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Wired Releases Full Text of AT&T NSA Document
ifitzgerald writes "This morning, Wired News released the full text of the AT&T NSA wiretap documents that are currently under court seal. From the article: 'AT&T claims information in the file is proprietary and that it would suffer severe harm if it were released.
Based on what we've seen, Wired News disagrees. In addition, we believe the public's right to know the full facts in this case outweighs AT&T's claims to secrecy.
As a result, we are publishing the complete text of a set of documents from the EFF's primary witness in the case, former AT&T employee and whistle-blower Mark Klein -- information obtained by investigative reporter Ryan Singel through an anonymous source close to the litigation. The documents, available on Wired News as of Monday, consist of 30 pages, with an affidavit attributed to Klein, eight pages of AT&T documents marked "proprietary," and several pages of news clippings and other public information related to government-surveillance issues.'"
Next time you are in court, how would you like evidence against you made public against the judge's orders, before the jury has made their decision?
Thank you Wired News for trampling what justice system we have left.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
I think our boys at Wired are in trouble now, no?
It seems like an awful risk for Wired News, opening themselves to being sued by AT&T. I sincerely hope nothing wrong comes out of this to them. But knowing the US... they just placed a sign reading "sue us"! :)
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
Since it's the court's job to decide what constitutes proprietary information, hopefully AT&T's claim will be shot down.
This might be unrealistic, however, since courts did seal the information in the first place... I don't really know how Wired can benefit from this in any way, except, of course, by gaining market share and possible users from the geek community.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
I am now a subscriber to your magazine.
Patriotism is being loyal and loving your country unconditionally and your politicians when they deserve it.
This administration deserves neither loyalty nor love.
Expecting the conservative mod down in 3..2..1
Wired states in the article that this isn't illegal. The gag order is only on the EFF and AT&T. So Wired are fine in posting it. Also, since the document isn't the exact document under seal but an older version, it may not constitute the final evidence given by Klein. Wired is not doing anything legally brave here: they have made sure to cover their asses.
The article fails to mention what the consequences for the EFF are though... (assuming the EFF leaked it to Wired.)
Information wants to be free, and you let it! thanks!
I surely hope so! grmpfb.. enemy of mankind!
maybe the boys at wired need to read slashdot
How sad that you have to troll for karma like this
3 793853 58749
"Expecting the neo-con mod down in 3..2..1"
or this
"Expecting the conservative mod down in 3..2..1"
Examples?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=186339&cid=15
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=186102&cid=15
Stop karma whoring, or at least get a new catch phrase.
Having looked through the documents that Wired provided, I didn't see anything that should qualify as a trade secret of AT&T. The documents do list a bunch of equipment that is located in AT&T's server rooms, including the splitter that lets 'Authorized persons' monitor the data flowing through the fiber optics cable- but it doesn't say how the equipment is connected to each other or what software programs the machines are running. This data is not enough for anyone to duplicate AT&T's network, not even in a small part. The only damage AT&T can expect to receive from the publication of these documents is even more of their customers convinced that they have been letting the NSA take all their information.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I fully expect Daily Kos to be brimming over with phone switching and network engineering experts in a few hours.
I never want a judge or a federal official telling me what I can and can't say. Ever. I don't care what people think their right is in a fair trial, but my right to speak my conscience or reveal information about others should be protected from government infringement.
If someone doesn't want information about a crime committed out in the open, they shouldn't have let that information out. There is no such thing as blackmail, in my mind, and there is no fair trial if you're guilty and the information is out there that proves it.
The immorality of what the NSA and AT&T have done is worse that the illegality of it. I see no reason why the ultimate penalty should not be paid by the government officials who created this beast. Treason is treason, and violating one's oath to uphold the Constitution is treasonous.
Of course nothing will happen. Some fines? Some words about terrorism? Do people not see that the worst terrorists are those with the worst weapons?
Even having grown up in communist Poland during the 1960s and 1970s, I cannot say that I've seen such a blatant attack on freedom and liberty.
Good to know Wired's weighing in like this. Too bad their reporter's phone records are going to be used to figure out his anonymous source.
Gee! I would sure love to be in litigation, and have partial information on the case in progress leaked out to the public, and then not even be able to defend myself from it since i am gagged by the judge. The people here who are saying that Wired is upholding free speech, wouldn't feel that way if it was their day in court. They are circumventing standard operating procedures.
Certainly NOT!
Any company given over 'private' data (whether it is mine or another citizen's) should be held accountable if they are breaking the law.
Or do we really want to live in a paranoid society run by a paternalistic Government?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire Internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the Internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.
Yessir folks they're tappin' into the WHOLE internet right there, readin' yer email and stuff. AT&T *should* be horribly embarassed that they have someone that stupid working for them. Still, it's amazing to me how many people are willing to buy into this mindlessness.
The only way that the American public would actually care about this case is if the NSA was sharing the data with the IRS. Then you might here a public outcry. All those ebay sells listed on your tax return?
Visit Savagenumber.com
>At what point will journalists in this country realize that we are a nation of laws?
Yes, we are a nation of laws. One of our first, and most important ones says:
"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
The executive branch isn't given the ability to stifle this right simply because some of the facts it exposes might be embarassing or actually illegal. If you really do think this is a nation of laws, you should be complaining about the White House breaking them long before Wired News.
>For those who would try and turn this around to point at the current administration, Let us all keep in mind that everything going on with the NSA is perfectly LEGAL.
And how exactly would you know that? Because the administration says so? For anyone who even pretends to respect freedom, that's not enough.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Let us all keep in mind that everything going on with the NSA is perfectly LEGAL. NO laws have been broken in the process here. Now, we may not LIKE what is going on, but not liking it doesn't make it illegal.
Repeating something many times doesn't make it true.
There is nothing propriatry or sensitive in the docs. All they are of a list of fibers that should have an optical splitter inserted. and where the new end should go. Working for a large telco, I have piles and piles of documents like these.
The Docs do not outine what traffic is on those circuits, where they go, or even where the tap goes.
The only thing they show is that there network was changed so that what ever is moving over the fibers is duplicated and sent somewhere else.
If it turns out the release of this information hurts anyone in Washington, "they," aka those-in-power-who-were-hurt, will find out who is responsible for the leak and find some way to make life miserable for him.
At the very least, "they" will spread the name around and brand the person as untrustworthy. While this will make it easier for him to get a job in the media and civil liberties industries the next time he goes job-hunting, it will make it very difficult for him to get new work in Corporate America, particularly companies with cozy relations with the government. If he has a security clearance, law license, or other credential, "they" will look for a way to suspend or sanction it.
Such is the way of covert poltics.
Any real conservative would applaud you for your post. It's often thought of that the Republicans are "conservatives". That is incorrect, however. They are not truly conservative in any way.
Conservatives stand for the ideas of the Founding Fathers. They are sickened by any limits on the freedom of expression, especially when it comes to political correctness or legislation that prevents the release of documents as in this case. A true conservative would be happy that you were able to openly present your view on this matter, and they would support you in every way, even if they did disagree with you. A real conservative would likely even be disappointed that there's a moderation system here.
Many of those who pass themselves off as Republicans today are not conservatives at all, even if they claim that they are. At best, they're neo-conservatives, but even then that's a misleading title. What they have done is take the worst of liberalism, and added extreme feelings of nationalism and religion to it. It's the sort of political ideology that resonantes with the less intelligent people of society. That is indeed why the Republicans are popular with rednecks in the US, for instance. They are universally disliked by actual conservatives, however.
So please, don't confuse "Republicans" with "conservatives". They are two very distinct groups of people, with two very different attitues toward basic issues such as freedom of expression, individual liberty, and so forth. Every real conservative is completely mortified by the recent goings-on within the US, and their involvement in wars around the world.
John Poindexter
I was always astounded at the gall that these Republican scum had when the appointed him to head this powerful agency/initiative.
According to this administration, "if you've done nothing illegal, you've got nothing to worry about having others find out about it". So if the NSA actions are "perfectly LEGAL", why are they worried about people finding out about it?
This is the first of 3 pages:
y /0,70944-0.html
http://www.wired.com.nyud.net:8080/news/technolog
Not sure why sometimes it doesn't work; coral is overloaded? Anyway, sometimes I have to try several times before it works.
While there are what sounds like tones of fantacism on the cover, or at least seen as such by us geeks (We can't forget that the typical homegrown Republican will be skimming it and can't be damned to know what a splitter is), this is really informative.
It's informative that our government has been screwing us over completely, and every corporation we have doesn't have the morality to stop them. It also shows that this administration will do anything and everything to continue to gain a steady flow of control over the American populace.
Of course, it's not like we didn't expect this. Global information survelliance is the next logical step after rendition, having the legal right to look at such records as library checkouts and credit card entries, going to war with Iraq, probably to increase oil prices, the President forcably removing 'the power to check' from Congress and the Courts, previous wiretapping incidents...
This is insane, and the American populace is so brainwashed that they'll walk around with it and cheer the guys ass off at his rallies and mindlessly elect people to further his goals without moral question.
Makes me sick.
P.S. Boy-oh-boy, I do hope that some international traffic went through that splitter to give the US Government some petty level of liability.
You can get the files off bittorrent here: http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3487747
Now next part is this whole "Nation of Laws" BS. Where is the law? Our own government has broken just about every right guaranteed to us by the constitution under the fictional guise of security when evidence proves we are no safer than we where on 9/11 and a lot of the law breaking is being used to keep government whistleblowers quiet and to get rid of "threats" to the current government in charge. Their own people leaked the identity of a CIA agent to get her either kicked out of the CIA or killed and they are getting away with it, jus because her husband flat out said Iraq doesnt have WMD which SURPRISE IT DIDNT. We have no laws if our own elected officials dont follow them. You have no rights atm and people FAIL to realize this because they listen to the bullshit spread by the media.
This ISNT legal, Im sorry if you think 3 lawyers and a lawschool kid (all who where consulted about this) constitutes legal right but it doesnt. There has been nothing in this war that WAS legal. And your a idiot and a traitor to this country and its founding principles and freedoms if you think it was.
Welcome to 1984.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
...OSHA will!
Check out the photos of the "secret doors". Now, I understand that networking can get a bit messy, but that doesn't justify keeping a needlessly unsafe work area. That place looks like a nightmare! And not even remotely handicap-accessible.
For shame, AT&T... Blatantly violating the US constitution we can overlook, but a dangerously messy work environment? Tsk tsk tsk.
Ah well... on the bright side, if they nailed Al Capone for tax evasion, perhaps we plebes will eventually see some form of justice done in this case.
>For those who would try and turn this around to point at the current >administration, Let us all keep in mind that everything going on with >the NSA is perfectly LEGAL.
That has yet to be determined. As of right now the programs are only operating under presidential directive, which is NOT a law. Despite the bush admin's efforts to keep this out of the courts, the legality/constitutionality of these will eventually be ruled upon (for better or worse).
It seems to me that Wired has decided not to respect fraudulent law makers, which is what the voice of a conscientious people should be doing. I certainly hope that the people's voice when it contests fascism avoids being crushed into silence. I applaud those who have the guts and nobility to push back against criminals where others are too cowardly or ignorant to stand up.
-FL
But seriously, I wonder how long this will stay online. I'd encourage those interested to save a copy, and mirror the crap out of it.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
If you'd read to the end of TFA, you'd have seen this paragraph-
The court's gag order is very specific in barring only the EFF, its representatives and its technical experts from discussing and disseminating this information. The court explicitly rejected AT&T's motion to include Klein in the gag order and declined AT&T's request to force the EFF to return the documents.
Wired didn't abuse the system, they played right within the rules. This is exactly the sort of case that makes democracies stronger - the government is accused of widespread abuse of power, and tries hard to avoid having any light shed on its case. The press reveals the evidence against the government, and the public gains insight into what their elected leaders are doing. Without an unfettered press, we'd have no clue what they were up to.
Bravo, Wired.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Okay, so Wired has joined the group of people that have published the informants statements, and judges, being the considered thinkers they are, would not have barred only the EFF if the judge did not want the statements published. One point for the judge on that one. Neither did the judge declare the documents be returned or the informant 'gagged', two more points for the judge. At this point, it looks like a rout on the field of play, AT&T is in trouble. All the disinformation that they have been spreading is shaping up to be the proverbial excrement headed for the oscillating rotary device.
....
Everyone in the world but AT&T and NSA can see the train wreck coming. Time for some timely resignations about now, and please please please can we all drop the bottom out of AT&T stock just now too!
Where is Judge Judy when you need her? I can't wait to see what unimaginable harm this will do to those wanting to take away more and more of my 'rights' as a citizen of the Empire of the Dollar.
No, I'm not posting AC, the American system of laws and justice do have a good balance most of the time, and eventually, if you play with fire long enough, you get burned. I am given the right to discuss, even rant about how my government is serving me. As of today, I still have all of the rights. I would like to see those spying, criminals get the justice they actually deserve.... treason against the people of US.
The right to bear arms is to ensure that the government remains humble, among other things. Despite that fact that this would be a lopsided event, the framers of the constitution did not try to make it impossible for future citizens to remove the government from power. NOW, I'm not saying that we should, for the most part, I like the way the US government works. What I'm unhappy with is that there are entrenched in that government, people who would abuse the power granted to them for their own gain. People who would misuse those power to abuse the rights of citizens for their own gain.
We, the people.... demand to know who those people are, and what they are doing. When the government acts in the dark, hides from the light of oversight, it is time for change... Its a mid-term election year, and 2008 promises to be a special kind of election. So lets all dust off our thinking caps and start taking notes:
Who is making mistakes now?
Who is supporting DRM/*AA/stupid Internet laws?
And so on... then lets all vote accordingly when the time comes, even if it politically seems wrong. A good mix of all three parties, and a few token representatives from the fringe parties is "GOOD FOR AMERICANS" (TM) and thus good for America, America's allies, and the world in general in as much as it affects the world in general.
And, if you're not a US citizen, don't be afraid to share your notes. I'm sure you get different news than we a 'given' here in the US. Lets make it a wiki if we have to
What do you think? Am I off my rocker here?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
At what point will journalists in this country realize that we are a nation of laws?
This is almost completely untrue. We are not, and never have been, a nation of laws. Laws aren't at the top of the hierarchy, and hopefully never will be. We are a nation of principles, and all our laws are subject to adherence to those principles.
When someone breaks a law in pursuance of those principles, they do our country a service. If they have the courage of their convictions, they may even be able to get the law overturned. If, on the other hand, it is determined that those principles do not support their action, the law will be upheld, and they will be held accountable for violating it.
Wired, from their own words, seems to believe that they're not even breaking the law (violating the court order) in this case. But if they are, they are clearly doing so in an attempt to bring matters to public attention that many of us feel require more public scrutiny.
So, at what point will the administration remember that we are a nation of principles? They seem to have convienently forgotten the ones they don't like.
Glenn Loos-Austin
UI Designer at Epic
http://www.flickr.com/photos/junkchest/
Bush opponents and privacy advocates have been screaming about how illegal it is (4th amendment violation), and crying over the invasion of privacy. The problem is, it's not illegal. the Supreme Court has already ruled on the legality of such issues.
The Supreme Court held in Smith v. Maryland (1978) that government collection of phone numbers called does not violate the Fourth Amendment. The Court reasoned that callers cannot have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in the numbers they dial:
[W]e doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial. All telephone users realize that they must "convey" phone numbers to the telephone company, since it is through telephone company switching equipment that their calls are completed. All subscribers realize, moreover, that the phone company has facilities for making permanent records of the numbers they dial, for they see a list of their long-distance (toll) calls on their monthly bills. . . .
[E]ven if [a caller] did harbor some subjective expectation that the phone numbers he dialed would remain private, this expectation is not "one that society is prepared to recognize as 'reasonable.'" . . . This Court consistently has held that a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties. . . . [W]hen [a caller] used his phone, [he] voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the telephone company and "exposed" that information to its equipment in the ordinary course of business. In so doing, [the caller] assumed the risk that the company would reveal to police the numbers he dialed.
But there is no need to stop at just phone numbers. There is a ton of information collected on you by others that the government can legally obtain and use under this ruling. Consumer data has become so valuable that companies known as data aggregators buy entire data banks from credit card companies, hotel chains, phone companies, etc., mix them with publicly available data from phone books or title companies and then sell access to their mega-database to marketing analysts seeking a comprehensive view of the American consumer.
Anyone with enough cash can find out what someone's mortgage payments are, what restaurants he frequents, what debts he owes and where he banks, whether he subscribes to American Rifleman or Martha Stewart Living, and whether he's more likely to visit Graceland or Greenland, among a thousand other features of his life. Acxiom, for example, the US's largest data aggregator, has 20 billion customer records covering 96 percent of U.S. households. That's a ton of data about you, me, everyone.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly said that the government may obtain business and other records held by third parties without warrant or probable cause, because those records are no longer private . Law enforcement officials may subpoena records, or request that they be provided voluntarily, or may simply purchase data repositories on the market like any other player in the digital economy.
Got that? The NSA could buy records from Acxiom (and all the other aggregators) and mine the shiznit out of it for whatever they want and it's all perfectly legal. From these third parties, they could know an astonishing amount about any one of us. I mean a breathtaking amount. Add in programs like Carnivore and Echelon (and probably and hundred other still classified ones) and you can be sure if the government wants to know everything there is to know about you, they know it. And they got it all legally.
If you don't like that, I can understand - I'm not sure I do either and it would be healthy to have a debate over that topic. However, constantly insisting that laws were broken only shows that you've never put any thought or research into the position you've taken and exposes you for a fool that is probably best ignored.
how would you like evidence against you made public against the judge's orders
Had you read the aritcle, you would have found: "The court's gag order is very specific in barring only the EFF, its representatives and its technical experts from discussing and disseminating this information."
Hint: Wired is not EFF.
Just when I thought all popular media was as usless as a Newspeak talking head, they go and do this?!?
Thanks, I feel as if a little light just broke through the clouds.
Does anyone else suspect that AT&T may be receiving special treatment for getting in bed with the fed? The anti-molopy police seem to have been looking the other way as AT&T snatched up BellSouth (the rest of Cingular with it) and SBC.
"I never want a judge or a federal official telling me what I can and can't say. Ever. I don't care what people think their right is in a fair trial, but my right to speak my conscience or reveal information about others should be protected from government infringement."
So, explain why you should be able to reveal the identity of minors in a court case. Or rape victims. Or Jane Roe (from Roe v Wade).
Smarter people than you made the rules, and they exist for a reason.
Nothing top secret or proprietary about that. The only details excerpted from previous public disclosures were some circuit numbers, a list of equipment and a schematic drawing of the coupling.
And as to the propriety of diclosing this "classified" connection...the NSA's evesdropping on US citizens' internet traffic. Often claimed and implied, but never proven. Here's the proof. It's about as "in the interest of national security" as Watergate and the breakin at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist was.
When the government goes out of control, sometimes the citizens need to take back that control. You can be sure that if this was a Democratic administration, the Republicans would be crying bloody murder.
Coral Cache of Wired
"The convictions were reversed in 1991"
Read your link.
crap...they found my pr0n.
Having just read through the documents, and being a network operator for a small network, this looks exactly like the installation thay ANY large network provider would implement to comply with the Lawful Intercept program mandated in CALEA.
While I agree that CALEA is an overly broad statute, it does require network operators to be able to provide the capability for court-ordered lawful intercepts. The whistle-blower, Klein, so far doesn't seem to have produced any evidence that AT&T and the NSA are actively spying without court orders, just that they could. But from that viewpoint, so could any phone company that controls the local loop for Internet or telephone calls.
Klein makes an incorrect intuitive leap when he says that since AT&T Narus system is spliced into their links to Verio, Genuity, UUNet, etc. that means they can read the entire internet. This is wrong, they can only read traffic that has been routed over their network, generally that means only traffic to, or from, one of their customers, as required by CALEA. The major Internet backbone links are OC-192 and higher, the Narus system described in the document could only handle up to OC-48 (1/4 the speed of OC-192 circuits).
On the issue of NSA being involved in this, it is possible that this system wasn't implemented for CALEA, but instead to allow NSA to wiretap conversations that had been discovered to be heading out of the country, and then requested to be intercepted. For instance, if they had an IP address of some mail server in Iraq, they could tell (legally without a warrant) AT&T to give them logs and conversations from any AT&T customer, over any AT&T network link, specifically to that foreign IP address. Or at least that is the way NSA and the administration perceive the rules for foreign intercept.
Another potential reason for NSA cleared individuals having access to the rooms is that NSA performs security clearance screening for telecommunications related lawful intercept employees. Which would be a logical part of the protection of a CALEA lawful intercept operation from being tampered with by foreign agents, or non-authorized parties.
it was probably crappy sci-fi author, boing-boing.net 'blogger', EFF 'fellow', and frequent wired contributor cory doctorow. i know he's burning to take credit for it, but his fear of prison is probably the only thing greater than his ego.
all signs point to him being the leak, however, and i applaud him for that- even if he's a terrible writer, an attention-whore, and an enabler of xeni jardin; at least he isn't a corporate shill... for at&t. if this were apple, he'd have kept it to himself, let there be no doubt about that.
Used to be a saying that "there's nothing more conservative than an Arkansas Democrat". That seems contradictory, but it's not.
Bush's Attorney General, Gonzales, wants to figure out how to twist any possible law covering journalism and national security into prosecuting journalists for publishing leaked info. Even though WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, Iraq War Sr and Jr, were all fought well without jailing leak publishers.
Bush certainly has "a new kind of war" in the Terror War: our goverment is at war with our people.
--
make install -not war
First of all, your a idiot if you think Judges are highly educated and trained
When calling other people idiots it is wise to not make yourself look like one.
and given how much the law has been twisted by a cerain administration lately, who is to say what cannot be construed as "aid" is say- a whistleblower letting the US cits know what is going on.
what defines "aid"???
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
AT&T continues to show how well it cooperates with the government. I wonder if that has anything to do with the ease in which it is regaining the position as the largest telecommunications provder in the nation? This level of govenerment cooperation is unprecedented and insulting to the idea of freedom of speech. How can one be assured that their communications are not being intercepted when we KNOW of the existence of "secret" internet communications taps? I guess we ought to just start encrypting everything.
You are wrong because:
_x_ Reaching Bizarre Conclusions Without Any Information
_x_ Failure to Understand Why Good Rules Don't Have Exceptions
No people in their current form can survive on "principles." Guidelines for societal structure cannot be based on the current moral frenzy of the day. This would turn every single act of government (as if it weren't already) into the logical fallacy "appeal to emotion."
There's a reason we follow the law to the letter, as opposed to religion by interpretation. It's so all parties are absolutely clear on what is acceptable and what is not. The constitution is a remarkably just system. You'll likely find that current laws you feel are unfair are actually already prohibited by a piece of paper 300 years old.
Being "in trouble" is a good thing in these circumstances.
If you don't publicly challenge the actions of the people who are trying to oppress you, you will lose by default.
Freedom is not free. Our forefathers were willing to die for it. The least we can do is risk some jail time (don't forget to vote!).
Conservatives stand for the ideas of the Founding Fathers.
And yet our founding father executed several people as spies - for publishing military information to our enemies. The situation is not as black and white as you make it out to be. (For example, by having Wired publish this we are having the least informed person make the disclosure decision. Remember, these programs have bi-partisan Congressional oversight - but only by the security committee. The Congressmen that are posturing are just using the fact that they are not on the committe for political gain. Don't be naive, look for the motivations of your representative.)
It's the sort of political ideology that resonantes with the less intelligent people of society.
Ah - no bias here! Honestly, the same could be said about any political party. Half of the people have an IQ less than 100. Very few have a high IQ (above 140 or so). Dumb people out vote you, get over it. (As a collorary to what I said above, your representative is primarily conserned with convincing those that do not check facts, but watch the news. Always check the facts! [BTW, as a republican you should be reading this site for an opposing viewpoint. I'm not sure what you should do as a Democrat - is the Drudge Report any good?])
And I find it laughable that someone (the grandparent) is worried about getting modded down by conservatives. Conservatives? Slashdot?
Watch, this comment will be modded down by liberals - virtually guaranteed!
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Typical LI requirements are to support copying 1% of traffic.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Where were the anti-Bush liberals when Clinton continued to bomb Serbia? Marching in the street, protesting the bombing. You probably saw them on TV and made fun of them. Probably called them "hippies," shouted some drunken inanity like: "The Sities are over!" Where were the anti-Bush liberals when Clinton extended the Police State after Oklahoma City? Protesting the reduction of our civil liberties. Some of us "anti-Bush liberals" (we weren't "anti-Bush" then, as he wasn't around, but that is quibbling) have been members of the ACLU for a long, long time. Some of us "liberals" put money, not just angry verbiage and blustering internet bravado, into our resistance to increasing government power. Both parties are monsters looking to expand the power of the State by expanding the power of the police to support it. This is true - but when Clinton was President, the Democratic Party did not have the monopoly on power the Republicans enjoy in Congress today. There were GOP leaders (Bob Barr chief among them) who defended civil liberties - and still do. Barr is persona non grata in the party now because of his principled non-partisan defense of civil liberties. Dismissing both parties as "monsters" is just as ridiculous, perhaps even moreso, than partisan loyalty. In your case, your thoughtless position not only offers no solution itself, your juvenile dismissal of "both parties" allows for no improvement, no room for rational discussion. I join you in the sentiment that both parties contain "professional politicians" - people who seek power or political office as a means in itself, rather than a means to better society and worked toward a progressive future. But so what? Judging by your example, the political parties are not the only ones with members who are incapable of seeing beyond their own petty self-interests and prejudices.
--- yr pal cal "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
You appear to assume two things which I strongly disagree with. . .
1. That "standard operating procedures" are not heavily fixed, (see recent appointments to the supreme court), so that Bush's morally defunct policies are upheld, (ie., the individual cannot fight abuse by the coroporate body),
2. That there is some semblance of similarity between a person and a giant corporation like AT&T. --Corporations have been demonstrated countless times to function without social conscience, without moral grounding, and with reckless disregard for others, among a whole host of other elements which give them all the basic behavioral traits as those held by psychopaths. The people here who are applauding Wired's actions are probably NOT psychopaths. The law SHOULDN'T give the same benefits and considerations to corporations as they do to individuals.
-FL
May I see your "DOWNLOAD AND ARCHIVE", and suggest that some also "SHARE" the document as well? Fire up your guntellas and torrents and whatever the kids are using today and get that out there for everyone. Then we can say "p2p == Freedom".
I am not a crackpot.
Everyone keeps talking about how that all these problems are the Bush administrations fault. Yet I see mentions only of the administration in people conclusions, instead of the story itself. There's a lot more people involved here than Bush's administration. It's really a cheap shot to spin everything on them. But as goes the trend, if the administration had acted sooner this comment wouldn't have been modded down.
or else!
The word "treason" has been so abused by people trying to steal the Rights that our Forefathers died for that it is meaningless in today's political discussions.
At it's most pure form, "treason" means attempting to destroy the government.
So, going public with details on what may be an illegal operation by the government is in no way "treason". Except to those who would like to claim that any actions they don't approve of would "hurt" the government (translation: "them and their party") and "help" the "enemy".
No we know why YOU'RE not working for AT&T!
--- yr pal cal "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
So the boys at Wired are only in trouble if enough people believe what Mr. Gonzales has to say.
One of the near truths we've been taught is the power of the government is defined and limited by the Constitution. Oh, it's a consistent theory of course, but only self-consistent. It's a convenient ficiton, not how things actually work.
The power of the government is defind and limited by what the people will go along with. The Constitution is just lists that out. Not even that really -- it's our understanding of what the Constitution says that empowers or limits government. Nonetheless, the Constitution is a powerful check on the government because as malleable a it is, it is nowhere near as vague as the concept of an "electroal mandate".
Which is why we've had such as bumper crop of semantic creativity out of Washington around the definitions of "unlawful combatant", "torture", "war" and "domestic surveillance". One way to change the law and the Constitution is alter the language out from under it.
These are not the sort of men whose wordplay is motivated by the sheer pleasure of it, and it's quality shows it. It's a brutal and ghastly affair, obsessed with the redistribution of power.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I didn't want to have to post an argument this time because there are too many idiots on here today defending the undefendable.
Thank you for posting something worthwhile. Lets hope you don't get modded down.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
Why bother interviewing the reporter to find out his anon source? just look up his call records for the last couple of weeks and they can find out for themselves.
There are still public pay telephones about, and inexpensive disposable cell telephones are common.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Having just read through the documents, and being a network operator for a small network, this looks exactly like the installation thay ANY large network provider would implement to comply with the Lawful Intercept program mandated in CALEA.
I suspect it was regulatory compliance and security budget that funded this installation, but it is a little "above and beyond."
The whistle-blower, Klein, so far doesn't seem to have produced any evidence that AT&T and the NSA are actively spying without court orders, just that they could.
I agree, but this does look very suspicious and it is certainly worth investigating. We were commanded to be "eternally vigilant" against our own government. This should be investigated and NSA files and procedures reviewed to determine just what is occurring. I see no national security reason to keep this secret (aside from, possibly, the contents of some actual intercepted communications).
This is wrong, they can only read traffic that[sic] has been routed over their network, generally that means only traffic to, or from, one of their customers, as required by CALEA.
I take it you've never heard of transit traffic?
The major Internet backbone links are OC-192 and higher, the Narus system described in the document could only handle up to OC-48 (1/4 the speed of OC-192 circuits).
Yup, at any given time, although I doubt AT&T has their connection constantly maxed out, so we don't know the real traffic rate percentage this can monitor. We also have no idea what the capacity of the storage they are using for forensic analysis of this data is, nor how long they are keeping it. Hopefully the average load, the regexps matched (at least in general), and the procedures in place will shed some light on this.
Or at least that is the way NSA and the administration perceive the rules for foreign intercept.
The courts have not yet ruled on this (and I suspect they will find the NSA in violation) and I think the "reasonable expectation of privacy" of the average citizen is pretty clear here.
Another potential reason for NSA cleared individuals having access to the rooms is that NSA performs security clearance screening for telecommunications related lawful intercept employees.
That seems more than a little far-fetched to me.
In my mind, I don't know what they were doing, but I think the circumstantial evidence is rather strong. The problem is, I don't trust that a proper investigation will be performed, given the current and obvious corruption of our government. I would like to compliment you, however, on at least providing some of the only rational discourse in this thread.
They do that already and it's legal. If you work for the CIA and you are leaking classified details to a reporter, and they suspect you then they'll hand over the detail to the FBI. The FBI will get warrants to search all your residences and pull records on all phone calls to/from those residences. And possibly even pull the records on the people you talked to.
It's called classified for a reason. It's impossible to run a national security program without secrets. Or, it would be very ineffective. In this environment security IS maintained through obscurity.
I think what people fail to realize is how in-admissiable much of this alleged 'warrantless' wiretapping whould be in court. This information, and the way it may be being obtained, is by it's nature unfit for our courts. This makes it usefull only to alert and focus agencies on direct outside threats.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Pertaining to the leaked document, does anyone find it odd that even though the splitters where installed, there is no activation date for any of them? (Page 13)
You're kidding, right? Slashdot is pretty far right. Look at the discussion any time the question of trade unionism comes up. One can hardly call this a left-wing consensus. The number of Thatcherites and Ayn Rand fetishists here is amazing. You'd struggle to find someone on /. seriously favouring the nationalisation of all industry, mass organised labour and a really high (like say 90%) top rate of income tax. THAT would be left-wing.
If there's a political consensus on /., it's a very individualist one. We're hackers, solitary creatures uncomfortable with being interfered with by either governments or corporations. It's right-wing, but also anarchistic, what you might call libertarian.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The whistle-blower, Klein, so far doesn't seem to have produced any evidence that AT&T and the NSA are actively spying without court orders, just that they could.
So, what's all the fuss about? Why was there a gag order on this information?
Seems that somebody thinks that this information reveals something important, and I figure they know a lot more than you...
The shocking thing in this case is not that Wired would leak the evidence, it's what the evidence contains, and the fact that it was kept secret. As the wired article concludes:
"This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian police state. It must be shut down!"
I'm sure that liberal and conservative nerds alike can recognize that there ought not to be a splitter on the optic fibers carrying your internet communications, that is monitorable by the NSA without a warrant or oversight.
I was skimming around trying to find more information on the whole MAE East and West facilities. There's not a whole lot out there; they seem to not like to disclose a whole lot about them.
Anyway, I did find this page on Cryptome, which provides some interesting maps and aerial photographs of the various sites.
What interested me most was the area adjacent to the MAE East facility marked "CIA SAIC ET AL". Interesting; not particularly suspicious, given that the CIA HQ isn't far from there, but still interesting placement.
At any rate, regardless of what you think of that unexplained mark on the photo, it's worth looking at the photos. I wonder what (if any) signs they have on the doors. I rather suspect that somewhere in that building is another "secret room" as well.
http://cryptome.org/maee-birdseye.htm
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Let me get this straight. The entire lot of you IT monkeys don't want the NSA or AT&T perusing through network traffic for fear of privacy concerns. That there is a double standard, isn't it?
I am sure each one of you has a policy in place to record/store all chat, FTP, and emails going through your enterprises. And you do it because, *gasp*, your CIO placed this policy into effect to avoid a couple things from happening.
Flying Spaghetti Monsters batman! We simply can't deviate from the CIO's orders for fear of being fired and the Flying Spaghetti Monster knows I need to have the latest ATI/Nvidia Pent-SLI rig for playing DOOM 5!
First, these policies that the Corp. can't be sued for your passing of Indian jokes disparaging their ability to code better and at 1/20 the cost of an American counterpart (yes, that means you!).
Second, that the Corp's trade secrets isn't "accidentally" FTP'd, SMTP'd, or P2P'd to the Chinese. "Yeah, that's it! I accidently sent those ultra top secret files detailing US military secrets to my email pen pal General Joe's Chicken! Damn that Outlook email autocomplete feature! I'll just use MicroSquish's re-call function and everything will be all right!"
Finally, these policies are put into effect to prevent losing market share or technological dominance in your respective industry. Else, your code becomes a commodity and then there are 1,000,000 Chinese retro-engineering your router/software/shoes and selling it for 1/3 of the cost of the real deal. Remember our good friends Huawei or New Barlun? Them dang Chinese will put everyone out of business if they don't "recognize" our IP. I heard the Chinese pay their employees in mis-spelled fortune cookies. I don't know about you but I'm deadly allergic to fortune cookies.
C'mon yea hypocrites! It's everywhere; what's bothersome is knowing you are being monitored. If you are doing something illegal/immoral/nasty/dumb/stupid maybe the NSA's monitoring system will make you think twice about doing it. If you are still intent, then perhaps you should find even sneakier ways of doing it instead of using a public system.
IT monkeys, let us unite and throw feces in the face of the true enemy! Uh, wait a sec, we have met the enemy and he is us!
There's got to be a compromise or we'll have Tariq "I've got boom-boom in my pants and I'm not afraid to use it!" al-DethWish al-Sadist living right next to you and me. Sure, we'll have backyard Bar-B-Ques together but will we be able to eat red meat and regale the good ole days living in fear of the A-Bomb instead of every single foreigner in our country?
The Founders deliberately said "only". They were coming from an environment where saying that kings have been overthrown was called treasonous. They wanted to make sure that dissent and even malfeasance didn't draw the same penalties as treason.
Wrong. Try again.
The whole point of a trial is that one group says "X has wronged me", then both parties defend their claims in front of a judge and/or jury.
Now you've got it. Ever heard of procedure? Rules of evidence? Those are the same rules which protect an innocent man when the police beat him into confessing to a crime he didn't commit, by preventing that confession from being heard by a jury. They're the same rules which say that a woman accusing, say, a professional basketball player of rape cannot be compelled to answer for her entire sexual history. You might think them trivial, but rules of evidence are absolutely essential to the just functioning of our legal system. Maybe you should read up on that.
As my Senator, Ron Wyden (who, BTW *is* a member of the Senate Intelligence Comittee), pointed out, the programs were shared only with the leadership of the committee and not with the membership as a whole. It's hard to see how his compalining about this is simply "posturing for political gain".
That is all.
This is a common conservative arguing technique. The trouble is, it isn't valid. Claming something is biased does not invalidate it. Facts do.
The poster said that conservative philosophies appeal to people with low IQs. This is a claim that can be quite easily measured. But you chose not to.
Remember that when Qwest checked with their lawyers and tried to follow the law, the government (after accusing them of being unpatriotic, of course) threatened them with loss of government contracts.
I take it you've never heard of transit traffic?
I have, but usually AT&T is not going ot have the "best path" to customers of UUNet, for example, except to an AT&T transit customer. Which qualifies as traffic that AT&T could be asked to intercept.
BTW, I agree that this whole AT&T/Narus/NSA situation is a terrible assualt on liberty, I just want to be sure that people put the blame where it belongs. The congressmen and senators that write these bad laws, the presidents for signing them, and the voters who keep electing them all.
everybody's phone records !
Probably about the same amount as used by systems like Echelon, of which this is probably an integrated or at the very least, a related piece.
And no, I really don't want to hear from the tree hugging, long hair hippy freaks who want to espouse their "Orwellian" big brother theories.
It's weird how people who make such a stink about 'liberals', (which as far as I can make out, are an illusory beast which only truly inhabit the skulls of bottom-rank neo-con rabble), often tend to include huge doses of emotionally charged name-calling among their various modes of 'argument'.
The only other group I know of which is so consistent in their use of jock-strap idioms, volume and general schoolyard childishness are indeed schoolyard children.
I find this consistency automatically validating as it means I am by contrast the more mature thinker and by extension, probably right most of the time whenever I disagree with a neo-con. Mature thinkers like to work through data thoroughly rather than jump to conclusions based on emotions and ego.
-FL
What's funny is that your claim is refuted by the very first link that comes up in google.
Heh!
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AT&T, you voided your right to keep your proprietary information locked up as trade secrets when you chose to engage in illegal activities with the government, conspiring to undermine our inalienable constitutional rights, namely the fourth and first amendments (and possibly the fifth in some cases if the "fishing" does turn up a crime). As bad as it is for pedophiles and terrorist and crack dealers to get away with what they're doing, I'd choose dealing with having those scumbags continue doing what they're doing than to lose my inalienable constitutional rights.
You got caught committing treason, and are now crying foul and are in essence trying to use the "trade secret" crap to get out of trouble and not lose customer confidence? Sorry, too late.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
these programs have bi-partisan Congressional oversight - but only by the security committee
Until last week not even the full committees were briefed on these programs, just the top person from each party. And Sen. Rockefeller - one of the people briefed - believed the program was seriously illegal but couldn't say anything about that, even to other senators, under penalty of law. That's "oversight"?!
Half of the people have an IQ less than 100
Not meaningfully true. It's a bell curve distribution where something like half the people have an IQ so close to 100 that it's within the margin of error. So 3/4ths of the people are of average or higher intelligence. And anecdotally (say, talking with strangers in bars) I can vouch that people with average intelligence can understand reasonably complex political arguments, operate reasonably complex machinery, handle basic math, and so on - and for those who can't it's a matter of education, not aptitude. The understanding of the importance of freedom is something that resonates particularly strongly with many average people. The "They don't really value freedom, so we might as well not 'give' it to them" argument is the worst sort of aristocratic nonsense - nonsense the Bush neo-cons have fallen for, which will be the cause of their fall.
Better than 40% of the common people repeatedly tell pollsters they already want Bush impeached for this stuff - despite no support in either the media or from most of the opposition party for the concept of impeachment.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I am sure each one of you has a policy in place to record/store all chat, FTP, and emails going through your enterprises. And you do it because, *gasp*, your CIO placed this policy into effect to avoid a couple things from happening.
As soon as my ISP is named NSA instead of AT&T, I will agree.
Because, of course, all FUD is liberal. Calling something "liberal" doesn't make any points for you, it just makes your argument partisan. And that takes away any power you might have had to change the minds of "liberals" who might read it, no matter how good your data may be. If you want to convince a liberal they are wrong, don't call them a communist. If you want to convince a conservative they are wrong, don't call them jack-booted thugs. Just make your point, and if there is intelligence there, it might stick. Otherwise, you're just wasting bandwidth.
It is fear of the consequences of breaking a law that enslaves the People.
When you lose your fear, you are Free. Again, our Forefathers were willing to die for their beliefs. And they publicly signed the Declaration of Independence even though it would be their death warrant if they lost.
Now, too many of us are willing to trade that Freedom for a false security. Too many of us live in fear of the consequences of Freedom.
Well, as I have said elsewhere, if what he claims is 1) true (probably is), and 2) is unusual - then people need to raise a ruckuss and change things. But when I look into the facts of the situation, what I see is people screaming "why wasn't I told" who are not even in the government, and Congressman with no need to know (as in not on the oversight committees) screaming "why wasn't I told". So my take away is that the Democrats are playing politics because they do not see the danger in doing so.
I believe such politics is extremely dangerous - because either they are really helping the enemy, or they are spamming the information wells so that I don't ever hear about Senator Ron Wyden (assuming that he was supposed to be informed and was not).
BTW, I am rather impressed with what I read about Senator Wyden - I wish there were more like him in office.
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There is a massive difference between "records" and "data." Until recently, the Federal government could not obtain a wiretap without obtaining a warrant (in some cases after the fact). There is a distinction between the records a company compiles regarding its customers and the interception of streams of data a company routes for its clients. AT&T and the Federal government are in big trouble because they may been "wiretapping" the entire United States citizenry. And then there's people like you who look for legislative rationalizations for this kind of insanity.
My, that was a yummy potato!
"Treason is all a matter of dates." - Clarion, Count of Monte Cristo
Well, all things are relative, I suppose. I think they are pretty far left, except in the things you mentioned ;-}
The thing is, it is very hard for the upper x% to argue for anything other than a meritocracy. Unions serve to make everyone get the same rewards, regardless of effort or ability - so it brings up the slackers and down the hackers, so you can easily see why hackers would be against it.
A simpler metric might be: Who thinks that Clinton is better than Bush? Who thinks that Bush is better than Clinton?
Or if that is unfair, who was better Regan or Clinton? Both men seemed to be very popular with their constituancies - where do you think slashdot would fall?
Personally, I don't really think Slashdot is that far left, really. I think that most of the annoying adolescents are far left, and they are the ones giving the crazy mods.
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So, what's all the fuss about? Why was there a gag order on this information?
It could be a distraction to focus people's attention away from discovering other things. I dunno....
Anonymous Troll. I /spit on you.
If you are doing something illegal/immoral/nasty/dumb/stupid maybe the NSA's monitoring system will make you think twice about doing it.
This argument is perhaps the single worst position one can hold in a discussion of rights.
Anytime one hears this, the intelligence and/or motives of the speaker should immediately be cast into doubt. Either you aren't intelligent enough to understand the issues at hand, have not thought about them at length, or are trying to do something evil.
Rights are not to protect the innocent. Rights are not to protect the "good people". Rights are there to protect the conglomerate of the human race. The guilty, the despised, the evil, the criminals, the dictators, the masterminds of genocide; each and every one of these has the same rights as you and me, except in so far as they can be demonstrably proven to utilize their rights to infringe yours or mine.
Furthermore, lets look at how you qualified that statement: illegal/immoral/nasty/dumb/stupid
1. Illegal: Yes, the government should be involved in cases of illegality.
2. Immoral: No, the government should NOT be involved in cases of what is or is not immoral. There is no universal standard of immorality. If you ask conservative Christian groups, they would say the Da Vinci Code movie was immoral, as it blasphemed their lord. If you talked to Catholic groups, they would say that contraception is immoral. If you talk to conservative Islamic groups, they would say that equal rights for non-believers and/or women are immoral. The government should not be picking and choosing ANY of these battles; and you should not fear for your own moral framework based upon the governments.
3. Nasty: If what you are doing is _legal_, it doesn't matter if it is nasty. There's no prohibition against being bad tempered, or even "evil". The prohibition is against illegal actions. If it infringes someone elses rights, than make it illegal, and handle it through a court of law, same as everything else the U.S. and/or state governments enforce against.
4. Dumb: Being dumb is a right. You have a right to fuck up as much as you like. As long as it is legal, the NSA should not be involved in your personal stupidity. You have a right to be as stupid as anyone else.
5. Stupid: See #4.
Here is a little better discussion of the matter. In a nutshell, determing what is "illegal/immoral/nasty/dumb/stupid" is extremely difficult, and I'm not interested in having the government determine what is and is not deviant. 70 years ago Congress would have said that surveillance of Negroes (Yes, that term is _exactly_ what Congress would have used for African-Americans)and Chinamen (Yes, this is ALSO another term that has graced the halls of Congress).
Today, there are movements with Congress to criminalize homosexuality and conduct open and unlimited surveillance/detention of AMERICAN CITIZENS of Middle Eastern origin (like myself). Might I remind you of the McCarthy era, and the House Commitee on Un-American Activities?
Joseph McCarthy, an incurable (and perhaps constant) drunk, paranoid, and somesay schizophrenic asshole routinely used phrases like, "If you have nothing to hide, why are you worried?"
Do you honestly believe that fascists like Rear Admiral John Poindexter, made infamous for his roll in Iran-Contra, who escaped life-long imprisonment on a technicality, and whom the Republic Party has now put in charge of the militaries "Total Information Awareness" (renamed Terrorist Information Awareness, har har), is more scrupulous than Joseph McCarthy?
Do you honestly believe that the rhetoric involved describing the constant hunt for terrorists in our borders, and the American People's demands for security is *ANY* differen
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
That was a pretty ballsy move on Wired's part. I imagine their lawyers are eating their Wheaties today.
The document itself seems pretty harmless to me--but thumbing the face of the court that "sealed" it is a huge F-U to the court system.
The said thing is that the litigation fees will probably be passed down to the AT&T customers.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
>Let us all keep in mind that everything going on with the NSA is perfectly LEGAL.
SecurityFocus columnist Mark Rasch thinks the pen register statute applies, forbidding the collection of call records with a court order or a FISA warrant. His opinion is also that even with a warrant the surveillance has to be targeted. One loophole might be that the phone companies keep this kind of data as an inevitable part of their operations and can share it if they choose -- but 18 U.S.C. 2702(a)(3) forbids them to turn it over to the government. Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) is also protected under 47 USC 222. Then there's the issue of breach of contract, or fraud, from the telcos violating their privacy policies. The remaining wiggle room is not enough to say "perfectly legal", let alone "perfectly LEGAL".
Mark Rasch is a former prosecutor and holds a Juris Doctor degree. He's former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit.
My wife walks past that building on the way to work every day. She has been calling it the "Spy Headquarters" ever since she first saw it. It just LOOKS guilty... It's almost hollywood in it's attempt to look like a secret NSA headquarters (completely "abandoned", but without the graphiti and homeless that a typical abandoned building in that area draws, and except for the mysterious lights that are only on at certian hours of the day and night only on the floors with the blinds drawn)...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
That post reminds me of the Ali G. bit with former Attorney General Thornburgh.
Poster's illiterate speculation on what is and isn't "legal" doesn't matter. Legality is a thing, and it is decided upon by Judges, whether poster agrees with the decision or not. Poster can say, "That isn't right", and not look stupid, (although poster would probably misspell "right", and look stupid anyway), but he should not confuse legality whith rectitude.
Failure to Understand Why Good Rules Don't Have Exceptions
If you're going to invoke this, you'll have to explain how allowing a judge to censor information without due process or appeal is a "good rule".
While I'm not a Libertarian, and I don't have much use for the Ayn Rand crowd, I don't find it' particularly helpful to view Libertarians as strictly right-wing.
Viewing political ideologies as left-right is too simplistic. I like the Nolan chart or other spectrum approaches better.
Wow - that's some very strong coolaid you have there!
So 3/4ths of the people are of average or higher intelligence
Um. Um. Wow. Just wow.
The "They don't really value freedom, so we might as well not 'give' it to them" argument
Whose argument is that?
40% of the common people repeatedly tell pollsters they already want Bush impeached
Where did you get this? Is President Bush doing a good job, yes or no. And no means you actually want him impeached? Fascinating. What I find incredible is that 30% of the people think he is doing a good job - I don't think he is evil, but I have trouble describing his administration as doing a good job.
So in summary, if I subscribe to your newsletter:
1) Everyone will be above average
2) Anyone that values freedom will dig out the facts about every government initative, but bad guys will not
3) The government will voluntarily give up power
4) If anyone thinks I don't do a good job I will be arrested
Hm. Any takers yet? I think I will have to pass on this one.
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>bi-partisan Congressional oversight
That's not working the way it's supposed to.
The Executive branch recently adopted a cute tactic. They said in effect "of course we'll answer questions from our Congressional overseers, but to keep our workload reasonable we'll only accept questions from committee chairpersons".
Committee chairpersons, of course, are Republican. If they were fair-minded and independent, they'd pass along information requests from Democrats. I'll assume fair-mindedness until proven otherwise, but Republicans are far from independent. The party has tight discipline and anyone who doesn't obey the leadership is not going to be a committee chairperson.
See AT&T Project Daytona
Massive amounts of data can be collected, but hard to manage in commercial DBs. Daytona® is a massively scalable data management system:
* Organizes and stores hundreds of terabytes of data on disk, supported by indices and a data dictionary.
* Offers a variety of parallelization paradigms for queries.
* Permits concise expression of sophisticated queries and provides answers to those queries quickly. Data is in a concurrent, crash-proof environment.
* Proven reliability, leading to Concept of Zero, i.e., lights-out operation.
Principal uses of Daytona in AT&T:
* Hawkeye, the database of record for all of AT&T's call detail, consisting of over 312 terabytes of information and 1.88 trillion records.
* Internet Protect where Daytona manages summary network security information.
If this is all above board and legal, there is no reason at all why our fine, upstanding, Constitutional government wouldn't want us to know the particulars about how it's done.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -Benjamin Franklin
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Those OC-192 circuits to UUnet and others may not entirely be for Internet either. PSTN traffic and private line come to mind, and the Nauraus is just one component used to intercept IP based traffic.
Easy, he shouldn't have censored information at all. The sixth amendment's guarantee of a public trial already prohibited him from doing so.
What's funny is that you didn't realize my claim was that saying something is 'biased' doesn't have any affect on the facts at hand. My claim was that a specific debate technique was not valid. I made no point regarding the specific issue being debated, as I don't really care about it.
I'm right, you lose, but do go on about IQs
So all the information in all cases before the courts be made public? I'm sure rape and molestation victims will not appreciate having their ID's and details of the crime made public.
That is a seperate issue, but, yes, I think it is obscene that unaccountable accusations can be made against men, making their right to a public trial meaningless. False accusations are not uncommon when the accuser's credibility cannot be properly questioned. The defendant is put in a position of proving his innocence - an accusation alone may result in a conviction in sex cases.
Seals on court records are used in many different types of cases to hide bias and injustice. I once worked on a man's case to prevent his ex-girlfriend from selling his child in another state (NY) under the guise of a legal adoption. The man's parenthood was terminated despite there being no legal basis for doing so. The records were sealed to protect the purchasers and the man and his legal representatives prohibited from mentioning any aspect of the case to the press in order to hide the judge's injustice.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Our constitution is not an attempt to codify laws, but rather an attempt to codify the exact same principles I was talking about. In large part, so that all laws can be evaluated against those nigh-unchanging principles.
Glenn Loos-Austin
UI Designer at Epic
http://www.flickr.com/photos/junkchest/
I live in San Francisco, so I'm going to put on my reporter's hat and go to the AT&T building, to ask some questions.
http://room641a.dyndns.org
A "strict constitutionalist" and a "civil libertarian" share a lot of common ground when you consider the fact that they are both, for the most part, political conservatives. They want political culture to be shaped by the absolutes of the Constitution. But culturally, civil libertarians and constitutionalist tend to have diverging moral views.
You can get as fine-grained about this as you want. As you mentioned before, there is no real black and white here.
PSTN traffic and private line come to mind, and the Nauraus is just one component used to intercept IP based traffic.
That is a good point, although I don't know how much of the regular phone traffic is run via IP in AT&T's network. I think the company name is "Narus," by the way, not "Nauraus" (unless you're misspelling it to avoid the filters :)
"And yet our founding father executed several people as spies - for publishing military information to our enemies. The situation is not as black and white as you make it out to be."
An entirely different situation. That was about people compromising our ability to fight a war - plans that had nothing to do with suppressing or destroying the freedoms of the people.
THIS instance is an example of the government FAR overstepping its bounds and trying to keep it covered up on the grounds that "well, we'd all be safer if you didn't know how we're violating your rights."
While they're trying to use a program to help us fight a war (I don't think it's a war, but for the sake of argument..), it is an unacceptable method. The ends don't justify the means. They have to work within the framework of the law and our rights as protected in the Constitution, EVEN IF it means a terrorist attack might succeed again. Otherwise, the terrorists win, without ever firing a shot, by destroying our way of life.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Idiot, theres a VERY large deiffernce between your employer controlling the office network and spying on you to make sure you doing what he pays you for isntead of surfing slashdot, and having a governemnt spying on us and controling the INTERNET
notice the degree of scale there? by your logic id be just as safe swimming with 1000 goldfish in my pool as i would with 1000 pirana. But wait you say, thats fucking stupid. OF COURSE IT IS.
slashdot has little one liners at the bottom of each page, i assume randomly generated, sometimes they are prefect here's the one i got.
'A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.'
oddly fitting isnt it?
Although I applaud standing one's ground, you must understand that of those who don't there is a portion who aren't simply caving in - they are taking a calculated decision.
:)
Do I...
A. Stand by ground, go to jail, and spend the next 4-8 years there pretty much powerless.
or
B. Let them win this one, and be free to fight another day that isn't 4-8 years into the future - like the next day.
Which option one chooses -should- be carefully considered.. I presume GP did
( not saying they would actually go to jail, let alone for 4-8 years )
I have, but usually AT&T is not going ot have the "best path" to customers of UUNet, for example, except to an AT&T transit customer. Which qualifies as traffic that AT&T could be asked to intercept.
Actually, I don't think AT&T is required to have the ability to intercept transit traffic, only endpoint traffic, although I could be wrong. UUNet is, of course, an AT&T transit customer, as AT&T is of UUNet. All the big ISPs are peering for transit traffic.
I just want to be sure that people put the blame where it belongs.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Even if AT&T is obligated to comply with legal wiretap requests I don't think they are required to give NSA personnel direct access and they certainly should be telling their customers about the fact that any communication is subject to being intercepted by the government. I understand their choices, as they seem like the right move from a "making money" perspective. That does not make them blameless.
You hosted it on your website!?! ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FRIGGIN' MIND?
You should have uploaded it to BITTORRENT! Muahahahaha! >:)
Well, if someone must lose I will lose for you. I'm OK, I can take it. But I guess the pointof my argument was not the he was biased. I did point out his bias (which is a useful thing apart from arguing any points - some people have pointed out my biases in several instances, which really helped me to understand their side of the issue), but then I went on to describe why I thought his information was incorrect.
Just an aside, arguing with people that you are right because they are dumb doesn't really work. Definately doesn't get people elected, regardless of merit.
But by all means, you win.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I was just joking. *gulp*
:) )
(Am I clear now? Whew
What's with the ^H bullshit?
Voting is a Right.
But an individual may lose a Right (including the Right to Life) through due process (that means a court case). Many States still have the Death Penalty.
Now, whether someone convicted of a crime loses his Right to vote is determined by many factors. And it varies by State. But I'm sure you already knew that and you're just trolling with the "privilege" bullshit.
but fairly vaguely....
Article III, Section 3, states:
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted."
The issue at hand is who are the enemies, and what does it mean to give them aid and comfort. The definitions in the Consitution are so vague that in this case, one could argue that expressing solidarity with Palestinian children killed in Israeli air strikes could be treason.
Certainly one could argue that this publication is treason, but to do so, IMO, would be to levy war against the democratic system of the United States and would also be arguably treason.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Public displays of outrage are important.
Here's another mirror.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Ooops. I misspelled "cojones"
My apologies to my confused Spanish speaking amigos who are trying to envision large hairy drawers or drums.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
This is an arguement ploy sometimes referred to as "no true Scotsman."
Re: "A True Scotsman has has Guiness and cabbage for breakfast." To which another replies in outrage, "No True Scotsman eats that! A True Scotsman has egg, black pudding, fruit pudding, lorne slice and ayrshire bacon."
We all have our allegiances, but please don't use this ploy.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Publicity is the public's last defense against the most corrupt government the U.S. has had in modern times, and probably ever.
For an early article about U.S. government conflict of interest, see Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government. The corruption has increased enormously since then.
--
Taxpayer Karma: If you give money to kill people, expect your own quality of life to diminsh.
Right, if you save the life of a wounded enemy soldier, you're committing an act of treason... even though wounded enemies are more trouble to the enemy than dead ones, except in extremely protracted conflicts. Yay for logic!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
freedom costs a buck o' fiiiiiiiive!
It is an interesting read for sure. I don't however see clear proof that the NSA is listening in on our converstations. I see that there is monitoring but the articles don't say how the data is being used. It seems more like it is looking for patterns but it is way too soon to say for sure. If this is the case, I'm not sure how that is any different that the looking for patterns such astransactions for $10,000 or more (used to fight laundering, etc). A pattern is a pattern and this time it may just be a pattern in a new medium. It is also significant to note that this is nothing new. In the mid nineties Al Gore was involved in a meeting where the government tried to have listening devices built into every phone manufactured. Unfortunately as society "progresses", there is more and more personal information that is disseminated, stolen, viewed, etc but companies, governments, crooks, friends, etc. I work for an ISP and quite often we receive notices from some organization telling us that one of our customers is distributing illegal copies of something or using a name, photo, logo, etc illegally. Some one somewhere is monitoring their patterns. Some of our connections have restrictions on certain activites, e.g. web hosting and we can tell if their pattern confirms or suggests inappropriate usage. The author is clearly opiniated and sometimes makes judgement calls. One example is "The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room." The fact that security clearances are requried is not proof of an illicit operation. The article presents a small but important part of a much larger discussion. I will withhold judgement until I have more information.
Even having grown up in communist Poland during the 1960s and 1970s, I cannot say that I've seen such a blatant attack on freedom and liberty.
Has anyone mentioned we're building a wall around the USA?
Of course, it's to keep the enemies of freedom and democracy out. The East Germans were told the same thing about their wall.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Idiot. Legality is not a "thing". The laws are unknowable even to lawyers - they fill whole libraries of conflicting statutes and decisions. Even in cases with undisputed facts and simple statute law, even for a good lawyer there is no telling what a given judge on a given day will do. The judge's personal history and sympathy or antipathy towards the parties and their lawyers have more to do with rulings than any law.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Shut up. Just shut up. You had me at "Anonymous Troll. I /spit on you."
Dollar, ya gotta take my post with a serious grain of salt or a couple shots of tequila.
These are all cases where the truth should, very reasonably, be of limited availability. They are, I acknowledge, fairly extreme examples but that is because for the most part it really takes an extreme case to justify such an extreme measure. (As you note, blackmail is also such a case - I guess it's still extreme for the individual concerned, though.) In my examples, I also note the harm involved, so I guess the second constraint is when intended harm exceeds good. All of the parent's examples and mine also concern themselves with speech that is not "freeing" or "unprejudiced", but is for the express purpose of "control" and "manipulation" - either of the target audience and/or, where different, the targets of the speech.
Where a reasonable person can conclude that the speech is within such an extreme circumstance that the consequences will be disproportionate to the speech itself, AND where that speech is intended to cause disproportionate harm, AND where that speech is not truly "free" but laced with spin, THEN I can see no sensible objection to constraint on that speech. In fact, it better well had be constrained*.
Where a reasonable person can conclude that the speech is in a moderate or benign contect, AND that the speech is intended to bring about good, AND where the speech is not only truthful but devoid of spin or propoganda, THEN that speech should be protected utterly and unconditionally.
This leaves all other permutations. I would argue that as you approach the absolute of the extreme case, you will get fewer and fewer cases that are clear-cut cases of where speech should be unconditionally free. However, I believe absolutely that the assumption should be one of speech being free and that those who would limit it should prove unconditionally and beyond all reasonable doubt that the listed factors are present and that they outweigh all other factors.
*Where a person or an agency deliberately and knowingly sets themselves up in a situation where exposure would seriously discredit that person or agency - particularly if it is a crime, a judge should have the power to rule that they are not entitled to legal protections from the consequences of their own actions.
Under NO circumstances should a Government be able to tell a court what should be secret and what shouldn't. I do not believe in such a right and see no justification for it, if only for the simple reason that that violates the separation of powers and also creates a conflict of interest.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Also, most states (if not all) have some means or applying for a "Restoration of Rights" provided that you have completed your sentence, etc. The requirements for this vary by state.
I don't know the specifics of passports and Federal convictions. I believe there is a block on the passport form that asks if you've ever been convicted of a felony, but I don't know if that would be sufficient to deny you a passport.
NOW the "Get Smart" guys build a "secret room" right in the bleepin Ma Bell building! And said room is of course (a) On the building plans, in duplicatre. (b) Known to everybody, as they're not allowed to go in there. (c) Uses scads of bulky and hot, and easily-identifiable off-the-rack equipment.
Sheesh!
So what can an average citizen do to? Can we switch carriers? If enough customers dropped AT&T and moved to another carrier/provider, I think that will send the message.
Or this sniffing is done at 'backbone' level, no use of switching ISPs/carriers.
I live in SF Bay area. My ISP is RCN, my wireless provider is Cingular (part of AT&T, I think)
Thanks
Well, my point was that an optical circuit doesn't automatically mean "IP". UUNet was MCI is now Verizon, and I doubt those OC192's are only carrying IP traffic. There's bound to be cross connections between CO's carrying POTS, PRIs and non IP circuits that could be carrying financial transactions, for example. The document is trying to create a connection to TIA which had a financials survillence component to it. Yeah, thanks for noticing my typo. AFAIK, the Narus is an IP interceptor only and I don't see (offhand, I'm not an expert on this type of gear) any non IP interception equipment here. There's also no evidence of a pipe line going offsite into the NSA itself. I'm having a hard time believing this is the TIA fear re-visited. There's not a lot of evidence to suggest any wrong doing, technically or organizationally. We don't know who has access to this equipment, we don't know if there are pipes feeding into the NSA directly. We don't know what protocols are in place for disclosure. I guess that's the problem, we don't know enough.
"Soviet Russia used these types of tools to hurt, incarcerate and kill innocent *people*."
They were not innocent, otherwise why would the government imprison them? I mean, unless you think the soviets imprisoned people at *random*. No?
So there was a reason. What you're saying is you don't agree with it.
"the Narus system described in the document could only handle up to OC-48 (1/4 the speed of OC-192 circuits"
The documents are a couple of years old. Naurus' new machine has OC-192 capability at the TCP/transport level and OC-48 at the application level.
Don't forget that this was just one switching center, and at least several others have similar NSA intercept installations. OC-48 is still a gargantuan capacity link. The largest line in the BellSouth ATM net (~2 million DSL customers) is OC-48 / 2.5 Gbps. IIRC there are fewer than 5 of those. The big networks don't like single points of failure, and generally prefer to have a few hundred or a thousand OC-12s and five or ten times that many OC-3s.
As someone who is a constituent, I will simply say that, like all Congresspeople, he has his plusses and his minuses. I like the stances he is taking with the last tax bill (read, the energy company giveaway) and his stance on net neutrality. OTOH, he will also occasionally vote for some really boneheaded stuff, too. That being said, he's better than Gordon "Sure! Let's do what the president wants" Smith (Actually, even that's sort of a cheap shot. On the whole, Gordon's been one of the more independent voices from the R side. All things considered, Oregon has been relatively well-blessed on the Federal representation front).
That is all.
And so it begins. As more information becomes available, more people are going to request disclosure.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
John Edwards says that George W. Bush is the "worst president of our lifetime"
"Conservatives stand for the ideas of the Founding Fathers"
Voting? Only for posessors of penises and property! Wooo! Slavery legal in every state! [Slavery, in fact, the norm for the ruling elite (Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Mason, etc.)] Black folks? Worth three fifths of what I am.
Yes, indeed, the ideals of the Founders. Let's definitely fight hard to keep them intact - but also, let's be damned sure we admit to what the ideals were before we go flogging them as our patriotic advert.
I got this e-mail from Verizon after I complained that my old username was not working. In the name of "SECURITY" they want me to have 8 character passwords and 8 character username. All for turning the phone records to NSA, now that is Funny. "Thank you for contacting Verizon Wireless through our website. I understand your inquiry and I will be happy to address your concerns regarding the My Account online feature's new and most recent updates to the website. For the protection of your online account information, we have recently made security enhancements to our website which will require you to use an 8-20 digit alpha-numeric Password, create a Username that can only be 9 digits or 6 to 20 characters in length, and establish a Security Question. I regret the inconvenience. During the updating/creating process, if the system is telling you that something is not in a valid format, this could refer to the Password or Security Question. You will have the option of selecting the radio button next to one of eight pre-determined questions or you will have the option to select the radio button to create your own Question. Please be sure that you are selecting the appropriate radio button. If you are creating your own Security Question, it must be between 6-80 characters and can contain underscore, period, dash (hyphen), @, apostrophe, question mark, and spaces, but no other special characters will be allowed. The question will be stored exactly as is entered. Your answer must be between 3-40 characters and can include letters, numbers, spaces (count as characters) and a period. No other Special characters will be permitted, and the answer will not be case sensitive. Although the answer is not case sensitive, the answer must be inputted exactly as it is created. For example, if your answer is "Peanut Butter and Jelly." than "peanut butter and jelly." would be correct, but "peanutbutter and jelly" is incorrect. When creating a login Password, it must be 8-20 alphanumeric characters (must contain at least one number and one letter) with no spaces or special characters. If you are still unable to access your online account after completing the procedures listed above, please respond to this email and include your current login Password and the login Password you would like to change to (that meets the login Password requirements), and the Username you would like to change to, in order to investigate this issue further. Be sure to also include the last four digits of the Social Security Number listed on the account for verification/authorization purposes. If you prefer, you can contact the E-Services and Support Department at 800-350-2830, and select option 1. Our hours are Monday through Friday, 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Pacific Time. We appreciate your business. Thank you for using Verizon Wireless products and services. Sincerely, Jasmine Verizon Wireless E-Services and Support"
I wouldn't exactly call it a ploy in this case.
Whereas the Scotsman example is using the "no true..." statement to describe a group of people who are only alike in their cultural heritage. The Conservative statement is using it to describe a group of people who all subscribe to the same political ideology and how said people would react to a certain situation which falls within the scope of ideals subscribed to by the group. It's really a very different situation than the way that you describe it.
Now that being said i'm kind of playing devils advocate here because i agree with what you're trying to accomplish in invalidating the "no true conservative" argument, just not the way that you went about it. The real reason why said argument is invalid in any discussion of current politics is because (as has been pointed out by many others on this board thus far) no classical or, for the purpose of continuity, "true" conservatives really exist as an actual tangible part of current U.S. politics.
Now i also agree with the original statement that started this debate in regard to their assertions about "true" republicans. Unfortunately, the fact that i agree that the statement is true does not mean that it holds any weight in the current topic of discussion or does any of us any good whatsoever (unless of course someone who was reading this just so happened to be in the market for a new political philosophy).
The AT&T case at issue is believed to relate to the warrentless surveillance of the content of phone calls between people within the US and people overseas. This is governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It states:
A "United States person" is a citizen or resident alien. It goes on to state other conditions. There is no evidence that any of these conditions (either excluding US persons or submitting of the oath of certification) have been followed in this case; therefore, the program is in violation of the law. Usually people call this "illegal".
Now, you could say it's "perfectly legal" in the sense that this seemingly clear violation of the law may be construed to be an exception under a radical interpretation of law held by a few appointees of the administration. Usually, though, a few people with vested interests offering a controversial argument that an action may be legal would not be termed, "perfectly LEGAL."
Attorney General Gonzales has argued that either a) Congress gave the executive the extra authority for this program under the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan or b) FISA is unconstitutional. (a) seems like a strange argument given that Gonzales has said elsewhere that they did not ask Congress for permission specifically becuase they feared they would be denied. (b) requires a very extreme interpretation of presidential power (essentially that the executive can break any law passed by Congress as long as they say it's for the war on terror). Anyway, if you're really interested in why Gonzales arguements are bogus, don't take my word for it, check out what this collection of eminent legal and constitutional scholars had to say.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
if i had points i would mod you up. Thank the 13 hells that someone other than myself finally pointed out that left and right is incorrect. Not only that but went a step further and invoked the Nolan Chart....BRAVO!
*carbonautomotons faith in mankind grew 0.0000001 sizes that day*
The major Internet backbone links are OC-192 and higher, the Narus system described in the document could only handle up to OC-48 (1/4 the speed of OC-192 circuits).
Yup, at any given time, although I doubt AT&T has their connection constantly maxed out, so we don't know the real traffic rate percentage this can monitor. We also have no idea what the capacity of the storage they are using for forensic analysis of this data is, nor how long they are keeping it. Hopefully the average load, the regexps matched (at least in general), and the procedures in place will shed some light on this.
Remember that these documents were from 2003, and the current Narus devices do in fact handle OC-192 in real time.
No, this isn't David Bergland's evangelistic text. This is an outsider's view of the precepts of libertarianism. I hope you can laugh at how close this is to real libertarianism!
Introduction
One of the most attractive features of libertarianism is that it is basically a very simple ideology. Maybe even simpler than Marxism, since you don't have to learn foreign words like "proletariat".
This brief outline will give you most of the tools you need to hit the ground running as a freshly indoctrinated libertarian ideologue. Go forth and proselytize!
Philosophy
Government
Regulation
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No, in fact I would prefer secret trials, where all the evidence is secret, where the fact I have been detained is concealed, and where I am executed quietly and buried in an unmarked grave.
That's how they did it in the Good Old Days
None of this nonsense about "public trials". We have terrorists to defeat!
A simpler metric might be: Who thinks that Clinton is better than Bush? Who thinks that Bush is better than Clinton?
Or if that is unfair, who was better Regan or Clinton? Both men seemed to be very popular with their constituancies - where do you think slashdot would fall?
I'll bite. I'd rate "woodshed" Regan over "meaning of is" Clinton, but "meaning of is" Clinton over both Bushes. Of the Bushes, I'd take the no-new-taxes liar over the Sadam-has-WMD liar, who's tied in my book with "Ms. Triangulation" Clinton.
And I'd trust Jon Stewart, Russ Fiengold or Warren Buffet over any of 'em.
So pigeonhole me.
--MarkusQ
Interpret that as you will. I will point out, however, that constitution limitations on the scope of a treason charge did not prevent lilly-levered members of congress from defining certain other acts as sedition.
Which of course makes it possible for the creative crypto-designer to work around this particular device type, if necessary. But I would think that any reasonably encrypted channel is immune to this automatic filtering.
Here is a good blog entry on the technical aspects of the AT&T-NSA scandal.
mirror of Mark Klein's ATT/NSA documents:
p df
http://cryptome.org/att_klein_wired.pdf (1.67MB)
Source: http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/att_klein_wired.
The example of the Cold War is instructive here. One of the parties was really, really good at keeping secrets. It did things like lock people up without trial, torture people, and suppress dissent as treason against the state. The other party had a (relatively) free press, strong guarantees for the accused, and lots of trouble keeping its secrets against the spies of the other.
Which side won, again?
Sean
Just an aside, arguing with people that you are right because they are dumb doesn't really work.
I didn't argue that I'm right because you're dumb. I argued that I'm right, and you didn't realize that because you're dumb. ;)
a couple of things...
i on/viewItem/itemID/11956. so...there's a bit of constructive criticism mixed with a bit of a pat on the back for not automatically assuming that what some /.'er said was correct.
#1: YES! 3/4's of the people are of average intelligence or higher. Now obviously this isn't EXACTLY true it would probably be more like 3/5's. Or if you want a VEEEEERY simplified breakdown you would just say HALF. But the basic breakdown remains the same (25% are severely below average, 25% are enormously above average and 50% are close enough to average that you may as well call them average). Obviously none of this pans out exactly if you were to take the I.Q.'s of everyone in the world and plot them on a graph. In that case you would find that they were spread pretty evenly but there would be more of them that congregated near the "average" point than anywhere else after all that's what makes it average. So if you want to be a math-snob about it then the statement is grossly incorrect but it works pretty well for simplification purposes.
#2: now here's the part that i agree with you on. I am unable to find any poll numbers that suggest that any large amount of the population is calling for the impeachment of the president (although i wouldn't be surprised to find out that they are). In fact the only poll that i've been able to find regarding this subject is one that was released by Fox news (which gives it a little less credibility due to the network that it came from) which states that 62 percent of people polled did NOT feel that Bush should be impeached : http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseact
What in-alienable rights?
Thoughs were taken away by King George via the Patriot act!
All we have left relisticly is the right to bend over and take it up the Aski.
Ok so supossedly we still have our constitution but how much does it really mean in the King George era when he can pretty much do anything and not suffer anything even though his apporval rating is in the toilet and he has violated well over a hundred laws and has yet to even hear the words impeachment cross his critics or opposistions lips let alone have to fend one off.
Honestly i'm beliving this guy could bring about the appocalypse (sounds likely he may already have) and nobody would stop him because nobody wants to really try. Or he has some mistical shield of invunerability from somewhere that keeps anybody from attempting such a thing.
I mean really where's the logic in this? Clinton who i didn't support and wanted to see taken down get's impeached for oral sex with an intern but King George can't get himself impeached to save his life even with he was (ok im being unrealistic here maybe) to kill one of our nations great patriots (if thier is any such thing nowdays) on the steps of the whitehouse in front of a full press not partial to him for no other reason then he wanted to have the pleasure of killing someone glorious other than himself.
God how many laws does this laughing excuse for a president have to violate before the nation finally says no more and yanks him out of theat ivory tower and puts him up before the full rath of the public for all the damage he has done to our nation and the ideals it was founded on?
Ok so i'm ranting and may have had a little to drink but i know what i mean and it's not personally directed at you. But somebody had to say it sometime that G.W.][ is like John Gotti before they finally took him down, He was like the bullet proof Don and that's bush right now in a nutshell.
Who's he got to kill to get impeached around here nowdays anyways?
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
loony on the right: "Wired are nothing but traitors and hate America. Why do you hate America, you communists?"
loony on the left: "Wired are heroes, standing up against the Orwellian Bush Regime."
some moderate: "This is a pretty complex issue. On the one hand, the government appears to be breaking the rule of law; on the other, Wired appears to be breaking the law and releasing information the government says is vital to national security. Do two wrongs make a right? Is one wrong worse than the other? How can you tell?"
MORTAR_COMBAT!: "WTF?"
If mere suspicion of unlawful activity by the government is enough to release classified information, then is any information is sacred? What activity is "bad enough"?
Isn't there some kind of sealed federal court that can hear this case instead of wide broadcast? We progressive cannot demand that a tyrant follow the due course of law, and neglect to do so ourselves if it is available to us. If we wish to say that the court itself is corrupt, then I don't know, I guess we're just fucked.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Okay BOJ: I have to say that i usually enjoy your posts and this one is no exception BUT i have a point of order that i would like to address.
We ALL need to stop using the term "otherwise the terrorists win." Although it is a valid argument it is also a very flawed one. It IS and HAS BEEN (ever since 09/11/2001) a trite and uninspired regurgitation of fears that have already taken form.
The idea is that if we keep reminding each other what we should or should not do in order to keep the terrorists from winning then it will do some good. What does it mean for the terrorists to win though? If by changing our way of life they win (which is the implication inherent in the aformentioned statement) then it's too late, they have won and it's time that we all came to accept that fact. As soon as even ONE person feels threatened by terrorism or is in fear of a terrorist, whose purpose by definition is to instill terror, has succeeded. What we need to worry about is not whether or not the terrorists win in this regard, we need to worry about whether or not we will allow the victory that they have secured and the fear that they have instilled to cause us to be subjugated by those who will take advantage of it.
It is with this in mind that i suggest an alternate statement to replace "the terrorists win" and that is, "we are RULED by terror."
Hope you don't take offense to this BOJ. It's nothing personal your utterance of said statement just happened to be the straw that sent me into a fervor, your statements still ring true.
no you see what you do is just make sure that
1 he remains alive but not combat ready
2 hes so loaded that he can't think (just juice him a mil or so higher than needed)
3 flag down the nearest/ next availible group of soldiers and transfer him to them
(cuasing the whole injured soldier worse than dead problem)
4 get him to talk
5 Patriot!!
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I think the real point you are trying to make with #1 is that having an IQ below 100 does not make you an idiot - and you're right, it doesn't. My point was simply that, in a democracy, you do quit well to target the lower half of the population - so both parties do it. (Presumably the smart people will not be convinced by retoric - at least that's the theory)
That said, IQ is a rather silly notion in my opinion - everyone has the area where they stand out, where they are better than most. IQ is one, rather insignifcant, dimension of a multidimensional human. It is merely interesting to people because humans are inherently so hard to measure that IQ is one of the best working models we have.
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Make of that what you will.
"We ALL need to stop using the term "otherwise the terrorists win.""
Actually I agree; no offense taken. It seemed trite when I wrote it, but I'm a little busy and couldn't quickly think of a better phrase. I like your alternative though and will keep it in mind.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
well you got the basic gist of it. and yes i agree it is best to target the lower half because the upper half is fickle due to their level of intelligence whereas the lower half value "loyalty" above almost all else since they are unable to choose right from wrong based on their on logical decisions.
and yes IQ is pretty useless in all actuality, in fact many of the people who i know with high IQ's are so focused on certain fields that they no longer are able to use that knowledge for what is known as "common sense", not really able to think objectively about anything other than their current obsession.
i really only attempted to make a point because you didn't say why you disagreed with his statement or why it was wrong, i think i managed to point out why it was wrong as well as why it was right though so i think we're done
An entirely different situation. That was about people compromising our ability to fight a war...
That is your opinion, and the opinion of Wired. However, the oposing viewpoint is that we are fighting a war of information. How long did Bin Laden keep using his phone once a journalist published that an intercept came from listening in on his phone calls? (That did really happen - though a congressman had told him, so it was an excusable oversight)
Publishing information about how we learn about attacks does not make us safer - because "bad guys" will now know more about how to circumvent the NSA's monitoring.
Personally, I believe that this does compromise our ability to wage the war we are in right now. The only question is how many deaths each freedom is worth. It is not zero deaths. I don't know how many it is, but is your father overseas right now? Is your brother? Would you go and sacrifice your life if you thought (not knew, just thought - soldiers always doubt) you could keep the rest of us free?
I believe the pendulum must move back towards freedom - but giving journalists a blank check to expose classified material is just a bad idea.
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lol redneck nigger-lover thinks he's an expert
More like:
Do I...
A. Stand by ground, go to jail, and spend the next 4-8 years there pretty much powerless.
or
B. Let them win this one, and contribute my own little piece of the destruction of the freedom I supposedly had.
No, corporate laywers normally file every single motion that could possibly work for their clients' interest. IANAL, but I've worked with enough to know this is their normal MO. In and of itself, the legal moves here don't make their clients guilty. (But the facts eventually may.)
Addendum
The Spartons who arguably may have been more democratic than the Atheneans had a rule for all their leaders that every 2 years for an ellected official had to stand in front of a court judge to answer for their actions and face and and all such punishment as may have been deemed appropriet for proven cases of endangering the nation or it's safety. Kings elected would rule for 4 years and at the end of such time would face the same judgements for their actions before a impartial ( or supposedly impartial) court and have to asnswer for their actions.
This resulted in the removale and exhile of at least one spartian king who ended up living in the land of persia under king Xersis during his invasion of Greece (who had asked the deposed king about the spartian warriors before the famous battle of Thermopylae about the warriors who responded that alone none of the warriors were worth any more than any other man but in any kind of group they were worth ten of any other men because of there group fighting abiltiies which it appears Xersis apreantly ingnored to his own detriment).
Sparta had more of a kind of government that we should have had (no i don't mean we should live a spartian lifestyle or spartian ideal or overall rule of law but it to me seams that they had a better way of handleing their leaders and government officials than we currently have.
Any and all leaders of our nation as well as ellected officials representing us should in all realistic form have to answer for their actions in a court of law not as has become the fasion for our nation the court of public oppinion which it seams cant deciced what it wants to do or how it wants to act in these cases which let people like Clinton who walked away from not only a moral violation (oral sex with of all things monica) but more over from standing up in a court of law and swearing on our most holy of books the bible and then lieing his Mother F*'ing Aski off. And from people like King George who litterally trample all over almost every law making up our nation.
In a spartian world Both Clinton and Bush ( and several other presidents) would have been exhiled or put to death or imprissioned for commiting such acts that are so clearly against the best interests of our nation.
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
"National security" has become Bush's get-out-of-jail-free card! He can violate any law, he can rape the Bill of Rights, and he can imprison anyone - he just has to claim "national security" to avoid punishment.
Sieg heil baby!
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it." Be's Jean-Louis Gass
"Publishing information about how we learn about attacks does not make us safer - because "bad guys" will now know more about how to circumvent the NSA's monitoring. Personally, I believe that this does compromise our ability to wage the war we are in right now."
I do sympathize with this position, because I understand where it comes from - the mindset that says we want to be safe, and we want to give our government the tools it needs to do so.
It's just that I cannot in good conscience agree with that position. I simply will never acknowledge that it is acceptable to trample personal freedoms in order to establish a surveillance program that may or may not be helpful (and to clarify, even if it were guaranteed to root out terrorism, I still would not accept it. The values of freedom and personal liberty and limited government power are more important to me than knowing I am safe from a terrorist. I realize I may be in the minority when I say that, but that's my position on it).
This program MAY BE helpful; but I cannot find it acceptable. There has to be another way, and the government should be forced to FIND another way, one that does not so egregiously trample our civil liberties - or even introduce the possibility of doing so. That makes fighting terrorism alot harder to do, and a much slower process, but to let ourselves be ruled by fear of terrorism is not a superior alternative.
"I believe the pendulum must move back towards freedom - but giving journalists a blank check to expose classified material is just a bad idea."
I agree, and I would never consider giving them a blank check to expose classified material. But I do think there ARE times when it is necessary, even when it risks national security, because freedom is a higher value than safety. It becomes, then, the responsibility of the leaker to make sure that they're damn sure they're doing the right thing. It takes courage to reveal this kind of information, and should only be done for the right reasons.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
This is all starting to look like a big load of paranoid crap to me:
1) Yeah, the NSA is tapping data from all the OC48s in the world and funneling them back to Fort Meade, using what? Short wave radios? Peer to peer radios secretly implanted in our buttocks?
2) ISPs install splitters all the time in feeds for debugging and SLA monitoring purposes. It's easy to do, and essentially undetectable by end users.
3) Klein's logic if you read TFDs is basically - I saw a guy who said he was from the NSA, then secret rooms appeared, therefore the NSA is monitoring all our phone calls.
4) The Bush administration has shown itself uttely imcompetent at conducting routine governmental activities, like Intelligence about WMDs and Hurricane Relief, so why would we think they would be even minimally proficient at Monitoring All The Phone Calls In The US?
5) There is a new domestic intelligence chief up for confirmation, and now is perfect time to orchestrate FUD campaigns that will scuttle his appointment.
Feh.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
There's a name for what we believe here: Libertarianism.
It stands for fiscally conservative, and socially liberal, the government should only be responsible for national defence, citizenship and a handful of essential public services - small government, low tax, lasse-faire, centrist, etc.
Obviously, you are an obstructionist
You got it in one. I'm an obstructionist.
My dream-team government is an honest, intelligent, committed and articulate president of one party facing a legislature of his or her peers from the other party(s), and a judiciary that fiercely defends the people from government malfeasance.
If they can collectively agree on anything, I'll support it too, but otherwise I'd rather they bicker amongst themselves.
--MarkusQ
So Barry Bonds makes the same as Randy Winn? I'm sure Randy will be thrilled to know that.
Unions don't seem to hurt pro athletes. Longshoremen are one of the few groups of workers that are (ajusted for inflation.) making as much now as in the 1950's. The last labor dispute between the ILWU and the ports was over the classification of comupter operators. IIRC the programers wound up being declared skilled laborers and had their pay more than doubled (even after the insanely high dues that the ILWU pays.)
If you are going to attack unions attack one of their many real problems. Lack of cooperation with management, lack of internal controls, lack of solidarity, inept leadership, corruption, participation in election fraud, etc. (I am being a bit redundant and leaving a lot out.)
The idea that if you are exceptional you will do better with out a union feeds into the Horatio Alger myths that Americans grow up with, but the reality is Michael Jordan (union) made a lot more money than Tiger Woods (non-union) is going to.
There are times when I think the American left and right have more in common with each other than with the "moderates" that back corporate management.
Work bio at MMWD
But I do think there ARE times when it is necessary
I do agree with your sentiments (although I find myself more trusting of the people in the government and therefore lean more towards safety), but to me this statement is the crux of the matter. Even assuming angelic motives, the journalists that are exposing the classified information are in the worst position to make the determination of "is it necessary". They do not know why something is being done, and at some point you need to trust that the people in the NSA are doing the best they can. In the past, I could see editors thinking long and hard about what they would and would not reveal - even calling up the President and giving them a heads up. Not asking permission, mind you - but at least finding out what is really going on. (And to be honest, I am not liking what I am hearing from the CIA - all government enforcers must be apolitical [at least when viewed externally] or we will fall.)
My problem is just that I don't see editors concerned about leaking information - anything that damages the current administration is OK to leak. No one is considering "maybe we shouldn't", or "let's get an insider's viewpoint" - it's just tell everyone, let our enemies know exactly how we try to listen to them, etc.
To be honest, I think what we need is a higher standard for journalists. We need to arrest them and have a trial to determine if they should have leaked the information, or if they were putting their personal politics higher than the lives of those in uniform. I'm fine with someone that leaks "CIA reads grandma's email" getting off after a trial (or even before the trial if there is no objection) - but someone that leaks "here are the locations of the NSA's secret listening post concentrators, which may be used to read grandmas email but more likely are used to allow broadband, wide net secure communication or overseas spying" really needs to go to jail.
I mean really - read the evidence, and use the assumption of innocence. The evidence is: 1) the NSA has super secret rooms (well, they used to be super secret) and 2) those super secret rooms have direct access to the AT&T communication backbone. There is no evidence of wrong doing, there is only evidence of the capability of wrong doing. In other words, by these standards we are all rapists - we have the equipment...
I guess I just think that the journalists are going too far, and that this is very bad for the country. In the end, journalists abusing their duty to report the bad classified stuff will end up reducing the access journalists have to classified stuff.
And that is bad!
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I thought that was interesting because I constantly hear how Fox is so full of knotheads, and how they *claim* to be fair and balanced, but the one dude who should be laughed off the stage at Fox comes out saying it's fair and balanced.
Makes it sound like this 'Fox is bad' garbage is Truth By Repeated Assertion.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
If there's a political consensus on /., it's a very individualist one. We're hackers, solitary creatures uncomfortable with being interfered with by either governments or corporations. It's right-wing, but also anarchistic, what you might call libertarian.
True libertarians have been driven away from Slashdot (at least from posting) by those on the reactive left. Just look at what happens when discussions come up on tierd internet - a myriad of posts moaning about how we are failing to pass a bill granting the FCC more power to stop a tierd internet from coming to pass. A true libertarian would not be seeking the empowerment of a governemnt agency to solve problems.
Slashdot has a whole lot of Libertarian posers who turn to the left at the first sign of trouble.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
(Intuitively, this is something you should be able to prove by a combination of induction and geometry.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
many of the people who i know with high IQ's are so focused on certain fields that they no longer are able to use that knowledge for what is known as "common sense"
Common sense is a myth, and usually refers to the group think of the moment. It was "common sense" that Iraq had WMD. It's supposed to be "common sense" that our torturing war criminal president is a better Christian with more morality than the other candidates for the office. It's supposed to be "common sense" that nudity on TV corrupts children. The majority of highly intelligent people think these ideas are ludicrous group think, and so less intelligent people accuse them of having no common sense.
Spend some time thinking about that...
Conservatives stand for the ideas of the Founding Fathers.
"Conservative" is simply about what people want to preserve relative to the current time. You can be "conservative" and try cling to the legacy of the Founding Fathers, you can be "conservative" and try to cling to the legacy of McCarthy, or you can be "conservative" and try to cling to the legacy of the swinging 60's and 70's.
Of course, although we have much to be grateful for, the society of the Founding Fathers is not what we want to live in today, not even self-proclaimed "conservatives". People who are calling on the Founding Fathers to justify their political beliefs are simply abusing historical images in an attempt to justify modern ideas of restrictive social ideas.
The PGA Tour is owned by the players, they are all self employed. It would be like if NBA teams were all owned by the players. Its easy to see they would make more money under such a system.
And BTW, Tiger Woods is projected to be the first billionaire athlete ever quite soon. Not from his paltry $10 million per year he wins, but through the $100 million or so he earns each year in endorsement deals.
I think in times of war solidarity may become more important
I would guess that there was a pretty random mix of red-team, blue-team, green-team, etc. partisans on flight 93. Yet, by all accounts, when push came to shove they all stood together. I also recall that in WWII, a group of pacifists volunteered to be infected with various battlefield diseases so that the doctors could test experimental cures on them.
If solidarity is needed, it will appear on its own.
--MarkusQ
Please excuse me - I'm going to take two quotes slightly out of context:
I realize I may be in the minority when I say that...the government should be forced to FIND another way
I'm curious about this - assuming that your are in the minority (which may or may not be true, but bear with me), would you still work to force the government to find another way? In other words, would you knowingly attempt to bypass the will of the people in this matter?
Obviously, it is an ethical/moral question - do you allow people to make decisions that you believe to be bad, and that have a perceived negative effect on you? Essentially, that is the contract of democracy... at least that is how I see it. What are your thoughts?
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i can understand how you would come to that conclusion and i'm not sure if maybe there was some level of sarcasm in the statements that the aformentioned person made as i didn't see this particular interview. One thing that i will tell you is that you should judge for yourself. Sit down and watch hannity and colmes or the o'reily factor or just read the "fox facts" at the bottom of the screen during a normal news broadcast, to me it seems pretty well to just repeat everything that the republican administration says and never question anything but feel free to draw your own conclusions, after all, that's what freedom is all about.
If our current government doesn't follow the constitution, could they be considered the enemy? So supporting our own gov't can be treason? That is what some groups are saying... As an Iraq vet, I'm angry at how some groups call all soldiers evil anti-american defenders of Bush. Yes, I chose to go to Iraq and get almost twice my normal pay while not having to kill anyone; my other option was to be labeled a traiter and coward, not follow my legal orders, forfeit pay, and go to Leavenworth. Every soldier who signs up for the military believes they will defend the constitution, not receive legal binding orders to break the constitution. We're dammed either way, so be fair and don't blame the troops. A lot of troops are against the Iraq war and hate Bush, so don't be so blind. Instead of pointing fingers, how about getting us some voting machines (instead of swimming pools and steak at the chow hall) in Iraq, or help make it mandatory for absentee ballots to be provided to the troops, and actually counted!
Anyway, I find that Fox is no worse than the other main media outlets, but I haven't watched them in like about a year.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Well it's been longer than a year since i last watched so maybe you just feel differently than i do on this subject. Seems to me that they literally echo the administration on most issues. You mention immigration policy well i'll buy that it seems that MOST of the republican members of the administration disagree with Bush about this. However on some other issues they're not quite as harsh take for instance when the wiretapping story broke, Fox news only spent a couple of minutes on it because they said that they wanted to get on to "more important issues" and then they did human interest stories all day. Like i said though, maybe we just disagree on this, i'm sure that it's a case of differing opinions and not a case of one person or the other being totally wrong probably the perception is just different from where i stand than it is for you. Although i will add one last thing. When i first started feeling that Fox news was completely biased, i had not yet heard anything from the other news sources or major media (or even any of my friends) about them being biased, it just seemed to me that they were. So while this may be a case of my position in life perceiving them as being biased it is at the very least (in my case) NOT a case of echoing the "liberal media" or towing the party line. (espeically since i'm a registered republican)
Hell, I clicked to the ARTICLE, but did NOT attempt to get at the link to the AT&T body they published. I won't even touch the mirrored link.
/. keyboard potato activity.
Why?
Hell, doing so could lead to a VALID warrant to bust down my door. It's one thing when I spout inciteful or supposition postions. It's ANOTHER thing entirely to seek and obtain information they government CURRENTLY deems classified.
If I MAKE UP stuff that they want to QUASH by labeling as classified, I disseminate my stuff publicly and make sure I have sources to validate and exonerate my work as artistic, compilation, and aggregation. Even though there ARE clauses that could still put me in jail, at least the public could have an opportunity to rally for my vindication and release. Going after AT&T docs that are SEALED is pretty stupid in today's ham-fisted, mind-twisted office.
I say don't touch them. If you have remote control and secure download locations for some spy-esque activities I suppose you are talented, resourceful and up to a LOT more than a typical day job or
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I think you misread the parent. I think they were talking about a progressive tax rate that reached 90% for people at the highest income levels. The reason people think this is a bad idea because they think that it undermines successful people and promotes mediocrity.
However, this is a simplistic argument that has at least one false premise: people are paid according to their contribution to society. You only have to compare the salaries of c-level executives to the average salary of people that work in their companies, teachers and social workers to professional athletes and/or people that were born into money versus those that were born into a family making below the poverty line. People are frequently not making an income based on their competence, success, hard work or any other factor attributable to themselves.
More often than not, it's dumb luck. If you accept that as true, then you can give a little more credibility to arguments that there should be a more equitable distribution of income to counter the effects of luck while at the same time supporting those things that are valuable to society - such as hard work, competence and so forth.
As far as politics go, you should also take a look at the political compass diagram, and take the test. As a benchmark, try taking a look at the 2004 Presidential Election and then the other countries. Notice how most fall in the upper right quadrant? If you think in terms of Clinton or Kerry being "left", then yes, Slashdot might be left in that sense - but still firmly in the same authoritarian right quadrant.
If you think "left" in terms of Gandhi and Stalin, then Slashdot isn't left at all - either with an authoritarian or libertarian aspect. But, it is like you said: what's left is relative to where you stand. The thrust of Slashdot follows the larger pattern that you can see in most governments - which is a right, authoritarian bias. It can be hard to see - especially in cultures like the U.S. that have such a narrow range of political expression, but tools like the political compass can be useful to get your bearings.
"Every real conservative is completely mortified by the recent goings-on within the US, and their involvement in wars around the world."
Unfortunately. the (few) real Conservatives can only hope to have any political influence under a NeoCon Administration. They are stuck. The public has never embraced real Conservatism, so the only way to sell any variety was to make bedfellows with the Evangelical ultranationalists who are horny for the Apocalypse.
The binary choices of Identity Politics leave no other effective option.
Democrat leftists do not want Conservatives (and on issues like the Second Amendment are bitter enemies) and the Christian Taleban are capable of instantly torpedoing any secular Conservative candidate.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Only our lifetime? He's being unduly kind.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Notice the ladder right next to it where one can pull out a ceiling tile and shimmy over the wall. oh look.. a misplaced ceiling tile.. next to a ladder.. so much for security? http://ly.lygo.com/ly/wired/news/images/full/secre troom1_f.jpg
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
It's right-wing, but also anarchistic, what you might call libertarian.
Unfortunately the Democratic and Republican parties are not at all representative of any political ideology other than autocracy.
The Democrats attempt to secure power by making you happy.
The Republicans attempt to secure power by making others happy.
The autocrats (fascists, Communists, etc.) attempt to secure power by threatening everyone with unhappiness.
And the libertarians support giving everyone power, although you risk being unhappy.
...not everyone is a gutless coward only concerned with protecting their own ass. Just sayin'.
people are paid according to their contribution to society
I have to admit, I really do believe that - almost by definition. Your example of contrasting a CEO and a social worker are the most telling to me - examine them closely. What happens if you remove a particular social worker from society? Either another one fills their place (because social workers are not really very differentiated), or we go without. Worst case, a few more children/people die than could have been. What happens if you remove a CEO from society? The amount of stuff that society can create goes down by the amount that the CEO was able to organize. Good CEOs are irreplaceable - if that was not true, they would not be getting the high salaries they command. Any person in the US can become a CEO at any time - incorporating a company in the US cost practically nothing. But the fact is, we (as humans) have a critical shortage of people that can turn the effort of others into stuff. We have no shortage of people to work - we have a critical shortage of people that can make work into something useful. The result - CEOs get paid ridiculous salaries, even though anyone off the street can become one (its not regulated), and CEOs are not typically very good at their job (because there is a shortage so we take what we can get).
You can talk about how a social worker has a more fullfilling job - perhaps you could discuss morals (although I beleive that if you do think the job of a social worker is more moral than the job of a CEO [ignoring the differences in actual people, just looking at the jobs], then you have something wrong with your moral structure).
Society pays people more for 2 things: 1) value to society, and 2) guns. If he's not using guns, and he's earning a high wage - he's helping society.
People born into rich families do not really get paid a lot comparatively - unless they are very good at resource allocation, another thing our society needs (though we seem to be better at that as a species than the CEO thing). If they aren't good at resource allocation, their money is quickly moved to those that do. That said, I do not believe that people should be able to give their kids large sums of money and power - mainly because it is bad for the kids. My will only allows my child to use any money for surviving until 18, and college.
You say that a lot of the deciding factors of income are related to the accident of birthplace - which is totally true. But if you go further, you will find the reason for this - who your parents are and what you are taught determines to a large extent how useful you will be to society. It is possible to a certain extent to learn to be a good CEO - at least above average. If your parents were CEOs, you are more likely to be one. But this can be circumvented by hard work and a little luck - my income has gone from living way below the poverty line due to injuries (and my father being away in a war, and let's face it: our military pay stinks!) to living far in excess of the average person. (I really reccommend everyone start a business, by the way. Even if it doesn't work out, what you learn doing it will make you MUCH more valuable to society.)
As for politics, I also greatly prefer the two dimensional representation - but many people have trouble with it. I am on the right, and a bit of a libertarian on most people's charts. The problem, of course, is that there is no real centerline - that was just where someone thought that the centerline belonged. (It is really funny to hear about how Europeans think the US is SO far right - it is, of course, just as valid to put the centerline way to the right of both of us. That way the US is much closer to center!)
Are you European, by chance? Your political views sound very European, so it would be rather interesting if you were an American.
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The way I read it, wired is making a big fuss out of very little. This is info that the EFF already had: "As a result, we are publishing the complete text of a set of documents from the EFF's primary witness in the case, former AT&T employee and whistle-blower Mark Klein."
Wired made it public, but that's not going to change the case in any way. It's not like Wired dug up some new info that will help the EFF.
FWIW, you may find Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(c) informative.
I think you misspelled "libertarian"
Libertas in infinitum
You are right, the point that we should be focusing upon is that AT&T gave NSA real-time access to communications. I thought from the original press reports that NSA had been given access to some sort of billing database that listed who called whom. But the contents of the document makes clear that the program goes way beyond this.
Think global, act loco
How about Bush's "Give Up Your Rights To Fight Phantom Terrorists" policy which has the big media and telecommunications companies to lying to and spying on citizens without the individual being able to report it to police and have people arrested for it. While this is nothing new, under the Bush regime the engine of fascism is no longer just idling. The throttle is being pulled out.
[. .
Corporations are NOT people. The laws which allow them to be treated as such are flawed, and it took a lot of dedicated work by a lot of evil lawyers to bend the law so that they have the same rights as people. So now that they ARE seen as people, they should be treated as such; meaning, when they display signs of mental illness, appropriate steps should be taken.
When you say that similarity to a psychopath should not affect how the law treats a person or group, I have to disagree. --Because actually, the law should and does. Mental illness is a state recognized by the law, and it generally results in rights and powers being restricted according to the severity of the illness. Psychopaths, if you can even catch the slippery monsters, are locked up forever.
-FL
Oh don't get your panties in a bunch. ;-) And don't go comparing yourself to minorities, there's no comparison. If I want to say that Libertarianism is a poorly thought out philosophy, that's not like putting people down for things they can't change. Hopefully you get the difference between, "I think you believe something silly" and "die, minority, die."
;-)
Okay, look, I actually don't want to hurt your feelings. I just wasn't in the mood for a debate about Libertarianism. However, since you responded, I will actually read your post and reply with something other than flip dismissal. Sorry. I haven't had my coffee yet. Forgive me?
You should understand, I come from a Anarcho-Syndicalist background, which is a slightly socialist leaning form of Anarchism, while Libertarianism is a very capitalist leaning form of Anarchy, and there's nothing an Anarchist hates more than another Anarchist who got it almost, but not quite right.
Just give me a little while, I promise I will read your post but I'm at work so I have to do this while I'm installing SuSE on three virtual machines. But if it gives you any consolation, I feel bad about being mean to you so I will read it and give a decent response.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
IIRC, there were more than two parties at the last election in the US.
Wikileaks, no DNS
With property as a positive right, it's humourous to see it as being seen as fundemental. The arguments within AC ranks about "Intellectual Property" make me smile to see how both sides distort and obscure the real issues. On my part, I distinguish "capitalism" (the doctorine of property) with "free market" (a freedom-based system of production and exchange).
Syndicalism, I see as a bastard child of anarchism and Marxism. Not to say that it has nothing to offer, but it weakens the potency of anarchism by minimising individualist solutions. It also risks approaching communitarianism, which is more restrictive than democracy, for sustained dissent is anti-community, rather than being a spur to improve the norms, and a source of future potential if the existing solution doesn't work out.
For anything like anarchism to function long-term, you need to start with love of diversity, and AC stamps on that by prescribing the solution. However, AS risks confounding "minority" with pre-indentified groups with a historical grievance, as presently occurs on the left. The (evolutionary) value of diversity is that one is ready for the future, whereas the leftist's concept is centred on the past.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Section 1
1.) The question of original coercion is actually an interesting one and hotly debated. Some believe we are inherently violent, others think something triggered our current state of being. I believe the latter. There is very little evidence for mass human on human violence before 4000BC. No walled villages. No swords. No mass graves. Interestingly, that time period corresponds to the desertification of the Sahara and Central Asia. James DeMeo theorizes that we developed agriculture, created a surplus, gave up hunting & gathering, and then had the first mass famine. We are violent because of the lingering post-traumatic stress disorder of this initial incident. In this theory, government preceded violence. I lived in Crete for a while, and I can say that the Minoans had a much less coercive government than later governments in the area.
2.) Government fixes things when the market breaks. The free market is only efficient at distributing resources when certain conditions are met. Externalities, imbalance of information, and natural monopolies cause market breakdowns. Government regulation fixes them. But it need not be a coercive geovernment. Libertarianism is a form of government, it is not Ochlocracy, or mob rule.
3.) I partially agree. I think everyone deserves to have the basic necessities of life: clothing, clean water, sanitation, medicine, food and shelter. Beyond that, the people who are smart and work hard should get more, but reasonably so, not millions of times what others get.
4.) This is trying to point out the falacy of treating one grouping of individuals (government) differntly than others (corporations, partnershps, amrriages, etc.) You have not addressed the basic point here.
5.) Having argued with Libertarians on the Internet for over ten years now, I can say that this may not be true for all, but for many, they DO simply parrot back the same tired arguments without understanding them, all the while claiming to be free thinking individuals. It gets tiring after a while, and it IS okay to poke fun at Libertarians for this. If you are not like this, good, the point doesn't apply to you.
6.) This is rebutting a point that Libertarians make all the time, that they had no choice about what type of State they were born into, how unfair that is. Don't like it? Move. Make your own state. What's that? No place to move to? Everythings owned already? Too bad, that's what would happen under Libertarianism, too.
7.) This is pointing out the fact that Libertarians for the most part do not put their money where their mouth is. Every other political philosophy has put it's ideals into practice, even if it failed miserably. Not Libertarianism.
8.) This is again making fun of the Libertarian tendency to parrot back sound-bite arguments without understanding them. As I said, I have been debating Libertarians on the Internet for years, and this wouldn't be funny to people like me if there weren't a grain of truth to it.
9.) I have no idea what this point means.
10.) Not mindless babble, one of the more important points. Libertarians can not agree amongst themselves how much government is necessary, and as they are all rugged individualists, they will never compromise to come up with a working definition. You think I'm bad? Try debating some hard core Libertarians, they will tear you a new one if you disagree about certain basic points.
Section 2
11.) But Libertarians act like this! Maybe you don't have as much experience debating them as I do. It sure feels like they believe this sometimes.
12.) See point 10 and try arguing that with a hard core Libertarian, you will have your ass chewed entirely off for taking that stance.
13.) People can be jerks to each other without government intervention. Many Libertarians think that without government, things like that wouldn't happen, which is bullshit.
14.) Listen to some Libertarian mathematics of economics sometime and get back to me with how silly this i
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Well put, Morosoph, very well put. No time to add anythign to the discussion, I just spent quite a bit of time answering carbonautomaton and I'm juggling three installs at work. Just wanted to say you have a very well developed political philosophy that matches my own quite well. I'm not actually an Anrcho-Syndicalist anymore, it's just a convenient shorthand. Hehe, I haven't paid my IWW dues in eight years or so...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I've been on the receiving end often enough to empathize. You were hoping for a nice argument and all you got was contradiction. I put that in my sig to try to remind myself to have a little patience. Anyway, my reply is done, have a read if you like, or don't, not like you owe me anything after me being a jerk like that.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I agree fully. As a conservative, I am sick of being identified with the republocrat party -- either branch. What's wrong with "look before you leap" or "a deal's a deal", or, "the law is the law" and is there as much to protect people from the government as each other? Well the government is people too, but they're allowed to shoot you, take you to gitmo (not under law, but who's stopping them?), profile you and so on. I DID vote republican, as the dems were saying "we know what's best for you" and that gave me pause -- which *you* were they talking about? Wall street stockbroker, the homeless bum he walks by every day, an honest programmer like myself, a logger in the woods, who? Centralization of power and information seems to tempt to corruption too easily for my tastes.
This is sort of off-topic. But my answer is that you as a soldier took an oath to defend this country from all threats foreign and domestic. You alone are responsible for your decisions regarding what that means (yes, I do consider Bush to be a domestic threat, but you can make the determination whether serving in Iraq is required by your oath).
Anyway, it is not that uncommon for a soldier to be opposed to the war and still serve. I had a close friend who served in Iraq as a member of the National Guard and yet was always opposed to the war. Sad to say, she committed suicide about two weeks ago (the was the third member of her unit *this month* to do so, so I doubt that it was a matter of politics).
We ought not to confuse the issues of supporting the troops and supporting the war. I deeply opposed the war and think that our Administration lacks a workable exit strategy in a conflict where our presence effectively makes an endgame impossible and where simply withdrawing at any given point is worse than staying. We ought to support our troops as our fellow countrymen but this does not mean staying silent about a war we never should have started and which needs a drastic shift in foreign policy in order to avoid turning a disaster into an even worse catastrophe.
Soldiers are doing their jobs. And they are supposed to follow all lawful orders. But the Administration ought not to hide behind the good men and women who serve in the armed forces to protect their policies from criticism. Yet the Administration has sought to confuse the support for the troops with the support for the war as a way of preventing political discussion on the matter. We saw this technique employed in the debates with John Kerry, for example.
I hope you understand the distinction I am making.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
That sure is cowardly.
When you decide to act out of fear and take yourself out of the game, you're doing exactly what the government wants you to do. This administration has been controlling and manipulating people out of fear from the beginning. It's easy- you dont need to pass laws or move mountains. Just scare people and they'll run and hide.
If you disagree with what's going on, dont remain silent and cowed. DO something about it. Make yourself heard. Make noise. Otherwise they've already won. Hats off to Wired.
I'm a Canadian, so the legalities would be even more interesting. I'm also of the opinion that the majority of American's are decent people, but your government and corporate corruption is a steaming pile of crapulance (well, so is mine, less in some ways and possibly more in others).
However, I would be hesitant to mirror the site purely on an I'm-afraid-of-slashdotting basis. However, in the meantime I'll happily seed P2P networks with copies of the PDF, perhaps those interested can do the same.
Let's use an analogy of the stock market. Classical economics talks about perfectly competitive markets where people have all the information they need, people make rational decisions, suppliers can freely enter and leave markets, etc. There are no perfectly competitive markets.
People do not have perfect information. They frequently do not make rational decisions. So, unless you change the meaning of the word "value" to basically mean that you deserve whatever the market decides to give you, you do not have much support for those notion that people are paid according to their contribution to society.
Thought experiment. Why don't companies publish the salaries of all their employees or for specific positions - for review by anyone in the company? If everyone is getting compensated relative to their true value, this would not present any problems - would it?
I work in a large American corporation. I actually check the H2 Visa forms that my company to get a sense of what different positions in my organization are paying - and I know as a fact that there is a huge disconnect between different positions relative to their value. I also know that this is not unique to my circumstance through people I know working in other corporations.
Secretaries make more than professionals because they work close to a C-level executive. Incompetent bosses carried by more junior people. People with seniority that actually take away more value than they bring paid more than stars. Anyone that has worked anywhere has seen these things.
My example was to compare the salary of CEO's who make millions to the average salary of an employee in their company. While there may be examples where a CEO might earn the millions that he makes in compensation, I would argue that it is the exception that proves the rule. To use your example, CEO's make more than social workers because the market pays them more. It would be trivial to point to incompetent CEO and people that are fantastic social workers - and by doing so you would be point out that an incompetent CEO is probably harming value but still gets compensated more than any social worker despite the relative quality of their work. Again, another disconnect.
Here's another social-economic data point Take a look at Table 680. Notice how since 1980 the top 5 percent have had a huge increase of their percentage of total aggregate income. How does your perspective square with systemic problems like that one?Well, I did explain why you would tend to see incompetent CEOs - good CEOs are rare, and so sometimes you have to make do with what you can get. Your comparison of a bad CEO and a good social worker is a good one - a bad CEO destroys less value than a non-existing CEO, while a good social worker does not increase the "stuff" society has by much more than a non-existing social worker. That is the comparison - it is how would you fare doing without. That is what decides "fair pay".
Now it is totally true that without social workers, the world would be a worse place - but without social workers, the world would actually run more efficiently and produce more stuff. I think it is even more true that if 20% of the population would learn to be a CEO (or small business owner, as we would then have) the world would be amazingly better off. The problem with a shortage of CEOs is that companies tend to not have adequate competition (internally and externally), leading to the problems that you mention. The "bad people" getting more money than good people happens much more in large companies than in small ones - and generally happens in poorly managed large ones.
As for your table - thanks for pointing that data source out, it is an interesting read. I believe your point is that it is unfair for 5% of the people to get 20% of the value surplus created by society - either that or that it is increasing. As I read the data, 5% of society creates 80% of the value surplus of society - and we are gradually increasing the share of the surplus that those value creators get to keep (which is fair because they created it). You know that 90% of the good code is written by 10% of the programmers, right? The same thing is true elsewhere. By paying people based on how much they produce, everyone is incentivized to take jobs that are helpful to society instead of taking social worker jobs that make you feel good (but in my opinion, most social workers do more harm than good - look at the projects in Chicago).
Yes, there are inefficiencies - people with good negotiation skills end up with more pay, etc. But networking is incredibly important when you are talking about value creation, so even some of these things that look like inefficiencies are actually value creating. And some social workers take advantage of the people they are supposed to serve, but that doesn't mean much for the value of social workers.
I think you are looking for "fair". "Fair" doesn't exist, because what I think is "fair" is very different from what you think is "fair". Like I tell my daughter, life isn't fair - you just have to do the best you can with what you have!
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Maybe I AM a coward. But, I am not selfish. I may be idealistic, but I'm not *totally* deluded. Somewhat, but not totally.
I'm already DOING enough shit to be put under observation.
I am 90% sure I'm STILL on the watch list. (In mid 2003, the FBI visited me, announcing themselves for my neighbors to hear. They were looking for an "airplane". It was my brother's R/C plane, an F-16. It never had an engine. All they say in my apartment garage was a crash-smashed-up barnstorming plane, which they laughed at and smacked themselves on the head, one of them saying, "We got called out here for THIS?"
These days, my computer crawls like a mofo, it crashes randomly/spuriously; my logs fill up with stuff that I'm not doing locally...). And it's a LINUX box. I'm not skilled enough to hunt down and stay on top of every exploit or even identify them. I use firestarter, etherape, and periodically check my logs. It's time-consuming. But, even a pristine box will get cracked eventually.
I'm 60% suspicious employers have "do not hire" lists. I suspect one of my former employers of rewriting its contractors use policy to require ALL contractors to own a car (I don't own one), which effectively makes it pointless for me to ask them to re-contract me.
Hell, SBC seems to be bouncing an e-mail I'm sending to a relative. The e-mail contains ONLY the URLs to my sites. The e-mail that DID get through is only about generic stuff: Linux, news, and newbie sites he might find useful.
Want proof of my "unhireability" in mainstream USA?
at the risk of getting my sites slashdotted, see my activities at:
www.otanashide.com
www.underway-shift-colors.com
www.dreadyacht.com
I feel (without 100% proof) I am on the precipice of being revered or reviled, exonerated or exterminated. I may seem hostile and Anti-US government on Slash, but I'm farrrr from doing any mechanical or physical destruction. I might piss off a number of people, but I'm not into blowing shit up, burning shit down, or the like.
Now, am I so cowardly? Reckless? Maybe. Stupid? Mildly. Ungrateful? No. Suicidal? Not totally. Basically, though, I feel that life is NOT about leaving Earth "unscathed". My day surely will come, but on my principles will I leave.
Besides, there are plenty of other people who can click that AT&T document link.
They had a BEAUTIFUL, 8.5x11 color photo of me from the Oregon DOT-- it was identical to my D/L I'd obtained in Oregon. They were polite, nice, and non-assertive. Casually-dressed. They even removed their shoes out of respect since I told them I don't wear shoes in my homes. It's not a religion thing. I picked it up from living in Vietnamese households. I despise the idea of street-filth carried by shoes getting on my carpet. I'm not a total clean freak, but that is how I keep my carpets clean. When I sold my home years ago, the buyers chose MINE because I didn't have worn-as-hell carpeting. No kick-holes in the walls, and so on. Anyway.... the pic of me was so nice I wanted a copy for myself.
The ONLY people who knew of that plane were either busybodies looking at me help my brother load it, or the apartment lady who INSISTED I remove from my closet every box that took up the footprint of my wall-to-wall closet in my art room. Hey, in Oregon they have rental laws that allow landlords to inspect the hell out of properties rented by them. I had windows covered by blankets, and tho I was on the ground level and she could have inspected from by the shrubs or had the groundskeeper do that part for her, she had me peel back the blankets which were there to keep prowlers eyes off my computer shit and books and the sunlight off my drawing papers.
I pulled out the boxes she saw the 4-foot-tall F-16. Putting 9/11, my skin color, and a like-new F-16 must have freaked her out. SOMEbody (not necessarily her, but SOMEBODY) called the FBI. It took them maybe a MONTH to pay me a visit, but about two days before they arrived, there was a VERY small, one-man plane buzzin
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Of course you totally chose to ignore the basis of my post. Specifically that there isn't enough hoursepower capable of filtering and processing the sum total of all internet bandwidth every second and instead chose to respond to my request to not hear from thre tree hugging crowd. A liberal will never respond to the facts. They respond to their feelings being hurt.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N