of the last eight weeks should have been started a long, long, long time ago by those who hold elected office, rather than by Edward Snowden.
Ars: Anything else you want to add?
Sen. Wyden: This is a unique time in our constitutional history. There's been a combination of dramatic changes in technology and sweeping decisions from the FISA court. If we don't take the opportunity to revise our surveillance laws now—to show that security and liberty can go hand in hand—all of us are going to regret it.
Ars: Thanks for talking to us.
I was quite impressed by this:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)-IainB (July 31, 2013, 09:55 PM)
Sounding the alarm: Ars speaks with vocal NSA critic Sen. Ron Wyden (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/two-years-later-senators-criticism-of-nsa-spying-sinks-in/)
Published on 6 Jun 2013
Excerpt from President Obama's speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in August 2007.
This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.
That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.
This Administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not.
Source clip: - here (http://www.youtube.com/redirect?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DSEdpTEBzoHc&session_token=sNJ4fZEtdH0YXhs6jDIBBHtG8KR8MTM3NTUzOTIyMUAxMzc1NDUyODIx).
I find this confuzzling. :tellme:-IainB (August 02, 2013, 09:30 AM)
^^ Thanks for the explanation.
Sheesh. I don't know how the electorate cope with such "ambiguity" in an elected President's mandate.
The thing seems to have more twists than an Agatha Christie thriller.-IainB (August 02, 2013, 12:18 PM)
Obama ran on the "We Want Change" theme. Well, we got change alright.... :(-Tinman57 (August 02, 2013, 04:55 PM)
Obama ran on the "We Want Change" theme. Well, we got change alright.... :(-Tinman57 (August 02, 2013, 04:55 PM)
Actually, we didn't. That was pretty much the point IMO. He's pretty much the same as W in the ways that count, and has continued the programs of his predecessor.-wraith808 (August 02, 2013, 06:14 PM)
Obama ran on the "We Want Change" theme. Well, we got change alright.... :(-Tinman57 (August 02, 2013, 04:55 PM)
Actually, we didn't. That was pretty much the point IMO. He's pretty much the same as W in the ways that count, and has continued the programs of his predecessor.-wraith808 (August 02, 2013, 06:14 PM)
Oh no, we got change alright. More money spent than any president ever, national deficit doubled... blah blah blah. But you still have to read in the sarcasm in that post.... :P-Tinman57 (August 02, 2013, 08:25 PM)
Two weevils crept from the crumbs. “You see those weevils, Stephen?” said Jack solemnly.
“I do.”
“Which would you choose?”
“There is not a scrap of difference. Arcades ambo. They are the same species of curculio, and there is nothing to choose between them.”
“But suppose you had to choose?”
“Then I should choose the right-hand weevil; it has a perceptible advantage in both length and breadth.”
“There I have you,” cried Jack. “You are bit — you are completely dished. Don’t you know that in the Navy you must always choose the lesser of two weevils? Oh ha, ha, ha, ha!”
- from The Fortune of War, by Jack Aubrey.
Presented without further comment...
Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/04/congress-nsa-denied-access)-wraith808 (August 04, 2013, 12:25 PM)
Presented without further comment...
Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/04/congress-nsa-denied-access)-wraith808 (August 04, 2013, 12:25 PM)
So, are we truly to believe that congressional claim that they too are victims of larger darker forces ... Or do we continue to assume, that they too, are simply lying to us. Neither option is at all good.
Lesser of evils indeed.-Stoic Joker (August 04, 2013, 01:19 PM)