"What? carrying out HumInt on people with extremist Islamic beliefs who have just been overseas training and where they're likely to see increased radicalisation and where they are likely to get their first taste of real actual blood is precisely the sort of thing internal security services should be doing."
And that's what *I* wrote. It doesn't matter where they go. What matters is what they do when they get there. Thoughts don't matter. Even "dangerous" thoughts, ideas, and discussions don't matter. Where people are from, or where they go, doesn't matter. It is what people DO that matters.
--
"The true test of whether people believe in the idea of freedom of association doesn't come when you allow people to be free to associate in ways that you think they should. It comes when you allow people to be free to associate in ways that you find despicable." -- Walter Williams
"But then what do to about those who would WANT the insurance data released and are willing and able to kill him? That's the other side of that coin. That's what the GP was referring to."
But who would that be?
The Russians? In order to show how the U.S. has been spying on them? But wait... maybe those documents actually show how the CIA and FSB have been cooperating to spy on politicians!
Just hypothetically. But you can pick just about any country and use the same argument.
I find it highly amusing that somebody modded the above comment "flamebait". I wonder who or what I'm supposed to be baiting or flaming. I honestly have no idea.
"He has also explicitly stated that he is not holding back anything for "insurance" since that would be an invitation to others to kill him to reveal these documents."
Depending on how you look at it, that's either silly or dumb.
The way "insurance" is supposed to work, is that you distribute the information to a number of other people, usually encrypted. Then you rig a kind of "dead man switch" so that the encryption key is revealed upon your death.
There are other methods, but that's the basic idea: to make it so that killing you would be against the interests of those who would otherwise want to kill you.
"If that's the case, then there is an obvious argument to be made that he is NOT working in the public's interest. If he were, he should have shared 'the good stuff' first."
That doesn't necessarily follow. It could be that what is held back are things that are damaging to the government, but not in the public interest to reveal. For example, he could be holding information about spy operations in Beijing that if known would harm U.S. intelligence operations but not benefit Americans in any significant way. (Just a hypothetical example.)
There is another thing that bothers me about OP's question, though:
"If... you were Holder and Obama, what sort of deal would you try to strike with everybody's favorite secrets-leaker?"
The problem with that idea is that I would never be Holder or Obama. I would never voluntarily do the things they have done. Hell, even at gunpoint I probably wouldn't do some of the things they have done.
"It all depends if you consider him a whistleblower or not. Whistleblowers are supposed to be protected."
There. Fixed that for you.
While we do have whistleblower laws, the laws the government has been trying to apply pertain to spies, not whistleblowers. Which means we either need to revamp our spying laws (likely), or revamp our whistleblower laws (also likely).
As an example of what is libel and what isn't, consider a rather famous case from the 17th Century. Back in those days, innkeepers typically brewed their own beer.
According to the documents, a visitor to a popular inn complained loudly in front of the other patrons: "My horse can Pisse better beer than you serve here!"
The innkeeper sued the customer for slander (libel, except that it is spoken). The judge's ruling said that the visitor was not guilty of slander, because the customer had not defamed the bartender at all. He had merely complimented his horse.
"Accusing someone of being a child molester is OK, but you can't call someone a liar. Can you call the person who called you a child molester a liar?"
Huh? Where did this come from? What is it supposed to mean?
Wait. I see. Steyn "comparing" Mann to Sandusky. Which he really didn't do. What he did was repeat a comment that had been made by someone else about Mann:
"He has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet."
So Steyn didn't actually compare him to Sandusky, or call him a child molester. He repeated someone else's comment, which was kind of a parody of the Sandusky affair.
Because it IS a kind of parody, in my opinion Mann has no chance at all of convincing a judge that he was actually "compared to a child" molester. Instead he was accused of molesting important data.
The problem is that because Mann is a public figure he has to show actual malice to win his case.
But re: the tongue-in-cheek reference to Sandusky, keep in mind that libel is pretty specific.
I am fairly familiar with the situation, though I don't claim to be an expert.
Remember that it is one thing to overtake an area. It is quite another to keep it. (Something the U.S. should have kept in mind, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.) Germany was spread pretty damned thin.
I'm not sure that's true. There are three factors. Of which I am aware, that is... IANAL. And of course I'm talking about U.S. Libel laws are different in UK.
[1] The statement must be of a defamatory nature (likely to cause others to have a lower opinion of the subject or otherwise damaging, as to professional reputation for example). [2] It must be untrue, and [3] the person stating it must know, or reasonably should know, that it is not true.
I could be wrong, but I don't think intent per se is a requirement. For example, someone could write something damaging about someone else, genuinely believing it to be true, but if they reasonably should have known it was not true, then they can still be guilty of libel. So it's possible to run afoul of the law without intending to tell lies about somebody.
Well, religion or not, one thing it should do is reinforce the principle that you should be careful what you say about people, even online, and regardless of whether you are a journalist. In most cases the libel laws are no different for Joe Shmoe than they are or a syndicated columnist.
Generally, opinions are fine... as long as they're clearly opinion and not stated as fact. Because even "You're an asshole" is commonly accepted as an opinion, that's probably okay... especially if you make it clear that it's only opinion.
But "fraud", and other such claims? Usually over the line, unless you can show that it's true.
"Entire campaign was adventurous from the very beginning, yet they were not far from succeeding."
Probably not true. Adventurous, yes. But succeeding? No. Not toward the end.
Yes, they kept advancing. Yes, they were coming close to making more major victories. BUT... they were shy of resources, they were fighting on 3 fronts, their supply lines were weakening, and their effort was simply no longer sustainable. Despite their "successes" on paper, they were actually losing the war in a practical sense, for some time, before their actual surrender.
"Yeah, what was the total call load then? Now compare that to the number of servers which make up google, and how many requests each serves per second or whatever unit of time you like best. You just can't manage that many machines without automation, not if you want them to behave as one."
If you had enough people you could. I already stated that it would be more error-prone. And obviously at some point you would run out of enough people to field requests for other people. But the basic principle is sound... it DID work.
" But later, Russian fighters were later designed with the idea that they would be simpler to build and fix. The combat strategy was that they would overwhelm Western air forces in battle by sheer numbers."
Yes, this is true but beside the point. Much of the Russian military equipment was intentionally designed to be lower-tech but cheaper to build and replace. I realize this was a strategic decision, but it doesn't change the fact.
And yes, I almost abandoned my reply when the MiG-29 occurred to me. Instead I modified it to say "seldom".
My main point was, though: the Soviets were prone to make lofty claims about their equipment that often did not pan out in the real world. That may have been a strategic decision, too... but again, it doesn't change the fact.
"Correction. It has been shown that in case of up to t errors, it can be solved with 3t+1 Generals/nodes/CPUs/whatever."
No, that's the situation in which messages can be forged or corrupted.
I was referring to the later solution using cryptographically secure signatures. This means messages (hypothetically) aren't forgeable and allow corrupted messages to be detected. A solution can be found with 3 generals, as long as only one is "disloyal" (fails) at a time.
The 1/3 failures at any given time is a reasonable restriction, since a general solution for 2/3 or more failing at the same time does not exist.
"Those automated systems enable a small number of human beings to administer a large number of servers in a consistent, sanity-checked, and monitored manner. If Google didn't have those automated systems..."
"Those automated systems" and "a consistent, sanity-checked, monitored manner" are statements about the general case. "Those" and "consistent" denote plurality.
"See, this particular case wouldn't exist at all without such automated systems..."
That was part of MY point.
I disagree that they would not exist. Although it's true they might be less problematic this way. Remember that every phone call in the United States used to go through switchboards with human-operated patch panels. It might be primitive, and it might be error-prone, but it did work. Most of the time.
No. The point was that it was an automatic system that caused the problem in the first place. If an automatic system hadn't caused THIS PARTICULAR problem, then an automated system to fix it would not have been necessary.
It's more like saying, "If Lupus *didn't* exist, I wouldn't need an immune system."
While this doesn't directly bear on your results, I've been saying for quite a while that there aren't nearly enough Tor exit nodes running at any given time. 1000 seems pretty ridiculously low. I think 10 x or 100 x the current number would be far better.
While "security through obscurity" is not ideal, isn't this the main purpose of Tor? To serve the purposes of anonymity and security, by burying any signal in a vast sea of noise?
What surprises me is the implication that this is something new. The Soviet jets seldom if ever met the specs of similar Western planes, and pretty much never met the claims made for them.
The abstract gives power & amperage figures per cm^2. But since both are "per cm^2" (same units), just divide to get volts. See above.
It seems rather low... on the order of 0.13V. But if the cells themselves are not of heavy construction, nothing says you can't make stacks of cells in series.
Slashdot Mirror
"What? carrying out HumInt on people with extremist Islamic beliefs who have just been overseas training and where they're likely to see increased radicalisation and where they are likely to get their first taste of real actual blood is precisely the sort of thing internal security services should be doing."
And that's what *I* wrote. It doesn't matter where they go. What matters is what they do when they get there. Thoughts don't matter. Even "dangerous" thoughts, ideas, and discussions don't matter. Where people are from, or where they go, doesn't matter. It is what people DO that matters.
--
"The true test of whether people believe in the idea of freedom of association doesn't come when you allow people to be free to associate in ways that you think they should. It comes when you allow people to be free to associate in ways that you find despicable." -- Walter Williams
"But then what do to about those who would WANT the insurance data released and are willing and able to kill him? That's the other side of that coin. That's what the GP was referring to."
But who would that be?
The Russians? In order to show how the U.S. has been spying on them? But wait... maybe those documents actually show how the CIA and FSB have been cooperating to spy on politicians!
Just hypothetically. But you can pick just about any country and use the same argument.
I find it highly amusing that somebody modded the above comment "flamebait". I wonder who or what I'm supposed to be baiting or flaming. I honestly have no idea.
"So if we had a whistleblower revealing corrupt Department of Agriculture activity, perhaps they'd be protected."
Probably not. Because then the government could claim a National Security "threat" to our farming infrastructure. Which was part of my point.
"But Snowden's situation was very carefully NOT protected by the new "stronger" whistleblower laws."
Which means we need to revamp those laws again. Which was part of my point.
"He has also explicitly stated that he is not holding back anything for "insurance" since that would be an invitation to others to kill him to reveal these documents."
Depending on how you look at it, that's either silly or dumb.
The way "insurance" is supposed to work, is that you distribute the information to a number of other people, usually encrypted. Then you rig a kind of "dead man switch" so that the encryption key is revealed upon your death.
There are other methods, but that's the basic idea: to make it so that killing you would be against the interests of those who would otherwise want to kill you.
" so who cares ?"
Apparently the person to whom I was replying does.
"If that's the case, then there is an obvious argument to be made that he is NOT working in the public's interest. If he were, he should have shared 'the good stuff' first."
That doesn't necessarily follow. It could be that what is held back are things that are damaging to the government, but not in the public interest to reveal. For example, he could be holding information about spy operations in Beijing that if known would harm U.S. intelligence operations but not benefit Americans in any significant way. (Just a hypothetical example.)
There is another thing that bothers me about OP's question, though:
"If ... you were Holder and Obama, what sort of deal would you try to strike with everybody's favorite secrets-leaker?"
The problem with that idea is that I would never be Holder or Obama. I would never voluntarily do the things they have done. Hell, even at gunpoint I probably wouldn't do some of the things they have done.
"It all depends if you consider him a whistleblower or not. Whistleblowers are supposed to be protected."
There. Fixed that for you.
While we do have whistleblower laws, the laws the government has been trying to apply pertain to spies, not whistleblowers. Which means we either need to revamp our spying laws (likely), or revamp our whistleblower laws (also likely).
"Snowden has repeatedly stated that he gave everything he has to the journalists and he no longer has the material."
Unless I am mistaken, he has also repeatedly stated that he has many more documents he has been holding back "for insurance".
It is possible I got mixed up, and he turned over that "insurance" in his last batch of revelations, but I thought not.
"And so was burning of witches. But we got better. "
Well, it seems that some of us did.
Oops. I was cut off in mid-reply.
As an example of what is libel and what isn't, consider a rather famous case from the 17th Century. Back in those days, innkeepers typically brewed their own beer.
According to the documents, a visitor to a popular inn complained loudly in front of the other patrons: "My horse can Pisse better beer than you serve here!"
The innkeeper sued the customer for slander (libel, except that it is spoken). The judge's ruling said that the visitor was not guilty of slander, because the customer had not defamed the bartender at all. He had merely complimented his horse.
"Accusing someone of being a child molester is OK, but you can't call someone a liar. Can you call the person who called you a child molester a liar?"
Huh? Where did this come from? What is it supposed to mean?
Wait. I see. Steyn "comparing" Mann to Sandusky. Which he really didn't do. What he did was repeat a comment that had been made by someone else about Mann:
"He has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet."
So Steyn didn't actually compare him to Sandusky, or call him a child molester. He repeated someone else's comment, which was kind of a parody of the Sandusky affair.
Because it IS a kind of parody, in my opinion Mann has no chance at all of convincing a judge that he was actually "compared to a child" molester. Instead he was accused of molesting important data.
The problem is that because Mann is a public figure he has to show actual malice to win his case.
But re: the tongue-in-cheek reference to Sandusky, keep in mind that libel is pretty specific.
I am fairly familiar with the situation, though I don't claim to be an expert.
Remember that it is one thing to overtake an area. It is quite another to keep it. (Something the U.S. should have kept in mind, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.) Germany was spread pretty damned thin.
I'm not sure that's true. There are three factors. Of which I am aware, that is... IANAL. And of course I'm talking about U.S. Libel laws are different in UK.
[1] The statement must be of a defamatory nature (likely to cause others to have a lower opinion of the subject or otherwise damaging, as to professional reputation for example). [2] It must be untrue, and [3] the person stating it must know, or reasonably should know, that it is not true.
I could be wrong, but I don't think intent per se is a requirement. For example, someone could write something damaging about someone else, genuinely believing it to be true, but if they reasonably should have known it was not true, then they can still be guilty of libel. So it's possible to run afoul of the law without intending to tell lies about somebody.
"There are certain places in the world that if you go you should be setting off alarm bells."
I see. Guilt by association is now okay? That's news to me.
I don't give the slightest damn where people go. It's what they do when they get there that matters.
While it might not be like an "iron curtain", per se, it certainly IS like a dictatorial police state.
"That should teach others to defile our religion"
Haha!
Well, religion or not, one thing it should do is reinforce the principle that you should be careful what you say about people, even online, and regardless of whether you are a journalist. In most cases the libel laws are no different for Joe Shmoe than they are or a syndicated columnist.
Generally, opinions are fine... as long as they're clearly opinion and not stated as fact. Because even "You're an asshole" is commonly accepted as an opinion, that's probably okay... especially if you make it clear that it's only opinion.
But "fraud", and other such claims? Usually over the line, unless you can show that it's true.
"Entire campaign was adventurous from the very beginning, yet they were not far from succeeding."
Probably not true. Adventurous, yes. But succeeding? No. Not toward the end.
Yes, they kept advancing. Yes, they were coming close to making more major victories. BUT... they were shy of resources, they were fighting on 3 fronts, their supply lines were weakening, and their effort was simply no longer sustainable. Despite their "successes" on paper, they were actually losing the war in a practical sense, for some time, before their actual surrender.
"Yeah, what was the total call load then? Now compare that to the number of servers which make up google, and how many requests each serves per second or whatever unit of time you like best. You just can't manage that many machines without automation, not if you want them to behave as one."
If you had enough people you could. I already stated that it would be more error-prone. And obviously at some point you would run out of enough people to field requests for other people. But the basic principle is sound... it DID work.
" But later, Russian fighters were later designed with the idea that they would be simpler to build and fix. The combat strategy was that they would overwhelm Western air forces in battle by sheer numbers."
Yes, this is true but beside the point. Much of the Russian military equipment was intentionally designed to be lower-tech but cheaper to build and replace. I realize this was a strategic decision, but it doesn't change the fact.
And yes, I almost abandoned my reply when the MiG-29 occurred to me. Instead I modified it to say "seldom".
My main point was, though: the Soviets were prone to make lofty claims about their equipment that often did not pan out in the real world. That may have been a strategic decision, too... but again, it doesn't change the fact.
"Correction. It has been shown that in case of up to t errors, it can be solved with 3t+1 Generals/nodes/CPUs/whatever."
No, that's the situation in which messages can be forged or corrupted.
I was referring to the later solution using cryptographically secure signatures. This means messages (hypothetically) aren't forgeable and allow corrupted messages to be detected. A solution can be found with 3 generals, as long as only one is "disloyal" (fails) at a time.
The 1/3 failures at any given time is a reasonable restriction, since a general solution for 2/3 or more failing at the same time does not exist.
"Neither was the responding commenter."
Yes, he/she was:
"Those automated systems enable a small number of human beings to administer a large number of servers in a consistent, sanity-checked, and monitored manner. If Google didn't have those automated systems..."
"Those automated systems" and "a consistent, sanity-checked, monitored manner" are statements about the general case. "Those" and "consistent" denote plurality.
"See, this particular case wouldn't exist at all without such automated systems..."
That was part of MY point.
I disagree that they would not exist. Although it's true they might be less problematic this way. Remember that every phone call in the United States used to go through switchboards with human-operated patch panels. It might be primitive, and it might be error-prone, but it did work. Most of the time.
Whoosh.
No. The point was that it was an automatic system that caused the problem in the first place. If an automatic system hadn't caused THIS PARTICULAR problem, then an automated system to fix it would not have been necessary.
It's more like saying, "If Lupus *didn't* exist, I wouldn't need an immune system."
While this doesn't directly bear on your results, I've been saying for quite a while that there aren't nearly enough Tor exit nodes running at any given time. 1000 seems pretty ridiculously low. I think 10 x or 100 x the current number would be far better.
While "security through obscurity" is not ideal, isn't this the main purpose of Tor? To serve the purposes of anonymity and security, by burying any signal in a vast sea of noise?
Your thoughts?
What surprises me is the implication that this is something new. The Soviet jets seldom if ever met the specs of similar Western planes, and pretty much never met the claims made for them.
The abstract gives power & amperage figures per cm^2. But since both are "per cm^2" (same units), just divide to get volts. See above.
It seems rather low... on the order of 0.13V. But if the cells themselves are not of heavy construction, nothing says you can't make stacks of cells in series.