Aside from the 'WTF is AT&T doing with over a quarter-century of phone records that would justify the cost of storing them, anyway?' angle, there are a few... concerning... elements.
1. The searches aren't "warrantless" in the strictest sense; but apparently most of them occur by the process of 'administrative subpoena', which requires no judicial oversight. The DEA has the power to get one simply by asserting that it needs one because drugs. (Sections 506 and 507 of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970). Given that the features of the program include turnaround times of an hour or less, barring atypically complex queries, there is clearly very limited review going on. It isn't the DEA running raw SQL queries; but the separation between it being the 'DEA's database' and 'AT&T's database' appears to be fairly limited.
2. Pretty much everything in the section of the presentation entitled "Protecting The Program"(starts on page 8): The program is 'unclassified' but "All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document" and there are specific instructions on how to conceal Hemisphere as the source in an investigation by using it first, to guide further subpoenas, and then retroactively building a case only on the subsequent subpoenas, in order to conceal, from the court and everyone else, the role of Hemisphere. As they describe the process:
When a complete set of CDRs are subpoenaed from the
carrier, then all memorialized references to relevant and
pertinent calls can be attributed to the carrier’s records,
thus “walling off” the information obtained from
Hemisphere. In other words, Hemisphere can easily be
protected if it is used as a pointer system to uncover
relevant numbers.
In special cases, we realize that it might not be possible to
obtain subpoenaed phone records that will “wall off”
Hemisphere.
In these special circumstances, the Hemisphere analyst
should be contacted immediately. The analyst will work
with the investigator and request a separate subpoena to
AT&T
This practice of evidence laundering would appear to be very similar to the "Parallel Construction" process described as in use by the DEA for other giant secretive data sources (with 'Parallel Construction' being the term for "recreating" a fictional chain of evidence that excludes the existence of sensitive data sources. Less friendly audiences might call this 'perjury'...)
Just don't expect insurance to cover your expenses. I love all these little "problems" the world invents - working so hard to absolve people of personal responsibility.
TFA specifically says that insurance doesn't cover the program.
More generally, is 'I am having trouble solving a problem, therefore I will seek expert advice and/or assistance' not 'personal responsibility' all of a sudden? I thought that problem triage and allocation of problem-solving capacity was an essential and foundational aspect of 'personal responsibility', with the question of whether or not to bring in consultants determined by the problem to be solved and its difficulty with respect to what you can do yourself...
Given that it's a voluntary adult treatment program, I assume we'll see pretty strong self-selection from people who think that it is a problem, presumably because they find themselves putzing around on the internet compulsively to the exclusion of doing whatever it is that they need and/or think that they want to do.
That's the handy thing about self-selection: regardless of how trivial the problem seems, when they have to sign up (and stump up $14,000...) voluntarily, you can be pretty sure that you'll get a set of patients who are genuinely deeply troubled by it. Given that the internet isn't physically addictive, and large swaths of it are actually pretty dull in excess, I'd expect somebody who seeks treatment for 'internet addiction' to have some sort of doing-stuff issue (even if the root cause is something like an anxiety issue, with the internet just being the most accessible retreat).
Once you start doing involuntary adult or child work, you are under rather more of an obligation to have an actual criterion or criteria to distinguish 'Timmy would rather play WoW than do homework, which upsets his parents' from 'Timmy is an addict', since there you are indulging in overt coercion at the behest of people other than the patient.
For me, the bigger surprise is how the comparatively wacky and/or retro theories (is somebody using up their spare microfilm from WWII? trained attack sharks? Surveillance birds?) even in a situation with modern communications and surveillance apparatuses to worry about, and plenty of murky-and-actually-happening-to-people attacks, disappearances, just-showing-up-at-the-morgue, and so on.
Concerns about spying are very plausible (and spying is also very plausible); but I would have expected the abundant supply of high plausibility conspiracy theories to have competed more successfully against the oddball ones.
Oh, don't get me wrong: the US 'intelligence community' is rotten to the core, as are its major corporate collaborators, and some theoretically not intelligence agencies that have taken on the ugly trappings of one (Is there any aspect of the 'war on drugs' that hasn't been a total clusterfuck for America and Americans, much less some of the poor bastards in countries we don't even pretend to care about?) are in the same boat. The FBI, of course, never really had a non-dangerously-corrupt-and-abusive period in its entire history, so it's harder to say that it has 'rotted' in any meaningful way.
However, I'm hard pressed to think of any countries where pissing off the clandestine services is legal, or where they don't treat legal restraint as an inconvenience to be avoided (at best, some lucky countries may simply have relatively vestigial and underdeveloped ones); and I'm hard pressed to think of countries that don't also have additional restrictions on speech (whether it be Britain's ghastly libel laws, 'hate speech', being a nazi, assorted vague 'materials contrary to social order and security' things, blasphemy/offending religious sentiments restrictions, 'gay propaganda', etc, etc.) that the US doesn't have.
We (among others) need to shoot a lot of spooks if we want to even pretend at rule of law, representative democracy, or other cute concepts; but we have atypically narrow restrictions outside of that context.
Repeat after me:
"fundamental freedoms apply online just as they do offline"
Indeed, comrade, we agree and are just moving to harmonize our regulations of the internet with our repressive system of informants and physical surveillance!
And the US is in a position to be talking about "fundamental freedoms"?
Depressingly, they do tend to bat above average RE: free speech: The feds are unnervingly interested listeners; but the list of subjects you can't talk about is very short.
The fan base shouldn't be so whiny and picky. That goes for any fan base or gaming community.
If you want a less whiny and picky fanbase don't, Just Don't base your game's appeal on a continuously-developed-since-1984 tabletop-wargamer-nerd cult hit. Especially not one with several successful-but-now-dated PC game interpretations already built by other developers.
If you have made that mistake, don't double down on the stupid by systematically alienating players and pushing the game toward the direction of being a generic action/arcade title (because that's not a crowded genre where better-funded franchises will crush you like a bug or anything...)
If you want to play the "This is my goddam gameworld, you don't have to like it, the door is that way!" strategy it's idiotic to base the game on a well-established franchise universe: it severely limits your creative options and ensures that you'll have a pack of fanboys with reference materials rules-lawyering you on every point. It's not as though there isn't a market for 3rd-person robot-blaster games, it just isn't called Battletech.
If you want a prefab fanatical player base, (which you can get by adopting an established franchise universe), be prepared to keep in mind that, so far as the gamers are concerned, it's your job to turn the universe they care about into a game that does it justice. You are just the means. If you can do that, you get the advantage of having the buzz done for you to some extent; but if you try to push against them, they'll quickly take the stance that you aren't doing your job.
It's hardly 'throwing them into a meatgrinder'. Nobody seems to know why a degree in theoretical physics gives you the power to single handedly cut your way through alien swarms, military black-ops teams, and some of the most horrifying violations of OSHA guidelines ever built; but it does.
With that kind of brainpower, there should be some startling developments in the next couple of decades.
It will be an interesting test of the fungibility of brainpower. You don't become some sort of high-powered physicist by being an idiot; but the process that produces physicists doesn't necessarily groom or evaluate candidates for doing not-physics, so we'll see what sort of not-physics they end up getting up to.
When the resonance cascade occurs, we'll be able to just zerg-rush the bastards with PhD-and-crowbar equipped theoretical physicists. Aliens won't stand a chance.
The cheap seats use pretty simple sensors (which is fair enough, when per-unit costs are a serious factor, you want to avoid the use of metal, and long-term reliability in harsh conditions is important); but some of the fancier ones, especially anti-vehicle and naval mines, have pretty sophisticated mechanisms; both for anti-tamper purposes and to ignore spurious signals from demining flails, explosive demining, or vehicles too small to be worth killing.
It's ultimately a somewhat pointless endeavor to decide exactly where the cut-off is; but these arent' just pressure switches.
First, the "We've almost solved the too-sloppy for robots" attitude has been around since the 1930s. Sure, we're closer, but it has seemed that there was always just one more "sloppy" thing left to solve.
That is very true; but each round of overhyped hubris has been accompanied by actual advances (always oversold; but real). I'd be the last to suggest that humans becoming 100% obsolete is a thing (even if you are an AI optimist, how soon is your magic AI and a robotic body of human or better versatility going to be available for the same price as a dubiously legal day laborer?); but that there certainly isn't anything stopping automation from replacing enough humans to shake up the economy and wealth distribution more dramatically than anything since the application of fossil fuels, possibly since the application of agriculture.
I don't employ any people in my car so you must mean the chauffeurs in the yellow cars who speak only Pashto or Urdu?
TFA seems to be arguing (not unreasonably) that if you've solved the machine vision and 'coping with surprisingly unpredictable environments' problems well enough to put a car on the road without being bankrupted by splattered pedestrians and next of kin, you've probably also solved the problems that were keeping our robot overlords out of a lot of 'semi-structured' environments that have not previously been economic to automate.
Conventional industrial automation is unstoppably, brutally, efficient; but you pretty much have to build the entire environment around the robots; because they are dumb as hell if anything doesn't go to plan (though, so long as it does, they can stuff boards or spot-weld chassis parts like nobody's business). If you solve the problems inherent in driving a car, you've made substantial progress in attacking environments that aren't built around robots and their limitations, which opens up many more just-sloppy-enough-to-confuse-robots and not-labor-intensive-enough-to-rebuild-for-robots workplaces.
Sure, a few Johnnycabs might be the most visible; but that'll be the tip of the iceberg.
It does make the moral standing of the actor more questionable; but I'm not sure that that's a problem; Cold-callers are one of the few life forms even lower than spammers, so somebody who preys on cold callers(however much I might not admire his moral uprightness) still seems like a net win.
Words like 'Phablet' are what turn good, decent, empiricists into linguistic prescriptivists, not that I can blame them under the circumstances (though a bit of mockery is always in order).
"sounds like the sort of individual who's opinion I certainly give a fuck about"
And yet, somebody at Yahoo dug a random paper he wrote out of the Annals of Tedious Philosophy (Volume 167), wrote a quick clickbait screed about it, and now it's on Slashdot...
remember, world power comes not just from mining natural resources, but preventing others from mining resources.
It's not even that noble: Where will you find people who will be satisfied by abundance (be it ever so great) at the same time they suffer the knowledge that their enemies are not suffering scarcity and want and the subjects of their petty jealousies and rivalries are not doing worse than they are?
You could hand people a post-scarcity utopia on a silver platter and they'd damn you for making their wealth worthless and their inferiors equal.
"I'm rather surprised that someone would seriously consider that it's okay to threaten someone's life because they want wear a strong perfume or similar lifestyle luxury choice. I'm not allergic to anything, and I would find it to be my duty as a decent human being to take colleagues with dangerous allergies into account when making decisions about things like deodorant or food I bring to workplace."
A useful, if disheartening, heuristic for evaluating behavior is that a surprising number of people act as though they are playing an RPG all the time: They are the Player Character, around which the universe itself revolves, a few people they care about may get to be party members or quest NPCs, and everybody else is just a kobold repeating a few stock phrases until it's their turn to be killed and looted.
Slashdot Mirror
The slide deck is available.
Aside from the 'WTF is AT&T doing with over a quarter-century of phone records that would justify the cost of storing them, anyway?' angle, there are a few... concerning... elements.
1. The searches aren't "warrantless" in the strictest sense; but apparently most of them occur by the process of 'administrative subpoena', which requires no judicial oversight. The DEA has the power to get one simply by asserting that it needs one because drugs. (Sections 506 and 507 of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970). Given that the features of the program include turnaround times of an hour or less, barring atypically complex queries, there is clearly very limited review going on. It isn't the DEA running raw SQL queries; but the separation between it being the 'DEA's database' and 'AT&T's database' appears to be fairly limited.
2. Pretty much everything in the section of the presentation entitled "Protecting The Program"(starts on page 8): The program is 'unclassified' but "All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document" and there are specific instructions on how to conceal Hemisphere as the source in an investigation by using it first, to guide further subpoenas, and then retroactively building a case only on the subsequent subpoenas, in order to conceal, from the court and everyone else, the role of Hemisphere. As they describe the process:
When a complete set of CDRs are subpoenaed from the carrier, then all memorialized references to relevant and pertinent calls can be attributed to the carrier’s records, thus “walling off” the information obtained from Hemisphere. In other words, Hemisphere can easily be protected if it is used as a pointer system to uncover relevant numbers.
In special cases, we realize that it might not be possible to obtain subpoenaed phone records that will “wall off” Hemisphere.
In these special circumstances, the Hemisphere analyst should be contacted immediately. The analyst will work with the investigator and request a separate subpoena to AT&T
This practice of evidence laundering would appear to be very similar to the "Parallel Construction" process described as in use by the DEA for other giant secretive data sources (with 'Parallel Construction' being the term for "recreating" a fictional chain of evidence that excludes the existence of sensitive data sources. Less friendly audiences might call this 'perjury'...)
Just don't expect insurance to cover your expenses. I love all these little "problems" the world invents - working so hard to absolve people of personal responsibility.
TFA specifically says that insurance doesn't cover the program.
More generally, is 'I am having trouble solving a problem, therefore I will seek expert advice and/or assistance' not 'personal responsibility' all of a sudden? I thought that problem triage and allocation of problem-solving capacity was an essential and foundational aspect of 'personal responsibility', with the question of whether or not to bring in consultants determined by the problem to be solved and its difficulty with respect to what you can do yourself...
Given that it's a voluntary adult treatment program, I assume we'll see pretty strong self-selection from people who think that it is a problem, presumably because they find themselves putzing around on the internet compulsively to the exclusion of doing whatever it is that they need and/or think that they want to do.
That's the handy thing about self-selection: regardless of how trivial the problem seems, when they have to sign up (and stump up $14,000...) voluntarily, you can be pretty sure that you'll get a set of patients who are genuinely deeply troubled by it. Given that the internet isn't physically addictive, and large swaths of it are actually pretty dull in excess, I'd expect somebody who seeks treatment for 'internet addiction' to have some sort of doing-stuff issue (even if the root cause is something like an anxiety issue, with the internet just being the most accessible retreat).
Once you start doing involuntary adult or child work, you are under rather more of an obligation to have an actual criterion or criteria to distinguish 'Timmy would rather play WoW than do homework, which upsets his parents' from 'Timmy is an addict', since there you are indulging in overt coercion at the behest of people other than the patient.
For me, the bigger surprise is how the comparatively wacky and/or retro theories (is somebody using up their spare microfilm from WWII? trained attack sharks? Surveillance birds?) even in a situation with modern communications and surveillance apparatuses to worry about, and plenty of murky-and-actually-happening-to-people attacks, disappearances, just-showing-up-at-the-morgue, and so on.
Concerns about spying are very plausible (and spying is also very plausible); but I would have expected the abundant supply of high plausibility conspiracy theories to have competed more successfully against the oddball ones.
'Patriotism' is not entirely a compliment, though it is often espoused as a virtue.
Ve haf vays of making them squawk...
Oh, don't get me wrong: the US 'intelligence community' is rotten to the core, as are its major corporate collaborators, and some theoretically not intelligence agencies that have taken on the ugly trappings of one (Is there any aspect of the 'war on drugs' that hasn't been a total clusterfuck for America and Americans, much less some of the poor bastards in countries we don't even pretend to care about?) are in the same boat. The FBI, of course, never really had a non-dangerously-corrupt-and-abusive period in its entire history, so it's harder to say that it has 'rotted' in any meaningful way.
However, I'm hard pressed to think of any countries where pissing off the clandestine services is legal, or where they don't treat legal restraint as an inconvenience to be avoided (at best, some lucky countries may simply have relatively vestigial and underdeveloped ones); and I'm hard pressed to think of countries that don't also have additional restrictions on speech (whether it be Britain's ghastly libel laws, 'hate speech', being a nazi, assorted vague 'materials contrary to social order and security' things, blasphemy/offending religious sentiments restrictions, 'gay propaganda', etc, etc.) that the US doesn't have.
We (among others) need to shoot a lot of spooks if we want to even pretend at rule of law, representative democracy, or other cute concepts; but we have atypically narrow restrictions outside of that context.
Repeat after me: "fundamental freedoms apply online just as they do offline"
Indeed, comrade, we agree and are just moving to harmonize our regulations of the internet with our repressive system of informants and physical surveillance!
And the US is in a position to be talking about "fundamental freedoms"?
Depressingly, they do tend to bat above average RE: free speech: The feds are unnervingly interested listeners; but the list of subjects you can't talk about is very short.
The fan base shouldn't be so whiny and picky. That goes for any fan base or gaming community.
If you want a less whiny and picky fanbase don't, Just Don't base your game's appeal on a continuously-developed-since-1984 tabletop-wargamer-nerd cult hit. Especially not one with several successful-but-now-dated PC game interpretations already built by other developers.
If you have made that mistake, don't double down on the stupid by systematically alienating players and pushing the game toward the direction of being a generic action/arcade title (because that's not a crowded genre where better-funded franchises will crush you like a bug or anything...)
If you want to play the "This is my goddam gameworld, you don't have to like it, the door is that way!" strategy it's idiotic to base the game on a well-established franchise universe: it severely limits your creative options and ensures that you'll have a pack of fanboys with reference materials rules-lawyering you on every point. It's not as though there isn't a market for 3rd-person robot-blaster games, it just isn't called Battletech.
If you want a prefab fanatical player base, (which you can get by adopting an established franchise universe), be prepared to keep in mind that, so far as the gamers are concerned, it's your job to turn the universe they care about into a game that does it justice. You are just the means. If you can do that, you get the advantage of having the buzz done for you to some extent; but if you try to push against them, they'll quickly take the stance that you aren't doing your job.
It's hardly 'throwing them into a meatgrinder'. Nobody seems to know why a degree in theoretical physics gives you the power to single handedly cut your way through alien swarms, military black-ops teams, and some of the most horrifying violations of OSHA guidelines ever built; but it does.
With that kind of brainpower, there should be some startling developments in the next couple of decades.
It will be an interesting test of the fungibility of brainpower. You don't become some sort of high-powered physicist by being an idiot; but the process that produces physicists doesn't necessarily groom or evaluate candidates for doing not-physics, so we'll see what sort of not-physics they end up getting up to.
Their attempt to build a giant, destructive, black hole with the LHC didn't work out, and now most of them are too depressed to try again.
When the resonance cascade occurs, we'll be able to just zerg-rush the bastards with PhD-and-crowbar equipped theoretical physicists. Aliens won't stand a chance.
The cheap seats use pretty simple sensors (which is fair enough, when per-unit costs are a serious factor, you want to avoid the use of metal, and long-term reliability in harsh conditions is important); but some of the fancier ones, especially anti-vehicle and naval mines, have pretty sophisticated mechanisms; both for anti-tamper purposes and to ignore spurious signals from demining flails, explosive demining, or vehicles too small to be worth killing.
It's ultimately a somewhat pointless endeavor to decide exactly where the cut-off is; but these arent' just pressure switches.
"Only if they dig themselves up, move and then rebury." Ideally they'll have spider-legs and make a horrible scuttling noise during this process.
Do land mines count as robots? They're pretty dumb, but autonomously so.
First, the "We've almost solved the too-sloppy for robots" attitude has been around since the 1930s. Sure, we're closer, but it has seemed that there was always just one more "sloppy" thing left to solve.
That is very true; but each round of overhyped hubris has been accompanied by actual advances (always oversold; but real). I'd be the last to suggest that humans becoming 100% obsolete is a thing (even if you are an AI optimist, how soon is your magic AI and a robotic body of human or better versatility going to be available for the same price as a dubiously legal day laborer?); but that there certainly isn't anything stopping automation from replacing enough humans to shake up the economy and wealth distribution more dramatically than anything since the application of fossil fuels, possibly since the application of agriculture.
I don't employ any people in my car so you must mean the chauffeurs in the yellow cars who speak only Pashto or Urdu?
TFA seems to be arguing (not unreasonably) that if you've solved the machine vision and 'coping with surprisingly unpredictable environments' problems well enough to put a car on the road without being bankrupted by splattered pedestrians and next of kin, you've probably also solved the problems that were keeping our robot overlords out of a lot of 'semi-structured' environments that have not previously been economic to automate.
Conventional industrial automation is unstoppably, brutally, efficient; but you pretty much have to build the entire environment around the robots; because they are dumb as hell if anything doesn't go to plan (though, so long as it does, they can stuff boards or spot-weld chassis parts like nobody's business). If you solve the problems inherent in driving a car, you've made substantial progress in attacking environments that aren't built around robots and their limitations, which opens up many more just-sloppy-enough-to-confuse-robots and not-labor-intensive-enough-to-rebuild-for-robots workplaces.
Sure, a few Johnnycabs might be the most visible; but that'll be the tip of the iceberg.
It does make the moral standing of the actor more questionable; but I'm not sure that that's a problem; Cold-callers are one of the few life forms even lower than spammers, so somebody who preys on cold callers(however much I might not admire his moral uprightness) still seems like a net win.
Words like 'Phablet' are what turn good, decent, empiricists into linguistic prescriptivists, not that I can blame them under the circumstances (though a bit of mockery is always in order).
"sounds like the sort of individual who's opinion I certainly give a fuck about"
And yet, somebody at Yahoo dug a random paper he wrote out of the Annals of Tedious Philosophy (Volume 167), wrote a quick clickbait screed about it, and now it's on Slashdot...
remember, world power comes not just from mining natural resources, but preventing others from mining resources.
It's not even that noble: Where will you find people who will be satisfied by abundance (be it ever so great) at the same time they suffer the knowledge that their enemies are not suffering scarcity and want and the subjects of their petty jealousies and rivalries are not doing worse than they are?
You could hand people a post-scarcity utopia on a silver platter and they'd damn you for making their wealth worthless and their inferiors equal.
Workers must take the power!
Workers at Fukushima appear to be absorbing power, does that count?
"I'm rather surprised that someone would seriously consider that it's okay to threaten someone's life because they want wear a strong perfume or similar lifestyle luxury choice. I'm not allergic to anything, and I would find it to be my duty as a decent human being to take colleagues with dangerous allergies into account when making decisions about things like deodorant or food I bring to workplace."
A useful, if disheartening, heuristic for evaluating behavior is that a surprising number of people act as though they are playing an RPG all the time: They are the Player Character, around which the universe itself revolves, a few people they care about may get to be party members or quest NPCs, and everybody else is just a kobold repeating a few stock phrases until it's their turn to be killed and looted.