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Carly Fiorina: I Supplied HP Servers For NSA Snooping
MFingS writes: According to an article at Motherboard, shortly after 9/11, NSA director Michael Hayden requested extra computing power and Carly Fiorina, then CEO of HP, responded by re-routing truckloads of servers to the agency. Fiorina acknowledged providing the servers to the NSA during an interview with Michael Isikoff in which she defended warrantless surveillance (as well as waterboarding) and framed her collaboration with the NSA in patriotic terms. Fiorina's compliance with Hayden's request for HP servers is but one episode in a long-running and close relationship between the GOP presidential hopeful and U.S. intelligence agencies.
Being that the program was classified, they would have just ordered are large number of assets without telling her the reason for them. If I were HP and the NSA wanted to buy a large numbers of servers, I would sell the servers to them as well.
From the article
Fiorina said. “They were ramping up a whole set of programs and needed a lot of data crunching capability to try and monitor a whole set of threats... What I knew at the time was our nation had been attacked.”
The summary makes it sound like she purposely did it to screw over Americans. There's nothing to indicate that. The waterboarding issue is added on even though it is not related. This is a flame bait summary, and a misleading article. We really don't need articles on Slashdot that demonize people like this.
I would care so much more about Carly here if I believed that any of the candidates won't cooperate fully with the NSA. Heck, one of the very few things Obama actually promised as a candidate was to cut back on this sort of thing, and he reversed as soon as he was in office. Either the NSA has some good shit on everyone in power, and/or everyone in power values convenience over the interests of the people. Sorry, I wouldn't even believe Bernie or Rand Paul here. We've created a monster.
"Do not summon that you cannot dismiss" - H. P. Lovecraft
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I don't fault her for selling the servers to the NSA. That's the job of a CEO at a hardware company. I do not like her defense of warrantless wiretapping. It's obviously a violation of the Constitution and her attempts to justify it is a disrespect to that fine document and a free society. It bodes ill for a government with her as guardian of the Constitutional rights of US citizens.
It's the "involuntary" part that is wrong.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
"small government" is just a b.s. mantra to support reduced taxes and regulations. Its proponents generally advocate a big, intrusive government, so long as the haves can have and do whatever they want.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Maybe it's the country I grew up in, but anything "framed... in patriotic terms" is usually only ever a disguise for some of the worst atrocities and general scummy behaviour possible.
Be wary of people who are doing things "for their country" rather than, say, "for humanity", "for peace", etc.
My country is a geographic statistic of my birth. How that justifies criminal and/or amoral behaviour against those with a slightly different statistic, I've never quite fathomed.
Fuck, even "I did it because it looked like the right thing to do" holds a billion times more weight than any patriotic shit.
Patriotism is racism without mention of colour. "Not born here" syndrome.
disclaimer: I have a household member who's worked as an engineer at HP under Carly.
The unending wellspring of universal hatred for Carly as a leader from those who worked under her (especially at HP) is impressive, and remains constant even from people whose politics are somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan. She did what she was told, she laid waste to that not-so-micro economy, and she shows no regrets whatsoever -- for either the human or financial disaster in her wake. There's no surprise, then, to find she was unquestioningly supportive of what she perceives to be rungs above her on the ladder of power. Godwin's Law is entirely appropriate for examples of where this leads; don't mistake "comfortable sociopath" for "hawkish."
Carly is precisely the sort of person who should never be allowed to have power over others, or even a sharp knife at dinner: Total obedience and no discernible ethics at all.
I think not...(*poof*)
There are people in this country who want her to be president, and that scares me.
Skepticism is certainly warranted - however, far better to go with someone whose track record indicates that they could oppose mass surveillance, or take actions to roll it back. I would choose someone who might go back on their word later over someone who PROMISES to do the very thing I don't want them to.
That, and the fact that it's TORTURE, the sort of thing we prosecuted people for in the past as a war crime.
It's also completely useless for gathering information, because all you get is garbage - someone will tell you whatever they think you want to hear to make it stop, even making shit up. Jesse Ventura put it rather well when he said something on the lines of "Give me Dick Cheney strapped to a folding table and a pitcher of water, and in 5 minutes I'll get him to confess to the Manson Family murders."
The government calls up your company for a big order of you product, and you make it happen and get the product delivered, and now you're going to crucified for it?
Carly was a horrible CEO and I want to see her ripped to pieces by rabid monkeys and dance about on the incinerated remains of her entrails. But I'm having a hard time seeing how - as a businesswoman - delivering a product for money makes her somehow worse because she happened to sell to the NSA. I'll still hate/mistrust her for the moral support of the questionable practices of the spook community in the 00s, but not for selling stuff.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Tabulating machines were not computers. Nor were comptometers. There were analog computers before digital ones, but IBM didn't make them.
(stares at moron who fails to understand what a computer is)
I see.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The NSA and the rest of the police agencies are there to protect US CORPORATISM.
There, fixed that for you. Having government "protect" capitalism is kind of a contradiction in terms.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
What business success?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I would care so much more about Carly here if I believed that any of the candidates won't cooperate fully with the NSA. Heck, one of the very few things Obama actually promised as a candidate was to cut back on this sort of thing, and he reversed as soon as he was in office. Either the NSA has some good shit on everyone in power, and/or everyone in power values convenience over the interests of the people. Sorry, I wouldn't even believe Bernie or Rand Paul here. We've created a monster.
"Do not summon that you cannot dismiss" - H. P. Lovecraft
You don't even need a conspiracy to explain it:
NSA: I need to look at anyone's email I want without a warrant.
Obama: What? Absolutely not, that's a huge invasion of privacy I was elected to stop!!
NSA: Ok, if there's a significant attack on US soil we'll investigate afterwards and find an email that plausibly could have warned us. Someone will then leak this email to the media and everyone will know that if you didn't take away this power we begged you for there was a non-trivial chance we could have saved the tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people who died in that attack.
Obama: Snoop away!
I stole this Sig
I know the AnCaps hate to hear it, but you do actually need a government even to have a chance of making capitalism work. It's all very noble to talk about how using force is unethical, but the violent will laugh in your stupid face while they rob you blind. Without an official government - authorized, equipped, and publicly funded to commit violence - all that you'll get is an unofficial one built by the best warlord to rise up to pluck all you idiots busily making economic value that you can't protect. At that point you'll have a choice: produce for the warlord (keeping a fraction, if any, of the profit), fight for the warlord's army, or a shallow grave courtesy of that army. Your option to pay off the warlord will last until the amount you pay + the cost of just rolling over you becomes less than could be squeezed out of you at gunpoint. Don't bother pretending you can hire you own armed protection agency to protect you; that's just setting up your own warlord whose guns point at your back instead of at your face.
That's not even considering external threats, which of course do exist. You can't overhaul humanity as a whole. An invader doesn't care that they'll wreck your pretty little fairy-tale economy; they want your land, your natural resources, your skilled laborers who will work for them if the only other alternative is a taking a bullet, and your technology. You know what the easiest way to get somebody's trade secrets is? Point a gun at them and ask.
Any way you cut it, if you don't publicly set up a government to enforce the will of the populace and fund it through social contract that says it's OK to coerce payment (and you'll still have defectors even then), you're just going to get a tyrannical government run by whoever has the biggest / best-trained guns and/or the best ability to convince others to fight on their behalf (and believe me, people are always willing to do that). The odds are very strongly in favor of you being nearer the bottom of the new government - possibly a couple feet underground - than being anywhere near the top.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Undergraduate degrees don't mean squat. My specialty was medieval history too, and I've been doing IT for twenty years. You aren't defined by the rag you bought to check off the box to get a job while drinking too much and smoking too much pot. It's what you do with it.
I'm no fan of hers, but she did manage to become CEO of HP either by building on that education or in spite of it. That's more than 99% of people do with their "superior" STEM degrees.
She, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, are statistical anomalies.
LMAO.. you're on a help desk, aren't you. Do you know what formal methods are? IEEE 754? Amdahl's law? Do you even know what the fuck numerical analysis is about?
Let me tell ya son, it's okay to be butt-hurt, but don't show it in public.
that's communism. that's not what sanders stands for.
here is actually a range of economic systems in the world, thousands of them, of varying complexity. it's not just social darwinistic capitalism versus gulag and toilet paper lines communism. the problem is you're uneducated and you can only think in these ignorant simpleton cartoons. try looking at how the government of denmark, sweden, or norway works. or just canada. that's modern socialism. and they are richer, healthier, safer, freer, better educated, and happier than americans
american exceptionalism seems to be about thinking how you're better when everyone pities you. we do many things wrong, like our pathetic education funding and healthcare debacles, and we need to look to other countries who clearly do it better than us. but no: "america #1! drool, snort". american delusional derangement
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wonder how you know people could appropriately judge the effectiveness of torture centuries ago. People did, indeed, believe that torturing a witch to get a confession of witchcraft was effective, but hat doesn't mean there was actually a witch. Your argument fails because there's no way to show torture's continued use has anything to do with effectiveness over perceived effectiveness. Kind of like how it still is now.
A tier-1 vendor supplied servers to the NSA! OMG! We need to boycott that vendor!
Wait, what? Other Tier-1 vendors ALSO wanted to win the NSA procurement contract? We must boycott them also!
And you know what? I hear they have Coca-Cola machines at the NSA! I bet their employees drank countless caffeinated sodas from Coca-Cola as they were violating the civil rights of countless millions of Americsns - we need to boycott Coca-Cola as well!
You know what? I bet all the government cars in the NSA fleet come from GM - we need to boycott all GM cars for their support of warrantless wiretaps!
Wow, it's amazing how many corporations secretly support the NSA's warrantless wiretapping! /sarcasm
Ken
And it just happens to be among the most evil acts that human beings can commit, as it is not merely about killing somebody, it is about complete destruction of a person.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Jesse Ventura put it rather well when he said something on the lines of "Give me Dick Cheney strapped to a folding table and a pitcher of water, and in 5 minutes I'll get him to confess to the Manson Family murders."
I think Mr. Ventura would be better served by waterboarding Cheney until Cheney agrees that waterboarding is torture.
Once that's been accomplished, there are only two interpretations: either Cheney has finally admitted the truth, in which case we have established that waterboarding is torture and therefore illegal; or Cheney was lying in order to make the waterboarding stop, in which case we have established that waterboarding is ineffective as means of extracting truthful information.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
tl;dr version of the above essay: she is evil because she didn't totally demonize Islam.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it