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Who's Flying Those Drones? FAA Won't Say
netbuzz writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation nine months ago filed a Freedom of Information Act request to prompt the FAA to release the names of government agencies and private entities that have received permission to fly unmanned aircraft over our heads. Nine months later, the FAA has neither released the information nor explained why it hasn't. On Tuesday the EFF filed suit (PDF) to force the agency to do so. Says EFF staff attorney Jennifer Lynch: 'Drones give the government and other unmanned aircraft operators a powerful new surveillance tool to gather extensive and intrusive data on Americans' movements and activities. As the government begins to make policy decisions about the use of these aircraft, the public needs to know more about how and why these drones are being used to surveil United States citizens.'"
Google!
Not me.. I don't want to be groped and scaned by the tsa or worse by any of those tla alphabet groups for not doing anything.
Citizen moving along, not looking at anything at all. Don't hellfire missile me bro.
Guess I can fly my own since they won't show me the list to prove my name's not on it...
With all the economic problems going on, and no end in sight, and the approval rating of the entire government in the shitter, it's pretty obvious. This government knows that the populist uprisings are going to eventually come to our shores, this is why they're bringing the troops home, this is why there have been so many laws restricting the rights of American citizens as of late...
There's going to be an American Spring, maybe not this year, but soon. Things cannot continue as they are...
Movements are publicly viewable.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Sad when you own government by you own people does not trust you and has to keep a eye on everything you do with every new
technology that comes out.
What would happen if someone shot one down?
I'd like to make a pac-man drone that could eat one and keep it in it's belly safely.
Seriously, I don't think it's anything to worry about. Satellites and helicopters are much more locally efficient. And as far as citizens doing it, states have the say. Arizona really kicks ass when it comes to model rocketry. When I lived there I saw people launching 15 foot tall rockets with cameras, etc. What's sad about this story is that the govt thinks they NEED to do this here.
And here I thought they were bringing the troops home at the demands of the American people.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
In the forms of helicopters and planes.
Now I am not saying we as people don't need to be concerned and watchful of how this develops, but the ZOMG!!! They have drones, omg omg knee jerk sensationalism if redonkeylous.
Drones save money over a helicopter or plane. You get more for less. A drone could also be set to follow a pursuit. It is a tool that I forsee becoming quite valuable. That includes us little citizens. But like any tool it could be abused. Just don't fall into the faux news sensationalism style knee jerk reaction
Needs a tinfoil had moderation option.
You must think the demands of the American people counts for something.
so, if a camera was placed on the street corner aimed at your front door, you'd have no problem with it?
your abstraction loses touch with reality.
what do you WANT for a world, in terms of how we live? you WANT to encourage this creeping intrusion on our privacy?
is that what you are arguing for?
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I don't see any reason why such licenses couldn't be sold to the general public. The plane has to meet FAA UAV standards which they'll have to make up as they go along... and some sort of background check and licensing procedure for the pilots will be important. But why shouldn't everyone get in on this thing? UAV crop dusters. UAV traffic helicopters. UAV medical helicopters. Any situation where we might use human pilots... consider if we need them. Maybe we can get skybuses. Big helicopters that take people across traffic congested cities to depots, train stations, or airports.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Those aren't the drones you're looking for
If we finally get rid of George Bush and elect a Progressive (someone like Obama, who has campaigned on maintaining transparency in government), I think we'll do away with this.
But as long as we keep Bush and Republicans in office, we'll always have these types of issues.
It's gonna get really bad when those troops are demob'd, can't find jobs and join OWS.
Or gangs.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
you are probably right. they are circling the wagons. no american spring! that would upset the balance of power, here!
things will get worse before they get better; but oh boy, are we in for some 'interesting' times ahead of us ;(
anything that represents freedom to the people is fearful to the government (all of them, not just the US).
world war 3 is not going to be fought with conventional weapons and it won't be single countries against single countries. I hope this does not happen, but all roads point to some big problems ahead for us all.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
You have no expectation of privacy in public, which is why we have those two words: "private" and "public". A camera looking at your door is the same as someone just standing on the street looking at said door.
Screw the front door, aim it at your windows.
...it will be obvious that they must belong to some evil foreign country and you're allowed to kill their cams with that high powered laser that you have never built in your backyard. ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
it's just a bunch-a old guys from the local rc-model club.
Surveillance on US Citizens is wrong, but we the people have let our politicians rule over us and we gave them permission to do this. We constantly re-elect the same political individuals who have systematically stripped our rights away from the citizens of this country all in the name of "they know what's good for us". Well once those drones are taken down, that's when the FAA will try to step out of the picture and the owners who have to replace these (at taxpayer expense mind you) will come a hootin' and hollerin' claiming they need more Federal $ from the budget office to replace their drones.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Capture one. See who knocks down your door.
Just make sure you're livestreaming, because you probably won't get a chance to talk to anybody about it for a very long time...
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Yeah, because just now all of a sudden people are demanding to bring the troops home. Everything was all hunky-dory up until recently.
Come on. There were a lot of people in this country that were against the war in Iraq before we had troops on the ground there. They're listening to the American people no more now than they were then.
You have no expectation of privacy in public, which is why we have those two words: "private" and "public". A camera looking at your door is the same as someone just standing on the street looking at said door.
which would be loitering
What if the camera hovers 20m above the street and stares into someone's sleeping quarters rather than at the ceiling, as one could view from a normal 1-2m height from the street? Or if it sits in the air above a property and takes pictures from there? Does an expert on air traffic have information on how far from the ground vehicles need to be before they're considered "in public space?"
It is not reasonable for a police officer to watch your door, 24x7... unless there's been a warrant issued.
While there may be no expectation of "privacy", it's not the same thing as expecting the State is constantly watching.
Not the same thing at all.
Yeah, how dare the powers that be don't want the fundies overthrowing the state and imposing their religious restrictions on us through force of arms, throwing their political opponents in jail on questionable charges of blasphemy and homosexuality, and getting rid of the legal mechanisms for popular agreement to change the behaviour of the government.
Were you not aware how the Arab Spring turned out?
There's going to be an American Spring, maybe not this year, but soon.
Problem is, what we get after is not likely to be any better.
The original founders of the country were pretty effing brilliant in ways that few are any more. They set up a system that worked for a pretty long time to guard against the kinds of abuses we're seeing now, with a recommendation that we throw it all out and start over every once in a while after it becomes too bloated and power-hungry, as it has. I haven't see much out of either OWS or the TP that comes anywhere *near* the sophistication of political thought that those guys had in the 1700's. These days, it'd be all about "gimme!" and not about trying to create a free state.
In this case, someone standing on the street who is able to direct or launch military strikes.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Get some trial lawyer lobbying group to ask for this info and it will happen a lot sooner.
Once a drone crashes people will want someone to sue, and without a pilot there is no one to go after. Enter an attorney from Dewey, Faulkum, and Howe looking for his 33%, and you'll have more briefs flying around than in the showers at Penn State.
or at least I'm not aware of having seen them flying overhead. Are they easily identifiable from the ground?
The big question is would you want a feed of YOUR POOL running on one of the Times Square Video Boards??
(bonus BB points if you have a young daughter)
(and thats not even getting into the issue of drones with IR cams or other wall penetrating sensors)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Drones being flown all over the country, by unidentified pilots, Microsoft giving their Flight Simulator game away for free. I coincidence? I think NOT.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Tinfoil, you say? It was a recent invention when my grandfather was sent to a gulag and my uncle was forcibly drafted into the Russian army to be what are now called "shock troops" or more accurately, "cannon fodder."
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
So to be clear, the EFF filed and FIA request to the FAA about USAF activity.
Omg, wtf?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Movements are publicly viewable.
I, sir, do my movements with the door locked and the window shade drawn. No one wants to see that.
Is loitering illegal?
It is not reasonable for a police officer to watch your door, 24x7...
And it's even less reasonable for a police officer to watch your door, 24x7, from the comfort of their own office... If they're going to do that, they should at least pay a penalty in terms of work...
so, if a camera was placed on the street corner aimed at your front door, you'd have no problem with it?
Nah! I can hit it with a paintball or pellet gun easy. Or, pay the neighbor's kid to smash it with a hammer. Or, just wait two days for someone to steal it.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
This is *only* going to bite them in the ass. Sooner or later, somebody screws up - lightly - and in the resulting suit, some judge will order this information to be public. The fall-out will be considerable, and people will be less trusting. The general who now, obsessed by his power to protect and the technological possibilities, decided to withold this information, is going to rue the day. Or not. But hey - maybe it's his retirement in three or four years, and maybe he can sing it out until then.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Are you actually that ignorant and obtuse, or just trying really, really hard to sound that way?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I somehow don't see american soldiers controlling the states, sure they can lock a city or two down, but not the country, we have about a million soldiers (much less very soon), and about 500x the population. If anything I can see more of a v for vendetta type scenario w mass protests. It's not the first time it's happened to this country though, we actually banned alcohol once.
I actually find this subject interesting.
Ignoring evil government spying and abuse, and just focusing on the standard issue crime we all know and hate...
We are now near a point where we could use technology to very effectively cut down crime. The issue is no longer technological but social.
As you said, imagine a camera on every street corner. Imagine a system that constantly monitored every road for bad driving and issued immediate tickets. Cut someone off.. drive too fast.. forget your turn signal.. instant ticket. Imagine how much that would improve safety on the roads. Bad drivers would either improve or driving would become so expensive that they'd give it up.
Go forward a bit, imagine a system that can automatically detect crime. Imagine literally not being able to rob someone.. or steal anything.. because a system would immediately identify the action, and track you wherever you went until the police picked you up making it virtually impossible to escape. Imagine how much crime that would cut down on.
All at the expense of having very little privacy, and of course opening the door for massive abuse.
Do you want to live in that world? Personally I don't think I would either. Do we want to or can we find a middle ground?
Of course, because the people fighting the erosion of our freedoms here in the U.S. in the wake of 9/11 just want to institute a theocracy! It's all a big scam!!
It amazes me how many people support the restriction of our rights (or resist anyone upsetting the status quo) because a bunch of fucking assholes crashed hijacked planes into buildings 10 years ago. We can be safe without infringement of our constitutional freedoms.
Technically the GP should have said stalking which is more clearly illegal. Loitering itself is going to depend upon where one is located and the specifics.
Only if you're operating under IFR. If you're under visual flight rules, the FAA doesn't have to have a record of the flight.
OTOH, a manned plane under VFR rules must have the N-number registration painted on both sides, and that publicly links back to the registered owner. If you can read the tail number, you can figure out who owns it. Theoretically, a drone in shared airspace and heavy enough to be a collision hazard should have the same registration and markings, but the FAA regs may not say that.
This
I agree with you 100%. I mean, just the other day my neighbor was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor for Googling "free Tibet".
I have discussed the surveillance state we live in now with several people, and the one overriding factor that determines someones "ease" with accepting it is whether they have children or not. Those with kids almost always(actually always...) will accept any form of "safety" whether it's taking their shoes off at the airport, having all their electronic communications sniffed for anything suspicious or now, having drones with incredibly powerful cameras spy on them constantly. The argument invariably devolves into the "I want my kids safe, Dammit!" tack. Any amount of evidence pointing to how we are slowly but surely devolving into a 1984 style society is greeted by blank looks and animosity, almost as if I'm the bad guy because I don't agree with the "save the children via becoming a police state" direction we are on.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Not really, that would be considered stalking in most of the developed world. One has a reasonable expectation typically that somebody isn't going to be camped out on the sidewalk across the street filming all that come and go.
FAR Part 91.119
Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes:
(a) Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.
(b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.
(c) Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure.
(d) Helicopters. Helicopters may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph (b) or (c) of this section if the operation is conducted without hazard to persons or property on the surface. In addition, each person operating a helicopter shall comply with any routes or altitudes specifically prescribed for helicopters by the Administrator.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You don't need to lock down a city. You just need to take out the trouble makers, most people are sheep and will act as such.
Take away food and water and reward people who tell on trouble makers - wont take long to get a tight grib on the population.
I have an expectation of privacy in my backyard. I have a 7 foot high privacy fence and trees which prevent/block views from my neighbors' 2nd floor windows. A drone flying above my house can easily look into my private backyard. So could a manned vehicle, I realize, but unless the FBI, local cops, etc. are using a U2 or something similar, I assume I'd know they're there visually or audibly. Drones can be much smaller, quieter, and even look like a bird.
Oh won't someone think of the children!
Traffic stations have had helicopters and small planes at low altitudes for decades, if you are scared of people seeing you in a bathing suit then cover your pool.
General Atomics flies the predator variants for DHS CBP along the borders (norh and south), JIATF-S flies the marine variants of these planes as well as the GlobalHawk and such.
Insitu flies the scan eagle in Arlington, OR Though in a very limited COA?
ISR inc. has a facility in West Virginia, though I don't believe they have an active COA anymore.
And countless military bases (Creech AFB, Nellis, Sierra vista, etc... Fly the drones)
Seriously though the EFF isn't trying very hard, all of these COAS are publicly available. You don't really need to file a FOIA request, the FAA is one of the organizations that makes it very hard to fly UAVs in the U.S, right now you should be more afraid of black helicopters than UAVs tracking you.
Hello, former sensor guy here.
No, they are very rarely detectable from the ground. Look at how efficient the exhaust system on a prius is at reducing acoustic signatures. Now put that on a plane that's blue-gray and 16000 feet over you and smaller than a cessna (in fuselage size).
Barely ever spotted unless deliberately flying low.
What if that someone started logging when you came and left, what kind of things you bring in your front door and called the police if they saw you carry a "suspicious" brown bag into your home?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
...the populist uprisings are going to eventually come to our shores, this is why they're bringing the troops home
This is much funnier if you read it with the voice of Dale Gribble. :-D
If the drones are prop driven, it wouldn't be hard to build a counter-drone to snag the prop on a line attached to a parachute.
Jet powered would be a bit harder, maybe a a strong, lightweight lead that could get sucked into the engine without breaking.
just sayin'...
damn, that would be a fun job, dreaming up and testing counter-measures.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Or the "Cancer Man" from The X-Files...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The issue here is that WHO these are operated by appears to be a government secret. The Government should not have a secret about which government agencies are operating in the US.
Most effective drone technology is still in government hands. (Yes there are some private drones available for anyone with the money to spare, but these are expensive and unlikely to be deployed on anything that is secret, and would more likely be used for forest management, crop evaluation, mapping, etc.)
That leaves two principal areas of sponsorship. Law Enforcement (DEA, ICE, etc), or Military. Military training over military training areas seems perfectly permitted. Military assistance watching the boarders or off shore seems well within the military mandate.
But military operating inland, over cities to spy on citizens is on pretty shaky grounds, and when doing so is a government secret the ground are not only shake they are slippery. You get tangled up with the Possee Comitatus act when you start using Air Force drones for non-defense purposes or to aid Law enforcement without a formal orders to do so, that must originate with the United States Constitution or Act of Congress.
So if the drones are flown by CIA, or Air Force there is a problem.
If the government comes out and says they are flown by DEA, fine.
But refusing to say seems pretty short sighted for an administration that promised open government.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
>> All at the expense of having very little privacy, and of course opening the door for massive abuse.
Except that in all the cases you describe they have always been able to be there and monitor us, it was just more manual and luck based.
It was easier for us to look around for a man in a uniform watching, or a marked patrol car following, or a plane in the air, but they could always be there.
We aren't giving up any private area, or any privacy, we are just giving up our odds of being viewed in what was always a public area that we could be watched in.
How's the crime rate in London? Has it fallen significantly since they implemented this?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
OWS and TP both fail, but for different reasons. The TP followers had the passion and focus to affect some pretty significant political "change" in a remarkably short period of time. Their problem though, is that most of them were so "unsophisticated" that they failed to realize that they were being played by big money. Can you say "astroturf"?
OWS, on the other hand, seems to grasp the issue (that we are fast-becoming a facist state) but lacks the focus and leadership that was built into the TP movement from the start.
Will that change? If things get bad enough, sure, but right now, the only one's seriously making change happen are the the Tea Baggers.
Company "A" flies over my property with their new spiffy surveillance drone. I power on my manual shot gun and shoot the trash down. Who do I send the bill to for recovery of scrap found in my yard?
I mean, just the other day my neighbor was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor for Googling "free Tibet".
Mod parent up. Comparing the USA to China does a disservice to people who live in true police states. Could the USA do much better? Absolutely - But Suggesting the USA is as bad as China means one has no clue as to how bad things really are elsewhere in the world.
Ask how well that's working out for the UK and the City of London?
Let me give you a hint - it hasn't.
You cannot EVER prevent crime. You can only prosecute it after the fact. Unless you make thoughts crime. In which case I don't want to live in your world.
Not in the US. At least not generally speaking. It was in fact ruled by the SCOTUS that loitering itself couldn't be outlawed (Chicago tried). It can only be illegal if done in a way that shows criminal intent. Stalking, for example. Watching a person's house may or may not be illegal, it would depend, but the police could likely warn someone who tried.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I can almost guarantee you this is outsourced to private US contractors.
As much as calling it on DHS or ICE would make sense here, I don't believe they would hire compenent enough people who have the proper background to fly these drones. Yes, that IS my actual argument.
I don't want to entertain the thought that they really, truely outsourced this to someone outside the US. That would be downright nightmarish! Possible, but nightmarish.
I want to be like Mitt, who has never done an honest day’s work in his life!
I want to be like Mitt, who would convince his cronies to invest 10% in a fund, and then borrow the remaining 90% from the banks, using the targeted company in the leveraged buyout as collateral -- that means transferring the 90% debt to the target company. (I’m going to buy a car, what’s your collateral, the bank asks me, the car I’m buying, I reply, try the bank next store, they reply.)
I want to be like Mitt, and receive free millions from the banks (after the LBO or leveraged buyout, they would borrow more millions from the banks against the targeted company – known as dividend recaps -- thus paying themselves a fortune while adding even more debt onto the target company).
[The proper term for this is debt financing or deficit financing, creating unbelievably burdensome debt on the takeover company to enrich themselves. Romney’s vast wealth, and that of other private banks and hedge funds, is directly responsible for the increase of the national debt.]
I want to be like Mitt, who avoided military service during the draft.
I want to be like Mitt, free money for no work and super-rich!
(Where’s the risk? There is no risk as the laws they bribed congress to pass, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, ensured that!)
...in terms of privacy. Not conducting airstrike operations, obviously...
I mean, we all (frequently) carry cellphones on our person. It's like willfully tagging yourself with an RFID tag, Microphone, and maybe even adding in a Camera and an Accelerometer for good measure.
If you think it's no big deal, considering that it's not always on your person, and that you choose when to carry it, your head is in the sand. These things are powerful POWERFUL surveillance devices. Telecom companies and not only compliant with government requests, they willfully collude with governments. And that's just the service providers.
Consider that even if you don't carry one yourself, there likely will be someone within earshot and maybe even line of sight carrying one. Whether that person is familiar to you, or even friendly is another matter.
This is a terrible attitude to have, it ignores the differences between a human and a machine and enables terrible abuses that are possible with the tirelessness and low running cost of a machine but would be terribly impractical to do with humans. You're allowing laws designed with humans in mind to be worked around through technological advances.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If things get bad enough, sure, but right now, the only one's seriously making change happen are the the Tea Baggers.
That's funny, because I have a hard time finding anyone that doesn't consider the Tea Party a total fucking joke.
...the populist uprisings are going to eventually come to our shores, this is why they're bringing the troops home
This is much funnier if you read it with the voice of Dale Gribble. :-D
Just how did you get that name? Do I know you?
-- Rusty Shackleford
What the heck are you smoking (and the mods who modded you up, for that matter)? American Spring... American Spring my ass. We are very far from modern requirements for revolution:
1/ support from powerful entity abroad
2/ economical desperation (far far far from what we have now)
3/ a socially coherent massive enough organization of individuals ready to sacrifice dramatic part of their lives (including live itself).
The approval rating of the government could be 0.0%, yet the same 0.0% will go to street.
OWS failed miserably.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Which isn't illegal in most free countries, and I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't care about.
One of the things that one of my teachers said to me in primary school was: "never compare yourself to the worst, or you'll always sink to their level. Always compare yourself to the best." That's good advice here. If you just keep patting yourself on the back for how great you think you are, you'll never get better, and you'll be less competitive.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
The police would tell them to fuck off and stop wasting their time.
I think you've seen too many movies where soldiers and sailors are non-thinking robots. Yes they are trained to follow orders, but they are also trained to think for themselves. It is highly unlikely they will shoot their fellow citizens without questioning the legality of the order. Plus the Constitution forbids the use of the Army and Navy for domestic law enforcement. That's the reason they aren't sent in immediately after national disasters... The state governors call up the national guard. And why Coast Guard detachments are assigned to Navy ships to make drug busts. The military doesn't even carry their guns around when on US bases, unless they are expressly training. Civilians provide most of the security and law enforcement on military bases. If anything, the political class would prefer the military deployed overseas if trying to suppress the population. Make it less likely they can join the rebellion.
tight grip, fingers, sand, etc.
I realize the FAA is hopefully keeping the two the fuck apart. But I am wondering how the goverment will squash the public out cry of some 150+ people dieing. I now the goverment will keep pushing for drones at all levels so am guess it would just set the it back a few years.
Paparazzi do this all the time. I guess the difference being they are not Government necessarily. But if paparazzi can do this without actually trespassing, than any non-government volunteer can do this. Then just pass the info along. So, what if the people operating the aircraft are third party?
Indoctrinate : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments Educate : to develop mentally, morally, or aestheti
Control of a populace is merely a means to justify more spending. The Hitlers and Pol Pot's of the world -- those who honestly value power (that special "right" to employ coercion against others) more than the money it brings -- are extremely rare. The vast majority of political elites in the world are hungry for money, not power.
Above all, spying and mass surveillance is a means to justify spending. The complacency it breeds is valuable to government not merely because it makes their agenda (which is bigger government) easier to achieve, but because it makes spending easier to achieve. At the top of the pyramid, the more money passing through your hands, the more leverage you have to exploit that cash flow for personal gain.
That's really all there is to it. Not very romantic, is it? Government is all about money, money and money. Follow it, because following the money is 10x as good an indicator of government's true intentions than a politician's age-old speech.
Take away food and water
Historically doing such things has only served to provide more converts for the opposition/rebellion. In any case, members of the US military swear an oath to defend the Constitution. Asking the US Military to "take out" American citizens would likely incite a civil war; some of the military would "follow orders" while other portions would side with the population. You should also take into account the fact that the American population is well armed; rifles may not be a match for a tank or jet aircraft in a conventional conflict but they do make the prospect of imposing martial law upon the United States very expensive in terms of blood and treasure.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Gaaah, why must people say wrong things on Slashdot? I don't think the government is worried about the basement uprisings that are refering to.
The soldiers are being brought back from Iraq (the only real withdrawal I am aware of) because Bush signed an agreement to bring them back by the end of 2011. Also, Obama had negotiated to keep more soldiers in Iraq, but couldn't get unqualified immunity for them from the Iraqi government. You can read a well written article by Glenn Greenwald here if you wish to know more.
It's the lack of random chance that makes this effective however.
No more "did a cop see it" .. or "is anyone looking". You simply get caught every single time (well, there is always going to be errors, but not enough that a criminal might be tempted to try their luck). Right now if you commit a crime, you have a good chance of getting away with it, which is probably why there are so many criminals. I imagine the crime numbers would drop if commiting a crime was an automatic arrest, every single time.
A) They don't want you to know who is spying on you.
B) You wont know who to sue when one crashes into your property, or causes an aerial accident.
C) This is easier than finding out if it is legal for them to be performing this kind of surveillance.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Lets see :
.......
you are not in tibet yet. but the RATE things are going, are in that direction.
so far, people like you have been sitting pretty saying stuff like 'this is not china' and so on, and believing that such things may not happen in america.
and, meanwhile, while all of you were just sitting like that, the RATE things were going has not changed. increasingly, more repressive laws and bills have been put out. habeas corpus was basically gone out of the window back around 2001. but it had a condition of 'enemy combatant'. you people rationalized it, just kept sitting on your butt. and now, after 9 years, habeas corpus is gone out of the window for ALL american citizens. without any kind of reprieve.
there have been many attempts to censor internet and new media before too. the rate things were going in that direction. you just sit on your butt while these attempts were made. believing that these would not happen there. first attack on net neutrality circa 2005 was attempted, dmca passed, acta went into preparation aaand fast forward to today - there is sopa.
see the point ?
as long as there isnt any change at the RATE things are going and the DIRECTION they are going, it is only a matter of time before things just happen.
in short, if you just sit tight on your butt saying 'doh at least i am not in china', you will someday discover that, you ARE in china.
i cant believe that kind of stupidity which afflicts the modern society : there are a group of people who are saying that they WANT to limit your rights for their own profit, they are DOING things to limit your rights for their own profit, they continually succeed in incrementally removing your rights, so it is just a matter of time until your most basic rights are gone. it is on the horizon. these people are openly saying that they want to remove them, and they are not only telling that, but they are doing what they are saying.
it is the stupidity of looking at now, and seeing things as they are, and thinking that they will keep stay same forever, despite there are those who are incrementally changing it.
Read radical news here
24 x 7? Only if Dunkin' Donuts deliver to said office...
I wish I had mod points for you. The moment you aren't concerned about it will the moment your caught up in a dragnet for viewing wikileaks, or go somewhere you're not supposed to IRL.
Whatever happened to spying at this level on ordinary citizens, simply being you know, WRONG?
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
About three years ago in a shit hole of a town I used to live in called Noel, MO, I saw a large passenger jumbo jet flying about 500 feet off the ground. It was incredible and loud. It seemed to be flying just fast enough not to stall. I was certain it was a crashing plane. I didn't notice any markings on it. This thing was about 500 yards away. I never heard the crash I was expecting.
The place is very hilly and full of trees everywhere, so I didn't see where it flew off to. There was only about 3 seconds I could see it through all the trees and hills.
I called the FAA and reported it on their emergency line when you see some suspicious plane activity. They dutifully took down my report. They called back 3 days later and said they have no record of the plane (no flight plans, no transponder data) and that it was probably a military plane and there was nothing to be concerned about.
That's how much the FAA gives a shit about really fucking weird airplane shit. I pressed him for more info and why I shouldn't be concerned about something so suspicious and he wouldn't budge. I remembered the claims that the planes that flew into the WTC were remotely controlled. I asked the guy after seeing I was getting nowhere if the government was test flying one of those remote controlled planes they flew into the WTC. He laughed and said he hopes not.
If they google "Timothy McVeigh hero", they might get 25 years hard labor. And you'd never hear about it.
And for damn sure, don't try to bring cupcakes on an airplane.
We can be safe without infringement of our constitutional freedoms.
Pretty sure you won't meet anyone in government who agrees with this. Which is a problem.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
They haven't implemented this.
They are closer to it, but it's the computer detecting every crime and automatic tracking that make it work. Commit a crime anywhere and the system flags it and tracks you everywhere.. eventually the police get around to picking you up. Anywhere, and every time.
Making commiting a crime an almost guarenteed arrest I imagine would prevent crime. Right now committing a crime is luck based, and sadly you have good odds. Making committing a crime the equivilant of automatic prison would be a hell of a deterant.
Those aren't mutually exclusive ideas.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
On a principled basis, I'd oppose such a system.
I would also oppose it on a practical basis. The laws of this nation (the USA) are so convoluted and messed up that it is impossible to get through a day without being in violation of something.
If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged. - Cardinal Richelieu
this is a real problem. Before (and, to an extent, now) it was an odds game. Sure, you might be breaking the law by jaywalking, or speeding a little, or receiving oral from your spouse. But the odds of getting caught were acceptably low (for the majority of people, anyway. enough to not cause significant backlash against authority).
But, this was probably inevitable. This is what happens when you let people create laws that apply only to the governed. I can't believe I'm doing this, but Ayn Rand actually summed it up pretty well
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens' What's there in that for anyone?"
Cite one person in China who has been arrested and convicted of a crime for Googling 'Free Tibet'.
You both misunderstood or did not comprehend it --- it wasn't an analogy --- quite the opposite, as the bank refuses the everyday people from using their target purchase as collateral. It's as if you used the car as collateral, then purchased the car, then took out further loans against the bank-owned car (as you haven't finished or even begun paying it off --- now that would be an analogy!)
sgt_doom
Not if I have an 8 foot privacy wall around my property it's not.
It might be fun to try to pick up the video feed from them, and re-stream it.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Nice try nutjob but makeup, hoodies, IR dazzlers, facial hair, glasses, etc. can all be used to trick the system.
You'd think someone on /. would realize that by giving more power to machines, you give more power to the few people who understand those machines.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Welcome to the Reich. You we shall make a SS trooper I think.
You will cut down on crime as much as CCTV has cut down on crime in London... which is to say that you won't affect it at all.
Most criminals will still wear masks, most crime will still go unsolved. If you're considering the threat of a flying eye in the sky, consider the threat of god watching your every move. People just don't care and they are dumb in general.
I don't expect privacy in public. I do however expect some transparency and accountability when the state, or an entity permitted to do so by the state, is surveilling citizens. The camera, or guy watching your door, is only comparable if we imagine that it's not just your door. Wouldn't you not be slightly concerned to find that a secretive entity, state or private, was engaging in mass surveillance? If not, you appear to fit in to the category of "nothing to hide, nothing to fear", who if they had to placed in a novel, would be those background characters in 1984 whose acquiescence renders them far too uninteresting to merit mention by name. Fortunately though, there are plenty of people ahead of you in the queue for room 101.
You are quantifiably full of shit, in that US troops have killed US citizens and not only did it not spark some widespread rebellion among the population in general, it didn't even spark dissent among the ranks of those on the scene when it happened.
Call up Vicki Weaver and ask how that goes. She isn't answering the phone? Is Lon Horiuchi in prison?
And your idea of fighting alongside a bunch of weekend warriors is idiotic. Sit in the woods on opening day of deer season for evidence that most of those boobs can't hit something as large as a deer, at conversational distances, under not threat to their personal safety whatsoever. The idea just because a guy has a rifle in his closet he can mount some kind of resistance against a force as well equipped and trained as the 1% could muster is simply boneheaded. Like one day some clear signal will go out and you'll l get up off the couch and go live like Boers.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Not there yet. But we certainly seem to be trying to catch up with a quickness....
Check your premises.
This is true, especially in the driving example. Even good drivers make mistakes and get away with them.
I suspect the system of punishment would have to be changed if this ever came to fruition. Right now it assumes your chance of getting caught is low, so the penalty is increased to even things out. You break 30 or so traffic laws.. by random chance a cop sees one of those.
Maybe crimes would need to be grouped with a certain number of freebies. Maybe you can get away with 3 "minor road violations" before getting dinged.
Maybe certain crimes that are there purely as a fallback need to be re-written or eliminated to deal with an environment where they are consistently applied (rather than being a tool the cops can bring out when needed). That might actually be better. Personally I don't like the fact that we are at the mercy of the police to not charge us with all the technically illegal stuff everyone does. Crazy subjective stuff should be refined (i.e. the difference between theft (a misdemeanor) and burglary (a felony and possible 10 years in prison).
I imagine the crime numbers would drop if commiting a crime was an automatic arrest, every single time.
you're right. And this is (in my opinion) a big problem.
Bullshit laws used to be dismissible. People would look at the bullshit laws and regulations and say, 'eh. yeah, 55mph on a straight highway with no on/off ramps for miles is unnecessary, but you can get away with doing 70mph most of the time.'
If increased surveillance was accompanied with an overdue overhauling of the current laws, it wouldn't be nearly so bad. I'm afraid that I don't even know what laws I'm in violation of on a day-to-day basis. And this is just regarding black/white matters. Determining how the courts will interpret something is a completely different matter. Fair Use? Maybe. depending on who is presiding
A small enough drone won't show on radar. In the event you are intercepted there's no pilot to arrest and likely they will destroy the evidence for you by shooting you down anyway.
As another poster says, you do a disservice to your country by being proud of not yet being as bad as a state like China when you may be headed in that direction. Do yourself a favour and aim the opposite direction in policy if you wish to always be so proud.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
We're obviously talking about emerging technology here and this is largely a theoretical exercise (we're also ignoring the more relevant abuse that makes this system next to impossible to actually pull off in a benificial way).
Maybe the system tracks all people all the time, and flags someone coming out of a building that it doesn't remember having gone in. Maybe it doesn't even use visuals.. maybe it uses a gravity displacement signature or some other startrek style mumbo-jumbo.
Asking the US Military to "take out" American citizens would likely incite a civil war;
I sincerely doubt that. Kent State.
They would do it in a heart beat fully convinced they were defending the United States government from violent overthrow.
When push comes to shove the US Army would make Syria look like a picnic. No military unit of any size is going to side with the people, and those that do will probably be executed on the spot just as they are in Syria.
Don't put your trust in the good sons. That's not the mindset that is prevalent.
Better stick to the ballot, because anything else will end badly.
No, OWS doesn't "grasp the issue" - they simply want a fascist state run to their liking, rather than the fascist state the Republicans (I refuse to call them conservatives, because they are not conservatives any longer) are aiming for. One wants cradle-to-grave socialism where the government runs and administers every facet of your life. And the other wants to let their buddies running large corporations lobby for no-bid contracts to decide who gets to run and administer every facet of your life.
If you really want to reverse the fascist tendencies BOTH of the major parties are following, you'll vote for the people who ACTUALLY want to reduce the size of government, and thus the scale of its ability to interfere with your freedom: the Libertarians.
And before some brainiac starts with the "Go to Somalia" bullshit, let's be clear: There is no disconnect between laws against fraud and general harm to your customers and the libertarian concept of a free market. "Free market" doesn't mean "anything goes," "free market" means that all the actors make consensual decisions based on their own self interests. Fraud can still be illegal. Use of force, coercion, and harm to others would still be illegal.
The less power you give the government to interfere with the lives of citizens, the less attractive the government becomes as a takeover target by corporations.
Just a matter of time. Don't you dare mod this as funny; you know it's coming.
Did it have a horizontal red stripe along the fuselage ?
Seems like the FAA would know if it was a water tanker and wouldn't be coy about it...
Looks like the closest place for something big to land would be 20 miles away.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Considering that term has been censored by the great firewall, I'd say chinese authorities certainly have motive, means, and opportunity to arrest people over it.
As far as conviction goes I'm not sure either way since I'm not familiar with due process over there, or lack thereof.
Obviously we are in the theoretical here, discussing a perfect untrickable system with massive processing capabilities and ignoring the inevitable abuse that would make it impossible to implement in a useful manner.
The driving thing I see as much closer to reality. It's hard to disguise a car .. they all have a unique id plastered on them, and removing it or obscuring it is a crime in itself.. and that id is already tied to the driver. It's probably not an easy thing to do, but I imagine software could be written right now that could identify most common driving violations. You don't need to track the car, just issue the ticket automatically, same as done with some redlight camera systems.
You are absolutely right.
as much as I dislike speed limits that are seemingly too low (and probably more revenue generators than anything else in many areas (excluding legitimate safety concerns like schools, construction zones, etc.)), it would be much, much worse without any objective determination of wrongdoing.
having to rely on the subjective shoot-from-the-hip judgement of someone that might not have the full context of the situation would be far scarier.
I'm interested in your idea of 'freebie' groupings with cutoffs. While I think that a law worth having on the books is worth enforcing, I also think that someone making 15-20 unsafe driving decisions (where any one of them would be most likely 'harmless' by themselves) should not be allowed to put me at risk.
on the other hand, you are left with the problem of deciding what kinds of 'little' violations (and how many) to allow. As much as I dislike the thought of relying on the mercy of someone being in a good mood, the humanity of cops on the ground can serve as an unofficial check against the overreaching arm of the legislature and the caprices of the court.
it certainly warrants further thought
Stop insulting the Tea Party. They're on the same side as the rest of the 99%, and you need them.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
It amazes me how many people support the restriction of our rights (or resist anyone upsetting the status quo) because a bunch of fucking assholes crashed hijacked planes into buildings 10 years ago.
What amazes me even more is how many people make this very argument, but then vote for a mainstream politician whose voting record clearly shows he or she is working hard to restrict our rights.
That's the fbi and marshalls, completely different code of conduct. Militia probably wouldn't do much, but a march on washington would.
and that id is already tied to the driver
this is a bit of a false assumption (the id is tied to the owner - not the driver). The fact that you (that's a plural 'you') hold this association so strongly makes it that much harder to prove one's innocence. An innocent man is starting from an even deeper deficit of trust.
Being a trustworthy (and car-less) guy during my college days, I have driven a lot of borrowed vehicles belonging to friends and family. I like to think that I'm a good and safe driver. But given the countless special circumstances that come up on even a routine drive around town, I would be afraid to drive (or loan) a borrowed vehicle if there is a chance that my friend will receive a ticket based on my (or another interfering driver) infractions.
I agree completely, it amazes me as well, but we can't be safe, with or without constitutional freedoms; safety doesn't exist. You can be safer, but you're never safe. There are only varying degrees of danger... and the threat of terrorism is about the least of all physical dangers Americans face. I mean, 40,000 people die on the highways every single year. They could make America far less dangerous ("safer") by spending the TSA money on safer highways.
Oh, as to a theocracy, we already live under a theocracy. The religion is mammon and their temple is called a "bank" and their high priests are called "investment bankers". Look at how they call economics a "science", much like the Christian Science religion does. Also notice that if you put trojan rootkits on a single computer Sony owns, they'll find you and you'll go to prison, but if Sony puts trojan rootkits on thousands of uinsuspecting customers' computers, they suffer no penalties whatever? In a society whose god is a dollar, whoever has the most "god" rules.
Free Martian Whores!
you are probably right. they are circling the wagons. no american spring! that would upset the balance of power, here!
things will get worse before they get better; but oh boy, are we in for some 'interesting' times ahead of us ;(
anything that represents freedom to the people is fearful to the government (all of them, not just the US).
world war 3 is not going to be fought with conventional weapons and it won't be single countries against single countries. I hope this does not happen, but all roads point to some big problems ahead for us all.
"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones” - Albert Einstein
So yes, nobody in China has been arrested for googling "free tibet". Even censored, the attempt to google it will be logged. The laws are on the books to use against people found "undesirable" (much like in the US, anyone can be arrested at almost any time, under the guise of, say, failing a field sobriety test (objective and unverifiable). All it takes is someone in real power who doesn't like you and your life as you know it is over. At least in China, you have a good idea of what it takes to become disappeared, unlike the US, which has assassinated US citizens without so much as a formal charge being laid against them. We aren't as bad as China, we are worse. At least in China you get accused before they come for you (or they tell you what you did as they shoot you - in the US, they kill you first, then accuse you in the media of being a traitor and terrorist without any formal legal charges at all). Presumed guilty is the current legal standard.
Learn to love Alaska
The drones will be used for several things, but first consider the cost of maintaining a single drone much less a fleet of them and then it becomes easier to determine us owns and operates them.
The primary target for these drones are American citizens, in several cases to keep a close eye on the militias training in the back woods and deserts of the US
Armed Militias samples. (samples there are plenty more)
http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/militia_m.asp?xpicked=4&item=19
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2022636,00.html
Training for what? If you asked that you're naive, now consider all the laws that have been passed or attempting to be passed (such as the current NDAA) there is no real threat from foreign terrorist in this country, the threat as perceived by "those that are in power" are the US people.
That is what the drones are for, that is what the new laws are for, that is what HLS is for, so stock up on cheetos fatties it's going to be a wild ride.
"May you live in interesting times"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times
It's not the first time it's happened to this country though, we actually banned alcohol once.
Why the surprise that alcohol was banned but no surpise that marijuana is STILL banned?
Free Martian Whores!
Stop insulting the Tea Party. They're on the same side as the rest of the 99%, and you need them.
Although they may be part of the 99%, they're on the side of the 1%.
They just don't realize it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It's a true point but I think it might not be as relevant. This issue also exists with the currently in use redlight systems I mentioned.
As I understand it, even if someone has borrowed your car, legally you are still liable for anything that happens while that vehicle is on the road. It's one of the risks you take when lending someone your car. Ultimately most people you lend your car to are hopefully going going to reimburse you for a ticket they incur.
Fun fact: as I understand it, if you borrow someones car and it gets taken by the cops under the ever popular "involved in a crime == ours now!" laws, I don't think the actual owner can get it back.
No, OWS doesn't "grasp the issue" - they simply want a fascist state run to their liking, rather than the fascist state the Republicans (I refuse to call them conservatives, because they are not conservatives any longer) are aiming for. One wants cradle-to-grave socialism where the government runs and administers every facet of your life. And the other wants to let their buddies running large corporations lobby for no-bid contracts to decide who gets to run and administer every facet of your life.
Thanks, I was looking for a good example of the straw man fallacy.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
As I understood it, that was why I was in the Army.
So we all lost our rights because the military fail to keep us safe or are unable to continue to do so.
Mmm.. was curious after posting this and did some googling. Looks like this might not be the case everywhere. Some places they need a photo of the driver as well... which I guess would solve the "friend borrowed it" problem.
Learn something every day :)
Ceiling Kitty now has drone sidekicks! D:
We aren't? We are assassinating "innocent" American citizens on secret presidential orders (assuming you believe in presumed innocent until found guilty, as the murdered were never even charged with a crime and never had a chance to respond, other than bleeding in the direction of the drone that executed them). http://jonathanturley.org/2011/09/30/did-obama-just-assassinate-a-u-s-citizen-aulaqi-killing-raises-questions-over-presidential-powers/
When such terrorists/traitors (if he were one) were tried in absentia and legally determined to be "bad" then we have some high moral ground to speak from, but the US is assassinating/executing US citizens for suspected crimes without trial. Is that really the best we can do? If so, we really are no better than China, other than being less efficient at dealing with our undesirables (but they do it more doesn't work, if we do it at all, we are worse than them because we are no better than them, while simultaneously claiming to be better than them).
Learn to love Alaska
They are only bring the troops home because the new Iraqi government ( that we setup ) essentially kicked us out.
They asked us to leave and they basically said we are going to attempt to capture and jail US Soldiers if they violate any of our laws, which naturally most of them probably have to do in order to accomplish anything useful over there.
Nobody in the US government deserves any credit. All our officials were negotiating up until the last to keep the troops there, it was not until those negotiations failed they it turned into "We are keeping our campaign promise to bring the troops home". Its so hollow you'd think it was Sadam's former information minister writing the line.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
MANY of "the troops" in Combat Arms are rednecks and not down with oppressing the American public. If the shit hits the fan the military will be divided.
It seems odd to civilians, but much of the military hold our corrupt civilian government in contempt. I'm much more worried about civilian apparatchiks who have never had military experience.
Timothy McVeigh was a soldier, and agree or disagree with his methods he knew government was becoming the enemy of the American public. The awkward part is the SAME oppressive government largely consists of "just plain folks" and they were collateral damage at OKC just like the collateral damage at Waco.
Note to future revolutionaries:
Pick your targets individually.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
24 x 7? Only if Dunkin' Donuts deliver to said office...
not that they would need to. Human-less monitoring and alerting is just an apt-get away.
An excellent point, although many simply assume that America is already the best in this area and then ignore or derail any attempts to improve.
They aren't listening any better, they are just pretending to listen better so the overt bribery of corporations buying legislation doesn't get so pronounced as to cause people to lose confidence in the government. Unfortunately in the US, patriotism/nationalism is devotion to ones government, not ones country (they are not the same). So we always fall back on nationalism to back the government that is run by traitors. A traitor is one who gives material support to enemies of the country. And the US government has given material support to Osama bin Laden and Saddam and Iran (and the USSR, and China, etc.). The government is the traitor. So what do you do when the law indicates the government should be put to death?
Learn to love Alaska
Plenty of people vote for a third party, just not enough; it's not human nature to go against the pack. The people who control this country are masters at understanding human nature, which is why things are as they are; they know how to manipulate the masses.
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
I don't worry about the government's unmanned drones flying over my house.
I worry about the "been known to make immediate unscheduled uncontrolled hard landings" V-22 Ospreys I so often see overhead.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Didn't Obama promise to leave Iraq during his campaign? Am I the only one seeing an obvious link between bringing troops back home now and the election later this year?
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38588550
I need the Teabaggers? They are anti-freedom anti-civil rights white supremicists who are on the side of the 1%. They are the white trash who think if they can get a job at Wal-Mart, they can retire millionaires from their hard work, while spending money they don't have on credit cards and such. They have never held a passport at age 40+, but are worldly because the US has international borders.
So your solution isn't solving the problem but rather circumventing the issue? I wouldn't want that camera there regardless of how frequently it was broken. It's that simple.
Bah brillant? more like self serving gun running slave dealing smuggling sedionist terrorists. Your current crop of Politicians seem to meet that criteria easily
Lon Horiuchi was a West Point grad and former office in the US Army, as was his father. Do you think he had a change of heart only after joining the FBI?
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I think when most people want socialism, they don't think of it as a controlled by the government, simply provided by the government.
They think:
Gov goes hey there here's an education (your pick) a house and a potential job, go be productive, if you don't like it buy your own house and get your own job.
Not
Gov gives you a house and a job and you have no other legal choice.
Which actually happens is irrelevant to my point, just that people don't necessarily want the government running their lives like little puppets, just providing them with all the resources and opportunities to do what they want to do. I'm sure some will be happy with just whatever the gov throws at them. Many will not and will strive for more. As well for many government provided services (in places that provide them) there are usually laws requiring them to allow private industry to try and do a better job (selling at cost (power, internet), etc), so you aren't really trampling individual private industry either. Plus the government won't necessarily own the company the builds that house, etc.
If you don't use the gov house you get reduced taxes or something. Sure you'll still be subsidizing the poor some, but that's you trying to participate in society, you don't want society don't live in one (and while I agree that can be difficult).
They asked us to leave and they basically said we are going to attempt to capture and jail US Soldiers if they violate any of our laws, which naturally most of them probably have to do in order to accomplish anything useful over there.
This was in direct response to contractors and soldiers committing outright murder of unarmed civilians on the streets of their major cities. Did we forget the helicopter gunship mowing down people minding their own business, and then attacking the people who came to help? How about the Haliburton contractors who opened fire in a public square for no reason? How about the group of soldiers in Afghanistan who've been convicted of randomly picking civilians to kill, essentially for fun, and planting weapons on them after the fact?
Besides all that, the right to enforce you laws inside your own borders is essentially the definition of sovereignty. You make it sound as if the Iraqis were trying to arrest soldiers for speeding when you should know by now that there have been serious criminal acts performed by US soldiers who have as often as not, gotten away with it with a slap on the wrist. It was a reasonable request by any measure, but it was obviously one that Obama couldn't have gone along with, it would have been political suicide. But I have to imagine that they could have leaned on the Iraqi government a whole lot harder and a whole lot longer if they really wanted to keep troops on the ground. Troops or no troops, the Iraqi government receives a lot of support from the US, threatening to yank that away would almost certainly have made the Iraqis change their mind.
Whom do we punish when we find later that the person was wrongly convicted and executed?
Good-bye
This government knows that the populist uprisings are going to eventually come to our shores, this is why they're bringing the troops home, this is why there have been so many laws restricting the rights of American citizens as of late...
I know folks in the military who are hoping and praying they are never put in the situation you imply here, because they don't want to have to make the choice between taking arms against the citizens they serve or taking arms against their government.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I would be happy to live in that world - provided that each and every camera made its feed available for viewing by the general public. The problem with omnipresent surveillance is that it produces a power imbalance between the public and the police. If you make the cameras usable by everyone, you keep the balance: they can be used for all the good things that phone cameras can be used for, only more so.
At the moment, there are 237 comments on this thread. ;)
And I don't see a single reference to Skynet.
What's wrong with you people?
One wants cradle-to-grave socialism where the government runs and administers every facet of your life. And the other wants to let their buddies running large corporations lobby for no-bid contracts to decide who gets to run and administer every facet of your life.
I never can tell with such people whether they deliberately lie, or simply don't listen. OWS wants even opportunity. Bush Jr. is explicitly against affirmative action. Nobody should ever get anything based on who their daddy was. Well, unless it's Bush Jr. getting into Yale with a poor record, in which case "legacy" (affirmative action for lazy white people) is perfectly acceptable. OWS recognizes the hypocrisy and such that the 1% uses to their advantage against the 99%. Nobody in the 99% should be eligible for "legacy" but everyone in the 1% should. As if the 1% needed even more handouts, or the 99% needed more hurdles. Yes, I'm explicitly stating that a qualified poor black person was rejected from Yale to let in a rich white person based on who his daddy was. When that's turned around, there's outrage, but when it's the poor black man being kept down, the 1% is fine with that.
"Free market" doesn't mean "anything goes," "free market" means that all the actors make consensual decisions based on their own self interests. Fraud can still be illegal. Use of force, coercion, and harm to others would still be illegal.
You are using economic terms incorrectly. A "free market" is a market with low barriers to entry and well informed consumers. The producers do not want a free market. They commit "fraud" (deliberately misleading consumers) whenever possible. The US does not have and would never have a free market. Such a beast requires tight government oversight, and those who say they want a "free market" do not want it, and those who are for governmental controls against corporate abuse wouldn't use that power to enforce a "free market." I'd love a free market. It puts the power in the hands of the informed consumers. But we don't have informed consumers, and may never have them.
Libertarians don't want to reduce the size of the government. They want to push their social agenda through, which may result in a smaller government than we have now, but they have no goal of "smallest government possible". If they did, they would support education more, as it's shown that $10 in education saves $12 in prison costs later. Instead, they have the "fuck education, we'll pay to put them in jail, but not pay to get them literate and productive" which indicates a goal of something other than trying to reduce the size of government as much as practical.
Learn to love Alaska
As I understand it, even if someone has borrowed your car, legally you are still liable for anything that happens while that vehicle is on the road.
I see that you did some further investigation below (thanks :) ), but I wanted to expand on this a bit.
I still find this troublesome. That is to say, the trend of positive identification. At the risk of widening the argument/analogy a bit, the fact that we (as a society) assume that identification can be so positively confirmed makes it that much harder for the innocent man.
When your debit card and PIN are skimmed, that extra layer of 'security' is tacked onto the burden of proof that you need to overcome when contesting the fraudulent charges ("Yes, but it says right here in my computer that a PIN was entered at this transaction. And you didn't report your card as stolen. How do you explain that, Mr. Customer?")
When the threshold of minutiae patterns that an 'expert' witness uses match a fingerprint is lowered from 90% to 70%, how do you explain that to the jury? Likewise (and probably more damning, thanks to pop-science shows like CSI), DNA.
And the last thing I would want to do is explain the Base Rate Fallacy to a jury of my peers judging my innocence in the face of a less-than-precise mechanical identification.
Though drifting away from the original debate a bit, I am concerned by the erosion of our presumption of innocence. I think that it damages not only the falsely accused, but also the levels of humanity and respect with which we treat one another.
Fun fact: as I understand it, if you borrow someones car and it gets taken by the cops under the ever popular "involved in a crime == ours now!" laws, I don't think the actual owner can get it back.
ugh. something tells me we're not on different pages of the 'civil asset forfeiture' debate.
>supremicists
Stopped reading there.
Circumcision is child abuse.
So if the drones are flown by CIA, or Air Force there is a problem.
But what if the Air Force or CIA only flies the aircraft, while another entity (e.g., the FBI) actually conducts the law-enforcement activity? The "fusion center" method is what the government has gone with previously for cyberspace operations, if my memory serves.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
In any case, members of the US military swear an oath to defend the Constitution. Asking the US Military to "take out" American citizens would likely incite a civil war;
No, it barely got noticed in the news.
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/09/30/did-obama-just-assassinate-a-u-s-citizen-aulaqi-killing-raises-questions-over-presidential-powers/
Learn to love Alaska
I agree with you 100%. Just the other day, I was going to tell a friend that "per capita", the U.S. imprisons people at a rate greater than China.
Which is true, but it's even worse than that. The U.S. imprisons more people than China, period. Despite China's population being three times that of ours.
And if you are poor, your odds of being treated fairly sink like a stone. And if you are poor and brown, your chances of being treated fairly, are just plain rotten.
FAR Part 91.119
Authored by the same FAA that's refusing to release information about the operation of drones. FARs are for the little guys.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
See if they're friendly.
And here I thought they were bringing the troops home at the demands of the American people.
Ha ha, good one!
The FAA is streamlining the COA process and has also increased staffing by more than a dozen people. In 2009, the FAA issued 146 COAs. As of December 1, 2010, there were 273 active COAs. The agency has issued COAâ(TM)s in 2010 to 95 users on 72 different aircraft types.
For aircraft that fly in restricted airspace they know the names of 273 people with licenses. They can easily issue a report about who those people work for.
If that were as above board as you suggest, why would they not simply SAY that?
There must be a clear legal issue keeping them from putting any information out, something they are worried about from a legal perspective, or
an evidence admissibility standpoint.
After all, if the Taliban can't spot these things when their life depends on it, it seems the casual drug runner in unlikely to see them either when
they don't have to worry about a missile strike. Drug organizations know they are being watched.
Simply stating that the FBI or DEA is authorized should not be that hard.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It's the lack of random chance that makes this effective however.
No more "did a cop see it" .. or "is anyone looking". You simply get caught every single time (well, there is always going to be errors, but not enough that a criminal might be tempted to try their luck). Right now if you commit a crime, you have a good chance of getting away with it, which is probably why there are so many criminals. I imagine the crime numbers would drop if commiting a crime was an automatic arrest, every single time.
"better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" --William Blackstone>/p>
Here in a S. English city (Bristol), I was digging my garden one autumn day, when just the faintest of traces of engine noise made me look up. Over the next two hours, a Britten-Norman Islander made three very exact circuits over my inner city house. High up (15 000?), in airspace usually used by the local airport, it was almost invisible; very funny I thought.
The next year, I read this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/24/uk-based-taliban-afghanistan
Try Googling "Child Porn" and see what that gets you in Amerika!
You may wish you had 25 years hard labor instead of 25" of hardness in your backside from your cell mate "Bubba."
On a side note: /. please dump some scripts so i don't have to play wak-a-mole with noscript just to post something!
Service ceiling of a Britten-Norman Islander is 13,000 feet according to Wiki., but this plane has a zillion uses, including aerial photography. It was as likely working for the City mapping department as anyone else. Not a drone.
Also, operations at 15,000 feet is not unusual over airports, because commercial aircraft are usually lower than that by the time they are on approach. Depending on the size of the airport, you might not even be in controlled airspace at that altitude.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Shoot one down or take control of one. Not easy, but eventually you'll find out, and you can then tell your cellmate at Guantanamo Bay who it is.
If they google "Timothy McVeigh hero", they might get 25 years hard labor. And you'd never hear about it.
I've often wondered in a druken moment what would happen if someone googled "Allah is a cunt" or "Mohamid is a cunt."
World War III?
When I was a young lad, I made and flew radio-controlled model airplanes. I neither asked nor got permission from any government agencies.
So what?
Making the whole of your non-criminal life the equivalent of automatic prison would be a hell of a reduction of that deterrent, yes? How does prison differ -- you still get three hots and a cot, you're still supervised everywhere, you're not allowed to wear any clothing that could let you evade face-tracking, and after a few media stories about tragic deaths that could have been prevented, you're still not allowed to do anything unsafe (see: Code 46 -- Sphinx knows best!).
In fact, anyone so hot for this system should deploy it in prison first (can it stop assrape, intergang violence, and smuggling?), and if it stops crime as much as it's supposed to, then we can talk about the wisdom of trading in our essential liberty to purchase this (supposedly non-temporary) safety.
Or when it changes absolutely nothing, as the guards subvert it, because they profit from smuggling and don't have a stake in gang wars (or worse, do have a stake) so let them knife each other... well, then I suppose you'll bring a proposal for tamperproof guards to guard the guards?
Does this apply to UAVs? If so, then everyone I've ever seen running an RC plane was violating the law.
Learn to love Alaska
Some of us think that the third parties are actually worse than the two major parties.
I imagine the crime numbers would drop if commiting a crime was an automatic arrest, every single time.
you're right. And this is (in my opinion) a big problem.
Bullshit laws used to be dismissible. People would look at the bullshit laws and regulations and say, 'eh. yeah, 55mph on a straight highway with no on/off ramps for miles is unnecessary, but you can get away with doing 70mph most of the time.'
If increased surveillance was accompanied with an overdue overhauling of the current laws, it wouldn't be nearly so bad. I'm afraid that I don't even know what laws I'm in violation of on a day-to-day basis. And this is just regarding black/white matters. Determining how the courts will interpret something is a completely different matter. Fair Use? Maybe. depending on who is presiding
How many laws did you break today?
I thought the courts ruled that someone acting as an agent of the government is held to the same standards, even if volunteer, unpaid, and unsolicited. The issue being that the police essentially hired PIs to do things illegal for the police to do (i.e. it's entrapment only if the government enticed you, not if your neighbor came over and did it, so a PI entrapping you invalidates the entrapment defense - or theft of private papers from a corporation suspected of wrongdoing). Because of repeated abuses of all kinds, the courts just came down with the answer that if they believe they are acting on some authority of the government, even if informal and ephemeral, then they are de facto agents of the government, regardless of the situation, if any, that led them to that agency.
Learn to love Alaska
Nope: the Iraqi government has wanted coalition troops out for years.
The withdrawal occurred so that no more casualties occur during Obama's re-election year. And no more embarrassments, either.
If the elections were in another 4 years then the troops would still be there for another 3.
Only if you're camping. Then it's loitering within tent. I'll get my coat...............
Actually, the camera is much less creepy than a person standing outside your door all the time.
The problem with the UK is they have no links between the separate CCTV systems. Someone robs someone, caught on camera, and there's nothing that can be done to track them. The camera one block over sees them enter their home, but it takes hundreds of man hours to manually try to find him in the adjacent footage. Imagine all CCTVs linked directly to an AI that tracks objects (the guy, regardless of makeup will be easily trackable) in a near full-coverage area. That'll result in a 100% arrest rate, rather than the posting of grainy and unidentifiable pictures on the news nobody calls in on.
Learn to love Alaska
There was some kind of show on TV that talked about the overlap between gangs and the military.
Apparently its way more extensive than you might expect -- they had dozens of photos of Disciples graffiti in BAGHDAD after the invasion and fairly alarming statistics about gang activity in the military (gangs continuing WITHIN the military).
Apparently the military's need for soldiers during Iraq led them to be less than selective when dealing with people who had criminal records or arrest histories.
There was also talk about discharged gang members using their military training against the police, but this seemed a lot more alarmist and harder to believe (I think they had one example they beat to death).
Not everyone who makes it into the military has a combat role assignment and I suspect that the low-end guys from gang backgrounds ended up in more service roles and not in front-line combat roles and thus while they may have had basic training in combat, probably didn't have a ton of first-hand experience or expertise in it,.
I am gonna risk an outrage with this, but my reasoning is that on global scale the biggest kid is the worst. Property of our system, it seems. Locally, sure, it is much better to live in a freer country (personal experience here). Somehow though, when thinking about humanity at this point in time I do not perceive China as worst country than the US. Perhaps if in the future China becomes the dominant country I will consider them worst just because they are the big one and in the system we live in somehow the big one can never resist screwing the smaller ones, never mind how the big one treats its citizens.
The things I hold dearest in a society (and data shows that these things correlate with positive societal development), well, the US is not exactly the champion in some (like violence, inequality) and others are in decline (human rights, free speech). I also favor the idea of different societies and groups within societies that live and let others live. That is not the US either. But wait, wasn't the original idea more or less on the right track?
Now that would be really interesting - if the the original idea of the US was preserved. Imagine all the states diversifying in culture over time, because of the free movement of people, a luxury that tribal people did not have. We have inherited in good measure the intrinsic distrust towards other cultures from the tribal times but with the development of civilization an issue of friction and ability to do great harm emerges that did not bother our ancestors. The idea of independent states with free trade and movement of people between them, with one very big stick in the hands of tightly controlled representatives that only take care to keep the peace between the states, if necessary, defend against outsiders and promote said freedoms, is quite good I think. It would be interesting social experiment too - it would allow for different cultures to test themselves against stability, progress and sustainability in conditions where they would not have to constantly waste resources in fighting the guy next door.
Alas, what I see and what I get from history is, that things tend to aggregate in our civilization system. Maybe because power tends to aggregate, I don't know. Look at the EU - it is already going too far trying to "harmonize" the domestic laws. This is the wrong direction, I think. Free trade and movement is good enough. And peace, of course, but that goes without saying. Is the aim to create singular global culture, so that there are no wars between cultures and countries anymore? If yes, I am not sure at all it is worth it or whether it would work...
the waters of the Rubicon aren't that muddy, despite the best attempts of purveyors of FUD.
I don't think we are are at the point of revolution (if we ever would be). But that's still a pretty bright line in the sand, and I would be very surprised (and disappointed) if it went unanswered
You have no expectation of privacy in public, which is why we have those two words: "private" and "public". A camera looking at your door is the same as someone just standing on the street looking at said door.
Yeah, but that's not what this is about. It's about constant surveillance and the fact that the information could be used later to show you were doing something wrong. Would you be okay with someone following you around all day watching to make sure you aren't doing anything wrong? Maybe so, but I wouldn't.
True, just conservative republican oil money doing the Tea party talking, courtesy of the Koch astroturf.
All they know is the billion dollar bill is not on the roof ...
WRONG.
We are bringing the troops home now because that is what BUSH agreed to years ago......
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_U.S._troops_from_Iraq
Quote:
In 2008, the US and Iraqi government signed the U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement which implments that all US forces would withdraw from Iraqi cities by 30 June 2009 and that All US Forces would be mandated to withdraw from Iraqi territory by 31 December 2011 under the terms of a bilateral agreement.
On 14 December 2008, then-U.S. President George W. Bush signed the security pact with Iraq. In his fourth and final trip to Iraq, the president appeared with Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and said more work is to be done.
If it were a manned aircraft it would be large enough to notice you're being spied on. If you see a guy trying to look through your windows, perhaps you'll spot it faster than an unmanned robotic spider (or who knows what).
So, yes it would be an issue, but you don't think it's because normally you'd have spotted it anyways. But I see what you're saying could be better paraphrased as:
So if you DON'T know and DON'T see anyone spying on you, do you feel the same? Perhaps not, but it certainly creeps you the hell out (ask any girl friend about it).
Americans may be appear to be united in their disdain for the Federal Government but they are completely split about what should be done about it or with it. We're clearly split down the middle over whether it is too big or too little, what its role should or shouldn't be in our daily lives or even what it's there for in the first place.
One thing voters aren't split over is that government isn't doing enough for them, whether it's crop subsidies, tax cuts or breaks, pork projects and other ways their representatives "bring home the bacon". Because of this, they also aren't split over the opinion their representative is one of the "good ones" and that the problem comes from the other ones. Otherwise, why would they be continuously reelected?
Yes I have seen those evil drones. They honk loudly and leave stinkin messes all over the place. They fly closely in formation which makes for easy targets. ...Now where did I put that 10 gauge double barrel over-under shotgun?
Well yeah, 4 years after they were promised to be brought home.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
>supremicists
Stopped reading there.
Do you have something against our supreme mice overlords?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
you don't get out much
these rat bastards allowed 9/11 to happen
to gain this edge.
wake up, we are on the same level as china now.
jr
It seems odd to civilians, but much of the military hold our corrupt civilian government in contempt.
That's not much consolation. Do the troops hold the government in contempt because it's corrupt, or do they hold it in contempt (and consider it corrupt) because it's civilian?
If the former, then why the heck are they serving in the military and executing corrupt orders for a government in which they don't believe? I can't see how that can be morally justifiable.
If the latter, then would they be more comfortable serving under a military dictatorship than a democracy? Because that would be the moral response to the situation, and it's not a direction I'd like to see America going.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
why, the witnesses that reported the crime, of course. it's the only way to teach people to stop falsely reporting crimes. filing a false police report is a capital offense, dontchaknow
on an unrelated note, I saw the GP stab some guy in an bar last night, I swear. The fact that we disagree on some things has nothing to do with my identifying him, I promise, you guys.
Actually, authored by the same guys who were put on skeleton crew by Congress *twice* in the last few months because of the budget debate.
Of course, *all* the laws are made by the government so they could easily exepmt the military or spy-guys if they wanted to.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You want to know something absolutely bone-chilling?
You know that China that sentences people to labor for thought crimes? That big bad China? Huge population?
The US imprisons more people than they do. That's more people, period. Also more per capita, a shit-ton more per capita, but the really scary number is plain old More. There are over a Billion Chinese! It doesn't seem possible, but it is true.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Libertarians don't want to reduce the size of the government. They want to push their social agenda through, which may result in a smaller government than we have now, but they have no goal of "smallest government possible". If they did, they would support education more, as it's shown that $10 in education saves $12 in prison costs later. Instead, they have the "fuck education, we'll pay to put them in jail, but not pay to get them literate and productive" which indicates a goal of something other than trying to reduce the size of government as much as practical.
Your argument is essentially 'libertarians don't support small government because they won't choose one form of government spending (education) over another (jail)', I hope you see the flaw in this. Toward "social agenda", most of the libertarians I know have none, they just want to be left the fuck alone and allow you to be too.
Look up minarchism, to pretend that there aren't people who are legitimately fighting for the "smallest government possible" is ignorant.
My front door stays closed. Free security monitoring is fine with me.
Metal thieves in my neighbourhood are the real threat. I socialise comfortably with local law enforcement, many of who are also retired G.I.s.
If the cops want to park a squad car out front I'd clear space for it so it would be off the shoulder of the road.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Do you have something to hide? It sounds like you're up to something in there but all you can do is make a big stink about your privacy?
It's probably been outsourced to India.
Nonsense. Our politicians are some of the best liars and scam artists known to man. They will simply not be beaten, even when the markets are dealing out punishing blows.
They'll find some way to stay in power...
I am John Hurt.
Your argument is essentially 'libertarians don't support small government because they won't choose one form of government spending (education) over another (jail)', I hope you see the flaw in this.
I don't see the flaw. If they are solely interested in the smallest and cheapest government, they won't care what the social agenda is. Instead, they deliberately choose a larger government because it does push their social agenda. The only rebuttal I've ever heard to this from a Libertarian is "I don't like that study, so I'll assert without ever having read it that their conclusion is wrong and that education does not reduce future expenses. Na na, nana na na, nana na na, na na." They have an explicit social agenda of abolishing anything that sounds or feels "socialist", regardless of the costs involved or the constitutionality of their agenda. I'd vote for a small government party, as soon as one comes around. The Libertarians aren't it. They are a "smaller" government party where they want to abolish all the checks and balances in place to force a "fair" or "free market", essentially the most pro-corporate of all of the parties, despite the anti-corporate statements of so many members of the party, the actions would be very explicitly and deliberately pro-corporate. I can't trust a party where most of the members don't agree with it (and with so many conservatives in it, it feels like most members don't agree with the official stance on abortion or gay rights either).
Learn to love Alaska
Outgoing dictatorships always tap the military as their last play.
I'm curious how many of our Generals / Admirals would comply with an order to fire on US citizens...the way things are currently going, we shall have a chance to test them soon.
I am John Hurt.
(for the record: not an Obama supporter)
Wait, so let me get this right. Everyone demands we go to war, so we go to war and send troops overseas. Then people decide that they dont want the troops over there, but the president(s) determine that you cant just yank thousands of troops out of a conflict overnight. People complain that the politicians arent listening to them. President then brings the troops home. People complain that theyre about to be oppressed and suppressed by a military state.
Am I getting this right?
We already have the tools to mount a defense:
I imagine these drones would have a pretty big RF footprint, that could be identified at take off, and posted along with speed, heading, etc. Use the internet, use packet radio, a mesh of covert modified WRT's. Establish a distributed network of passive RF foxhunting arrays controlled by microcontrollers attached to the aforementioned WRT's, That takes care of tracking and targeting. As for neutralizing the illicit device, that may prove difficult. Shooting it out of the sky could result in civilian casualties, so that's no good. Perhaps a crude long range acoustical device could be used to cause a sympathetic vibration in the drones fuselage, thus rendering the camera useless. I suppose the whole GPS hack might work a few times, but I'm pretty sure there is someone locked in a room fixing that bug right now. Lasers would probably be ineffective, as anything powerful enough to permanently damage the optics would most likely be large and less than portable, so it would probably be found quickly.
Yes, I believe he is. Many of our policies, while not word for word copies of the USSRs, are functionally taking on an identical nature.
And while I am not a tea-bagger (well, perhaps occasionally, when I play Halo), the man has a point.
I am John Hurt.
You know that China that sentences people to labor for thought crimes? That big bad China? Huge population? The US imprisons more people than they do. That's more people, period. Also more per capita, a shit-ton more per capita, but the really scary number is plain old More. There are over a Billion Chinese! It doesn't seem possible, but it is true.
Maybe living in a free society makes people abuse their freedoms more (leading to situations that require jail). Or
How many Chinese who would normally be jailed are sold into slavery or shot and stuffed to be shown in traveling displays in other countries? How many are tortured in secret?
"OWS, on the other hand, seems to grasp the issue (that we are fast-becoming a facist state) but lacks the focus and leadership that was built into the TP movement from the start. "
No, it's that the Tea Party was deemed to be useful and used by certain very powerful groups which had motivation and money to push it.
The OWS side doesn't have anybody with similar power pushing them (even though nearly all opinion polls show a greater sympathy for OWS than for Tea Party).
That's why the Republican candidates went to nice "tea party" town halls and talk show programs and licked their boots, and why the OWS was encamped outside, cold and pepper sprayed.
The natural sympathizers for OWS run away to the right, and the natural sympathizers to the Tea Party run away to the right.
True. Thanks to 3rd strike laws, mandatory sentencing, and 'zero tolerance'.
Thinking the Prison guard union always lobby for.
That said, China locks up a hell of a lot more people for speaking their minds, practicing non approved religions, and gatherings.
There is your difference.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
>supremicists
Stopped reading there.
Do you have something against our supreme mice overlords?
I, for one, welcome them.
False. You act as if it was sudden. It was not. He started fighting the pubs on the issue immediately.
You are a product of the pubs campaign. Stop anything Obama wants to do, then blame him for it not happening. we see this all the time.
Wanted to close Gitmo, all the pubs went nuts saying we can safely house them on American soil; which is clearly bullshit. The pubs don't like that idea, because it's still debatable if torture on foreign soil counts as torture.
Trying to work with the UN regarding climate change: pubs keep fighting.
Forclosure help: pubs fight it.
Wanted to end income tax for senior who earn less then 50K- Killed by pubs who want to take everyone but the rich.
on and on.
Even thing the pubs wanted, the flip flopped when Obama agreed.
I mean, come on!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
giant laser, kaboom.
hahahahha.. no. Delude fools who have no clue about history.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Truth hurts, huh?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
nice my ass.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's a matter of degree.
I grew up prior to the Berlin Wall coming down, and the overthrow of the USSR government, and see all the things that we used to be taught made the Soviet Union evil being done to some extent in our own nation:
- Propoganda "news" sponsored by the powers that be
- Arrests without warrants
- Searches of the innocent
- Speech limited, and relegated to certain zones
- Science limited by politics
- Torture
- No habius corpus
- Prisons filled with prisoners of arbitrary laws for political reasons (war on drugs, etc)
The list goes on and on.
Still - we aren't quite as bad. Yet.
Check your premises.
If you define though crime as including the use of marijuana to ease one's stress, then we have more thought crime prisoners than they do.
Check your premises.
Rube ridge is irrelevant to the discussion. Maybe when someone show sup with a warrant you should hide behind you children like a coward?
I can't think what else to call staying in your house know they are unlikely to move do to risk to your family.
And since the weavers shot first, days before the siege, things might have been a bit tense.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wow. Insightful comments on /. again. Thanks!
The price of CPUs and cameras will be pennies pretty soon. If everyone has a recording i think we can avoid 1984.
Funny you should ask that question?
Seems someone ELSE was asking the same thing, and got an answer they didn't like.
Posting this as A/C, for reasons that will become obvious after you read that.
You should stand up and stop this from happening like it is already.
Keep your heads in the sand everything is going to be ok. COntinue with your daily routines and please do not deviate from protocol.
Now will someone please recommend a country to move to? I think S/America but I think the sphere of influence is too close.
I'd love Bhutan but the probability of that happening as easily as S.America is very low.
Interesting. I've run across that posting before (thank you reddit), but would like to hear some confirmation on it.
And I'm not worried about various people knowing where I stand, so I post with my username. The day that things become bad enough that I am 'disappeared' is the same day that life will probably take a turn for the worse for the majority of the populace. To paraphrase Death's line from Good Omens, "I'd think of it as leaving work early to beat the traffic." Which reminds me, Discworld is a fricking awesome series. What happens to Rincewind after Sourcery? Does he find a way back?
I am John Hurt.
If the government wanted to spy, manned aircraft would be much better for the task.
What the EFF is asking about are "COA" operators. COA's (Certificates of Authorization) are issued by the FAA since there are not "final rules" for UAVs which would allow them to "file and fly" the way a manned aircraft does. The COA process is burdensome and highly restrictive. UAVs are restricted to specific routes, altitudes, times, etc. COAs are used primarily to get from one restricted area to another, or from an airfield to a restricted area so the UAV can conduct training or testing.
While UAVs are difficult to see or detect, they are significantly more conspicuous than a Cessna, and you can mount a sensor ball on anything. UAVs are more expensive and logistically complex to operate than a comparable manned aircraft. Google AC-208B "Combat Caravan"
How about "face-book and twitter are a pair of cunts"? You are obviously from across the pond, so I expect that a drunken moment for you is most of the day, being on the dole and all. But go ahead and feel free to search for the phrases you proposed, nothing bad or scary will happen. The sand people aren't going to come around and attack you.
Yes, I'd like further confirmation of it as well, but the information that they *did* get looks very, very much like a major shit-storm. I was military for nine years, and from my experience and impressions, it looks like about 50 tons of Ex-Lax came rumbling through that command. Hence, nobody got the Big Chicken Dinner, or even a Article 15.
All you need to point out is that Bush signed the agreement to withdraw our troops. All Obama is doing is abiding by the agreement Bush signed. It never ceases to amaze me how many things Bush did, started, or agreed to do, is demonized and attributed to Obama.
Member of American Sarcasm Society - Motto: "Like we need your help!"
Sounds like you know the same assholes I do.
I'm not an expert on US politics but wasn't one of Obama's election pledges to get out of Iraq? It sounds like Bush ignored the people calling for an end to it but then the government changed and the people's will was executed.
I agree that voters are often ignored but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Problem with voting for anyone other than the two mainstream parties is that your vote is largely wasted. At least if you vote for one of them you can try to prevent the worst option from gaining power. It is eveb worse in the UK with our broken system.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Whatever happened to spying at this level on ordinary citizens, simply being you know, WRONG?
When was that?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's not actually very scary
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It is entirely relevant. Randy Weaver failed to pay a tax, and a soldier shot his wife on orders from the US government.
That quite directly contradicts what is being claimed, that US soldiers won't follow orders to kill US citizens.
If you've some specific beef with the example, there are plenty of others. Unsurprisingly, FBI snipers regularly train for and are expected to manage situations that are 'tense', by the very nature of their job. I was deployed for more than a year as an 8541 in the USMC and I can absolutely assure you that if you shoot people you aren't cleared to shoot you'll be in prison as fast as they can get you there, tense or not.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Gaaah, why must people say wrong things on Slashdot? ... You can read a well written article by Glenn Greenwald here if you wish to know more.
Actually you've stumbled onto one of the reasons people say wrong things on Slashdot - Glenn Greewald. Greenwald often brings up points worthy of discussion, but his perspective is typically from such fringe political position that they effectively become wrong, or bordering on nutty. He leads many people astray, not unlike Chomsky.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The, mmm, Drone Program USA, is at the discretion and benefit and demand of the President of the United States of America.
Drones in Afganistan have proven their worth. They allow for killing at a distance and killing anonymously .. .though we all know that "death by Drone" is a direct Presidental Order, that is where it comes from, that is who ordered it, there is no ambiguity.
Giving this philosophy and technology to Law Enforcement across the USA is a God Send!
Now, City, County, State Police departments across the USA can and have the means to klll anonymously at will and at their discretion.
What about local, state and Federal Laws? The Perps, like the President will piss on the local, state and federal laws and even piss on the Constitution of the USA to prove their point that THEY are and will always be the LAW.
We need a Civil War! That will put an end the Obamas of this country, the United States of America.
May God forgive them ... WE will not.
But installing cameras everywhere won't catch crime at the upper levels.
We are worse because we claim the higher ground while being as bad (or trying to be as bad).
Learn to love Alaska
I needed a pair of binoculars to see properly/identify the aircraft, so it was at some height; it was certainly in controlled airspace, the main N America - S England/N France traffic is passing over me as I type, albeit it at double the altitude.
But it was the odd pattern. Didn't think twice about it when I saw it the first time, but why would anyone mapping fly the exact same route at least three times (maybe more- I wasn't out before or after)? Also, it wasn't sweeping in cardinal directions, it was doing a wide circuit. Weather was totally clear and any decent photogrammetrist would get the pictures first time. Can you suggest another purpose?
Whos history?
The one in the current books around here tells a diferent story than the glory you think is your home. In the first week there might be uprising, but when food is scarce and the method for getting some is compliancy people fall in line.
You don't need the entire military, just the ones controlling. Rest can be demoted/fired - and you aren't asking them to kill ordinary citizens, you are telling them to kill the terrorists and trouble makers, which the oath if I'm not mistaken specifically asks marines to do. (Foreign and domestic threats yeah?).
And if you are in doubt, look at the last "uprising" you guys could muster with the 99% - people are scared to challange authority (including myself); get a mark on your perfect record and you just might find yourself living under a bridge...
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38588550
These aircraft probably aren't operating under part 91.
Do you want to live in that world?
I once considered moving to London, but I changed my mind. Too rainy for me there.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
So you're saying we're bringing back murderers? That's a pretty dumb thing to do. Will we at least lock them up? Or are we cool with shooting up peeps as long as we do so far away from home?
That there is far more buzz on the internet about these issues of our police state than is ever covered by the lame stream media, for some reason or other ... something to do with free speech, DHS/TSA "lists", and the national security surveillance police state. Occupy Movement type public demonstrations seems to keep attracting more and more of a police state response, these domestic UAVs being only the "latest thing". How long before these domestic UAVs are armed with missiles or 20 mm cannon, for law enforcement purposes of course?
Wait wait, I am sorry but you have to be of the sort that excepts those evil Republicans are just obstructionists bit as a matter of faith types.
Lets review:
1. Bush had already signed an agreement to remove the troops at the time Obama ultimately did before he left office. So baring the troops coming home early the president should get no credit. This what happened.
2. Obama was commander and chief, the military goes where he tells the to go, had he said leave IRAQ they would have. Congressional hearings or not the President *could* have order the troops home early.
3. The first two years of Obama's presidency he had a majority of his own party in BOTH houses of Congress. There is simply no way the Republicans could have effectively blocked a troop withdrawal, even though I strongly suspect they might have tried.
4. Members of the Obama administration were negotiating with IRAQ to keep the troops there longer.
So if anyone should get credit for bringing the troops home, its Gorge W. Bush!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Erm. Is there a large Afghan community in Bristol, then?
Copper is better. Just ask No Secrets Anywhere, their buildings are wrapped with copper sheeting.
Other free societies don't seem to have this problem.
No, I don't think so, my only personal knowledge of this area are of links to Pakistan. Literally all the Pakistani children (correction, boys) in primary school classes I deal with go and visit every early summer; it rather messes up teaching and testing them. But this builds conjecture on speculation.
The plane was flying an odd pattern over a relatively long period, unless your experience of aircraft finds them often flying a circuit overhead for hours? I'm simply pointing out in a discussion on what drones may be doing over US skies, that casual, almost throw away, lines in a report on UK-based Taliban, show that the RAF may run UK-based surveillance.
You send drones everywhere in the world, and then worry about being spied? Talk about hypocrisy
<quote><p>so, if a camera was placed on the street corner aimed at your front door, you'd have no problem with it?</p></quote>
Do you mean a weaponized (as drones are) camera?
Shoot one down. You will find out quick enough who is flying the thing.
meh, it's just a bunch-a kids with RC toys. if you got an RC helicopter for x-mas you'd want to fly it too.
You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.
Your repeated violation of the Verbal Morality Statute has caused me to notify the San Angeles Police Department. Please remain where you are for your reprimand.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
One wants cradle-to-grave socialism where the government runs and administers every facet of your life. And the other wants to let their buddies running large corporations lobby for no-bid contracts to decide who gets to run and administer every facet of your life.
I never can tell with such people whether they deliberately lie, or simply don't listen. OWS wants even opportunity. Bush Jr. is explicitly against affirmative action. Nobody should ever get anything based on who their daddy was. Well, unless it's Bush Jr. getting into Yale with a poor record, in which case "legacy" (affirmative action for lazy white people) is perfectly acceptable. OWS recognizes the hypocrisy and such that the 1% uses to their advantage against the 99%. Nobody in the 99% should be eligible for "legacy" but everyone in the 1% should. As if the 1% needed even more handouts, or the 99% needed more hurdles. Yes, I'm explicitly stating that a qualified poor black person was rejected from Yale to let in a rich white person based on who his daddy was. When that's turned around, there's outrage, but when it's the poor black man being kept down, the 1% is fine with that.
I'm not sure where you're getting your notions of the extant positions relative to affirmative action, but from my perspective your attempted analogy between hiring practices and Yale's admissions practices is a failed analogy, because you seem to have overlooked a viewpoint with a large number of adherents. All the conservatives I know are firmly supportive of at-will labor markets, which means both employee and employer retain their right to freely enter into whatever contracts they find mutually agreeable, and such contracts can be terminated at-will by either party for any reason not previously constrained by the terms of the contract. What this means is they are opposed to government-mandated or enforced affirmative action, but believe companies should be able hire and fire according to whatever standards they believe best. So if a muslim-owned business doesn't wish to hire alcoholic homosexuals, or a black-owned business wants to only provide employment for blacks, or a family-owned business wants to only hire their own children and grandchildren, that is perfectly acceptable. The same principle applies to other situations, such as university enrollment practices.
Your summary of the opposition to affirmative action as "Nobody should ever get anything based on who their daddy was", is grossly inaccurate, and therefore your attempt to paint anti-affirmative-action adherents as hypocrites has failed.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Wow, it was so throwaway that I didn't spot it until I re-read just now.
A written constitution really would be quite a nice thing to have....
Also when, where, and why they are flying.
Since Bush, (Watch Bill Maher, comedey act recorded in 2008), the American population has been conditioned to live in fear. Fear is a good motivator to exaggerate dangers.
On reflection, as I have been informed by various readings on the internet, that the 9/ll actions were contrived by the group of individuals on the plane and another half dozen others. Suicide bombers etc, are normally brainwashed people, who are also deprived of sleep, so that their rationalization to the wrong doing is blurred ever so badly.
The big joke to really promote fear is all about checking shoes, or the hand up the crotch if the xray is not revealing enough. What does it prove? Jobs in insecurity is what it proves.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
As I understand it, their system is mostly a failure due to the cameras not really being centrally connected and matching video footage a nightmare to the point where cops don't bother. They put the cameras up thinking it would deter crime with no thought to how the video would actually be used.. but as such the cameras were so ineffective that people assume they arn't even being monitored and thus they don't deter anything.
Last I heard, the success rate was like 3% or something like that.
They also still believe Regan and Greenspan's lies that reducing taxes on the rich, will translate into higher incomes for themselves.
Depends actually. Cases where an unsolicited private actor volunteered information about criminal behavior have usually gone through. Same volunteer returning to offer information again, however, is likely to become a case invalidated by the court because they were aware said person is doing such a thing and have benefited from the person before.
What this means is they are opposed to government-mandated or enforced affirmative action, but believe companies should be able hire and fire according to whatever standards they believe best. So if a muslim-owned business doesn't wish to hire alcoholic homosexuals, or a black-owned business wants to only provide employment for blacks, or a family-owned business wants to only hire their own children and grandchildren, that is perfectly acceptable. The same principle applies to other situations, such as university enrollment practices.
Ah, so the argument is that "blacks only" toilets and restaurants should be fine. Back to the bus with you (so long as the bus is not government owned).
"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal" but once out of the womb, the jackboot of the white man will grind you up and spit you out, and as long as we are a government contractor and not an actual government department, that's OK. And yes, I get the irony that such a statement came out by those who also came up with 3/5ths.
Learn to love Alaska
What this means is they are opposed to government-mandated or enforced affirmative action, but believe companies should be able hire and fire according to whatever standards they believe best. So if a muslim-owned business doesn't wish to hire alcoholic homosexuals, or a black-owned business wants to only provide employment for blacks, or a family-owned business wants to only hire their own children and grandchildren, that is perfectly acceptable. The same principle applies to other situations, such as university enrollment practices.
Ah, so the argument is that "blacks only" toilets and restaurants should be fine. Back to the bus with you (so long as the bus is not government owned).
The argument is that if the government forcibly obstructs your right to be secure in your person and property, and to associate your person with and transact business on your property with whosoever you choose, then you have very few rights at all, for you have already accepted that the government can compel you to associate with another person against your will, and to make your property serve another person. Once you've accepted such a government, then you've subjected everything that you are and everything that you have to the will of the majority. Be careful -- the ballot box giveth, and the ballot box taketh away.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
The argument is that if the government forcibly obstructs your right to be secure in your person and property, and to associate your person with and transact business on your property with whosoever you choose, then you have very few rights at all, for you have already accepted that the government can compel you to associate with another person against your will, and to make your property serve another person.
With all the "on your property" statements, I'm surprised you didn't launch into a rant on fiat currency and point out that you can't "own" property as long as it is taxed. You are advocating a system where property owners have more rights than everyone else. That's been done before. They called it a fiefdom. They didn't end up working out so well.
Once you've accepted such a government, then you've subjected everything that you are and everything that you have to the will of the majority. Be careful -- the ballot box giveth, and the ballot box taketh away.
So, let is into your little world. You think slavery should not have been abolished in the US because those slaveholders should have the right to enter into any contract they wish "on their land". And the government interfered with people freely interacting by stating that one person may not own another. Damn that progressive government interfering with our rights.
And, on that line, what about your views on Apartheid?
If you aren't comfortable with your views taken to the extreme, then you aren't comfortable with your views at all.
Learn to love Alaska
Last I checked, Microsoft, Apple, Android / Google were all U.S. owned companies and we're finding more and more that they have to do what their government says.
At least with communists you know that the government is filtering/monitoring/altering and that makes the U.S. just as bad.
There's a lot of laws going in really fast that are meant to be end game laws. For example
SOPA - We need some way to control an internet (notice once it's controlled it's a seperate internet).
DMCA - Information can't go free. We'll distract from the myriad free or sponsored media as long as we need to, no one is getting together for anything BUT MONEY!
Wall Street Bailout - You were insanely greedy. But at least you were doing it for money. The eternal measure of a man's worth!
Note, the above were not tinfoil hat: those are scarier.
You aren't scared of $100B/year? The cost is going up faster than health care! This is supposed to be America, land of liberty!
Man, you really need that seminar!
The cost is something worth worrying about, but if people commit crime, they should go to jail. Liberty doesn't mean, "can commit crime and not be punished." So saying China is more free because they have fewer people in jail is non-sequitur.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Blame Fox and "24". Seriously.
Don't you forfeit your citizenship when you start to fight with the enemy?
Nope, you can forfeit it by resigning citizenship at an embassy. I know of no other way to officially rescind citizenship. There is no "automatic" way to forfeit it, and even if there was, some action would have to be taken by someone somewhere, othewise, they can kill anyone they suspect as a bad guy, and kill them and rescind citizenship later if anyone makes a stink about it. Oh, and how do you determine he fought with the enemy without a formal accusation or conviction? He was never even informally accused of anything until after someone found out that the President ordered an assassination of a US citizen, and certainly never tried or convicted. And the irony is, if he did lose his citizenship, what crime justified his assassination? It couldn't be traitor, as he can't betray a country he's not a citizen of, right?
Learn to love Alaska
I strongly disagree. We could try other approaches such as drug legalization, investment in education, addiction treatment, improved healthcare. We don't have to throw people with mental or substance problems in jail. Our prison population has exploded over the last 40 years and has not made our society any better.
When I grew up people were afraid of the USSR because they were not free and wanted to enslave us. We were afraid they'd institute their vast network of informants and prisons. Well we have it now and I don't like it.
Man, you really need that seminar!
When I grew up people were afraid of the USSR because they were not free and wanted to enslave us. We were afraid they'd institute their vast network of informants and prisons. Well we have it now and I don't like it.
We were afraid of the USSR prisons because you could be jailed for speech. It wasn't because of the mere act of having prisons. I think you probably know that.
We could try other approaches such as drug legalization, investment in education, addiction treatment, improved healthcare.
Yes, I am interested in the drug legalization experiments that Switzerland and Netherlands have tried. I am completely in favor of experimenting with different things at a small scale, and if they work out, expanding those programs. Of course, if we can reform people, it is better than paying for them to stay in jail.
Our prison population has exploded over the last 40 years and has not made our society any better.
Have you seen the crime rates? here's one sample. Since recidivism is so high, it only makes sense that keeping people in prison longer will prevent them from committing crime longer. Not saying it's the best way, but it is hard to support the idea that it has no effect.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."