Worth Reading: Trevor Pott's editorial on NSA PRISM and its real ramifications

[40hz]

Actually I posted the graphics assuming that's what you're LOL'ing.

-Stoic Joker (June 26, 2013, 01:34 PM)

Yep, you for the graphics. I missed they were by you. All fixed now.  

[wraith808]

That's not fearing the people...that's viewing them with contempt.

-Stoic Joker (June 26, 2013, 01:34 PM)

This... And actually I'd phrase it a little differently... that's fearing the person rather than the people.  There's a distinct difference.  If the war for independence had hinged around any one person and that person had been taken out, what would have happened?  Historians look back at the close calls that George Washington had during the fight, and how differently things would have played out had any of those close calls come to pass.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again... look at The Spartacus File by Lawrence Watt-Evans.  It's science fiction... but when you read it, bile will begin to rise as you recognize similarities between our own government and that in the book... and the actions and behaviors.

A quote from the book

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.

[40hz]

This has been a concern for some time even if it's smoldered mostly below the surface.

Back in 1968, this made for TV movie ran precisely one time and was never aired again.

It's very loosely based on Sinclair Lewis' cautionary tale It Can't Happen Here. (The book was better.)

Sinclaire sketches out a future American fascist state under the rule of President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip and his single party American Corporate State (the "Corpos") with it's squads of armed and uniformed Minute Men brigades. Well worth a read.

Some excerpts from the book

(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..

Project Gutenberg Australia has the full text up online here.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And on that happy note I think I'm gonna bow out of this discussion since I've said everything I really have to say about this - and I don't want to start (or possibly continue?) boring people by repeating myself.

The rest of you carry on. This is an important discussion you're having.

[TaoPhoenix]

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.

[wraith808]

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)

That has little to no impact, IMO.  Think about it.  Marriage is an institution created specifically to control.  So... people have fought long and hard... to be under more control.

[Tinman57]

  And yet some more news on something that we already knew, just not verified.....

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.

http://www.pcworld.c...t-use-for-years.html

[IainB]

"Shadow on the Land" was from 1968? Seems remarkably prescient.
IFS = DHS/NSA/Militarily Armed Police?

On a lighter note, there is a super little post in Googland:

Securing your WiFi network
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)

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.
This little missive comes hot from the press after Google had:

• (a) deliberately collected Wifi location data in their StreetView video vehicles - which seems to have got them into legal hot water in Germany, but, strangely nowhere else;  
• (b) been pretty clearly identified as a major Big Data co-conspirator in breaching Internet users' privacy/security as per the Guardian's published NSA leak details.

On reading the post and watching the vid, my amazement at the barefaced effrontery of this post was followed by the thought "Supposing they are serious? Now why would Google seem to be so concerned about our improving/maintaining Wifi security?"

Then a possible answer hit me. I've done quite a bit of work in the area of what's called "Data Quality" for corporate databases. It's a complex subject, and difficult to achieve consistently good results. Google are probably obliged to ensure the quality and integrity of the surveillance data that they gather for the NSA is not only maintained, but also improved, and one of the ways that they can do that is to ensure that it is secure at source. That way, it is validated - it has its author's indelible "fingerprints" all over it, so to speak.

The NSA have an incredibly difficult surveillance job to do, and to do it they will probably need the data to meet at least three basic criteria:

• (i) Accessibility: Is it fully accessible, and is that access controlled by us? (Check.)
• (ii) Timeliness: Is it timely - i.e., not delayed? (Check)
• (iii) Data Quality: Is the source security, quality and integrity of the surveillance data certain? (No, not yet.)

Hmm.

[TaoPhoenix]

"Shadow on the Land" was from 1968? Seems remarkably prescient.
IFS = DHS/NSA/Militarily Armed Police?

-IainB (June 27, 2013, 09:27 PM)

I managed to get around to reading Harlan Ellison's Alone Against Tomorrow collection and a few of those tales are coming home to roost too!

[IainB]

   As I have stated elsewhere in this forum, I am apolitical and do not really understand US politics.
However, I have been able to gather from my many American friends, colleagues and contacts how, in the US, one's religio-political beliefs/affiliations/leanings can be very important and seem to tend to - if not be expected to - override one's reason in any given matter.
   If, whatever the issue, how one thinks about an issue seems to be primarily dictated through the lens of one's religio-political paradigm - which would then necessarily colour one's stated views - then it may often be necessary for the individual to engage in a backwards rationalisation to justify said views.
   On the subject of the NSA PRISM surveillance leaks and associated revelations, there sometimes seems to be a general tendency to try to blame this on a particular political party/individual. Many might see this as being irrational, because it seems to be effectively abrogating the responsibility of the voters for whatever party was voted into power with whatever mandate(s) it had.
   In a democracy, you generally get what you voted for.
If you voted for (say) "the lesser of two evils", then that is what you will get - and it'll still be its evil self.

There is an interesting post on The Reference Frame blog which touches on this: Pros and cons of the U.S. surveillance program
A well as the pros and cons being interesting, this bit of the post caught my attention:

...I was sort of pleasantly surprised by the New York Times editorial

    President Obama’s Dragnet (via NewsMax)

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. ...

The current situation regarding the NSA PRISM and related surveillance seems to be, for better or worse, a fait accompli, and the surveillance seems to have become well-established and was apparently accelerated over a number of years (probably starting since before 9/11/2001), and to have gone worldwide. 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.
Whatever happened before was then. This is now, and if you thought you understood the situation, then what you probably don't understand is that the situation just changed - again.
(I forget who it was who said that last bit.)

[40hz]

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)

Non serviam.

[IainB]

I was just reviewing the comments to the article in The Register - per the OP to this thread: When a country goes off the rails, why should we trust its computing systems?
I rather liked this one: (my emphasis)

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.

I think that's a very good point indeed. All that would need to be done would be to formalise the shift that Google has already made from being an independent corporation to it being a department of the NSA. Problem solved.

[40hz]

A major reason why it's so easy for governments to get away with what they do...

This is the mentality they're largely dealing with:
Worth Reading: Trevor Pott's editorial on NSA PRISM and its real ramifications

[wraith808]

Non serviam.

-40hz (July 01, 2013, 07:34 AM)

The only response.  To which I add consensus facit legem.

As long as we consent or give in, they will continue to make such things the law with our tacit approval.

Ægroto, dum anima est, spes est

[Stoic Joker]

Okay... Since I had to Google all the Latin... I ran across this other quote that I found rather interesting:

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.

Kinda sounds like the gang in Washington to me.

[wraith808]

Cicero is a great philosopher- one not spoken of in the same tones as Socrates and Aristotle outside of philosophy circles, but one that should be as his writings are more readily applicable to everyday life.

One of my favorites (and I'll have to quote it in English...)

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.

Emphasis mine.

A great man.. I think it also telling that he was the first man in his family to become Senator.  Sort of like the freshmen politicians of our day.  The only difference being he didn't change as time went on, staying loyal to the ideal of the Republic rather than the temporal power he was offered, which leads to another of his quotes that I love:

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.

[Stoic Joker]

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)

It's no wonder he isn't very popular...^that's^ blasphemy, and almost seditious these days.


He sounds like our kind of people.  

[wraith808]

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'

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.

One other tidbit... If you read released NSA documents and histories, you can find that Carter was the only president who raised the question of the privacy of citizens in discussions with top spy chiefs in NSA.  It's mentioned in the Thomas R. Johnson , American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989. The book is classified top-secret Umbra, so the public version is heavily censored.

You can find it online in pdf form from: http://www.gwu.edu/~...iv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB260/

Jimmy Carter- our last honest president. (And I say this as even though I disagreed with a whole lot of his policies, especially economic.  But then we got Reagan after that, so...)

[Tinman57]

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'

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)

  Yep, Bushy is the one that started all of this crap, and Obama pushed it even further.  The news today was that Europe is having a hissy fit about the U.S. spying on European citizens.  Well gosh, they're just now figuring that out?  It's not like FISA didn't openly state what it was going to do, and the U.S. has been busted more than once for spying on our allies.  Either way, I hope between the pressure we're putting on them and Europes pressure will resolve this problem, but most likely the U.S. will just keep on doing it secretly....

[wraith808]

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.

[40hz]

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)

+1!

Right now I think that a good number of US 'allies' are extremely embarrassed, both about what the US has been up to, and their degree of direct or indirect complicity in it.

There's a lot to be said for speaking "truth against the world." Something our self-proclaimed "democratically elected" and "representative" governments now seem incapable of doing.

It's a problem. One that will be corrected. Again. And the same old lesson re-learned for about the hundredth time, if history is anything to go by.

So it goes.

Let's get busy!

[Tinman57]

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)

  That's old news.

[wraith808]

^ Sorry if I misunderstood that you were being sarcastic... 

[IainB]

"Non serviam."
"Facit legem."
"Ægroto, dum anima est, spes est."

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.

Time to throw in a bit of Greek, perhaps?
How about "Molon labe"?
It sounds great. Apparently from the defiant Spartans just before they were totally defeated at the Battle of Thermopylae.

In coarse English slang there is a term that can be used to cover this sort of thing - "Pissing into the wind".
Maybe it really is simply time to adapt to the changes, I don't know.
Some people (not me, you understand) might say, for example, that maybe it is time to accept things as they are and practice saying something like "I stand with the NSA!" (or similar) as though you really meant it - it's just more words, after all - and that quite a lot of people apparently learned to do that sort of thing in Germany in the '40s in order to get on and be left to live their lives in relative peace. However, I couldn't possibly comment.

[40hz]

^ 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.
 

[Tinman57]

  I really don't even know what to think about this, so I'll leave it to all you guys n gals that know a little bit more about Europes politics.....  But I will say that I'm a little cynical about it....

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.

http://www.pcworld.c...d-prism-scandal.html