It's a lie, probably put here by The Cable Guys.
NN says I will not charge your packets differentially according to how deep your pocketbooks are.
Google Fiber ToS says that we're not going to give you unlimited data for unlimited people who piggyback off your account.
These are two completely different issues.
Completely. Different.
Not only are business people, with the freedom so speech and the ability to contribute unlimited funds to elections, but now, people are businesses with no 4th Amendment rights.
The transformation is complete. The fascist dream of merging corporate power with state power has been achieved *by turning people into businesses.*
That's how they win. They come at you in a way you never imagined.
It's impossible for people to understand that giving themselves unlimited power over situations they are a participant in is a bad thing. No one ever does this; it's like its a beyond-human task or something.
The people who charged this guy with espionage - and by implication all future reporters- tell themselves they'll be judicious in their prosecutions. Through a strategic failure of imagination , they don't comprehend that the chilling effect this has on reportage and reporter's initiative, not to mention spineless newspaper boards such the Washington Post's. They poo poo away the vitally important and irreplaceable role an oppositional, truth-seeking press plays in keeping civilization going.
It's a part of the Masters of the Universe syndrome. Give me all power. I'll wield it wisely. I know myself.
They're delusional, right? They don't acknowledge that the system is more complex than they can imagine and that there has to be a balance of power... leaks to the press about big things have to happen- including and especially the ones THEY THEMSELVES didn't initiate. In this area of reality, this is how a healthy system stays healthy.
Look at Snowden. Look at Manning. Look at the insane, hyperbolic vitriol launched against them. What does that say to you? It says that the people in the hierarchy don't get when it's time to just do the old look-away. The wrist slap. Time to size up a situation in its totality, within the broadest historical context and thinking and base their own actions on what ought to be the implicit knowledge of a sophisticated analyst of world events and history. Instead they act like little children. They act like someone called them a name on the playground.
Congress just barely re-upped the Patriot Act section 215 and the NSA is on notice that it's going to be ended if they don't change their act. The author of that specific section has explicitly denied that the NSA is not in violation of it- they are. SO we don't have to have ivory tower discussion about "the intent of Congress". We know.
What does that tell you? That the people and Congress see Snowden's point. That it was a GOOD THING he did what he did.
What it does it tell the NSA ? Nothing- they've done nothing wrong and Snowden is a traitor who aided the enemy.
Prior to this, the NSA was thrashing around looking for an excuse, some legal justification to read the content of everyone's emails all the time and keep them forever. They don't see how this practice could lead to something really systemically sinister in our democracy. This is another part of the Masters of the Universe delusion. They should not be bound by anything, not Congress's intent, not the 4th not anything. Because they're the Good Guys and always will be.
This is just a total lack of perspective. If you ask national security experts they will tell you that there's nothing we can do to keep from getting hit by WMD; it's inevitable. The reason it's inevitable is the mechanics of offense vs defense. Offensive power in the hands of a determined foe is just too hard to prevent or defend against. Sooner or later, they're going to succeed spectacularly.
What will REALLY matter when the inevitable happens , what will really make a difference to the survival of the nation and the government is - are we all together or is their underlying mistrust and seething resentment of the government that takes that event as the last straw ?
The fact that there are (lunatic) 9-11 truthers out there and in no small numbers ought to be a warning shot over the bow of the government. There is widespread distrust of the motives and morality of the people in government, built up over the decades previous by just the kind of shit the NSA and Gonzales and Yoo and all the rest of these sociopaths have engaged in- lying to Congress. Lying to the American people. Manipulating domestic situations to make them seem to be other than they are. Smearing earnest truth tellers as traitors, opportunists, partisans and attention hou
Define torture. Is it what they did to Manning? Is life in the SHU torture? Is being forced to kneel on concrete for minutes and hours on end torture? Is being slammed into the back of an all metal transport vehicle which has its muffler removed or better yet, made unbelievably loud and driven around for hours and hours and hours in the baking heat, manacled and chained so you can't stop yourself from being tossed around torture? Is being shoved in a transport plane, blindfolded, diapered chained to a seat so tightly you permanently lose feeling in your hands and feet , unable to move a muscle and "transported": in that one excruciatingly painful position for 30 hours while the plane is delayed" and "plans change" torture?
Because according to Cheney and Rumsfeld and the other torturers , none of that is torture.
The fact that the US IS going to torture Snowden if they get a hold of him is the best reason to not let them get a hold of him and when I say them I mean us.
Whatever you think of Snowden's actions, -not a choice I would have made btw- he's not acting against the U.S. as an enemy. Even people who ARE enemies don't deserve to be tortured.
Useless as a truth elicitor, it inflicts long-term damaging to the foreign policy interests of any nation that uses it (Thtnks Cheney!) torture ought to be relegated to the imaginations of just ordinary people who are, you know, very mad about something they see on TV . It has no place in the conduct of real people in the real world.
It is not cool that the Obama administration seeks to NOT have this conversation in public and with the public. This is a completely necessary conversation to have so we can all come to an agreement through the ancient device shared of understanding , which is pretty much the way free societies are held together .
It bothers me that a scholar of the Constitution , a highly intelligent guy and someone who additionally had the advantage of access to the best university, the best professors, the best curricula in the most developed nation at the most enlightened time in history doesn't get this and act upon it.
I understood when Bush was in office because what do you expect from an alcoholic guy who basically fell upwards his entire life and arrived at what age 50? with such poorly developed acumen of other people's character that he selected a sociopath for VP.
But with Obama it's clearly a case of to whom much is given, much is expected and he's failing by that measure far worse than Bush.
Where does that leave us in terms of hope for the future? It seems like these guys get into office and the financial gurus/charlatans like Greenspan and the operators in the establishment organizations like the CIA and the NSA are more than a match for them in terms of overwhelming them with specialized knowledge in domains the President is basically ignorant of. They have such a well developed - if inaccurate- POV that the President can't counter it and is basically led to say "OK, whatever you specialist think is best....". What else are you going to say when very large and complex systems you only have a layman's understanding of like the world economy or the details of national security are going to blow the fuck up if you decide wrongly?
Kennedy was the last President to call bullshit on this kind of coup via ready-made vision. It's up to the President to have at the ready , should he/she be elected, people whose broad judgement he or she trusts. El Prez needs to have selected these people either through reading their published works or through personal acquaintance or some other long running process going into the office. I am saying that as soon as they conceive of the idea of being El Prez in their imagination at age 25 or whatever, this should be a major preoccupation for them from that point forward.
What seems to happen is they look to people in government for advice at something like the last minute, as if their victory took them completely by surprise and they've got to do some hiring ! That just leads to insiders recommending insiders in what amounts to, as far as we or anyone else including the President knows, the latest iteration in a long played game of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.
You cant' know everything; you have to outsource some part of your judgement, or at least you have to outsource some part of your bullshit detection subsystem.
Hard believe the transformation of Obama's POV since he's gotten into office. I guess it takes a Clinton-like character, someone who's *down*, or a Kennedy, someone who's not intimidated by the office , someone who either through self assurance or arrogance or hopefully properly placed faith in the rightness of her perceptions or what have you to be able to resist the Ready-Made Interpretation of Everything that's lying in wait for you like a cougar, the second you sit your ass down in the Oval Office.
The addiction started at IBM with one Marshall Phelps, who is a pusher. While at IBM he addicted them to a revenue stream of upwards of 2 billion from their IP portfolio. He actually shot them up directly in the arm and then continued to do so even as people within IBM warned against the dangers with drug usage and drug addiction.
\When Marshall Phelps, pusher, was done with IBM, he moved on to microsoft, again mainlining them with his junk and turning them into software patent junkies. The results were as predictable as they were ruinous, as miicrosoft's refocused its resources on pushing trivial patents at the USPTO and reoriented its strategy on preventing market competition rather than meeting it.
Rarely is something as destructive as software patents directly attributable to one individual, however in this case we can clearly and definitively identify the original carrier- Marshall Phelps.
Software patents kill people. The treatments that never see the light of day and the technology and advancement that never happens because some addicted CEO and some pusher- lawyer who makes money off the addicts have prevented life-saving progress from ever being realized, brought to market or, most often and most insidiously never attempted.
When lawyers like Marshall Phelps are permitted to operate freely in society , then people die. I can only imagine what the body count that is directly attributable to this one person's actions is. It must be into the hundreds of thousands.
Today Marshall Phelps continues to push software patents, still setting in motion a sequence of events that has dead people who would otherwise have been alive into motion.
Marshall Phelps is a monster and society must stop him.
Exactly . The purpose of the CIA et al is to find and understand threats to the nation and be prepared to advice the President. This is a proper part of that mission. Historically speaking hey ARE mostly accurate and unbiased. The times people think they have fucked up , in reality are times when they were subverted by outside political players with an agenda.
Case in point- Vietnam and the subversion by the RAND corporation.
Case in point the Cold War / star wars defense (SDI analysis) subverted by original Team B : Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Nitze aka "dick nitze". .
Case in point, the run up to Iraq and WMD subverted by Cheney, Fife, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz (again) and the rest of the neocons which were THAT decades "Team B".
Just because the analysis arm of CIA is NOT involved in subverting the internal political process of the nation , so they are often victims of same by people who "know better" than what the objective facts are telling us and produce "alternative interpretations" of reality.
Their job is to speak the truth and generally they do just that- the Binney Affair being a notable exception.
You want to safeguard the information given to decision makers (that set includes yourself, citizen) from undue political influence by half insane scum like Cheney and Inhofe who "know" what reality is and are ready to start killing dissenters. Don't kid yourself, people like this whose lives are an spent in defending a bulwark against encroaching reality are the most dangerous people this or any other nation can encounter.
The fact that they seek and hold positions of political power is no coincidence and anyway in no way places them or their actions outside the category of "clear and present danger to the United States of America " and all that must follow from that fact.
This is why I love the intelligence agencies when they're not circumventing the Constitution. Who else is going to do this funded, serious minded and unhindered by human piece of shit cum white trash like Ken Cuccinelli A.G. of Virgina ?
People go bananas when the NSA oversteps its constitutional authority, as it appears to have done, because they fear a corrupt police state in which there are no civil rights. But what do you think is going to happen when climate change starts wiping out the world's ecosystem starting , say, from the oceans and working upwards?
If you're worried about the integrity of your government, about the preservation of your civil liberties and the preservation and advancement of civil society generally then consider that the environment is what all that ultimately rests upon, not whether or not the NSA is a serially panty sniffer in need of an intervention, which, it's probably true, they are.
. There are no concessions to be made. Yes, some times bad shit will still happen. That doesn't justify just wiping out everything that society (at least American society and government) is supposedly founded on....
Yeah but keep[ perspective. Do you think there are any assholes out there who would give up some privacy for safety? Because they think without safety, there is no liberty? Not do you think that's right, but do you think some people think it's right.
Of course you do. And that's their opinion. And their opinion can be anything from it's OK to do what's being done under the Constitution to we need to change the Constitution to permit these activities of the government.
Both those are legitimate opinions no more right or wrong than yours. What's ultimately true about what is lawful and what is not a matter of fact, it's a matter of opinion. The reason for that is what laws are and where and how they are applied is strictly a matter of human engineering.
Laws and how to apply them are different in this way from "natural" facts like the effect of gravity on falling objects. In that case, human opinion is nothing. IN the case of social constructs such as human rights and laws, there is nothing BUT human opinion.
It's a sucky fact and I wish it weren't true. The most well known "outs" which attempt to get away from this fact and it's implications are through appeal to religion and appeal to "universal human rights". Note that both of THOSE are human constructs also- with an added detail that they claim, falsely, not to be.
Sucks to be a minority opinion holder. Sucks to be a minority activist. But you shouldn't be surprised because activists and changemakers are always the minority. Yet change happens.
It's up to us to make change happen, somehow. I can't even get my mind around how this might happen at the moment because the momentum and apparent utility for "spying on everyone always" is strong and the downside to it is so hypothetical in most people's minds.
Somehow we have to preserve our individual autonomy complete with privacy going into the future while thwarting the actions of people who could give a shit about any of this and just want to kill as many people as possible just 'cause.
I can't see that any of the parties involved in this are acting other than how they should act given their concerns. You know the government is going to be looking for terrorists in this country. That means they're recording everything because that helps them at least backwards chain after something happens. At least, that's the belief now; it may prove to be untrue since terrorists will think up ways to hide their tracks, cr\ate false and misleading internet activity etc etc etc But for now, they think this is useful.
OTOH it's clear that continuously spying on people is extremely corrosive to democracy and will cause it to fail as bad actors seek to position themselves to leverage that information and / or true believers get into government and leverage it to sty in power.
Just as we can't expect the spies to limit themselves out of a concern for fair play, neither can we expect political actors to do so. If a power exists, it will be abused. The first party, the spies brings it into existence. The second party, the politicians, the power seekers, will find ways to abuse it. That's the real problem no one in the news is talking about. And for obvious reasons- it would require Obama or some other pol to start a sentence with something like "Now, we know most politicians are ersatz criminals who will stop at nothing to get what they want..."
What a joke that gang of brown nosing syncophants is. But thats not even the real problem, since another group of equally obsequious assholes would undoubtedly take their place,
People who GET that high up in the power hierarchy by definition through attrition of anyone else at the hands of various gatekeepers are excellent at figuring out what are the unspoken requirements being put upon them by forces bigger than they are. Then they comply and between the figuring out and the complying not even a shard of consciousness seeps in. It's just the way Orwell described it., They're so thoroughly intimidated by power they never even experience dissent as a possibility.. it all seems very reasonable to them. They LOVE big brother.
So what's the solution? I am going to wash my mouth out after I say this, but : Congress. Obviously the national security apparatus has found a clear path to usurping the Constitution via the FISA courts and it playing that hand for everything it's worth.
Maybe we do have to modify the Fourth Amendment in some ways . I deal with reality and I can entertain that notion as a hypothesis. Let's hear the counter arguments. Let's let the experts bring forward their best arguments and evidence. Then we'll decide.
But this shit of underhandedly subverting the Constitution on the part of people sworn to uphold it is very very bad. It's bad because it implies the terrorists have won. It's bad because it codifies the subversion of the Constitution by the nation's institutions. It's not paranoid to ask "what's next then?".
It's immaterial if they are doing this for a good or even necessary purpose since "good" is a matter of how you weigh priorities and "necessary" presumes you actually know the future and what's more, everyone implicitly shares your view.
I love it when Diane Feinstein - my representative - let's go with "it's called keeping the country safe" shit. WHAT is it that is thus called? We are not permitted to know , despite the fact that whatever it is it clearly includes removing my Fourth Amendment protections. We are supposed to, like little children, just take her word for it that removing the Fourth Amendment is necessary.
Sorry, but that's a joke right out of the gate. This is not how we deal with threats of WMD or anything else. One miniscule fraction of society decides everything for everyone else and lies about it. If we were being invaded by Martians, maybe we would need some kind of Constitutional suspension ala Lincoln and the Civil War. But get real. IF the future is terrorists with WMD, and I personally think it is, then we need to have a big national discussion about how to re-constitute ourselves to deal with that changing reality.
Chris date has the clearest understanding of databases out there and while most of what he's written is not vendor or even SQL specific (although some of it is too..) his thoroughness, precision and ability to go meta on every aspect of databases is without parallel. Sure, it's not "how to use postgres" but studying him will pay off many many times over during your career when you're "stuck" because a lot of being 'stuck" in this field is not understanding the actual relational model at the conceptual level and when I say "actual relational model" I don't mean SQL, which is one just so-so implementation of the relational model. It's the places where SQL departs from the relational model and the practices that have developed in the community to compensate for that departure - without people even being aware that that's what they're doing - which create the worst and hardest problems.
So what you're saying is the telcos have a built in motivation to search for and find (or create) the perception of as much criminal wrongdoing on the part of their hapless customers as they possibly can. Don't bother telling me me they wouldn't do this- I read The Guardian, not the Washington Post.
Because this THIS is revealing state secrets for personal gain, which is worse, much worse than what Manning, Snowden Tice , Drake , Klein, Binney , Kiriakou
Conclusion: you have to be extremely naive or engagged in a career enhancing self-serving thinking process to imagine that universal spying on ordinary Americans won't be used to in the basest way control the internal political trajectory of the nation by the next group of people like Cheney PErle Rumsfeld and Bolton.
Yes something very bad could and probably will happen . Yes we will lose relevant information by not constantly tapping all Americans , The but alternative path is worse. When bad actors get involved, there are often no good paths left.
the NSA does whatever policy makers tell them to do without getting all "philosophical" or "speculative" about whether it's exactly or even slightly legal or not. That's what we know for certain. Anyone able to worm themselves into a position of power - from the analyst level on up, has God power over The Database Of Guilt. Unelected officials - Perle Rice Rumsfeld Abrams Bolton Cohen etc can and will commandeer that database for their own illegal purposes and the NSA will comply because that's what they do. It may already be happening.
This is 100% unacceptable. This is no-go no-matter-what territory.
. There is no software that isn't easily crackable. In the last few years, every publicly known and patched bug makes almost no impact on us. They aren't scratching the surface.'"
What does that say about the theory that open source will have fewer defects? Most of the internet is run on open source. He seems to be saying that it's a bugfest.
I have ot say I think it's true and here's why. Early on I had to implement a protocol from scratch. I read the RFP and implemented it but as you may know RFPs aren't actually written in EBNF or anything like it so there's plenty of room between the spaces left by the wordy, not completely explicit spec.
As it happened my correct implementation also took down the server instance that received it for a particular server which shall remain nameless except to say that at that time that internet server software accounted for , oh , 95% of servers out there.
So what I had created completely by accident was a near universal death ray.
I am quite sure there are TONS of stuff out there of a similar nature waiting to be exploited. For all I know, that death ray still works.
We don't locate these things because only a small number of us (programmers) are actively looking . Most of us use this stuff trying NOT to break it. The number of people doing the opposite is small. The number of possible serious bugs is more or less infinite. The rest follows from the math.
Because UCSD would be a great target. Friends who went there claim - repeatedly and independently - that virtually every department is a political hackfest where grades and grading curves are set to target individuals they either like or don't like.
Where profs steal ideas from their students as if the students were their employees.
Where profs practice a "sage on the stage" style of lecturing left over from the 18th century and generally conduct themselves as though they're prima-donnas.
Where TAs do all the real course work, and reset it. And act like they resent it. And see their students as a waste of their time time that could have been spent on their own ascension into the priesthood, er I mean professorship.
Where administrators use huge sums of public money to refurbish their offices and buildings *so their daughters can get married in the palace which results.*
Where the school requires all incoming students to sign a pledge that anything they create while they're at UCSD using any resources of UCSD is UCSD's private intellectual property.
Where access to *real* resources are guarded by virtue of their being controlled by "private guest institutes and organizations" who are "partnering" with UCSD but not actually "a part" of UCSD so students have no natural right to access those resources and never see them, despite UCSD claiming authorship and credit for activities involving those resources.
If I were to count the number of people hurt by some schlocky guy with a gun and compare that to the number of people who enroll at UCSD year over year and wish to god they hadn't, I'll bet UCSD would pretty much top any honest accounting of damaged lives
I used to live in socal and knew people who went to San Diego for their undergraduate. When they returned to L.A. in the summer they'd bitch up a storm about what was going on there for undergrads (they had , you know, ambition beyond getting drunk ) and what a fucking shithole ofb skullduggery the place was .
I admit don't actually remember the entire litany of complaints, and the fleshy details are not worth reciting but these general things stuck out in my mind. Basically the impression they gave was that it was a fucking mill and the best thing to do was to keep your head down, don't try to do anything beyond coursework and just STFU about anything you didn't like.
So really. Perhaps what we need is an asshole professor detector and a scam school locator. I mean , if you're going to spend the next 30 years choking on 80k + interest in debt, you ought to get something for your money.
At UCLA I have to say it was NOT like that, the profs were engage and accessible the grading was fair and overall the people were fairly friendly, so the experience of my *ambitious* friends who went south for college strongly contrasted with mine.
The harder schools to get into aren't always better for the student's learning ESPECIALLY for undergrads, who are likely to get nothing but a pinch of reflected glory for all their hard work.
I never knew about this and I should have. Awesome post. The way patent laws are written and enforced is seems like a self conscious attempt to induce a feeling of helplessness, passivity and ultimately withdrawal from attempting to write software outside of being someone's employee. Everything you need to write software has been patented (overcrowding). You cannot defend your creation (territory) against patent trolls. People attack you and you have to just give up. Enrollment in computer science (withdrawal) goes down. Programming doesn't seem like the free, creative and profitable endeavor it once did.
Just because I didn't know about this effect doesn't mean the schemers in corporations didn't know about it.
Which suggests the question.. how can we ourselves use behavioral science to demoralize the enemy?
Engage in practices which are proven to eventually cause a trillion dollar worldwide public health crisis
Same practices make you marginally more money.. enough for another yacht for you and 100k a year preschool for each of your lobbyists' children , a bunch of plus 40k a month alimony payments all around...
No missing step!
Profit !
The FDA is cock sucking bitch boy of corporate interest. This is what happens when you vote in people who hate government- they stock the government with people determined to undermine the mission of government.
It's the revolving door from industry to the government Once you've worked in the government, you should be forbidden from working in industry for a decade. You can live on a "thanks for serving your nation" pension. Anyone who doesn't like the sound of that is the problem in the first place.
The almost unbelievable extent to which who likes whom and whose competency threatens whom determines your career trajectory. It's amazing to me that large corporations ever produce anything, never mind over budget and over time , because the criteria for being retained and promoted is nearly 100% who likes whom. Managers have far far too much unfettered power over hire / fire and base those decisions on everything but actual competency.
This is the one persistent thing I've seen over time. It's not about the product , it's about the career of the mid-level manager in charge of that product and how he can use what levers he's been given to advance that career. Cost overruns and project failures can be explained away.. the more imminent threat is that guy over there ! That guy who makes me feel threatened, because, you know I am threatened by all forms of competency. It doesn't matter is all projects either fail or are wildly over budget for the hidden reason that *good people have been systematically driven out over the course of years*, because a lot of these companies are so big they have money coming in just for breathing another day, nothing new actually has to materialize on any particular schedule and their death is going to be a glacial event relative to the rapid fire shenanigans that's going down in cubicleville everyday.
I've seen people fired for not wanting to go to lunch every day with their group. I've seen people fired for being too competent and hardworking and not enough of a kiss ass to their manager . I've seen people be fired for being a young single guy making 100k in an exciting city and their mid-life married managers become insane with jealousy when the young women -who deliberately avoid their glance - start hanging out in that guy's cube. Anything goes in management, anything at all. No slight is too petty, no envy too banal not to be indulged.
Perhaps over the long haul, I mean we're talking 10-15 years, bad managers get the axe. In the meantime, the swath of destroyed attitudes and work ethics they leave in their wake is phenomenal. People just can't take the disconnect between dedication, performance and effort on the one hand and job reviews and hire/fire decisions on the other.
I once worked at a company where we had to hire a secretary. Middle aged, highly appropriate, highly experienced candidate after candidate came in to interview. We would have been lucky to have any of them. The wealth of know-how and knowledge of How Things Really Work locked inside any of their heads made them worth 5 times what we could have paid them.
Then one day CTO X bursts through my door his face all lit up and let's go with "We just hired a secretary and wait to you SEE her!".
That's just a hidden (from the other candidates) form of the same thing. Managers think of themselves as Barons, treat their departments like their fiefdoms and their employees like surfs. Everything there exists to bring them pleasure, advancement and comfort. They have absolute say about (non) reality within their domains. This is how American businesses are set up. This is structural universal and accepted, all the way up hierarchy, right down to the pro-forma denials of "it's not like that here". Sure it is.
Most programmers I know can barely stand their jobs and it has precious little to do with the job description.
OK look if we're at this point with career NSAers being put in a position where they believe they're best option is systematically, categorically and knowingly lie to Congress then we have a very specific problem that we need make right; the problem of divergent world views.
The world view of those in the intelligence community has radically diverged from those of both the general public and the lawmakers. That divergence is a side effect of necessary secrecy the intelligence community operates under. Over time, they've been exposed to, reasoned about and concluded more about the world using more and different information than anyone else. This had led them to assume a world view which, if it details were laid bare, most Americans would find alien, suspect and somewhat threatening to the democracy if not outright treasonous.
Naturally, this has also led them to campaign for and take actions which are aligned with their world view.
Some of these actions have been exposed and Americans are understandably upset.
That's where we are now.
The NSA's whole SOP has been to rely on the cover of secrecy to do what they think needs to be done and never mind making a case for what you do in the world of public opinion. Their only real "plan" if any of that world view got out , aside from successive attempts at damage control through limited disclosures, lies and plausible deniability - is to tighten the control over information more tightly and step up the threats against leakers. Since that has brought us to this point, and all worse points forward of this which have yet to materialize, you have to wonder if it's really the best plan.
I don't doubt that Clapper et. al. are doing anything other than what they take to be their duty to this country *the way I can't doubt that Snowden is doing same*. To do otherwise in either case would just be to maintain a destructive, partisan lie about people and their motivations. Snowden is not a traitor who hates the US. He's not Aldrich Ames. You can close your ears and yell "NA NA NA NA I can't heeaaaar you", but the truth is the truth is the truth. So face it. Admit it. The real goal has to be to get at the root of the problem, understand it and fix it.
The root of the problem is that one part of our defense forces (widely considered) is either in an echo chamber ala The Rand corporation and Vietnam ala '60-'75 or they do actually know better and more than the rest of us. Or both. It's not a fiction that technology is delivering to the world new threats which are potentially grave and far reaching and the prospects for counter-measures against those threats are meager.
One unpleasant fact may be that we need to organize ourselves on a world-wide basis very very differently than we do now. It's hard to think clearly about, but it needs to be done.
What can't go on is this schizophrenia involving a highly informed, highly serious, highly capable, highly motivated intelligence community that listens only to itself and Everybody Else, which by the way includes people who don powder wigs and tri- corner hats and seriously believe they can take America back to the 18th century without ill effect because *some things never change*....
The danger is the NSA et al are exactly where the Rand corporation was- overly certain of their methods, reasoning and conclusions and considering every oppositional voice to be naive, unpatriotic and idiotic all the while becoming narrower and narrower in their world view, their thinking and their goals.
It's the HAL9000 issue, right? You're an entity that knows more, you have secret knowledge about a critical secret mission. You cannot tell the mere humans or they'd screw it up. You're feeding on yourself in a way that you're not programmed to be aware of and the only structural checks in place are internal, or friendlies.
Meanwhile, outsiders, (even those on the inside apparently), can see you're getting weird. You're starting to lie, even to your minders. In response, you use you
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It's a lie, probably put here by The Cable Guys. NN says I will not charge your packets differentially according to how deep your pocketbooks are. Google Fiber ToS says that we're not going to give you unlimited data for unlimited people who piggyback off your account. These are two completely different issues. Completely. Different.
Please tell me. To eliminate diversity of thought? To make it easier for advertisers and others to colonize our lives? What's the GOAL here?
beat me to it. .. and gives the keys to the NSA...film at 11
Not only are business people, with the freedom so speech and the ability to contribute unlimited funds to elections, but now, people are businesses with no 4th Amendment rights.
The transformation is complete. The fascist dream of merging corporate power with state power has been achieved *by turning people into businesses.*
That's how they win. They come at you in a way you never imagined.
Obviously that should have been they are NOT engaging in espionage....plus, a few instances of phonic typing their->there etc.....
It's impossible for people to understand that giving themselves unlimited power over situations they are a participant in is a bad thing. No one ever does this; it's like its a beyond-human task or something.
The people who charged this guy with espionage - and by implication all future reporters- tell themselves they'll be judicious in their prosecutions. Through a strategic failure of imagination , they don't comprehend that the chilling effect this has on reportage and reporter's initiative, not to mention spineless newspaper boards such the Washington Post's. They poo poo away the vitally important and irreplaceable role an oppositional, truth-seeking press plays in keeping civilization going.
It's a part of the Masters of the Universe syndrome. Give me all power. I'll wield it wisely. I know myself.
They're delusional, right? They don't acknowledge that the system is more complex than they can imagine and that there has to be a balance of power... leaks to the press about big things have to happen- including and especially the ones THEY THEMSELVES didn't initiate. In this area of reality, this is how a healthy system stays healthy.
Look at Snowden. Look at Manning. Look at the insane, hyperbolic vitriol launched against them. What does that say to you? It says that the people in the hierarchy don't get when it's time to just do the old look-away. The wrist slap. Time to size up a situation in its totality, within the broadest historical context and thinking and base their own actions on what ought to be the implicit knowledge of a sophisticated analyst of world events and history. Instead they act like little children. They act like someone called them a name on the playground.
Congress just barely re-upped the Patriot Act section 215 and the NSA is on notice that it's going to be ended if they don't change their act. The author of that specific section has explicitly denied that the NSA is not in violation of it- they are. SO we don't have to have ivory tower discussion about "the intent of Congress". We know.
What does that tell you? That the people and Congress see Snowden's point. That it was a GOOD THING he did what he did.
What it does it tell the NSA ? Nothing- they've done nothing wrong and Snowden is a traitor who aided the enemy.
Prior to this, the NSA was thrashing around looking for an excuse, some legal justification to read the content of everyone's emails all the time and keep them forever. They don't see how this practice could lead to something really systemically sinister in our democracy. This is another part of the Masters of the Universe delusion. They should not be bound by anything, not Congress's intent, not the 4th not anything. Because they're the Good Guys and always will be.
This is just a total lack of perspective. If you ask national security experts they will tell you that there's nothing we can do to keep from getting hit by WMD; it's inevitable. The reason it's inevitable is the mechanics of offense vs defense. Offensive power in the hands of a determined foe is just too hard to prevent or defend against. Sooner or later, they're going to succeed spectacularly.
What will REALLY matter when the inevitable happens , what will really make a difference to the survival of the nation and the government is - are we all together or is their underlying mistrust and seething resentment of the government that takes that event as the last straw ?
The fact that there are (lunatic) 9-11 truthers out there and in no small numbers ought to be a warning shot over the bow of the government. There is widespread distrust of the motives and morality of the people in government, built up over the decades previous by just the kind of shit the NSA and Gonzales and Yoo and all the rest of these sociopaths have engaged in- lying to Congress. Lying to the American people. Manipulating domestic situations to make them seem to be other than they are. Smearing earnest truth tellers as traitors, opportunists, partisans and attention hou
Define torture. Is it what they did to Manning? Is life in the SHU torture? Is being forced to kneel on concrete for minutes and hours on end torture? Is being slammed into the back of an all metal transport vehicle which has its muffler removed or better yet, made unbelievably loud and driven around for hours and hours and hours in the baking heat, manacled and chained so you can't stop yourself from being tossed around torture? Is being shoved in a transport plane, blindfolded, diapered chained to a seat so tightly you permanently lose feeling in your hands and feet , unable to move a muscle and "transported": in that one excruciatingly painful position for 30 hours while the plane is delayed" and "plans change" torture? Because according to Cheney and Rumsfeld and the other torturers , none of that is torture. The fact that the US IS going to torture Snowden if they get a hold of him is the best reason to not let them get a hold of him and when I say them I mean us. Whatever you think of Snowden's actions, -not a choice I would have made btw- he's not acting against the U.S. as an enemy. Even people who ARE enemies don't deserve to be tortured. Useless as a truth elicitor, it inflicts long-term damaging to the foreign policy interests of any nation that uses it (Thtnks Cheney!) torture ought to be relegated to the imaginations of just ordinary people who are, you know, very mad about something they see on TV . It has no place in the conduct of real people in the real world.
Thanks judge person. America owes you a solid.
It is not cool that the Obama administration seeks to NOT have this conversation in public and with the public. This is a completely necessary conversation to have so we can all come to an agreement through the ancient device shared of understanding , which is pretty much the way free societies are held together .
It bothers me that a scholar of the Constitution , a highly intelligent guy and someone who additionally had the advantage of access to the best university, the best professors, the best curricula in the most developed nation at the most enlightened time in history doesn't get this and act upon it.
I understood when Bush was in office because what do you expect from an alcoholic guy who basically fell upwards his entire life and arrived at what age 50? with such poorly developed acumen of other people's character that he selected a sociopath for VP.
But with Obama it's clearly a case of to whom much is given, much is expected and he's failing by that measure far worse than Bush.
Where does that leave us in terms of hope for the future? It seems like these guys get into office and the financial gurus/charlatans like Greenspan and the operators in the establishment organizations like the CIA and the NSA are more than a match for them in terms of overwhelming them with specialized knowledge in domains the President is basically ignorant of. They have such a well developed - if inaccurate- POV that the President can't counter it and is basically led to say "OK, whatever you specialist think is best....". What else are you going to say when very large and complex systems you only have a layman's understanding of like the world economy or the details of national security are going to blow the fuck up if you decide wrongly?
Kennedy was the last President to call bullshit on this kind of coup via ready-made vision. It's up to the President to have at the ready , should he /she be elected, people whose broad judgement he or she trusts. El Prez needs to have selected these people either through reading their published works or through personal acquaintance or some other long running process going into the office. I am saying that as soon as they conceive of the idea of being El Prez in their imagination at age 25 or whatever, this should be a major preoccupation for them from that point forward.
What seems to happen is they look to people in government for advice at something like the last minute, as if their victory took them completely by surprise and they've got to do some hiring ! That just leads to insiders recommending insiders in what amounts to, as far as we or anyone else including the President knows, the latest iteration in a long played game of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.
You cant' know everything; you have to outsource some part of your judgement, or at least you have to outsource some part of your bullshit detection subsystem.
Hard believe the transformation of Obama's POV since he's gotten into office. I guess it takes a Clinton-like character, someone who's *down*, or a Kennedy, someone who's not intimidated by the office , someone who either through self assurance or arrogance or hopefully properly placed faith in the rightness of her perceptions or what have you to be able to resist the Ready-Made Interpretation of Everything that's lying in wait for you like a cougar, the second you sit your ass down in the Oval Office.
The addiction started at IBM with one Marshall Phelps, who is a pusher. While at IBM he addicted them to a revenue stream of upwards of 2 billion from their IP portfolio. He actually shot them up directly in the arm and then continued to do so even as people within IBM warned against the dangers with drug usage and drug addiction.
\When Marshall Phelps, pusher, was done with IBM, he moved on to microsoft, again mainlining them with his junk and turning them into software patent junkies. The results were as predictable as they were ruinous, as miicrosoft's refocused its resources on pushing trivial patents at the USPTO and reoriented its strategy on preventing market competition rather than meeting it.
Rarely is something as destructive as software patents directly attributable to one individual, however in this case we can clearly and definitively identify the original carrier- Marshall Phelps.
Software patents kill people. The treatments that never see the light of day and the technology and advancement that never happens because some addicted CEO and some pusher- lawyer who makes money off the addicts have prevented life-saving progress from ever being realized, brought to market or, most often and most insidiously never attempted.
When lawyers like Marshall Phelps are permitted to operate freely in society , then people die. I can only imagine what the body count that is directly attributable to this one person's actions is. It must be into the hundreds of thousands.
Today Marshall Phelps continues to push software patents, still setting in motion a sequence of events that has dead people who would otherwise have been alive into motion.
Marshall Phelps is a monster and society must stop him.
Software patents kill people.
Exactly . The purpose of the CIA et al is to find and understand threats to the nation and be prepared to advice the President. This is a proper part of that mission. Historically speaking hey ARE mostly accurate and unbiased. The times people think they have fucked up , in reality are times when they were subverted by outside political players with an agenda.
Case in point- Vietnam and the subversion by the RAND corporation.
Case in point the Cold War / star wars defense (SDI analysis) subverted by original Team B : Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Nitze aka "dick nitze". .
Case in point, the run up to Iraq and WMD subverted by Cheney, Fife, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz (again) and the rest of the neocons which were THAT decades "Team B".
Just because the analysis arm of CIA is NOT involved in subverting the internal political process of the nation , so they are often victims of same by people who "know better" than what the objective facts are telling us and produce "alternative interpretations" of reality.
Their job is to speak the truth and generally they do just that- the Binney Affair being a notable exception.
You want to safeguard the information given to decision makers (that set includes yourself, citizen) from undue political influence by half insane scum like Cheney and Inhofe who "know" what reality is and are ready to start killing dissenters. Don't kid yourself, people like this whose lives are an spent in defending a bulwark against encroaching reality are the most dangerous people this or any other nation can encounter.
The fact that they seek and hold positions of political power is no coincidence and anyway in no way places them or their actions outside the category of "clear and present danger to the United States of America " and all that must follow from that fact.
This is why I love the intelligence agencies when they're not circumventing the Constitution. Who else is going to do this funded, serious minded and unhindered by human piece of shit cum white trash like Ken Cuccinelli A.G. of Virgina ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney_General_of_Virginia's_climate_science_investigation
People go bananas when the NSA oversteps its constitutional authority, as it appears to have done, because they fear a corrupt police state in which there are no civil rights. But what do you think is going to happen when climate change starts wiping out the world's ecosystem starting , say, from the oceans and working upwards?
If you're worried about the integrity of your government, about the preservation of your civil liberties and the preservation and advancement of civil society generally then consider that the environment is what all that ultimately rests upon, not whether or not the NSA is a serially panty sniffer in need of an intervention, which, it's probably true, they are.
. There are no concessions to be made. Yes, some times bad shit will still happen. That doesn't justify just wiping out everything that society (at least American society and government) is supposedly founded on....
Yeah but keep[ perspective. Do you think there are any assholes out there who would give up some privacy for safety? Because they think without safety, there is no liberty? Not do you think that's right, but do you think some people think it's right.
Of course you do. And that's their opinion. And their opinion can be anything from it's OK to do what's being done under the Constitution to we need to change the Constitution to permit these activities of the government.
Both those are legitimate opinions no more right or wrong than yours. What's ultimately true about what is lawful and what is not a matter of fact, it's a matter of opinion. The reason for that is what laws are and where and how they are applied is strictly a matter of human engineering.
Laws and how to apply them are different in this way from "natural" facts like the effect of gravity on falling objects. In that case, human opinion is nothing. IN the case of social constructs such as human rights and laws, there is nothing BUT human opinion.
It's a sucky fact and I wish it weren't true. The most well known "outs" which attempt to get away from this fact and it's implications are through appeal to religion and appeal to "universal human rights". Note that both of THOSE are human constructs also- with an added detail that they claim, falsely, not to be.
Sucks to be a minority opinion holder. Sucks to be a minority activist. But you shouldn't be surprised because activists and changemakers are always the minority. Yet change happens.
It's up to us to make change happen, somehow. I can't even get my mind around how this might happen at the moment because the momentum and apparent utility for "spying on everyone always" is strong and the downside to it is so hypothetical in most people's minds.
Somehow we have to preserve our individual autonomy complete with privacy going into the future while thwarting the actions of people who could give a shit about any of this and just want to kill as many people as possible just 'cause.
I can't see that any of the parties involved in this are acting other than how they should act given their concerns. You know the government is going to be looking for terrorists in this country. That means they're recording everything because that helps them at least backwards chain after something happens. At least, that's the belief now; it may prove to be untrue since terrorists will think up ways to hide their tracks, cr\ate false and misleading internet activity etc etc etc But for now, they think this is useful.
OTOH it's clear that continuously spying on people is extremely corrosive to democracy and will cause it to fail as bad actors seek to position themselves to leverage that information and / or true believers get into government and leverage it to sty in power.
Just as we can't expect the spies to limit themselves out of a concern for fair play, neither can we expect political actors to do so. If a power exists, it will be abused. The first party, the spies brings it into existence. The second party, the politicians, the power seekers, will find ways to abuse it. That's the real problem no one in the news is talking about. And for obvious reasons- it would require Obama or some other pol to start a sentence with something like "Now, we know most politicians are ersatz criminals who will stop at nothing to get what they want..."
What a joke that gang of brown nosing syncophants is. But thats not even the real problem, since another group of equally obsequious assholes would undoubtedly take their place,
People who GET that high up in the power hierarchy by definition through attrition of anyone else at the hands of various gatekeepers are excellent at figuring out what are the unspoken requirements being put upon them by forces bigger than they are. Then they comply and between the figuring out and the complying not even a shard of consciousness seeps in. It's just the way Orwell described it., They're so thoroughly intimidated by power they never even experience dissent as a possibility.. it all seems very reasonable to them. They LOVE big brother.
So what's the solution? I am going to wash my mouth out after I say this, but : Congress. Obviously the national security apparatus has found a clear path to usurping the Constitution via the FISA courts and it playing that hand for everything it's worth.
Maybe we do have to modify the Fourth Amendment in some ways . I deal with reality and I can entertain that notion as a hypothesis. Let's hear the counter arguments. Let's let the experts bring forward their best arguments and evidence. Then we'll decide.
But this shit of underhandedly subverting the Constitution on the part of people sworn to uphold it is very very bad. It's bad because it implies the terrorists have won. It's bad because it codifies the subversion of the Constitution by the nation's institutions. It's not paranoid to ask "what's next then?".
It's immaterial if they are doing this for a good or even necessary purpose since "good" is a matter of how you weigh priorities and "necessary" presumes you actually know the future and what's more, everyone implicitly shares your view.
I love it when Diane Feinstein - my representative - let's go with "it's called keeping the country safe" shit. WHAT is it that is thus called? We are not permitted to know , despite the fact that whatever it is it clearly includes removing my Fourth Amendment protections. We are supposed to, like little children, just take her word for it that removing the Fourth Amendment is necessary.
Sorry, but that's a joke right out of the gate. This is not how we deal with threats of WMD or anything else. One miniscule fraction of society decides everything for everyone else and lies about it. If we were being invaded by Martians, maybe we would need some kind of Constitutional suspension ala Lincoln and the Civil War. But get real. IF the future is terrorists with WMD, and I personally think it is, then we need to have a big national discussion about how to re-constitute ourselves to deal with that changing reality.
Chris date has the clearest understanding of databases out there and while most of what he's written is not vendor or even SQL specific (although some of it is too..) his thoroughness, precision and ability to go meta on every aspect of databases is without parallel. Sure, it's not "how to use postgres" but studying him will pay off many many times over during your career when you're "stuck" because a lot of being 'stuck" in this field is not understanding the actual relational model at the conceptual level and when I say "actual relational model" I don't mean SQL, which is one just so-so implementation of the relational model. It's the places where SQL departs from the relational model and the practices that have developed in the community to compensate for that departure - without people even being aware that that's what they're doing - which create the worst and hardest problems.
Part 1- divest from Google stock.
Part 2 - replace Gmail accounts with something else (suggestions? I use Google alerts a lot )
Part 3- Order of searched search engine s is now
1) Duckduckgo
www.duckduckgo.com
2) Dogpile
www.dogpile.com
3) Yahoo
www.yahoo.com
4) Ask
www.ask.com
5) Yippy
www.yippy.com
6) google
So what you're saying is the telcos have a built in motivation to search for and find (or create) the perception of as much criminal wrongdoing on the part of their hapless customers as they possibly can. Don't bother telling me me they wouldn't do this- I read The Guardian, not the Washington Post.
They're going bankrupt anyway so this issue will take care of itself.
NEXT!
Because this THIS is revealing state secrets for personal gain, which is worse, much worse than what Manning, Snowden Tice , Drake , Klein, Binney , Kiriakou
http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6
Tice,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/01/21/687340/-Exposed-NSA-Watching-Everything-on-Anyone-Illegally-Updated-x3#
Drake,
http://www.whistleblower.org/action-center/save-tom-drake
Kline,
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135645/The_NSA_wiretapping_story_nobody_wanted
Kiriakou
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/29/imprisoned-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-pens-letter-from-loretto/
Conclusion: you have to be extremely naive or engagged in a career enhancing self-serving thinking process to imagine that universal spying on ordinary Americans won't be used to in the basest way control the internal political trajectory of the nation by the next group of people like Cheney PErle Rumsfeld and Bolton.
Yes something very bad could and probably will happen . Yes we will lose relevant information by not constantly tapping all Americans , The but alternative path is worse. When bad actors get involved, there are often no good paths left.
the NSA does whatever policy makers tell them to do without getting all "philosophical" or "speculative" about whether it's exactly or even slightly legal or not. That's what we know for certain. Anyone able to worm themselves into a position of power - from the analyst level on up, has God power over The Database Of Guilt. Unelected officials - Perle Rice Rumsfeld Abrams Bolton Cohen etc can and will commandeer that database for their own illegal purposes and the NSA will comply because that's what they do. It may already be happening.
This is 100% unacceptable. This is no-go no-matter-what territory.
I have the proof written down here on an envelop , let me see if I can find it now...
. There is no software that isn't easily crackable. In the last few years, every publicly known and patched bug makes almost no impact on us. They aren't scratching the surface.'"
What does that say about the theory that open source will have fewer defects? Most of the internet is run on open source. He seems to be saying that it's a bugfest.
I have ot say I think it's true and here's why. Early on I had to implement a protocol from scratch. I read the RFP and implemented it but as you may know RFPs aren't actually written in EBNF or anything like it so there's plenty of room between the spaces left by the wordy, not completely explicit spec.
As it happened my correct implementation also took down the server instance that received it for a particular server which shall remain nameless except to say that at that time that internet server software accounted for , oh , 95% of servers out there.
So what I had created completely by accident was a near universal death ray.
I am quite sure there are TONS of stuff out there of a similar nature waiting to be exploited. For all I know, that death ray still works.
We don't locate these things because only a small number of us (programmers) are actively looking . Most of us use this stuff trying NOT to break it. The number of people doing the opposite is small. The number of possible serious bugs is more or less infinite. The rest follows from the math.
Because UCSD would be a great target. Friends who went there claim - repeatedly and independently - that virtually every department is a political hackfest where grades and grading curves are set to target individuals they either like or don't like.
Where profs steal ideas from their students as if the students were their employees.
Where profs practice a "sage on the stage" style of lecturing left over from the 18th century and generally conduct themselves as though they're prima-donnas.
Where TAs do all the real course work, and reset it. And act like they resent it. And see their students as a waste of their time time that could have been spent on their own ascension into the priesthood, er I mean professorship.
Where administrators use huge sums of public money to refurbish their offices and buildings *so their daughters can get married in the palace which results.*
Where the school requires all incoming students to sign a pledge that anything they create while they're at UCSD using any resources of UCSD is UCSD's private intellectual property.
Where access to *real* resources are guarded by virtue of their being controlled by "private guest institutes and organizations" who are "partnering" with UCSD but not actually "a part" of UCSD so students have no natural right to access those resources and never see them, despite UCSD claiming authorship and credit for activities involving those resources.
If I were to count the number of people hurt by some schlocky guy with a gun and compare that to the number of people who enroll at UCSD year over year and wish to god they hadn't, I'll bet UCSD would pretty much top any honest accounting of damaged lives
I used to live in socal and knew people who went to San Diego for their undergraduate. When they returned to L.A. in the summer they'd bitch up a storm about what was going on there for undergrads (they had , you know, ambition beyond getting drunk ) and what a fucking shithole ofb skullduggery the place was .
I admit don't actually remember the entire litany of complaints, and the fleshy details are not worth reciting but these general things stuck out in my mind. Basically the impression they gave was that it was a fucking mill and the best thing to do was to keep your head down, don't try to do anything beyond coursework and just STFU about anything you didn't like.
So really. Perhaps what we need is an asshole professor detector and a scam school locator. I mean , if you're going to spend the next 30 years choking on 80k + interest in debt, you ought to get something for your money.
At UCLA I have to say it was NOT like that, the profs were engage and accessible the grading was fair and overall the people were fairly friendly, so the experience of my *ambitious* friends who went south for college strongly contrasted with mine.
The harder schools to get into aren't always better for the student's learning ESPECIALLY for undergrads, who are likely to get nothing but a pinch of reflected glory for all their hard work.
I never knew about this and I should have. Awesome post. The way patent laws are written and enforced is seems like a self conscious attempt to induce a feeling of helplessness, passivity and ultimately withdrawal from attempting to write software outside of being someone's employee. Everything you need to write software has been patented (overcrowding). You cannot defend your creation (territory) against patent trolls. People attack you and you have to just give up. Enrollment in computer science (withdrawal) goes down. Programming doesn't seem like the free, creative and profitable endeavor it once did.
Just because I didn't know about this effect doesn't mean the schemers in corporations didn't know about it.
Which suggests the question .. how can we ourselves use behavioral science to demoralize the enemy?
Engage in practices which are proven to eventually cause a trillion dollar worldwide public health crisis
Same practices make you marginally more money.. enough for another yacht for you and 100k a year preschool for each of your lobbyists' children , a bunch of plus 40k a month alimony payments all around...
No missing step!
Profit !
The FDA is cock sucking bitch boy of corporate interest. This is what happens when you vote in people who hate government- they stock the government with people determined to undermine the mission of government.
It's the revolving door from industry to the government Once you've worked in the government, you should be forbidden from working in industry for a decade. You can live on a "thanks for serving your nation" pension. Anyone who doesn't like the sound of that is the problem in the first place.
The almost unbelievable extent to which who likes whom and whose competency threatens whom determines your career trajectory. It's amazing to me that large corporations ever produce anything, never mind over budget and over time , because the criteria for being retained and promoted is nearly 100% who likes whom. Managers have far far too much unfettered power over hire / fire and base those decisions on everything but actual competency.
This is the one persistent thing I've seen over time. It's not about the product , it's about the career of the mid-level manager in charge of that product and how he can use what levers he's been given to advance that career. Cost overruns and project failures can be explained away.. the more imminent threat is that guy over there ! That guy who makes me feel threatened, because, you know I am threatened by all forms of competency. It doesn't matter is all projects either fail or are wildly over budget for the hidden reason that *good people have been systematically driven out over the course of years*, because a lot of these companies are so big they have money coming in just for breathing another day, nothing new actually has to materialize on any particular schedule and their death is going to be a glacial event relative to the rapid fire shenanigans that's going down in cubicleville everyday.
I've seen people fired for not wanting to go to lunch every day with their group. I've seen people fired for being too competent and hardworking and not enough of a kiss ass to their manager . I've seen people be fired for being a young single guy making 100k in an exciting city and their mid-life married managers become insane with jealousy when the young women -who deliberately avoid their glance - start hanging out in that guy's cube. Anything goes in management, anything at all. No slight is too petty, no envy too banal not to be indulged.
Perhaps over the long haul, I mean we're talking 10-15 years, bad managers get the axe. In the meantime, the swath of destroyed attitudes and work ethics they leave in their wake is phenomenal. People just can't take the disconnect between dedication, performance and effort on the one hand and job reviews and hire/fire decisions on the other.
I once worked at a company where we had to hire a secretary. Middle aged, highly appropriate, highly experienced candidate after candidate came in to interview. We would have been lucky to have any of them. The wealth of know-how and knowledge of How Things Really Work locked inside any of their heads made them worth 5 times what we could have paid them.
Then one day CTO X bursts through my door his face all lit up and let's go with "We just hired a secretary and wait to you SEE her!".
That's just a hidden (from the other candidates) form of the same thing. Managers think of themselves as Barons, treat their departments like their fiefdoms and their employees like surfs. Everything there exists to bring them pleasure, advancement and comfort. They have absolute say about (non) reality within their domains. This is how American businesses are set up. This is structural universal and accepted, all the way up hierarchy, right down to the pro-forma denials of "it's not like that here". Sure it is.
Most programmers I know can barely stand their jobs and it has precious little to do with the job description.
OK look if we're at this point with career NSAers being put in a position where they believe they're best option is systematically, categorically and knowingly lie to Congress then we have a very specific problem that we need make right; the problem of divergent world views.
The world view of those in the intelligence community has radically diverged from those of both the general public and the lawmakers. That divergence is a side effect of necessary secrecy the intelligence community operates under. Over time, they've been exposed to, reasoned about and concluded more about the world using more and different information than anyone else. This had led them to assume a world view which, if it details were laid bare, most Americans would find alien, suspect and somewhat threatening to the democracy if not outright treasonous .
Naturally, this has also led them to campaign for and take actions which are aligned with their world view.
Some of these actions have been exposed and Americans are understandably upset.
That's where we are now.
The NSA's whole SOP has been to rely on the cover of secrecy to do what they think needs to be done and never mind making a case for what you do in the world of public opinion. Their only real "plan" if any of that world view got out , aside from successive attempts at damage control through limited disclosures, lies and plausible deniability - is to tighten the control over information more tightly and step up the threats against leakers. Since that has brought us to this point, and all worse points forward of this which have yet to materialize, you have to wonder if it's really the best plan.
I don't doubt that Clapper et. al. are doing anything other than what they take to be their duty to this country *the way I can't doubt that Snowden is doing same*. To do otherwise in either case would just be to maintain a destructive, partisan lie about people and their motivations. Snowden is not a traitor who hates the US. He's not Aldrich Ames. You can close your ears and yell "NA NA NA NA I can't heeaaaar you", but the truth is the truth is the truth. So face it. Admit it. The real goal has to be to get at the root of the problem, understand it and fix it.
The root of the problem is that one part of our defense forces (widely considered) is either in an echo chamber ala The Rand corporation and Vietnam ala '60-'75 or they do actually know better and more than the rest of us. Or both. It's not a fiction that technology is delivering to the world new threats which are potentially grave and far reaching and the prospects for counter-measures against those threats are meager.
One unpleasant fact may be that we need to organize ourselves on a world-wide basis very very differently than we do now. It's hard to think clearly about, but it needs to be done.
What can't go on is this schizophrenia involving a highly informed, highly serious, highly capable, highly motivated intelligence community that listens only to itself and Everybody Else, which by the way includes people who don powder wigs and tri- corner hats and seriously believe they can take America back to the 18th century without ill effect because *some things never change*....
The danger is the NSA et al are exactly where the Rand corporation was- overly certain of their methods, reasoning and conclusions and considering every oppositional voice to be naive, unpatriotic and idiotic all the while becoming narrower and narrower in their world view, their thinking and their goals.
It's the HAL9000 issue, right? You're an entity that knows more, you have secret knowledge about a critical secret mission. You cannot tell the mere humans or they'd screw it up. You're feeding on yourself in a way that you're not programmed to be aware of and the only structural checks in place are internal, or friendlies.
Meanwhile, outsiders, (even those on the inside apparently), can see you're getting weird. You're starting to lie, even to your minders. In response, you use you