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Embarrassing Stories Shed Light On US Officials' Technological Ignorance
colinneagle writes "Speaking at the SXSW Conference recently, Dr. Peter W. Singer, director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, recalled one U.S. official who was 'about to negotiate cybersecurity with China' asking him to explain what the term 'ISP' (Internet Service Provider) means. This wasn't the only example of this lack of awareness. 'That's like going to negotiate with the Soviets and not knowing what "ICBM" means,' Dr. Singer said. 'And I've had similar experiences with officials from the UK, China and Abu Dhabi.' Similarly, Dr. Singer recalled one account in which Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of the U.S. Homeland Security Department from 2009 to 2013, admitted that she didn't use email 'because she just didn't think it was useful.' 'A Supreme Court justice also told me "I haven't got round to email yet" — and this is someone who will get to vote on everything from net neutrality to the NSA negotiations,' Dr. Singer said."
I've heard that government moves slowly, but having high-power officials 20 years behind the times seems a bit outrageous.
The monitor *IS* The computer as far as my parents are concerned
AOL *IS* the internet... and email....
The hard drive *IS* known as gigabytes
Im sure others have similar stories
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
This is in some ways an advantage--SCOTUS is supposed to change slowly. But it also results in crazy rulings at times, like the idea that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in who you call. The judges who made that decision a few decades ago grew up when there were still *shared phone lines* between neighboring houses.
The guy who had to learn what an ISP was, or the guy who didn't know and didn't ask and made government policy on it anyway?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Its just a bunch of tubes.
Have gnu, will travel.
Their ability to scoop up such a trove of data on our use of the Internet seems really fearsome, but what is their actual ability to make use of the data? They could use their tools plus the US global enforcement powers to nail Internet frauds like the Cryptolocker ransomware, thereby redeeming the bad press they been getting since Snowdon. That they are not doing so tells me that they probably cannot do so.
I'm looking at you, Kathleen Sebelius. The healthcare.gov fiasco is just one obvious symptom. The world depends utterly on science and technology, but is being guided by people who I will describe politely as "technically challenged."
We've seen the results recently, and they're not pretty. I think our democracy itself is going to have to go through a thorough upgrade to remain viable. IQ tests for politicians? No, it's not egalitarian. It's not the American way. It may, however, allow the country to survive in something like its present form over the next century.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
That they are not doing so tells me that they probably cannot do so.
An intelligence agency doesn't (necessarily) do policework. They may (or may not!) drop a tip to the FBI when they come across something big, but for the most part the NSA doesn't care in the least about "minor" crimes like ransomware or carding or murder. Until something reaches the level of impacting actual national security, the NSA merely observes.
Also, don't mistake the useless fucks in Washington for the geniuses (not used sarcastically) that get invited to apply to the NSA - The former may effectively cripple the latter in practical matters, but the latter by no means count as technologically illiterate.
It's not that it can't do useful things for everyone; it's that you have to balance that against things like time wasted. For the head of a major agency with private secretaries and aids at her call, checking and sending emails might not be the best use of her time.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There are state Supreme Courts, and other countries have them too, so unless you are going to type out the entire thing, SCOTUS is more specific. Are you opposed to all acronyms, or just this one for some reason?
Okay, the cybersecurity negotiator ignorance is bad, the rest less so.
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
- Donald Knuth
The role of Supreme Court Justice is also "to be on the bottom of things". It is possible to understand enough about email to make good judgements about it without using it on a daily basis. The justices have to make weekly about subjects which they have absolutely no interaction with in their normal day-to-day life. From technical to finance to agriculture, no one can possibly be an expert on all the issues they hear. It is their job to constantly learn enough about a subject to know what is important from a legal and constitutional point of view. If they are failing to do this, then that is a legitimate complaint. The fact that they weren't familiar with "common knowledge" technologies before encountering them in court, or haven't chosen to incorporate them into their life isn't.
Actually this is why you should be very concerned about the NSA. The people doing NSA surveillance know what they are doing. The oversight does not. That is the scary thing.
You know of an IQ Test that can measure corruptibility? I don't think the problem with our elected officials is generally a lack of intelligence; it's a lack of character and responsibility to their actual electorate, rather than the highest bidder.
Why did we get a comment containing a link to a blog post about a news article elsewhere on the internet?
I mean, holy crap, Slashdot, can't you even bother to give us a link to the actual article anymore? We have to go on a link-to-a-link goose chase?
Which supreme court?
New York City Supreme Court,
New York State Supreme Court,
and that is just one city and one state. we have 50 more states and a lot of cities duplicating names.
My personal favorite. is 3 local towns 3 zip codes . Each town has a Winter Street. All three Winter Streets are within 5 miles of each other and don't even come close to touching in any way shape or form.
Talk about annoying.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Conextual knowledge is usually required to make good decisions. Without that context, decisions are likely to be random. Yes, the lawyers should present information to develop context, but where to start? Do they have to start with 1 + 1 = 2 ? Obviously not. So what assumptions should they make about the knowledge of a judge? Probably they start with what a ordinary person would know; but if a judge knows less than an ordinary person?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Since when do you have to raise your arms above your chest to use a computer?
Like Fawn Hall in 1986? Ollie North's secretary, who printed out his emails so she could shred them?
No terminology is perfect, but using RAM/ROM would end all confusion on this topic permanently.
At the cost of introducing a different confusion. "How come I can write to read-only memory?"
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Think about it, next time you wonder how on earth someone could come up with a law that is so far away from reality that it hurts. These people are the same the make laws concerning computers, the internet and everything connected to it. Most of the time taken verbatim from sources that have a rather intense interest in certain laws (aka "lobbying groups"), without even having the slightest idea what their laws will entail.
And this is why the whole crap is in the sorry state it is in today, with laws that are not executable, laws that make no sense, laws you cannot heed and laws that benefit a minority at the expense of everyone else.
And it's only half as dangerous as long as it's just domestic. It gets downright scary, though, when international laws get negotiated. Because one thing is certain: Whatever country can field the ones that can spell TCP/IP without too many accidents will be the one-eyed king amongst the blind.
Even though I'd fear that he'll just be the one eyed dummy that's being remote controlled by some corporate lawyer who DOES have an idea what he's doing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of the U.S. Homeland Security Department from 2009 to 2013, admitted that she didn't use email 'because she just didn't think it was useful
No, she knew how every email was scanned, so there was no way in hell she was going to use plain ol' email. She is just using the "I'm old so I don't use computer stuff" excuse to cover the real reason.
"Internet service provider" is used to describe a provider of connectivity from an end user to the internet at large. "Internet service provider" is also used to describe a provider of a service accessible only over the internet. On more than one occasion I've seen it used one way where I was expecting the other way, i.e. I didn't know what the writer meant, and I had to find some other clarifying statement.
it is completely outrageous...the people who make the laws about a thing not knowing the essential function of how a thing works...that's the definition of legislative incompetence!
the problem is there is so much impoetence & misunderstanding about Tech that the relative measure for 'competent' is frighteningly low...
here's who to blame:
1. Politicians themselves. They're idiots if they don't try to understand what they're making laws about plain and simple. But it doesn't end there....if we're trying to diagnose this problem we have to look deeper. Any cursory look at **policy** will show that **Republicans** are by far and away the worst offenders. They wear technological & scientific ignorance like a badge of honor They're always against Net Neutrality.
2. Tech industry. Your Google's, M$, and even facebook.com's...they all throw money around to accomplish their *corporate* goals. They flood the conversation with PR & drown out any dissenting voices. They make anti-user moves, including monopolies, then lobby congress to avoid any anti-trust accountability. This all causes intense confusion in the literature!
3. Us...tech people. We do a shit job of explaining ourselves. We give new products idiotic and abstract names that alienate non-techs. We have a culture of **snobbishness** and **superiority** that leads us to be condescending & either *over-explain* or more often **over-simplify**
if you are a US citizen, you can make a difference in ***ALL THREE CATEGORIES*** starting today...stop voting for Republicans...stop giving shit stupid confusing names...and stop acting like knowing something that is confusing & only comes with trial and error makes you inherently superior!
tech is confusing...we helped make it this way...we can fix it!
Thank you Dave Raggett
At least the government official asked. It's better to look like a fool before the negotiation than after. And since acronyms can mean different things in different contexts, the example cited wasn't even as dumb as it might seem at first glace.
I think one of the major issues here is that voting has become a joke. "We" (and I mean the collective American people, not just myself and the others responsible for the next statement) vote for these idiots based on the fact that they have someone sending amusing tweets and know how to talk in circles about things. We definitely don't vote for them based on anything reasonable (like experience, previous ACTUAL accomplishments, etc). If we want that to stop, we need to stop voting for prom queens and vote for a leader.
To make people feel superior? You're projecting the insecurity you feel when people who know what they're talking about talk in front of you about things you don't know enough to talk about. Acronyms are used by people with knowledge of a subject to more quickly communicate information about that subject to someone else who is also familiar. If you're reading this site, you can use a search engine to find your acronyms. I bet you threw away every book you ever read when you came to a word you didn't recognize.
Here's a hint for you: if you don't know the meaning of an acronym, and you can't be bothered to find out, move on to the next article! This story is not for you! If you find this happening a lot, it could be you don't have a sufficient vocabulary for participation in this forum. Don't feel bad, it just means you're average!
Here's another hint: acronyms are far more often constructed for the sake of having a clever acronym than ever for the purpose of making an idiot feel like an idiot. Seriously, when it comes to acronyms making one feel inferior, only the guilty are taking offense.
"ROM". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I find this just a bit ironic, laughing at him for not knowing the terminology, while having literally no conception of what his job is or what it entails.
Should the guy know what an ISP is? Yeah, sure. Maybe he's not competent because he doesn't know. But do you have any conception of what else his job involves? Do you know who else might have been sent to do it? Do you know who else is on the team, buttressing his weaknesses? Do you have even the faintest conception of what it even means to "negotiate cybersecurity with China"?
Government is a job, like any other job, in that it involves some highly specialized and specific requirements that look like irrelevant trivia to people not doing it. You're all programmers here, and I'm sure you get irritated when somebody dismisses some vastly complex task as a "simple matter of programming". It seems a little rich to be so unaware that the same goes for everybody else's job, even a "government job". The overwhelming majority of what you hear about "the government" is frank BS. I'd feel a lot safer if the voters took a bit more effort to understand what the government actually does and why. Hearing the same kind of Fox News-level anti-government propaganda from this supposedly-smarter echo chamber does not fill me with confidence. /dons asbestos undies
Politicians, judges, and other people in power are rarely young. So it stands to reason that they're "behind the times", though it is outrageous that they don't educate themselves on the issues and technologies they're supposed to oversee and negotiate about.
The simple fact of the matter is politicians are idiots who don't understand anything beyond getting bought off by lobbyists, screwing the public, and spinning things so they get elected again. I firmly believe that less than 10% of the politicians in the world are actually intelligent people out to do the best for society as a whole; I believe the other 90% are power-tripping freakazoids who don't understand anything more than "I want to be the boss."
Most of them would take a role as dictator in a heartbeat if they were given the chance.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's not THAT surprising. She is a lawyer and Law Schools tend to beat common sense out of people pretty much the way that firefighter training beats the survival instinct out of people. It's pretty common for a lawyer to insist that a plain English sentence which would not be misinterpreted by anyone (other than a lawyer) has multiple possible meanings. She asked to have a term defined... even though she probably heard it before and probably used it herself. But in an "official" conversation her lawyer training kicked in and she asked to have the term defined "exactly." Lawyers can be that way when they don't rise above their training to learn how to communicate effectively while remaining precise.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
first, you posted the wrong link...here's the proper link: http://www.networkworld.com/co...
2nd, You commit fatal false equivalence. These two things:
1. ALL REPUBLICANS in lockstep opposing ***any*** net neutrality policies
2. ONE legislator **writing a letter** that does nothing more than **ask** for **another agency** to consider regulating something
false equivalence all over...1 is way different than 2. 1 is a baseball bat to the head...the other is...
3rd, everyone who understands the issue agrees Net Neutrality is the right course....only corporations & their GOP sockpuppets oppose net neutrality. However, ***regulating Bitcoin is a debatable policy*** Many would want some kind of government resopnse. I'm not saying its a good idea, or that i agree with the letter.
1 is different than 2...your comparison is full of logical error, false equivalence, trolling, and willful ignorance
Thank you Dave Raggett
I totally agree with your post. Most likely the government official in the negotiations has a background in law and or policy and not information technology. Take an average Slashdot tech head and throw him into a court of law or political fish tank. You would get a fair share of snickers from the policy wonks as he/she would get lost in their daily language.
yeah, the thing you (attempted) to link to was **NOT WHAT YOU CLAIMED IT WAS**
it was a **false equivalence**
again...google searching to find a non-abusive law that a GOP'er co-sponsored does not, in any way, counter or disprove my point...for the same reason as above...
**false equivalence**
you're dead in the water...just accept that things are different than you thought & adapt...take pride of it...only if you refuse to change are you being prideful
Thank you Dave Raggett
From the Declaration of Independence "... But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security...."
The Founders did not establish a Democracy, and you will find nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, The US constitution or the Bill of Rights the word "democracy" as they were actually against it for they knew it leads to oligarchy, which we are much closer to today.
Those who might argue the the Declaration fo Independence is not law, they are correct. But what they may fail to understand is its more important and more powerful than law, as it is the spirit and intent of all valid and legitimate law in the US. And any law that violates this is not law any more than you can have a legal contract to murder someone. The job of a US judge is to deal with the exception of law that do not fit the spirit and intent of the founders as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
The founders in writing the Declaration of Independence fired all government personnel past present and future who violate the spirit and intent of the founders establishing this republic. Once informed of being fired any (people funded) government employee continuing in such position is committing and act of impersonating such an employee and stealing funds from the peoples funding of government.
Yes the government has been hijacked. And the Founders even gave real life examples written in the Declaration of Independence, that the spirit and intent of the founders would not be misconstrued.
The correction is simple, the taxpayers should be given voice where the individual taxes they pay they have say in how those taxes are to be used wile voting is a limited democratic supplement to the Republic in hiring who can best optimize the allocation budgeting of the people in generating team work benefits the people share in (the constraint of teamwork benefits is where taxpayers can chose). By chose the taxpayers can allocate all or some portion of their taxes to "decided by government - as a funding buffer" for which voters also influence the direction of such funding. The tax processors (who may be your neighbors) simple allocate funding as per taxpayers instructions.
Simple solution of putting control of the funding of government bank account in the hands of those it should be in, rather than the employees who have proven they cannot handle the bank account properly, and fail to budget while lying to the people in an illusion of being elected (approx 50% of the qualified voters did not vote this last election, making the "NO VOTE" the actual winner of the election. What ever government wants funding for they have to notify the taxpayers and request it.....meaning they have to be transparent!
The liars, cheats and warmongers who have hijacked the government do not like this solution. The Why should be obvious! These lazy have no real interest in the communication tools technology has provided for there scope of communication does not include the people, but just the few participating in the hijack. IOsolating oneself from the critical public for which you are supposed to work for is very telling of intent.
You know of an IQ Test that can measure corruptibility?
Nope, but there is a test that works rather well. Have them run for office. If they can't raise the necessary funds they're probably incorruptible.
Why do we care about the Supreme Court of the Useless Soviets?
If you're gonna type out an acronym, type out ALL of it.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
And they are generally the same judges. When a context changes, reinterpretation and upholding are in the eye of the beholder.