The whole 'box cutter' thing is a scam. There might have been some of them, but it's just as likely that they used traditional knifes. The airlines just promoted 'box cutters' because they wanted it to look like a failure of imagination rather than the actual failure, a failure of security. It's just as likely that real, perfectly normal knifes were smuggled onto the plane and used.
The above, incidentally, is true, although this post is obviously a joke as the GP was probably actually disputing that it was 'Arabs', not that they used 'stanley knives'.
I know what fascism is, I'm using it the way it was originally used by Mussolini, where there is almost no distinction between businesses and governments, but, unlike communism, the partnership is used to funnel huge amounts of money to corporations. It's basically the opposite of communism, instead of the government controlling the means of production, corporations control the means of governance.
You're apparently using it to mean 'totalitarian' or 'authoritative', which is just silly, we already have words for that. Those can be anything from a dictatorship to communism to fascism. All those are non-democratic, all of them differ as to who is in charge and what their goals are. (And all those 'goals' take second place to 'protecting the regimen'.)
And the term 'Islamofascism' is just a silly name. Islamism has almost none of the traits of fascism. It is also anti-democratic, so it's authoritative, but it's theocratic authoritative.
I've been wondering that myself. I mean, it would be a losing battle, but no one even seems to be trying. No shootings, no attacks on telecom property, nothing.
It really is starting to look like the rights' constant claim that 'We need guns to keep the government in line' was just a lot of hot air.
Did you not read what I said? You're assuming I'm making the common assertion that people couldn't fight off the government, when I made no such claim. (Although I also happen to believe that is true.)
What I asserted is that point will never be reached. That is not a step between here and fascism.
Oh, of course, if you actually start a gun battle with the government, you're going to lose.
I was just pointing out that isn't how it works. It doesn't matter how clever you think you are, how well-defended and armed you are...as the government will not attack you in the first place like that.
And if you attack first, the guy you're going to kill will be a local cop who's serving a perfectly legal eviction notice and has a wife and small child at home, and if you're not taken down by the resulting gun battle you'll fry, and no one will give a shit when you do.
The idea that we'd have troops marching in the streets that need fighting off is just sheer lunacy. No, we'll end up in a society where no one speaks out. When they do, they need up 'investigated' and spending all their money to defend themselves and losing their job and then their house even if they're found innocent. They'll eventually pull themselves back up working some minimum wage job, but won't ever make that mistake again.
Taking a gun to a fight against fascism is akin to taking one to a fight against a flash flood.
Have fun in your little made-up universe where the government comes to round you up and you manage to fight it off.
In the real world, fascism is when the corporations and governments work as a single entity, and you can wander around with your fucking gun all you want. In fact, you'll have to wander around, because the government/corporations took your house and your car, and no one will hire you.
At which point you'll be arrested, not as some big anti-government hero by jackboot thugs, but for stealing bread to live on, by a perfectly normal cop who's just doing his job, a job that absolutely no one except you disagrees with, so when you shoot and kill him you're getting the electric chair and no one thinks you're a hero at all.
There are different types of totalitarian governments, and assuming a fascist one operates like a communist one is faulty. Fascist governments don't put troops in the streets...they work with corporations to make sure 'the wrong sort of people' do not have any economic power, and do not have anywhere to peddle their ideas.
Modern fascist states don't even bother to kill those people, and pretending they're going to show up in some stormtrooper outfit and start a gun battle with you is insane. They'll show up with a court order to evict you from your home because you failed to pay your mortgage, because pressure came from the top at your company to let you go. Or they'll just sue you and ruin your finances.
America is not a bunch of tiny castles where, as long as you can hold off the invading armies, you will be fine. The idea that that is how the world works is astonishingly naive. Almost all the population of America lives in housing they do not fully own, they get food from places they do not control like the supermarket, they require operating in society for money to obtain said food and shelter, a society where economics are controlled by some very large players that can crush them like bugs.
And a fascist state isn't going to 'assume control', you asshat. There's not going to some insane coup, there's a going to be a slow change, which has, in fact, already happened, or have you not looked at the telecom immunity stuff? That's classic fascism. The government breaks the law, the government gets private companies to break the law, the government gives said companies huge amounts of cash, the government attempts to make such behavior legal retroactively. We've got government officials and AT&T officers leaping back and forth between each other in an incestuous loop. Your government spying on you, sponsored by AT&T. It's not 'totalitarian' yet, as evidenced by the fact Democrats managed to stop the immunity, but it is fascism, at least the start of it. (And the same thing's happened with Blackwater.)
Oh, and before you start ranting about gun control some more, be forewarned I'm against it. I'm just not stupid enough to think that the US government being slowly corrupted by business is something that can be fought off with gunpowder. Guns are useful to deter crime and to deter invasion. They aren't useful against a corrupt government in any meaningful way.
That logic works for actual deliberate actions of a committee.
But this was an accident. It's not like the Democrats voted for it and the Republicans against it.
A much more logical headline would have been that the House Judiciary Committee, or even 'The Democratic-lead House Judiciary Committee', published the addresses. An even more accurate one would have been that a staffer of the House Judiciary Committee did it, because I can assure people 'Committees' do not send email. (All in favor of pushing the send button, say 'Aye'.)
But 'US Democrats' is totally misleading. Neither the Democrats or the Republicans did this. Possibly one of them is at fault, more than likely some HJC staffer is at fault. (IIRC, Committees have staff that's independent of any of their members for exactly this sort of activity, but I could be wrong.)
Although I wouldn't have really said anything about the headline if we hadn't had the assertation that, 'had the Republicans done it, blah blah blah'. The idea that the Republicans would have taken more heat for this just annoyed me when the Democrats are taking the heat right now with absolutely no grounds.
That said, I do blame the HJC for not having more privacy safeguards in place, when they are explicitly looking at 'retribution' in the Justice Department. And I mostly blame the Democrats because I expect the Republicans to be irresponsible. But they aren't the ones who screwed up, they just failed to put safeguards in place to stop screw ups.
Actually, might I suggest that email is a damn stupid communications medium in the first place to use for whistle blowing? Especially when it's not anonymous? (They aren't listening to anonymous people in this investigation.)
Cite a reliable source for that number. I think you'll find that the majority of the US wish it was over, and quickly, but aren't such fools as to think that just packing up and leaving is actually in anyone's interests, excepts Iran's.
Yes, if you define 'We want them to leave now' in the stupidest possible terms, and then assert 'We can't leave quickly' as actually meaning 'We shouldn't start leaving now.'.
In actuality, most of the American people want us out. This means withdrawal ends a few months from now, and it starts now, now whatever stupid-ass interpretation you've decided to give it. I don't know where the first poster got '70%', but here's CNN six months ago with 60% wanting to leave now or within a year. It's only gone up.
By the way, do YOU know where all of that VX went? No one else does, either.
There's no evidence that Iraq has ever had VX gas. They researched it post Gulf War, but there's no evidence they weaponized it at any point, or produced any amount of it. Meanwhile, we didn't discover any weapons labs, or any precursors, or anything. It's amazing how Saddam managed to keep all that hidden. (Instead of, oh, using it at any point in time on the invading army.)
But I like the theory that the pro-war people are so desperate to be proven right that their argument is 'We fucked the invasion up so much we didn't actually capture the WMDs, and God only knows where they are now.'.
It's better for Saddam to have VX than some completely random person we don't know anything about. You may think the claim that Iraq had WMDs but they managed to get misplaced somehow justifies an invasion, but what it really would justify is impeachment of the entire administration for gross incompetence and endangering this country by creating loose chemical weapons.
Especially as the people defending the war also apparently think the insurgents fighting for control of their country have the same motives and desires as the 9/11 terrorists. Let's hope none of them stumble across a box marked 'VX gas'.
Thank God you people are actually just delusional on both counts and we don't have a bunch of loose WMDs bouncing around in a country filled with people are willing to come over here and attack us, because, frankly, causing that would have been crossing the line from 'gross incompetence' to 'treason'.
I think you're underestimating the bureaucracy in the legislature. Committees and staff for those committees continue to exist year after year, with the same staffers and mostly the same congressentities.
You seem to have missed the fact that 'Democrats' was actually added by the submitter. The 'House Judiciary Committee' is one that sent the email, which, last I checked, has Democrats and Republican on it.
So, ironically, you're complaining about how it would have been treated different had the Republicans did it and Slashdot is biased against Democrats, when actually an unknown party did it and Slashdot blamed Democrats. (Or, at least, the submitter did.)
Even if we find out that a Republican sent the email, though, it was still probably an accident. If they want a 'mole' looking for whistleblowers, they have it in the congressentities on the committee, they don't need to blatantly email the list to everyone.
DailyKos is not a technology site, and the person who posted this diary doesn't understand that all Verisign normally gets is the signing request. (I'll probably post something like this there also.) They don't have your private key, they can't decode your communications.
What they could do is intercept it and man-in-the-middle it. With Verisign's help, they can trivially make a key that works in every browser. (And buying a non-verisign key won't help...end users will just be handed a 'legit' verisign one and don't know that server has a different one.)
I urge everyone with an SSL server to post the MD5 and SHA1 fingerprints of their public key, or even their entire public key, on their site and I urge people to occasionally check them against what their browser reports. Sadly, Firefox, at least, doesn't seem to actually report the public key in any usable format, and I can't see how to get the MD5 and SHA1 fingerprints from the key using openssl. If anyone has a set of step-by-step instructions, that tell exactly what to put up and how to instruct end users to check it, that would be nice to link to.
And if you have an SSL server and a Linux shell somewhere else, and run 'openssl s_client -connect example.com:443' from both the server and that other place to make sure the 'BEGIN CERTIFICATE' part matches.
I seriously doubt the NSA is doing this, but it should be easy enough to notice if it is.
And, speaking of 'occasionally checking', it would be nice if there was some Firefox extension to inform you that the encryption key had changed, and what the old and new key were. If the old key wasn't due to expire, and the new key has the same date as the old, it probably means someone is running a man-in-the-middle attack. They'd keep the dates the same, along with all the other info, to make it harder to notice, whereas while someone could buy a new key in advance, they wouldn't get one with the same date as the old.
Encrypted, hidden data can be added to MP3s, MPEG4s, PDFs, scans, executables, random leftover noise on the disk. It can be hidden on microSD cards, printed on paper, and hidden on DVDs.
See, right there I'm with Bruce. Why would you put steganography tools on microSD cards?
Why not put the data encrypted on the card, and then hide the card? Doesn't that seem to make a lot more sense?
I mean, those things can hold a lot now, a good deal more than you could reasonable hide via steganography.
If you're smart, you'll just up and install the encryption tools like Truecrypt, but have a porn partition or even a tiny file with credit card and personal information, a 'legitimate' use for the program.
And, yes, I know people are talking about hidden communication channels, for, for example, spies, not storage, but, frankly, that's idiotic.
Any large data is going to be transfered in person via encrypted flash drives. A flash drive is a lot easier to dead-drop than a DVD-R. They have ones thin enough that they can fit inside library books or pass as change, and ones sturdy enough that they can stay outside for a week in mud. Anyone who thinks the 'secret plans' are traveling via the internet is confused. (Well, not at the start of the trip. Once they end up at the embassy or whatever the data obviously can be openly strong-encrypted and openly transfered however the hell they want.)
And any tiny data can be communicated via public signals. Which, incidentally, is a kind of steganography. Spies already have all that worked out. For example, if you ever wear the red tie with the brown suit it means your cover is blown and you need immediate pickup, stuff like that.
I don't doubt technology plays a role in this, but I doubt 'encryption' or 'steganography' does, as tools like that are, as you pointed out, dangerous. I suspect it's more stuff like 'If anyone ever anonymously replies to a slashdot post of yours using this specific subject, check dead-drop #3 that evening'. Call it 'manual steganography', where you go around looking for clues that everyone else can see but no one else knows what to look for.
Uh, how is that a right of privacy? That electronic surveillance can only be used when it is backed up by a statute doesn't mean that it can't be used, and doesn't mean that other means of surveillance can't be used.
Perhaps you have forgotten the point of this discussion, so I will remind you. I quote:
It could be (and obviously is) argued that there is a fundamental right to privacy that implies that the government should be unable to attempt to obtain any non-public information about us without meeting the standard of probable cause -- but that does not seem to be addressed by the 4th amendment. All it would take would be a law passed by Congress to establish that prohibition.
I pointed out that FISA, which is 'a law passed by congress', established that prohibition, but, as you have no idea what FISA is, or apparently, what anything is, we've had about ten inane posts about it.
The Congress has the power to create by law military organizations and agencies, and to provide them with basic regulations, but any laws they pass which impede on the President's constitutional power to actually use those agencies to conduct national security operations are unconstitutional.
When did the president get put in charge of national security? Congress is in charge of defending the nation, which is the closest thing to 'national security' I can find in the constitution.
That's the second time you've just made up a term and decided it was a presidential power, the first being 'waging war'. STOP IT.
By what stretch of the imagination are "the military" and agencies "provided for the common defense" separate concepts?
Um, in the 'constitutional' stretch of the imagination?
However, you're right, except backwards. Congress is actually in charge of creating rules and regulations for both any executive civilian agency it chooses to let exist, and the military if it chooses to let that exist.
At any level, which means, in theory, it could actually issue orders to troops in the field. This is obviously stupid, the intent of the constitution is that the President is told what to do with the military and civilian agencies, within what boundaries, and he does it.
Now, traditionally, he's given looser play over the military, because micromanaging a military is stupid, part of the concept of the chain of the command is that, at each level downward, orders should become more specific, from 'invade that country' at the top to 'set up that mortar right here and attack those guys over there with it' at the bottom.
Where you have become confused is to think that 'commander-in-chief' means 'absolute boss'. A commander-in-chief is merely the highest 'military rank' possible. It does not mean that no one can control that person, it means that is where the military ends. We end it at a civilian, which is slightly confusing, but we did that way on purpose because what that actually means is that no one else can give them military orders because no one else is at any point above them within the chain of command, not that no one can make the top civilian follow civilian laws and regulations. (Including those that control what orders he can give the military.)
It is like being Secretary of State...that's where the State Department ends. Anything above that is not the State Department. That doesn't mean there's nothing above it or that the State Department has no controls besides that person.
Aside from the fact that the president runs ALL the executive agencies established by Congress, and that is the meaning of "faithfully executing the law", the NSA IS part of the Department of Defense, and in fact must, by law, be directed by a lieutenant general or vice admiral.
The NSA is entirely a civilian organization. It is lead by a military officer in a civilian capacity. Pretending and wishing otherwise doesn't make it so.
Can you not actually read or something? Congress and the president are jointly in charge of providing the common defense. Their respective roles in this are enumerated in a document called the Constitution of the United States of America.
Perhaps you would like to list where the president's role in providing for defense is in the Constitution. All I see is that he is commander-in-chief of a military that may or may not exist on Congressional whim.
Yes. You seem to do fine when you actually quote the document. The problem seems to be in reading comprehension
Whereas you, of course, don't seem to be quoting any of the document at all. Odd, that.
The court system is involved when a civil law suit or a criminal prosecution is filed. These are the "cases and controversies" which the Constitution gives them power over. It doesn't by any stretch of the imagination give them power over deciding what country to invade or what country to spy on.
No, and no one's saying the court system should be doing that.
What the Judicial branch is doing is enforcing the rules and regulations that Congress has created for the military. I'm otherwise confused as to who you think is in charge of said rules. Yes, there are specific inferior courts for them, created by Congress, (Exactly like all other Federal inferior courts.), under the UCMJ, but those courts answer to the Supreme Court.
Since the beginning of history, waging war has involved spying on the enemy. To argue that these are unrelated activities is asinine. To argue that spying on our enemies is related to some OTHER function of government besides the waging of war is similarly asinine.
The president is not in charge of waging war. You can't just make up terms and say the president is in charge of them.
The president is in charge of the day-to-day running of the military. You can argue that makes him de facto in charge of intelligence conducted by the military, assuming that Congress has not passed any rules or regulations otherwise, which is a reasonable position. He's in charge of all the behavior of the military barring rules and regulations to the contrary, and that presumably includes all the normal functions of the military.
Sadly for your point, neither the CIA or NSA are even part of the military in the first place, so that point falls rather short of where you were trying to land it. And they aren't 'not part' in just some technical sense. They are not under military chain-of-command, they are not under UCMJ, they are not treated as member of the military under any treaties.
The military intelligence agency is the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. (And some other things, like ONI and MCIA and other branch organizations. And now MIP.) It's easy to tell the difference...the DIA and other military operations are headed by generals and other officers that report to other generals and the Joint Chiefs, the CIA is headed by a civilian. The NSA is, weirdly, headed by a military officer by law, but that's simply a law as opposed to being part of the traditional military chain of command, they don't report to the Joint Chiefs, and the Deputy Director is always a civilian, as is almost everyone in the organization.
This is how we can help you to aquire thinking skills of your own. It stands for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Yes, because that's a useful way to know what laws do, look at the title of them and guess. Here is the actual statute from FISA:
Title 50, ch 36 subchapter I 1809) A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally--
(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or
Look, it's what you argued didn't exist! FISA create a 'right to privacy' under the law, although not using those words, and requires all wiretapping 'under color of law' (Aka, as part of the operation of the government) to be authorized by statute.
While you can yammer about how the 4th amendment doesn't say what all courts have said it says, that's really rather irrelevant. The government cannot listen to communication of private individuals, by law, regardless of to any constitutional claims. A law must explicitly be passed allowing such listening.
So, when you say that 'Not being wiretapped is not a constitutional right, although Congress could pass a law creating privacy for such communications' and I twice pointed out that FISA does exactly that, you didn't even bother to look it up to see if that might have some basis in fact, thus demonstrating you're not just misinformed, you're willingly misinformed about this issue.
In other words, you didn't actually listen to the right-wing talking points well enough. The claim on the right has to be that the executive branch has some constitutional right to wiretap, not that people don't have a right not to be wiretapped. That last concept was Nixon's, and the response was FISA, to outlaw wiretapping on statutory grounds. (In addition to the always-assumed-before-then constitutional grounds.)
It's sorta like, even if we didn't have a right not to be deprived of our life without due process, the executive branch still couldn't wander around killing people because killing people deliberately is almost always illegal, without an reference to the constitution at all. Just plain ordinary laws make it illegal. Likewise, wiretapping without operating with the explicit legal framework laid out by the laws is illegal, and that's entirely unrelated to whether or not doing that is constitutional.
It's not a power of any sort?
If it's a power, you should be able to find a reference to it in the Constitution. You can't. The executive has no power allowing them to gather foreign intelligence.
You could possibly argue he has the right to use the military however he wants, aka, as much as Congress lets him, but, sadly for you, neither the NSA or the CIA are part of the military, he has no 'constitutional right' to them. They aren't even part of 'faithfully executing the law', as they are not law enforcement. They are something created solely by Congress under Congress's power to provide for the common defense.
Of course FISA established a right of privacy for citizens. A specific one that said anyone wiretapping their communications was behaving in a criminal manner.
That's how laws work, you see. We protect people's right to live by criminalizing, for example, murder. We protect their right to privacy by outlawing the monitoring of them.
And wiretapping is not an executive power. Even if it's not unconstitutional, it's not a 'power' of any sort.
Congress is in charge of the 'common defence', not the president. (And by 'common defense', they mean 'defense of all', aka, national defense.)
But more to the point, Congress in charge of making 'Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces'. Congress is in charge of the military, I don't care what fuzzy-headed thinking you're doing about 'commander-in-chief', the president can only act within rules and regulations created by congress. A commander-in-chief is in charge of the military, it does not mean that no one is in charge of him or he follows no rules, just that the top of the military reports to him.
Congress can require all wars are fought with nerf bats if it wants, or that there's no military at all. Congress set the rules.
And, more to the point, the existence of 'regulations' does, indeed, imply that the court system in involved in it. Congress makes regulations, everyone follows them, the court decides them.
And, perhaps even more relevantly, 'commander-in-chief' has nothing to do with foreign intelligence gathering at all. There is nothing in the constitution that would grant an 'intelligence gathering' power to the President. Not any sort of mention of any sort. None whatsoever.
Foreign intelligence gathering exists solely because Congress, while providing for the national defense, decided to make such a system and, like all the other agencies they set up, handed over to the executive to run. It's no more a presidential power than running the Post Office is.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought everyone knew this one?
The whole 'box cutter' thing is a scam. There might have been some of them, but it's just as likely that they used traditional knifes. The airlines just promoted 'box cutters' because they wanted it to look like a failure of imagination rather than the actual failure, a failure of security. It's just as likely that real, perfectly normal knifes were smuggled onto the plane and used.
The above, incidentally, is true, although this post is obviously a joke as the GP was probably actually disputing that it was 'Arabs', not that they used 'stanley knives'.
I know what fascism is, I'm using it the way it was originally used by Mussolini, where there is almost no distinction between businesses and governments, but, unlike communism, the partnership is used to funnel huge amounts of money to corporations. It's basically the opposite of communism, instead of the government controlling the means of production, corporations control the means of governance.
You're apparently using it to mean 'totalitarian' or 'authoritative', which is just silly, we already have words for that. Those can be anything from a dictatorship to communism to fascism. All those are non-democratic, all of them differ as to who is in charge and what their goals are. (And all those 'goals' take second place to 'protecting the regimen'.)
And the term 'Islamofascism' is just a silly name. Islamism has almost none of the traits of fascism. It is also anti-democratic, so it's authoritative, but it's theocratic authoritative.
I've been wondering that myself. I mean, it would be a losing battle, but no one even seems to be trying. No shootings, no attacks on telecom property, nothing.
It really is starting to look like the rights' constant claim that 'We need guns to keep the government in line' was just a lot of hot air.
Did you not read what I said? You're assuming I'm making the common assertion that people couldn't fight off the government, when I made no such claim. (Although I also happen to believe that is true.)
What I asserted is that point will never be reached. That is not a step between here and fascism.
Oh, of course, if you actually start a gun battle with the government, you're going to lose.
I was just pointing out that isn't how it works. It doesn't matter how clever you think you are, how well-defended and armed you are...as the government will not attack you in the first place like that.
And if you attack first, the guy you're going to kill will be a local cop who's serving a perfectly legal eviction notice and has a wife and small child at home, and if you're not taken down by the resulting gun battle you'll fry, and no one will give a shit when you do.
The idea that we'd have troops marching in the streets that need fighting off is just sheer lunacy. No, we'll end up in a society where no one speaks out. When they do, they need up 'investigated' and spending all their money to defend themselves and losing their job and then their house even if they're found innocent. They'll eventually pull themselves back up working some minimum wage job, but won't ever make that mistake again.
Taking a gun to a fight against fascism is akin to taking one to a fight against a flash flood.
Have fun in your little made-up universe where the government comes to round you up and you manage to fight it off.
In the real world, fascism is when the corporations and governments work as a single entity, and you can wander around with your fucking gun all you want. In fact, you'll have to wander around, because the government/corporations took your house and your car, and no one will hire you.
At which point you'll be arrested, not as some big anti-government hero by jackboot thugs, but for stealing bread to live on, by a perfectly normal cop who's just doing his job, a job that absolutely no one except you disagrees with, so when you shoot and kill him you're getting the electric chair and no one thinks you're a hero at all.
There are different types of totalitarian governments, and assuming a fascist one operates like a communist one is faulty. Fascist governments don't put troops in the streets...they work with corporations to make sure 'the wrong sort of people' do not have any economic power, and do not have anywhere to peddle their ideas.
Modern fascist states don't even bother to kill those people, and pretending they're going to show up in some stormtrooper outfit and start a gun battle with you is insane. They'll show up with a court order to evict you from your home because you failed to pay your mortgage, because pressure came from the top at your company to let you go. Or they'll just sue you and ruin your finances.
America is not a bunch of tiny castles where, as long as you can hold off the invading armies, you will be fine. The idea that that is how the world works is astonishingly naive. Almost all the population of America lives in housing they do not fully own, they get food from places they do not control like the supermarket, they require operating in society for money to obtain said food and shelter, a society where economics are controlled by some very large players that can crush them like bugs.
And a fascist state isn't going to 'assume control', you asshat. There's not going to some insane coup, there's a going to be a slow change, which has, in fact, already happened, or have you not looked at the telecom immunity stuff? That's classic fascism. The government breaks the law, the government gets private companies to break the law, the government gives said companies huge amounts of cash, the government attempts to make such behavior legal retroactively. We've got government officials and AT&T officers leaping back and forth between each other in an incestuous loop. Your government spying on you, sponsored by AT&T. It's not 'totalitarian' yet, as evidenced by the fact Democrats managed to stop the immunity, but it is fascism, at least the start of it. (And the same thing's happened with Blackwater.)
Oh, and before you start ranting about gun control some more, be forewarned I'm against it. I'm just not stupid enough to think that the US government being slowly corrupted by business is something that can be fought off with gunpowder. Guns are useful to deter crime and to deter invasion. They aren't useful against a corrupt government in any meaningful way.
...except the actual bad plans he made.
That logic works for actual deliberate actions of a committee.
But this was an accident. It's not like the Democrats voted for it and the Republicans against it.
A much more logical headline would have been that the House Judiciary Committee, or even 'The Democratic-lead House Judiciary Committee', published the addresses. An even more accurate one would have been that a staffer of the House Judiciary Committee did it, because I can assure people 'Committees' do not send email. (All in favor of pushing the send button, say 'Aye'.)
But 'US Democrats' is totally misleading. Neither the Democrats or the Republicans did this. Possibly one of them is at fault, more than likely some HJC staffer is at fault. (IIRC, Committees have staff that's independent of any of their members for exactly this sort of activity, but I could be wrong.)
Although I wouldn't have really said anything about the headline if we hadn't had the assertation that, 'had the Republicans done it, blah blah blah'. The idea that the Republicans would have taken more heat for this just annoyed me when the Democrats are taking the heat right now with absolutely no grounds.
That said, I do blame the HJC for not having more privacy safeguards in place, when they are explicitly looking at 'retribution' in the Justice Department. And I mostly blame the Democrats because I expect the Republicans to be irresponsible. But they aren't the ones who screwed up, they just failed to put safeguards in place to stop screw ups.
Actually, might I suggest that email is a damn stupid communications medium in the first place to use for whistle blowing? Especially when it's not anonymous? (They aren't listening to anonymous people in this investigation.)
Sorry, I meant Iraq researched it pre-Gulf War.
Cite a reliable source for that number. I think you'll find that the majority of the US wish it was over, and quickly, but aren't such fools as to think that just packing up and leaving is actually in anyone's interests, excepts Iran's.
Yes, if you define 'We want them to leave now' in the stupidest possible terms, and then assert 'We can't leave quickly' as actually meaning 'We shouldn't start leaving now.'.
In actuality, most of the American people want us out. This means withdrawal ends a few months from now, and it starts now, now whatever stupid-ass interpretation you've decided to give it. I don't know where the first poster got '70%', but here's CNN six months ago with 60% wanting to leave now or within a year. It's only gone up.
By the way, do YOU know where all of that VX went? No one else does, either.
There's no evidence that Iraq has ever had VX gas. They researched it post Gulf War, but there's no evidence they weaponized it at any point, or produced any amount of it. Meanwhile, we didn't discover any weapons labs, or any precursors, or anything. It's amazing how Saddam managed to keep all that hidden. (Instead of, oh, using it at any point in time on the invading army.)
But I like the theory that the pro-war people are so desperate to be proven right that their argument is 'We fucked the invasion up so much we didn't actually capture the WMDs, and God only knows where they are now.'.
It's better for Saddam to have VX than some completely random person we don't know anything about. You may think the claim that Iraq had WMDs but they managed to get misplaced somehow justifies an invasion, but what it really would justify is impeachment of the entire administration for gross incompetence and endangering this country by creating loose chemical weapons.
Especially as the people defending the war also apparently think the insurgents fighting for control of their country have the same motives and desires as the 9/11 terrorists. Let's hope none of them stumble across a box marked 'VX gas'.
Thank God you people are actually just delusional on both counts and we don't have a bunch of loose WMDs bouncing around in a country filled with people are willing to come over here and attack us, because, frankly, causing that would have been crossing the line from 'gross incompetence' to 'treason'.
Um, no.
Publically traded companies have an obligation to present accurate financial information. Not only to their employees, but to everyone.
Insider trading would be if they only gave accurate information to their employees. 'Not lying' to everyone is not insider trading.
I think you're underestimating the bureaucracy in the legislature. Committees and staff for those committees continue to exist year after year, with the same staffers and mostly the same congressentities.
You seem to have missed the fact that 'Democrats' was actually added by the submitter. The 'House Judiciary Committee' is one that sent the email, which, last I checked, has Democrats and Republican on it.
So, ironically, you're complaining about how it would have been treated different had the Republicans did it and Slashdot is biased against Democrats, when actually an unknown party did it and Slashdot blamed Democrats. (Or, at least, the submitter did.)
Even if we find out that a Republican sent the email, though, it was still probably an accident. If they want a 'mole' looking for whistleblowers, they have it in the congressentities on the committee, they don't need to blatantly email the list to everyone.
2008 motto: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, we've lost the country.
Annual preventative doctor visits: $200 per life saved
You've just given me an idea. I'm going to start complaining about 'socialized security'.
I, too, was once reminded of something by the article, where someone did something.
DailyKos is not a technology site, and the person who posted this diary doesn't understand that all Verisign normally gets is the signing request. (I'll probably post something like this there also.) They don't have your private key, they can't decode your communications.
What they could do is intercept it and man-in-the-middle it. With Verisign's help, they can trivially make a key that works in every browser. (And buying a non-verisign key won't help...end users will just be handed a 'legit' verisign one and don't know that server has a different one.)
I urge everyone with an SSL server to post the MD5 and SHA1 fingerprints of their public key, or even their entire public key, on their site and I urge people to occasionally check them against what their browser reports. Sadly, Firefox, at least, doesn't seem to actually report the public key in any usable format, and I can't see how to get the MD5 and SHA1 fingerprints from the key using openssl. If anyone has a set of step-by-step instructions, that tell exactly what to put up and how to instruct end users to check it, that would be nice to link to.
And if you have an SSL server and a Linux shell somewhere else, and run 'openssl s_client -connect example.com:443' from both the server and that other place to make sure the 'BEGIN CERTIFICATE' part matches.
I seriously doubt the NSA is doing this, but it should be easy enough to notice if it is.
And, speaking of 'occasionally checking', it would be nice if there was some Firefox extension to inform you that the encryption key had changed, and what the old and new key were. If the old key wasn't due to expire, and the new key has the same date as the old, it probably means someone is running a man-in-the-middle attack. They'd keep the dates the same, along with all the other info, to make it harder to notice, whereas while someone could buy a new key in advance, they wouldn't get one with the same date as the old.
It's called 'a code'. You pick words that actually mean other words. No one can understand it unless they have a codebook.
Encrypted, hidden data can be added to MP3s, MPEG4s, PDFs, scans, executables, random leftover noise on the disk. It can be hidden on microSD cards, printed on paper, and hidden on DVDs.
See, right there I'm with Bruce. Why would you put steganography tools on microSD cards?
Why not put the data encrypted on the card, and then hide the card? Doesn't that seem to make a lot more sense?
I mean, those things can hold a lot now, a good deal more than you could reasonable hide via steganography.
If you're smart, you'll just up and install the encryption tools like Truecrypt, but have a porn partition or even a tiny file with credit card and personal information, a 'legitimate' use for the program.
And, yes, I know people are talking about hidden communication channels, for, for example, spies, not storage, but, frankly, that's idiotic.
Any large data is going to be transfered in person via encrypted flash drives. A flash drive is a lot easier to dead-drop than a DVD-R. They have ones thin enough that they can fit inside library books or pass as change, and ones sturdy enough that they can stay outside for a week in mud. Anyone who thinks the 'secret plans' are traveling via the internet is confused. (Well, not at the start of the trip. Once they end up at the embassy or whatever the data obviously can be openly strong-encrypted and openly transfered however the hell they want.)
And any tiny data can be communicated via public signals. Which, incidentally, is a kind of steganography. Spies already have all that worked out. For example, if you ever wear the red tie with the brown suit it means your cover is blown and you need immediate pickup, stuff like that.
I don't doubt technology plays a role in this, but I doubt 'encryption' or 'steganography' does, as tools like that are, as you pointed out, dangerous. I suspect it's more stuff like 'If anyone ever anonymously replies to a slashdot post of yours using this specific subject, check dead-drop #3 that evening'. Call it 'manual steganography', where you go around looking for clues that everyone else can see but no one else knows what to look for.
Uh, how is that a right of privacy? That electronic surveillance can only be used when it is backed up by a statute doesn't mean that it can't be used, and doesn't mean that other means of surveillance can't be used.
Perhaps you have forgotten the point of this discussion, so I will remind you. I quote:
It could be (and obviously is) argued that there is a fundamental right to privacy that implies that the government should be unable to attempt to obtain any non-public information about us without meeting the standard of probable cause -- but that does not seem to be addressed by the 4th amendment. All it would take would be a law passed by Congress to establish that prohibition.
I pointed out that FISA, which is 'a law passed by congress', established that prohibition, but, as you have no idea what FISA is, or apparently, what anything is, we've had about ten inane posts about it.
The Congress has the power to create by law military organizations and agencies, and to provide them with basic regulations, but any laws they pass which impede on the President's constitutional power to actually use those agencies to conduct national security operations are unconstitutional.
When did the president get put in charge of national security? Congress is in charge of defending the nation, which is the closest thing to 'national security' I can find in the constitution.
That's the second time you've just made up a term and decided it was a presidential power, the first being 'waging war'. STOP IT.
By what stretch of the imagination are "the military" and agencies "provided for the common defense" separate concepts?
Um, in the 'constitutional' stretch of the imagination?
However, you're right, except backwards. Congress is actually in charge of creating rules and regulations for both any executive civilian agency it chooses to let exist, and the military if it chooses to let that exist.
At any level, which means, in theory, it could actually issue orders to troops in the field. This is obviously stupid, the intent of the constitution is that the President is told what to do with the military and civilian agencies, within what boundaries, and he does it.
Now, traditionally, he's given looser play over the military, because micromanaging a military is stupid, part of the concept of the chain of the command is that, at each level downward, orders should become more specific, from 'invade that country' at the top to 'set up that mortar right here and attack those guys over there with it' at the bottom.
Where you have become confused is to think that 'commander-in-chief' means 'absolute boss'. A commander-in-chief is merely the highest 'military rank' possible. It does not mean that no one can control that person, it means that is where the military ends. We end it at a civilian, which is slightly confusing, but we did that way on purpose because what that actually means is that no one else can give them military orders because no one else is at any point above them within the chain of command, not that no one can make the top civilian follow civilian laws and regulations. (Including those that control what orders he can give the military.)
It is like being Secretary of State...that's where the State Department ends. Anything above that is not the State Department. That doesn't mean there's nothing above it or that the State Department has no controls besides that person.
Aside from the fact that the president runs ALL the executive agencies established by Congress, and that is the meaning of "faithfully executing the law", the NSA IS part of the Department of Defense, and in fact must, by law, be directed by a lieutenant general or vice admiral.
The NSA is entirely a civilian organization. It is lead by a military officer in a civilian capacity. Pretending and wishing otherwise doesn't make it so.
In our country, a
Can you not actually read or something? Congress and the president are jointly in charge of providing the common defense. Their respective roles in this are enumerated in a document called the Constitution of the United States of America.
Perhaps you would like to list where the president's role in providing for defense is in the Constitution. All I see is that he is commander-in-chief of a military that may or may not exist on Congressional whim.
Yes. You seem to do fine when you actually quote the document. The problem seems to be in reading comprehension
Whereas you, of course, don't seem to be quoting any of the document at all. Odd, that.
The court system is involved when a civil law suit or a criminal prosecution is filed. These are the "cases and controversies" which the Constitution gives them power over. It doesn't by any stretch of the imagination give them power over deciding what country to invade or what country to spy on. No, and no one's saying the court system should be doing that.
What the Judicial branch is doing is enforcing the rules and regulations that Congress has created for the military. I'm otherwise confused as to who you think is in charge of said rules. Yes, there are specific inferior courts for them, created by Congress, (Exactly like all other Federal inferior courts.), under the UCMJ, but those courts answer to the Supreme Court.
Since the beginning of history, waging war has involved spying on the enemy. To argue that these are unrelated activities is asinine. To argue that spying on our enemies is related to some OTHER function of government besides the waging of war is similarly asinine.
The president is not in charge of waging war. You can't just make up terms and say the president is in charge of them.
The president is in charge of the day-to-day running of the military. You can argue that makes him de facto in charge of intelligence conducted by the military, assuming that Congress has not passed any rules or regulations otherwise, which is a reasonable position. He's in charge of all the behavior of the military barring rules and regulations to the contrary, and that presumably includes all the normal functions of the military.
Sadly for your point, neither the CIA or NSA are even part of the military in the first place, so that point falls rather short of where you were trying to land it. And they aren't 'not part' in just some technical sense. They are not under military chain-of-command, they are not under UCMJ, they are not treated as member of the military under any treaties.
The military intelligence agency is the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. (And some other things, like ONI and MCIA and other branch organizations. And now MIP.) It's easy to tell the difference...the DIA and other military operations are headed by generals and other officers that report to other generals and the Joint Chiefs, the CIA is headed by a civilian. The NSA is, weirdly, headed by a military officer by law, but that's simply a law as opposed to being part of the traditional military chain of command, they don't report to the Joint Chiefs, and the Deputy Director is always a civilian, as is almost everyone in the organization.
This is how we can help you to aquire thinking skills of your own. It stands for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Yes, because that's a useful way to know what laws do, look at the title of them and guess. Here is the actual statute from FISA:
Title 50, ch 36 subchapter I 1809) A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally--
(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or
Look, it's what you argued didn't exist! FISA create a 'right to privacy' under the law, although not using those words, and requires all wiretapping 'under color of law' (Aka, as part of the operation of the government) to be authorized by statute.
While you can yammer about how the 4th amendment doesn't say what all courts have said it says, that's really rather irrelevant. The government cannot listen to communication of private individuals, by law, regardless of to any constitutional claims. A law must explicitly be passed allowing such listening.
So, when you say that 'Not being wiretapped is not a constitutional right, although Congress could pass a law creating privacy for such communications' and I twice pointed out that FISA does exactly that, you didn't even bother to look it up to see if that might have some basis in fact, thus demonstrating you're not just misinformed, you're willingly misinformed about this issue.
In other words, you didn't actually listen to the right-wing talking points well enough. The claim on the right has to be that the executive branch has some constitutional right to wiretap, not that people don't have a right not to be wiretapped. That last concept was Nixon's, and the response was FISA, to outlaw wiretapping on statutory grounds. (In addition to the always-assumed-before-then constitutional grounds.)
It's sorta like, even if we didn't have a right not to be deprived of our life without due process, the executive branch still couldn't wander around killing people because killing people deliberately is almost always illegal, without an reference to the constitution at all. Just plain ordinary laws make it illegal. Likewise, wiretapping without operating with the explicit legal framework laid out by the laws is illegal, and that's entirely unrelated to whether or not doing that is constitutional.
It's not a power of any sort?
If it's a power, you should be able to find a reference to it in the Constitution. You can't. The executive has no power allowing them to gather foreign intelligence.
You could possibly argue he has the right to use the military however he wants, aka, as much as Congress lets him, but, sadly for you, neither the NSA or the CIA are part of the military, he has no 'constitutional right' to them. They aren't even part of 'faithfully executing the law', as they are not law enforcement. They are something created solely by Congress under Congress's power to provide for the common defense.
Were you born stupid, or did it take training?
Of course FISA established a right of privacy for citizens. A specific one that said anyone wiretapping their communications was behaving in a criminal manner.
That's how laws work, you see. We protect people's right to live by criminalizing, for example, murder. We protect their right to privacy by outlawing the monitoring of them.
And wiretapping is not an executive power. Even if it's not unconstitutional, it's not a 'power' of any sort.
Can you not actually read or something?
Congress is in charge of the 'common defence', not the president. (And by 'common defense', they mean 'defense of all', aka, national defense.)
But more to the point, Congress in charge of making 'Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces'. Congress is in charge of the military, I don't care what fuzzy-headed thinking you're doing about 'commander-in-chief', the president can only act within rules and regulations created by congress. A commander-in-chief is in charge of the military, it does not mean that no one is in charge of him or he follows no rules, just that the top of the military reports to him.
Congress can require all wars are fought with nerf bats if it wants, or that there's no military at all. Congress set the rules.
And, more to the point, the existence of 'regulations' does, indeed, imply that the court system in involved in it. Congress makes regulations, everyone follows them, the court decides them.
And, perhaps even more relevantly, 'commander-in-chief' has nothing to do with foreign intelligence gathering at all. There is nothing in the constitution that would grant an 'intelligence gathering' power to the President. Not any sort of mention of any sort. None whatsoever.
Foreign intelligence gathering exists solely because Congress, while providing for the national defense, decided to make such a system and, like all the other agencies they set up, handed over to the executive to run. It's no more a presidential power than running the Post Office is.
Yes.