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Senator Dianne Feinstein: NSA Metadata Program Here To Stay
cold fjord writes "The Hill reports, 'Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) predicted Sunday that lawmakers who favored shutting down the bulk collection of telephone metadata would not be successful in their efforts as Congress weighs potential reforms to the nation's controversial intelligence programs. "I don't believe so," Feinstein said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press (video). "The president has very clearly said that he wants to keep the capability So I think we would agree with him. I know a dominant majority of the — everybody, virtually, except two or three, on the Senate Intelligence Committee would agree with that." ... "A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan. New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness," Feinstein said. "We need to be prepared. I think we need to do it in a way that respects people's privacy rights."'"
will never go away citizen, we need to spy on you to keep you safe. Now pick up that can.
Anyone that thinks this wouldn't stay around in some form isn't dealing with reality. It's far to useful to someone somewhere.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Seriously, what federal government program has ever been rolled back?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It would do my heart good if she moved to another state so we can get back to business as usual around here....
...perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan."
On the contrary, I think they understand that very well.
You can't put the cat back in the bag...now that they know what the NSA is capable of they will use untraceable methods.
This will only monitor the rest of us.
"A matter of [internal] security... the age old cry of the oppressor!" - Captain Picard
""A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan.'" ... and we're not about to give it up without a fight!
"We" are not the Great Satan, Dianne. That would be you and the rest of your despicable brood of self-righteous overbearing pax americana terrorists.
Is this woman for real? She seems very protective of our Great Satan role. There are new vicious terrorists popping up everywhere, especially right here in our own back yard she seems to infer... And what the hell, the president thinks it's a good idea, so those of us in the congressional branch ought to jump right behind him on that, because, you know, he's a politician, we're politicians and we all just roll like that... Everyone knows that the American people don't need/want privacy anyhow... They will all feel so much better once we remove those annoying constitutional freedoms that are such a distraction in their day to day lives. Just like castrating a dog! How does that silly putz stay in office anyhow?
"A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan."
Maybe we shouldn't occupy that role?
Good thing that the Legislative and Executive branches of government are set up to balance each other.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If she says the metadata program needs to stay, then she needs to go. It's as simple as that.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Glory to Arstotzka!
What she is really saying is, "Fuck you Citizen! We are the Government and will do as we like. We are not concerned that nearly all Americans and 100% of foreign nationals are appalled by our actions. Go back to playing with your iPhones while us grownups take care of business".
The Senate Intelligence Committee wants to keep the program that lets them collect information on everybody, and legality be damned. Which would only be a problem if anybody actually stood up and said it was illegal, admittedly.
In other news, water continues to be wet, the sky continues to be blue, and people in the Middle East continue to kill each other.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
No,no, no! You pillage BEFORE you burn!
Amazing the number of people who get that wrong and do them out of order....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"we still occupy the role of the Great Satan."
Yes Senator Feinstein, that's why we want to stop the collection. I would rather the US wasn't known as "the Great Satan" by other countries.
Thanks for confirming that, Diane!
Pssh, yeah--inalienable human rights are so passe.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Indeed, there is a very dangerous terrorist on the loose: her name is Dianne Feinstein.
Circumcision is child abuse.
The people that keep voting her into office are nuts. Give California back to Mexico.
Have gnu, will travel.
A critical requirement of preparation is evidence of the effectiveness of your preparation. Where's the evidence that dragnet surveillance is effective?
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
They don't give a shit what we, the people, their boss, want. They're going to continue doing it anyway.
Dont worry, the Senate will pass a law prohibiting the NSA from spying on them.
It's really really hard to avoid the conclusion that they've got some killer blackmail data that's keeping her dancing this oppressors' line. The alternative is that she really believes these lies. Given that the GOP isn't winning California in the foreseeable future, the only realistic prospect for her removal is a primary challenge, which, of course, is the easiest thing to pre-empt with convenient revelations. Sadly however, given that she was reelected in 2012, we're not getting rid of her soon unless the grim reaper gets her - she is 80.
Sometimes I wonder, when I am having sex or pooping, if my relatives in heaven can see what I am doing. I mean if there is an after life and we really do go to heaven to watch over our loved ones, what's to stop them from seeing me doing the nasty? Would that be considered metadata? Between the NSA and my dead relatives, all of this watching is really disturbing.
...and take the control out of their hands.
It's obvious that no one in power can be trusted to NOT collect as much as they can collect. It doesn't matter whether that is a government or a business. There is only one REAL solution. Encrypt everything. And since one cannot trust proprietary solutions to NOT include a back door into the encryption scheme, the only solution is to use open source software AND for such software to be routinely audited by knowledgeable people. And for all of us to be vigilant concerning other ways to circumvent the encryption.
It seems to me that this is a declaration of an arms race between those in power and the average user. But of course, hasn't it always been that way?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
9/11 happened because they needed the entire Nation to embrace the Patriotic Act and all of their neofascist arsenal. They let it happen, and immediately got a bunch of rednecks screaming "USA! USA! USA!" at the top of their lungs in front of the White House. Face it guys, you are becoming the fourth Reich. You just traded Hebrew for Muslim in the tale of the Unholy People Hitler used to get the Germans in line behind him.
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No,no, no! You pillage BEFORE you burn!
Unless you are in a hurry.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
If you think Feinstein holds the 2nd Amendment as gospel then you have no idea what you're talking about.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
If you want people to support the metadata program and various and sundry other programs that various services and branches are or will be using, then you need for the people to want those programs. You can't just say, "It's for your own good," or "..we should support the President," and expect them to not have reservations.
How about we start by making news reporting in the US, more about actual, real, factual news, including not merely local, but national and GLOBAL news. Embedding reports with units during previous deployments has shown it brings support to our troops, if not why they are where they are. How about the US get a taste for what rough and bloody events happen in the real world? If The People want to be protected from that coming to their shores, they'll support the things that keep that away.
The People give the power, and if not done carefully, The People will take the power.
Which reminds me: We need more Statesmen, and fewer Politicians both in the US, and abroad.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
That's what I "love" about my "representative": never afraid to state the blindingly obvious, while completely and derisively ignoring the will of the people she nominally speaks for. Of course the government is not going to willingly give up their police-state surveillance powers; governments never give up power they have taken, legally or otherwise. Blah blah, security, protection, something about terrorism, etc.
In addition to "spying" on the general populace, she also does not like the idea of the general populace having any significant arms.
http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/assault-weapons
...violate people's privacy rights in a way that respects people's privacy rights?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
"A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan..."
The senate intelligence committee behaves as if we've already lost our national identity to the "war on terror." Surely Feinstein understands that "privacy people" aren't going to be placated by such a statement and that their continuing discontent will only serve to perpetuate the perception of our formerly great nation as "the Great Satan." It's a vicious circle, and the only way out is to enact policies that live up to the two key tenets outlined in the last line of our national anthem.
As an aside, I don't think there's anyone left in this country who doesn't understand that we occupy the role of "the Great Satan." Republican constituents meet the idea with doggedly obstinate belligerence. Democratic constituents snivel the truism to comfort themselves while their two-faced ideologues advance the security state agenda after being elected to do the opposite. We all see it.
A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan.
That is classic...
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You are not Still the Great Satan, you are Again the Great Satan, to a whole new group of people.
And if it burns after the rape you better visit a doctor.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
You must not pay attention to American politics. Feinstein has been working tirelessly against the 2nd amendment for over thirty years.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Could it be we are living in a mind control prison with no real democracy, like Dr. Robert Duncan says?
Did you know they installed mind reading and mind altering radar systems in 1976, and today they have a database with all our recorded thoughts memories, and data? Everything you ever saw, felt, heard, dreamt, said or did is stored in this database, according to Dr. Robert Duncan CIA/DOD/US DOJ physicist and whistleblower. Total psychoenergy monitoring sits at 1.4 terabytes per second for all watched. And they torture and remotely control people, directing energy and voices into peoples heads, use this information to manipulate and control society.
How could any American have control over their lives if this is being used by the President, Senators, Congressman, Police, FBI, DOD, CIA, NSA, in secret? Dr. Robert Duncan said he helped develop most of these technologies, and they're abusing and misusing all his work. They do EEG cloning, memory probes, EEG projection, etc. Watch us pee and poo and fuck, and enter our minds to control and abuse us.
Download Dr. Duncan's book The Matrix Deciphered in PDF, watch his video testimony, and learn more here: http://www.oregonstatehospital.net/d/russelltice-nsarnmebl.html
Since they really have this, realize every word they tell us (Senator, Congressman, President, State official, would have to be a lie. They use this, and lie about it in every statement they make. "There is no domestic spying on Americans" -Obama).
But, "Rape, burn, pillage, rape" is so much more alliterative than the correct form.
Feinstein's falling victim to what I like to call "The Information Fallacy." Let's say that we knew that terrorists were going to blow something up at some time. It would be hard to thwart this based on this information, right? But if we obtained more information and learned their names, their target, and the exact date they planned to attack, thwarting them gets a lot easier. So far so good, but it can lead people to figure that getting even more information would lead to finding even more terrorist plots (perhaps even ones we don't know about yet).
In an ideal world, albeit one where privacy isn't a concern, this might be true. In the real world, though, gathering tons of information from everyone just leads to a signal-to-noise problem. For every one "Let's blow this up" terrorist phone record there will be millions (if not more) of "How's dad doing?", "When should we meet for dinner?", and other mundane phone records. There might even be some that tick off the right keyword boxes but for the wrong reasons. "That backpack is da bomb" might refer to explosives in a carry-on or it might be the use of slang to indicate that the person's backpack is really nice.
Sadly, too many politicians are worried that reducing the information we gather is just going to let terrorist messages slip by. It might, but we should be doing more focused information gathering (with proper checks and balances to prevent abuse) to improve signal-to-noise, not general information gathering hoping that some signal pokes out from all of the surrounding noise.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness," Feinstein said. "We need to be prepared."
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
We keep hearing about the boogeyman terrorists who are coming for us .. these terrible people with these terrible plans. But really, we've done orders of magnitude more damage to ourselves than anyone external possibly could have done. And we continue to bludgeon ourselves about the head and shoulders, deflecting any semblance of reasoning with "because terrorism"
This signature is false.
But if any 9/11 type attack hits, then we'll unload on the government for being incompetent muckety mucks who can't blow their nose with a box of kleenexes in front of them.
When did that happen? When 9/11 happened, I was criticizing the actions of the government for taking advantage of people's stupidity and curtailing our civil liberties.
You authoritarians seem to think it's even remotely acceptable to toss out principles and fundamental liberties in the name of safety, but that is simply not the case.
She in no way represents the voters of California. She represents herself.
If she does not represent the voters then why do those same voters keep electing her? Senate races aren't gerrymandered so obviously she must have some significant appeal across the state to those who continue to vote her into office.
hey AC, parent is right & others like pixelpusher listed these
you are just wrong, AC. you need to hack through the rhetoric & cognitive dissonance. Trolling is not argumentation & you need to stop...the only way to "lose" a discussion like this is to remain ignorant
the idea that 'saving face' in a discussion is more important than all other factors is the core of trolling...just stop...
Thank you Dave Raggett
it's fine w/o a citation...everyone, even young adults w/o kids, has seen the effect of public school budget cuts based on artificial scarcity
Thank you Dave Raggett
"government spying" is loaded language...everyone is against "government spying" on its citizens like in the book 1984
what I want to see from this AC is actual policy solutions.
the government's job, per the constitution, is partly to use law enforcement & the military. the people have a right for their personal effect to be secure from that *unless* probable cause...etc
virtually everyone would agree that the above statements are accurate and true & reprsents how our system works
digital communications exist. we on /. understand how it all works.
digital communications, such as a routing table, IP address, MAC address, list of SMS's from a certain number, this is ALL personal data, covered by the US citizen's right to privacy
you, AC, and every critic of this policy must either be criticizing the very *existence* of government OR the debate is about when/how not if the government can access your personal data
the debate is about WHEN and HOW...the government has the right to access your personal data with proper warrant
what is proper warrant for the different kinds of digital communication?
THATS THE QUESTION that none of the privacy trolls here on slashdot want to discuss.
everyone wants to pop off fiery bon-mots about how X politician is just as bad as Bush & reference a work of fiction that critiques totalitarian regimes
its bullshit...it hurts our industry & makes our jobs harder
stop bitching and start typing policy solutions
Thank you Dave Raggett
I propose that, in exchange for the continued mass surveillance, all NSA employees and everyone involved in NSA oversight shall be injected with a GPS tracking device and forced to wear head-mounted camera, with feeds from both published 24/7 on the web.
Democracy. ~ rule of majority of idiots ~
Go through the list... she's always said yes to expansions in executive power.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I wonder if the president or feinstein understand that they are losing people's trust and they are now more scary. And it looks like they are willing to act on this.
From Feinstein's point of view, and others like her, the United States IS the government and ONLY the government. Only things that threaten the government are relevant. Everything done in Washington D.C. is to make sure the government survives. They don't give a rat's ass about you and me. We're just the unwashed masses who they feed upon.
The trouble is that even if you find a good person and elect them to office, after they're there for a while they get infected with that chronic disease called power.
I've given this much thought and I really like the idea of limiting a person's political "career" to one term in one office, no matter what level of government they're elected to. So, if you're elected to your local city council, you can serve one term and never be eligible to run for another office on any level in your whole life. Sure, we'd get a bunch of amateur no-nothings, but it may be better than what we have now.
Feinstein has had access to threat assessments. Notice that those who get access to this information OR perhaps it's those who have influence over big brother are all informed in such a way that they go against the public.
Multiple possibilities exist. Here are a few to think about:
1) "You don't know what we know" creates a culture with an attitude that your ignorance of the situation makes your views irrelevant. It is similar to people who know science and history dealing with Sara Palin types. I leave discussion of differences up to you.
2) Lobbyists do not have to be registered. The CIA, NSA, FBI, HMS, using what they know about policy makers (legal or not) can tell them what they need to hear to get them to vote where desired. Similar to lobbyists but without the $$$ "contributions". Add to that all the privatization produced contractors who DO contribute $$$. They don't have to lie, it's easy to filter information in a biased but honest way to alter perception. Officials rely great deal upon their staff and dept. staff for information, they must take the word of the NSA when it lies to them... until a "traitor" like Snowden provide proof. Sure they should be skeptical but you can't get much done or get far without functionally acting trusting. I suggest "Yes, Minister" as a primer on the subject. You'll see this when you write something specific to your representative and get a non-canned reply - when you get a new representative and write it again you'll get nearly the same reply from the new official (because the staff hasn't changed.)
3) Officials. Sometimes the law forbids doing one's job or doing the right thing. Snowden is an example of this. People who accept the "reality" of the situation succeed and those who don't quit early or are fired or are imprisoned. This fosters a culture. Even like minded people will have to officially oppose and stop others if they want to continue. It is quite a bit like authoritarian societies where children turn in their parents (and if you don't think the USA is already authoritarian, you have a lot of learning to do.) The NSA head has to lie or become a Snowden and Snowden types never make it to the top... if they didn't contract out they'd have filtered him out at a lower security level -- it would take years to get to where he was if he wasn't a contractor. Plus officials have catch-21 situations in their career history that can be used against them.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
So which is it? Is our police state so incomptent that it can't stop disturbed teens from shooting up schools, or are the terrorists so incompetent that they can't manage similar (or worse) carnage? And other than 9/11, it's not like we were swimming in attacks before they went all Stasi on us.
The Constitution is the law here, and the only criminals we need to be focused on are the ones in our own government. They gave away the freedoms that Al Qaeda could never take from us and that makes them worse in my book.
What is this "virtually everybody" she is talking about?
Virtually everybody WHO MATTERS. If you're not on the committee, you don't matter; and if you disagree, you don't matter either.
With those two exceptions California is actually largely Republican.
Right. That's why California has 38 Democrats versus 15 Republicans in the House of Representatives, 2 Democrat senators, over 60% of the voters vote Democrat in presidential elections and the Republicans haven't won a majority of the popular vote in presidential elections since 1988. (that's 25 years for those of you counting at home) The Democrats hold enormous majorities in the State House and State Senate and registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by over 2.5 million voters.
But you go ahead and keep believing that California is "largely Republican" if it helps you sleep at night.
I think we need to do it in a way that respects people's privacy rights.
If it is to be done, it needs to be done in a way that respect's people's civil rights.
Supporters of the NSA spying program have been rephrasing the concerns with it as a privacy rights issue. The concerns with it go deeper than that: fundamentally it is a violation of the constitutional and civil rights afforded by law. Reframing it a privacy issue is a dishonest way of downplaying the serious constitutional violations that the NSA is infringing upon.
Nobody ever seems to remember that the NSA falls under the Executive Branch. Congress doesn't have to do squat. There's this one guy who has the authority to tell the NSA "Don't do that," and they're required to stop.
Clue: He lives in a really big house with a boring paint job.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
*facepalm* California, you need to get rid of this senator ASAP.
Not only does it not follow that a president wanting this, should cause Congress to agree with him, but on the contrary, it's the Senate's job to check presidents.
I could theoretically respect a senator who took simply took the position "domestic spying is a good idea," and I might even respect them more if they said something like "we ought to take seriously, the idea of repealing some of the Bill of Rights, as much of that stuff no longer reflects the values of Americans." (I'd oppose such a person, but realistically, I'd also probably lose debates to them, as their statement would be pretty damn accurate.)
But when she uses "a president wants it," as the reason for giving presidents more power, she's pretty much admitting she's neglecting her duties as Senator, even working against those duties.
But daring to ask *why* we are so hated is still considered an act of treason (spoiler: it ain't because 'they hate our freedoms').
"'..."I don't believe so," Feinstein said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. "The president has very clearly said that he wants to continue to recieve the funding provided by the contractors who supply the equipment, software and bodies involved in this billion-dollar operation. So I think we would agree with him. I know a dominant majority of the - everybody, virtually, except two or three, on the Senate Intelligence Committee would agree with that." ... "A lot
of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still need massive
amounts of campaign funds going into this next election cycle", Feinstein said.
"We need to be prepared. Television spots and Youtube ads are frickin'
expensive!"'"
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
False? You linked to a page that states the opinions of a few judges. Anyone even slightly intelligent knows that the government was never meant to be able to outsource its spying to corporations, so this is a clear violation of the spirit of the fourth amendment.
Your average voter, be s/he a Democrat or Republican, is not interested in liberty in any meaningful sense. S/he is interested in license. "Give me license to do what I want, and if anything bad happens, fix it and let me go back to doing whatever caused it."
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Lots of senators have given their support to the NSA, some on stronger terms then Feinstein. I'm in no way excusing her, I completely disagree with her on this, but this is clearly an effort to continue to polarize an issue that is sadly a failure by both major parties.
The amount of power you posess is directly proportional to how much it corrupts you. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. No one who posesses power ever willingly relinquishes it.
The NSA (and the rest of the intellgence community, for that matter) appear to have taken lessons from organizations like the Catholic church, and organized religion in general: If you can keep people in a constant state of fear, their higher cognitive abilities are, for all intents and purposes, turned off, and they naturally turn towards leadership for "answers" to keep them "safe". With religion, it's the fear of the Devil and of Eternity in Hell that keeps the masses in a state of fear. With the U.S. government and the intelligence community, those roles are played by "terrorists" and by "the destruction of America".
By some means (or perhaps any means necessary), the populace of the U.S. needs to take the power back. All these "threats to the U.S. and it's citizens" have, for the most part, always been there, and will always be there -- they've just been leveraged by people with power who, like all people with power, do whatever they can to maintain that power, and to increase their power towards Absolute by whatever means necessary.
I believe that taking the power back from these power-mongering types can still be accomplished through peaceful means, but only if the bulk of the citizenry of the U.S. continues to wake up and fully realize what's been going on. Assange, Snowden, and their ilk have given the first wake-up jolts, it's now up to the rest of America to decide if they want to become fully conscious, get up, get dressed, and start cleaning house, or if they want to just roll over and go back to sleep.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
"still occupy the role of Great Satan"
Perhaps, but it's idiots like this who are making us "fulfill" that role.
If you did you are / were a complete fool and here is why...
Our government, believe it or not, generally acts in the best interest of us. How do I know this? Because at a time in my life I worked for it.
You can site all of the lobbying abuses, sweetheart deals, back room dealing, etc. etc. but the general thrust of your argument would still be wrong
Senator A votes to have deal B go through and for the most part he does it for two reasons, re-election money or to get a project / company / entity to do business in his or her state because fundamentally his interests generally align with the people who elected him or her to office.
When it comes to national security everyone had a total freak out when a bunch of guys from Saudi Arabia flew airliners full of people into buildings. Was the NSA kinda clueless? Maybe, were our politicians? Very much so, so they did what all politicians do, they gave an agency carte blanche and looked the other way while saying you had damn well better cover our asses from here on out..
What is really funny about this, is that the so called "Meta Data" is noting more than your phone bill. Ah but the chink in the armor are phones you can buy with a prepaid sim in them for cash. You don't know who made a call you just know that a call was made, so even that data is hard to deal with because you actually have to track the device down, put some eyes on the ground and search for 1 person out of the population of [insert large metropolitan area here ] to see who is using that phone. I think we could go a long way towards prevention of bad things my outlawing them. You want to buy a pre-paid cell phone, fine, we scan your photo ID so at least we have a picture of the person or perhaps a finger print. Do that and we catch half of the gang bangers tomorrow.
You see I really don't care who knows the number I made a call to or got a call from, what I do care about is them knowing the content of the call, and I am not even sure the new data center in Utah could hold all audio from every call made. What this is really is know if two baddies are talking to each other, or a baddie is calling a guy who works for the FAA, an airline, a company that manufactures chemicals that can be made into explosives, etc. you get the idea.
As to Diane Feinstein I think she should have to register as a foreign agent of Israel since she their US lobbying arm. I used to vote for her but have voted against in the last two senatorial elections and I am a Democrat!
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Elections are rigged....that should be obvious after the California GMO labeling vote where the results were polled as 70% in favor of, and then amazingly and unexpectedly the actual vote tally was reversed with 70% voting against the labeling.
That was when I knew that Californians DO NOT VOTE.
Why?
Because you have a reversal of the poll, on a indifference based issue. What does that mean? Most people either care about having GMO products labeled or they do not give a damn. Almost no percentage of the population except for a few die hard folks on the right that still 3 DDT are actually concerned about preventing GMO labeling.
So you had grass roots vs the weeds of indifference. With zero affect on the weeds. Those who don't care about GMO labelling, have not horse in the race. Adding it doesn't affect them. They don't care. That was an IMPOSSIBLE vote, blamed on a spending and advertising fee but clearly a result of the electronic voting fabrication system.
Benefits, Retirement and Pensions
I've always been generally right-leaning, and I am REALLY up in arms about the NSA stuff.
It's not really a left/right issue. It's an issue of how you feel about the 4th amendment and how much you trust the government to protect your civil liberties. I don't have any ideological objection to the government being empowered to look for dangerous criminals but I have a HUGE problem with them gutting my Constitutional rights in pursuit of these same criminals. It's NOT SUPPOSED to be convenient for the government to watch me. That is the entire point of the 4th amendment and a few others as well. Terrorists are criminals and I expect them to be treated as such under the law, particularly when the party under suspicion is a US citizen.
I think the problem is that circumstances have organized such that the executive branch no longer has meaningful oversight. Congress is unwilling to take a stand because anyone who does gets voted out of office for "being soft on terrorism". The judiciary has largely punted on the issue so far by claiming no one has standing to challenge. (It's unclear how you prove standing against a classified program that you can go to jail for talking about) Worst of all we have a surveillance program with zero accountability to the electorate. We have a secret program, doing secret activities, "overseen" by a secret (rubber stamp) court, with secret findings than are never required to be made public. Exactly how am I as a citizen supposed to make an informed evaluation of the actions of the NSA? Maybe what they are doing is fine (yeah I doubt it too) but I have no way to know.
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Great. Terrorism is now the eternal go-to answer for all the government's problems with those pesky laws protecting us from government tyranny.
Can we just massacre our fucking corrupt government now and set up something more rational and less invasive in its place?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Jewish by any chance?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
"A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan."
Well then, be like Darth Vader and take off the mask.
If you think the NSA issue is a right vs left kind of argument in today's political climate you're even further gone than what I first thought!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Is she trying to turn Christians against the government? Because that sounds exactly like what she's going to end up doing with this statement!
Twinstiq, game news
What is needed is to take all the money being spent on capturing every piece of data the NSA can get its hands on and redirect that money into a massive hiring program aimed at dramatically increasing the number of people employed to turn all the data into useful information that the right people can take and act upon.
Capturing everyone's phone calls and internet data wont catch the next 9/11 hijackers or the next Boston bomber, especially since the next guys are going to assume that they are being spied upon when they use any kind of electronic communications and will use secret codes, one-time-pads and other things (as well as non-electronic communications methods that no wiretap can ever collect)
She's self-righteous, arrogant, and downright evil. It's high time she get kicked out of office.
hey dude...I'm not your 'bro'...
nowhere did I contend what you say I contended...your comment is a string of straw man arguments...like this:
"just because the government can X doesnt mean they should"
where X is some thing that would invade privacy but maybe not technically be illegal
you're arguing against a straw man...there's like 3 or 4 points in there...it means nothing
I never said those things are good, or that they government should do them
I ASKED WHEN/HOW IT COULD BE DONE...if the answer is virtually never fine
Thank you Dave Raggett
I do not follow her on her "The Great Satan role" reference. Would someone care to explain this to me?
Nothing against Elizabeth Emken, who as far as I can tell is a fine person, except for her involvement in an evil criminal conspiracy called "The Republican Party". Yes, there are some good Republicans, and California seriously needs to upgrade our local Republican Party, who tend to be nasty right-wingers who don't have any more clue about fiscal responsibility than our Democrats do, interspersed with occasional rich folks showing off. (The 2006 token Republican, Dick Mountjoy, was a pro-war right-winger, and California didn't have their "top-two primary", so I was able to vote Libertarian, since there was no risk of him beating Feinstein. I don't remember if I voted for Emken or abstained, since there are no longer third-party candidates in the general election here.)
But it won't be safe to vote for any Republicans for anything until the national party cleans up the corruption of the Bush/Rove/Cheney/Norquist/Koch era. Senate majorities matter even if our senior senator is consistently on the side of Evil. House majorities matter, and Congressmembers occasionally get promoted to Senator. State legislators run for Congressional seats, city council members run for state legislature, school board members run for city council.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No, it doesn't affect the Senate races. The latest rounds of assembly-district gerrymandering have been fun to watch - the Republicans put together a plan for a bipartisan citizens commission to run the gerrymander, figuring that it would work better than letting the majority-Democrat legislature do it, and then botched the followthrough that they needed to stack the commission with Republicans; they ended up with a group that was less Republican than the legislature, and didn't have the commitment to preserving current members' seats that a legislative version would have had. So they lost a few more seats than they needed to, but fundamentally this is California, where we've got a majority of Democrats, the Republicans are mostly nasty right-wingers with no more care about fiscal responsibility than the Democrats have, and pretty much everybody viewed Schwarzenegger's attempts at fixing the budget to be half-hearted and the Republicans to be Not Helping, so they got stomped.
California's legislature has fairly short term limits, which means they're much more influenced by current events and nobody sticks around long enough for the programs they pass to actually get implemented, so the penalty for failure is low, there's no institutional memory, and lobbyists write most of the legislation and get assembly members to pass it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Are you serious? The rich do write most of the regulations, so it's not like that's going to keep them in check. Look how well it worked for the 2008 banking collapse, or the persistence of the military-industrial complex.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They only can write it to benefit one over another because of Keynesian economics. That is the entire problem- manipulating the economy instead of simply keeping products from harming people and the environment (people by extension) and preventing fraud.
I don't really care about the military-industrial complex so bark up another tree. The banking collapse was directly associated with Keynesian economics. It could have been avoided if congress would have acted in 2003 when the request to change regulation on and monitor GSEs in the mortgage industry was made.
Yes, Feinstein likes a big-spending government, and prefers more of that spending to go to social programs than Bush did, but that doesn't make her a "leftist" any more than it made him one. She's pretty consistent in her opposition to most of the Bill of Rights - doesn't like free speech on the Internet, doesn't like search warrants, didn't stop torture at Gitmo. Yeah, she's occasionally come out to support the liberal side of issues like gay marriage or abortion, but it's not like she really broke through a lot of boundaries on those in the Senate.
Basically, the only thing leftist about her is that she counts as +1 in the "D" column instead of the "R" column when you're counting the Senate majority party, which does make a huge difference. But she's got enough seniority that California's Democrats haven't run a serious primary challenger against her in years, and California's Republicans know they're going to lose so they've only run token candidates who are doing their "take one for the team" job in return for future party favors. It's too bad Carly Fiorina decided to run against Barbara Boxer instead of DiFi - I dislike her immensely, but it would have been a fun race to watch.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Those were the days.
that collecting insane amounts of irrelevant data helps stop terrorism.
If terrorists know we are collecting tweets, do you think they will continue to use twitter?
who is this AC? is it deconfiction unlogged?
I'm confused...
also, if deconfiction wants to reply that would be nice...I'd like to hear what deconfiction thinks the policy about privacy should be
not complaining about how things ARE...but a description of policy of how things SHOULD BE
Thank you Dave Raggett
I just don't see how anyone can continue to adhere to the same tired partisan political blathering that passes for intelligent political discourse.
Neither party cares about the public, the constitution, privacy, or anything except for the money being funneled mostly secretly by lobbyists and special interest groups.
The Coup d'état against the US people wasn't broadcast by the US media.
I think it's pretty difficult to say that the people that want a smaller more limited government is inherently authoritarian.
"Limited government" in republican-speak generally means government with less taxation authority particularly for things the democrats support. If the republicans were serious about genuinely more limited government they would be pushing for a smaller military but instead they increase military spending at every opportunity regardless of actual need. They also would be making serious efforts to limit medicare and social security which are another 50% of federal spending but they never really seriously address limiting those programs. Even when they do try it generally comes in the form of "screw the poor" legislation like eliminating food stamps with no alternative to replace it with. Also a lot of their social positions are incompatible with the concept of limited government. Their "family values" positions are a fundamentally a form of government supported social engineering. They are perfectly fine with a less limited government as long as it is for things that support their social agenda.
No, the republicans may want less expensive government but they certainly do not want genuinely limited government.
I had a good laugh at this thread, people bashing Diane Feinstein, first because she is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then because she is a Democrat from California, all of which is beside the point if these same people use Google, or Facebook, or Twitter or any other social media company. The post to which I replied has the right idea, and I am saying so in more words to amplify the point that although I don't like what NSA is doing, that we have accepted the same thing done by every social media company out there as a fair business activity. That is the irony, and that is what the people who replies above don't get about technology, that people will use it to their advantage because its power is evident. Lots of businesses use similar techniques to find potential customers that NSA uses to develop networks of terror suspects. It isn't Google Analytics, but it is the same idea. So, until all of the people who posted so far agree that Social Media should be outlawed, we are stuck with the temptation NSA has taken. It is the nature of the Big Data we are saving about each other.
Uh huh.
The US government accessing all the data and metadata of private companies by the companies involuntarily compliance, without permission or need or notice to affected parties that dealing with those companies or services means serving the data to the government, and under gag orders with criminal penalties for saying anything--and with the government requiring entry for any of its agents to their facilities to take-over machines and interface at the government's will, is the same as what companies are doing with the metadata.
You need to try again.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Please redraft your reply to me. It s hard to parse the run-on sentence. There need to be some separation of ideas. That is why we have the period as a punctuation mark.
Let's review the extreme paranoia....
- Flouride, now even the FDA is turning against it.
- They're listening to our phone calls and reading our emails. No, you're just crazy. Well, whad'd'ya know...they are.
- Fast and Furious Gun Running, deliberate arming of cartels. Seriously, even I thought that was crazy. I was wrong.
But let me point you to the real fact. There is ZERO way for us to confirm votes. It would be extremely easy to implement in these electronic voting systems. Every voter would receive a printout with a code, heck, do it as a QR code. No names, nada, but you could take that code and go online and confirm that your vote was registered correctly. This SHOULD OF BEEN MANDATORY for these new systems.
But the truth is, when you have a zero cause issue, facing a strong vocal grass roots, and the polls are 60%-70% in favor, and then surprisingly, the end result was a complete reversal. You've got to be honest, and take a step back and evaluate the likelihood of that your election system is rigged.
GMO Labeling is a I care or don't give a damn issue. To overwhelm a grass roots issue polling at 2/3 requires a substantial amount of motivation on the part of the electorate. And honestly, that just wasn't there. This issue didn't have anything to motivate those who weren't for it, to oppose it.
If by that, you mean that the right wing uses DiFi for posters recruiting for their side, maybe so, but those are cartoon versions of her used for their own side's purposes, and the two aren't really equivalent or parallel. Darth Cheney's evil, and the left wing hates him, but he's a military-industrial-complex radical, not a social-conservative right-winger.
(I'm going to have to deviate from my usual position on Cheney here, which is to grudgingly admit that the man almost certainly doesn't actually eat live puppies for breakfast, but not to say anything more positive than that about him... And I'm a Libertarian, not a leftist or progressive.)
Cheney's not, as far as I know, a racist. He's not a theocrat. He was against gay marriage until his gay daughter forced him to reconsider his position, but he's not one of those people who are hung up about gays or who use homophobia as a way to drum up business with other right-wingers. (He'll happily use Fear of Foreign Terrorists to do that, but the business he's trying to drum up is military business, not Republicans-vs-Democrats; he'd prefer a Republican-controlled big army and intrusive spying system, but a Democrat-controlled one will do, and Feinstein was his type of Democrat.) He's not been part of the Republican War on Women. He was fine with the right-wingers' desires to militarize the border, but that was because he likes militarizing things, not because he wants to stop having cheap immigrant labor available for US businesses.
Cheney's not one of those right-wingers who say that "Government doesn't work" because they want to cut social programs and annoy progressives. He's the type of conservative who likes lots of very big, very intrusive government. The kind the right-wingers pretend they dislike, even as they help elect guys like Cheney.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks