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Full Details of My Attempted Entrapment For Teaching Polygraph Countermeasures
George Maschke writes "In May of this year, I was the target of an attempted entrapment, evidently in connection with material support for terrorism. Marisa Taylor of McClatchy reported briefly on this in August. I've now published a full public accounting, including the raw source of the e-mails received and the IP addresses involved. Comments from Slashdot readers more technically savvy than I are welcome."
We would never have had PGP or encryption research outside government labs if everyone followed such rules.
The way I see it, no one would be using encryption nowadays if Obama managed to be president in the nineties.
Were you around in the nineties? That was when Clinton used CALEA to force telecoms to build the exact infrastructure that was exploited after 9/11 by Bush, and later Obama. That was when Clinton pushed the ultimately doomed "Clipper Chip", with all other strong encryption to be criminalized. Turns out, something as ham-handed as Clipper turned out to be un-necessary, since the NSA was just able to (apparently) subvert certification authorities and cripple hardware-based random number generators.
If Clinton had allowed a secure digital infrastructure to be built in the first place, none of the current shenanigans would have been possible, or at least would have been way harder.
Some fraudster in the UK went down recently for selling dousing rods as bomb detectors to the Iraqis. There were quite a few people credulous twits in the media who went after skeptics who were against this transparent ripoff, but it took a good ten years for enough momentum to build, to get this investigated, and for the criminal who ran this, to get charged with anything.
As far as I can tell, polygraphy is just as full of woo as phrenology, and it was invented roughly around the same time. I do wonder how long it'll take for the stupidity to be debunked sufficiently hard, for the public outcry to overcome the True Believers and have this snake oil abolished?
"I'm sorry, but in my country, I'd laugh at you if you asked me to take one."
You seem to have a strange idea of the United States. The job he was referring to is a private employment position for a bank, which is a privately-owned business. They can hire (or not) any security guard they want.
Personally, I would laugh at them too. Same with pre-employment drug screening. I simply won't do that. (And the practice has fallen out of favor, anyway.) But remember: it is private parties who did these things; it had nothing to do with government.
"When did your boss get to control your life?"
For a long time, a lot of people in the U.S. let employers get away with this kind of thing. I don't know why. I don't put up with it, nor do any of my friends. It isn't like that so much, anymore. I think the employers finally figured out that they were chasing away all the smart people.
"The US must be much more stupid than I suspected."
If you're judging an entire country by one person's anecdote, you must be much more stupid than I expected.
My reply to both you and the parent is that IMHO most people (including Greenspan, and all of Wall Street) misinterpret Rand. If you recall, the protagonists in each of her books is a builder, not a financier. They were virulently opposed to those who used manipulation of the economic and political system for their own gains. Her books were really about the importance of the creative and technical versus the political.
I think it was Nietzche ("Man and Superman"?) who proposed the dichotomy between masters and slaves. I have always felt that he was wrong, that while those two groups may exist, there is a third group, the technical/creative, who does not want to be master and refuses to be slave.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Try asking anyone under 30 if they know what the phrase "Papers Please!" denotes
It's just two words... It's a lot of things.
It's when the Military place soldiers in a natural disaster area such as New Orleans after Katrina requiring you to show military ID or proof of government authorization, to avoid arrest, or having vehicles impounded
It's an attack onAmerican birthright citizenship
It's two words that succinctly describe America's dark future.
Personal and Professional Encounters with Surveillance
anti-state.com: May I See Your Papers Please?
It's what Mr. Hiibel of Nevada went to jail for refusing to comply with
It's what police do now to ordinary people minding their own business.
It's congress work on the REAL ID act
It's a name given to a section of an Arizona law upheld by the Supreme court.
It's the name of a complaint against changes the US is making starting this Fall 2013 to further restrict the free travel of Americans and greatly increase the difficulty of US citizens getting passports
It's the name of a dystopian video game about communist immigration control.
It's the name of an anti-TSA blog
It's a request you comply with when asked by the police; otherwise, you face immediate arrest.
No. Capitalism has a host of feedback mechanisms - supply and demand being the archetypical one. Like any good complex adaptive system, when a new 'species' (for example a new technology and resulting new market) appears, the other entities in the system dynamically adapt. This is very similar to the evolutionary ecosystems model. Political feedback, to my mind, should mainly be of the sort that prevents fish that are too big from swimming up small creeks and blocking water flow. (I know that's a really obscure analogy, but I like it.
A major distortion that exists presently is what I would consider incorrect government policies that encourage near-monopolies and effective monopolies. In the US, anti-trust laws are directed primarily at maintaining two things: preventing unfair advantage of a company's monopoly position, and maintaining a fiction of competition among two to four dominant players.
If I had my druthers, I would prevent any company with more than 10% of a market to buy or take control of any other market participant for any reason.
From my own studies of free enterprise as a CAS, it appears to me that if any company controls more than perhaps 20% of a market, or if fewer than 10 or so companies constitute a large percentage of a market, they have effectively too much monopoly power. I have not done the research in detail - I was prepared to work on the PhD in Economics and this was going to be my area of research, but I did not pursue it at that time, so these are 'back of the envelope' numbers.
Nevertheless, it's instructive to use ecosystems as an analogy. A climax forest may have only a dozen or so tree species but it is very rare for it to have as few as four or five. Aspen trees are interesting - a particular aspen grove may in fact be a single genetic individual. But the environment varies enough that this grove can not take over 100 square miles. This is because the local environment changes constantly, so the area next to the Aspen grove may be better for maple, or fir, or scrub grassland.
So to maintain the maximum diversity, and dynamic adaptability and efficiency, the role of government regulation is absolutely _not_ to provide a single market. (I.e., do _not_ normalize the laws across all jurisdictions.) That made sense when the economies of scale truly applied - it took a lot of money to build a steel mill. But economies of scale now are primarily tools of capitalist domination. If a large company is truly more competive than small companies, then this should be the case across many jurisdictions with differing local rules. Normalizing the rules across jurisdictions is unfairly (IMHO) handicapping smaller businesses, which as it happens often have lower unit costs these days than large companies. Case in point - labor productivity at a MacDonald's franchise is substantially _lower_ than at the old mom and pop hamburger joint - this is due to two things - MacDonald's already made your burger so it's faster, and every MacDonald's burger is the same - no guessing. But both of those are obsolete criteria in today's world of freely available information.
At one time, the number of jurisdictions was large, and the information flow between them was relatively slow, so this was not such a large problem. But now we are close to having a single global economic model. This puts the entire economic system at constant risk - e.g. "Too big to fail". This idea is in itself a condemnation of the legal structure we have allowed to develop. And now with the availability of incredibly fast means to rationalize markets, that legal structure is, oddly enough, a bad idea. Today we need more diverse markets, not more similar markets. And that is where the political factor comes in. Or, as I've said to many of my friends, "All decisions should be made as locally as feasible," - whether economic or political.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/