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Bruce Sterling On Total Information Awareness
securitas writes "Declan McCullagh interviews Bruce Sterling about Total Information Awareness (renamed Terrorist Information Awareness and raising concerns) or 'Poindexter's nutty scheme' as Sterling thinks of it. He predicts TIA will destabilize the government and lead to internal KGB-style coups. Whether you agree with him or not it makes for thought-provoking reading."
>John Poindexter, programmer, Navy Admiral, >National Security Advisor, etc.
You forgot convicted criminal.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonalbe searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
but that seems to have been forgotten, along with.."Congress shall make no law....abridging the freedom of speech or of the press."
Campaing finance reform restrictions on commericals 60 days before elections.
and "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Every law restricting non-criminals from owning certain types of weapons.
Some times I wonder if legislatures even fscking read the constitution any more.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
Total Information Awareness underware is still available
I put the 'fun' in fundamentalism
Most people wouldn't classify Orwell's '1984' as science fiction. It's not a narrow genre-bound work, Orwell didn't publish his stories in pulp SF magazines. And 1984 was about Stalinism. Orwell was a former Communist, and very disillusioned about the whole thing.
It never once uses the word "internet" either. Is it your contention that the Constitution is therefore irrelevant to any matter concerning the internet?
Furthermore, your argument is hung precariously on a semantic hook which does not support it, at all. When the founding fathers talked about "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" what do you think they were talking about, if not privacy?
Your understanding of the Constitution is fundamentally flawed. The Bill of Rights is an addendum, spliced onto the body of the Constitution by those who feared that unless certain rights were explicitly enumerated, the government would run roughshod over individual liberties. But the basic concept of the Constitution is that the federal government has certain powers-- and no others. In other words, if the Constitution does not explicitly allow the federal government to curtail the privacy of its citizens, it is prohibited from doing so. 10th Amendment says: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Unfortunately, the feds have grabbed all manner of powers to which they are not entitled, and ideologues on the Supreme Court have permitted it to happen.
The problem with the excuse of despot removal to invade Iraq is that the invasion would have clearly have been a war crime. UN agreements by all its members disallows invasions of its members unless there is some sort of approval by the Security Council. The US pretext was that previous resolutions permitted military action upon violation of the resolution conditions. Despotism was not a condition in the resolution. But Iraq producing WMD was a resolution condition.
Also, the American public would never go to war over "liberating" Iraqis. Some dumbasses, sure. But not the majority of voters in this country. But apparently, its permissible to lie to the American public (and kill American servicemen) if they won't impeach you after the deception is exposed.
That said, currently there is no proof that members of the Executive Branch fabricated evidence or that the President was aware the evidence MAY have been forged or non-existent. All Bush and Powell did was read the CIA/DIA report's conclusions.
Don't think the US suffers no consequences from this action. We lost roughly a hundred servicemen, and more patriotic soldiers lives every week. Apparently, their lives are cheaper than the quality of life of the Iraqi citizen (or the price of a barrel of oil). Lets spill some more American blood to free North Koreans, Iranians, and Africans.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
If it's anything like his columns for Wired, it will be filled with bitterness over the 2000 elections spilling over into everything he writes about.
Can't believe I'm taking time to refute this silly and groundless statement. Sterling's first column for Wired, issue 10.12 (December 2002), covered Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index -- no mention of the 2000 elections. Subsequent issues to date:
Friend, you are evading the issue. The issue has nothing to do with the content of the lie, as despicable as it is for a married man to be a serial philanderer (oh, btw: yes, I *was* equally outraged when news of Newt's hypocrisy came to light, and I'm ever so glad that he is gone: and please note that however despicable Newt's treatment of his wife was, he was Clinton's moral superior in this: he didn't lie about it under oath, and he resigned from office). The issue is threefold: that Clinton deliberately misled a grand jury while under oath, and that he suborned perjury, and that he committed these crimes as a) an attorney, who knows better, and b) as the President, who is the ultimate law enforcement official under our form of government.
What Clinton did was a felony, sir. We could at this point go off on a long tangent about how he exacerbated his crimes by going on TV to lie to the entire country about it, and about how he bombed foreign nations in a transparent attempt to divert the public's attention from his behavior, and then we'd begin to get just the smallest idea that maybe a President's lies under oath add up to more than being "about sex".
Where were you hypocrite when Reagan's cronies were subverting the Constitution? Where was your sense of moral outrage then? Or your so-called integrity?
In the first place, this is irrelevant to the present discussion. You are attempting to divert our attention from the (off-topic) topic, which is the moral turpitude and felonious behavior of President Clinton. If you care to discuss that, I'm all ears.
In the second place: a) as others suggested might be the case, I really was too young to understand Iran Contra. I still don't. b) Even if we grant for the sake of argument that Iran Contra was as bad as the Democrat-controlled Congress and its shills in the media would have us believe, to my knowledge no one ever credibly suggested that Reagan was guilty of anything (cf. Nixon for the media's total willingness to pillory a GOP President if possible). c) As you might guess from my revulsion at Newt, I'm not a Republican, so to attempt to pin the "hypocrite" label on me is going to be rather more difficult than pointing at various idiotic GOP boondoggles. In my opinion there is maybe one member of Congress who isn't a liar: Ron Paul, who takes his oath of office seriously enough to actually ask of every piece of legislation whether it is Constitutional or not (hint: the answer is almost always "No" these days).
Now, please address what I said, instead of changing the subject.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Every male between the ages of 18 and 45 (55 if the person has served in the military), and every female between 18 and 35 (45 with military service) is a member of the state militia.
As a member of the militia, when you are called to service, Mass state law requires you to bring your own firearm.
This state is schizophrenic, sometimes...
Oh, and to respond to the idiot you replied to: The militia was never abolished, because the National Guard is not a STATE MILITIA. Itâ(TM)s federal, and one of the groups the whole idea of the militia was designed to protect the US citizens from. If you donâ(TM)t like it, fine, but donâ(TM)t lie about it.
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
So what would you replace the UN with - I suppose we all just should do whatever the US says? Bow down before Caesar? Pax Americana indeed. The US has been trying to undermine the UN since the UN was founded. It has withheld money, bugged delegations, bribed weaker nations, bullied stronger ones. The UN should be fixed - not abandoned. The USA needs to recognise that it is just one country out of hundreds and each country has certain soverign rights. Until you do even the Dutch can scare the pants off your chicken-shit gangster government.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it