One way to stop this, prove to them that what they are doing doesn't work, and show them something that does. If you assume that these people actually want to defend America and are doing all these horrible things because they think this is the best way-
We need mandatory disclosure of all Fisa warrants after 90 days. If they need it kept secret past that they can get a real judge to sign off on it. And any time the government asks a corporation for your data or meta-data you get notified unless there is a court order involved.
I LIKE the idea of outsourcing domestic spying. It means the people spying on us will filter out the irrelevant stuff. Like if you're a politician and your kids are sexting their friends, or if the mayor is sleeping with his secretary kind of stuff that's useless for intelligence work. It also means if your government gets out of control there will be someone out there who might intervene (in theory).
A strict reading of the Constitution looks to outlaw searching anyone anywhere without a warrant, not just searching Americans. Might want to watch that slippery slope there, fella.
If the (current) President of the USA is willing (and able) to ignore the Constitution of the USA, why do you think the next President would follow a mere law?
We already know this bill won't work. The executive branch can stop the spying at any time, just by giving an order. Therefore we know the executive branch LIKES the spying on everyone, and will work to keep it going. So if they are supporting this bill then this bill can't have any real limits on the spying.
5000 HD video channels, with a footprint of 1/3 the planet converted to a data channel (downlink only) works out to about 5,000 x 6 MB / 500,000,000 = 60 bytes per second. And that's why satellite internet sucks. With cell towers your individual bandwidth is a function of how many people are using that tower. If you aren't getting enough you add towers, simple as that. It just costs money and the cell companies find it's more profitable to throttle than upgrade their network. Throttling your internet/cellphone is free, so long as everyone does it to prevent competition.
The smaller the tower, the easier it is to hide it. The regulatory hurdles you must clear are proportional to the output power of the cell tower. So making them smaller and lower power means it's easier to install.
The NSA spends a lot of time and money "Defending America" by spying on everyone. But if the Copyright cartels drive everyone to use VPN's and crypto it will directly undermine all that hard work and money spent. As a matter of national security, the government of the USA needs to block the copyright enforcers from this path.
The second amendment is already gone. All they have to do is make a secret law banning guns, then they convict every gun owner of that, then take away your guns because you're all convicted criminals. The second doesn't apply to anyone convicted of crime, and the government can ban anything it likes.
For the people this is targeted at 100,000 dollars is a very large amount of money. Imagine the hacker computer rig you could build with that! And imagine the street cred in finding holes in TOR (and patching them).
Given the pathetically low level of security at the NSA (Snowden was just a sub-contractor!) it's likely that everything they get is forwarded to the Russians, and given what we know of the NSA it's likely they have compromised TOR. So this probably is misdirection to fool the dissidents.
One of the problems with computer games is people camping the spawn sites. Or knowing that the body armour is in the watch tower over the east gate. Once you know the rules of the system you can "Game" the system to give yourself an unfair advantage. The same tactic works with computer based intelligence analysis. You can "game the system" to get any arbitrary result you want.
Computers are terrific for gathering data, but very poor at analyzing it for useful intelligence. If you want your intelligence service to be effective you need: Filtering to sort out the useless from the "of interest", manpower to go through all that filtered data to analyze it and figure out what it means, and someone at the top of the chain to make the politicians listen to reason.
Microsoft built their empire on using what they have to leverage into the next market. They can't do that if nobody wants what they are selling now, so they must have a working tablet/phone interface that people want. They tried Windows RT and it flopped because it couldn't leverage anything since it's not "Windows". Attempt 2 is making windows a tablet OS then all the desktop users will start to buy tablets with it. If Microsoft was smart they would make their own version of Android with a full Windows emulator under the hood (proprietary code, MS-Android only!). That would allow them to run all the legacy code, and all the Android code, and still be locked to Microsoft.
So long as there are ungoverned places in this world we will need borders to keep the lawless bad men from such places out. So long as governments need taxes to exist we will need borders to keep the money inside their reach. You don't believe in borders? Then you won't mind if I build a house in your front yard, since property borders are just holding humanity back. A national border is the limit of a government's power. The only way to eliminate borders is to eliminate government. And we can't eliminate government because most people don't want to deal with all those pesky details outside of their own lives, so they let others handle the details for them.
The Rebels meet the legal definition of soldiers. And many of them are ex Russian army so they likely had people with the training to use the anti-aircraft launcher without needing training from Russia. It's also possible that supporters in Russia (family and friends) could have sent the tanks and APC's, but not without the Russian government knowing about it. In political circles allowing others to move heavy weapons through your country to a war zone counts as military support.
Russians clearly "like" the separatists in Ukraine, and there are clearly Russians with military training/experience pouring into the region to help with the fight- but if the Russian military was directly involved the war would have ended by now instead of Ukraine pushing them back.
They have a defined country, wear military uniforms, and have a chain of command. That makes them soldiers just as clearly as Union soldiers in the American civil war were soldiers.
Slashdot Mirror
One way to stop this, prove to them that what they are doing doesn't work, and show them something that does. If you assume that these people actually want to defend America and are doing all these horrible things because they think this is the best way-
We need mandatory disclosure of all Fisa warrants after 90 days. If they need it kept secret past that they can get a real judge to sign off on it. And any time the government asks a corporation for your data or meta-data you get notified unless there is a court order involved.
I LIKE the idea of outsourcing domestic spying. It means the people spying on us will filter out the irrelevant stuff. Like if you're a politician and your kids are sexting their friends, or if the mayor is sleeping with his secretary kind of stuff that's useless for intelligence work. It also means if your government gets out of control there will be someone out there who might intervene (in theory).
A strict reading of the Constitution looks to outlaw searching anyone anywhere without a warrant, not just searching Americans. Might want to watch that slippery slope there, fella.
If the (current) President of the USA is willing (and able) to ignore the Constitution of the USA, why do you think the next President would follow a mere law?
We already know this bill won't work. The executive branch can stop the spying at any time, just by giving an order. Therefore we know the executive branch LIKES the spying on everyone, and will work to keep it going. So if they are supporting this bill then this bill can't have any real limits on the spying.
Shooting back into Russia isn't an option, as the Russians would use it as an excuse to send in the army in "Self Defense".
The Ukrainian government told them it was safe to fly there.
It's an active war zone, you can assume everything flying is hostile.
5000 HD video channels, with a footprint of 1/3 the planet converted to a data channel (downlink only) works out to about 5,000 x 6 MB / 500,000,000 = 60 bytes per second. And that's why satellite internet sucks. With cell towers your individual bandwidth is a function of how many people are using that tower. If you aren't getting enough you add towers, simple as that. It just costs money and the cell companies find it's more profitable to throttle than upgrade their network. Throttling your internet/cellphone is free, so long as everyone does it to prevent competition.
The smaller the tower, the easier it is to hide it. The regulatory hurdles you must clear are proportional to the output power of the cell tower. So making them smaller and lower power means it's easier to install.
The NSA spends a lot of time and money "Defending America" by spying on everyone. But if the Copyright cartels drive everyone to use VPN's and crypto it will directly undermine all that hard work and money spent. As a matter of national security, the government of the USA needs to block the copyright enforcers from this path.
The second amendment is already gone. All they have to do is make a secret law banning guns, then they convict every gun owner of that, then take away your guns because you're all convicted criminals. The second doesn't apply to anyone convicted of crime, and the government can ban anything it likes.
For the people this is targeted at 100,000 dollars is a very large amount of money. Imagine the hacker computer rig you could build with that! And imagine the street cred in finding holes in TOR (and patching them).
Given the pathetically low level of security at the NSA (Snowden was just a sub-contractor!) it's likely that everything they get is forwarded to the Russians, and given what we know of the NSA it's likely they have compromised TOR. So this probably is misdirection to fool the dissidents.
One of the problems with computer games is people camping the spawn sites. Or knowing that the body armour is in the watch tower over the east gate. Once you know the rules of the system you can "Game" the system to give yourself an unfair advantage. The same tactic works with computer based intelligence analysis. You can "game the system" to get any arbitrary result you want.
The USA is spending more time/effort/money to collect all that data, but doing a worse job. It's the American way.
Computers are terrific for gathering data, but very poor at analyzing it for useful intelligence. If you want your intelligence service to be effective you need: Filtering to sort out the useless from the "of interest", manpower to go through all that filtered data to analyze it and figure out what it means, and someone at the top of the chain to make the politicians listen to reason.
Microsoft built their empire on using what they have to leverage into the next market. They can't do that if nobody wants what they are selling now, so they must have a working tablet/phone interface that people want. They tried Windows RT and it flopped because it couldn't leverage anything since it's not "Windows". Attempt 2 is making windows a tablet OS then all the desktop users will start to buy tablets with it. If Microsoft was smart they would make their own version of Android with a full Windows emulator under the hood (proprietary code, MS-Android only!). That would allow them to run all the legacy code, and all the Android code, and still be locked to Microsoft.
A single underlying OS, a UI that adapts to the hardware, and proper sandboxing so a single mistake by the user won't turn their box into a zombie.
So long as there are ungoverned places in this world we will need borders to keep the lawless bad men from such places out. So long as governments need taxes to exist we will need borders to keep the money inside their reach. You don't believe in borders? Then you won't mind if I build a house in your front yard, since property borders are just holding humanity back. A national border is the limit of a government's power. The only way to eliminate borders is to eliminate government. And we can't eliminate government because most people don't want to deal with all those pesky details outside of their own lives, so they let others handle the details for them.
If the Company isn't acting in the Nations best interest then the Nation has no need of the Company.
The Rebels meet the legal definition of soldiers. And many of them are ex Russian army so they likely had people with the training to use the anti-aircraft launcher without needing training from Russia. It's also possible that supporters in Russia (family and friends) could have sent the tanks and APC's, but not without the Russian government knowing about it. In political circles allowing others to move heavy weapons through your country to a war zone counts as military support.
Russians clearly "like" the separatists in Ukraine, and there are clearly Russians with military training/experience pouring into the region to help with the fight- but if the Russian military was directly involved the war would have ended by now instead of Ukraine pushing them back.
They have a defined country, wear military uniforms, and have a chain of command. That makes them soldiers just as clearly as Union soldiers in the American civil war were soldiers.