Seriously, what kind of logic is this? The justice department didn't say that they didn't try to poison her! They must have!
If think it's more like if she was found poisoned, and the Justice department said "I have no knowledge the DoJ had any involvement with poisoning her food or by poisoning her with toxic gas. We have no comment on whether or not we poisoned her with an injection toxin or through a contact poison".
To our knowledge, the Justice Department has never compromised Ms. Attkisson’s computers, or otherwise sought any information from or concerning any telephone, computer, or other media device she may own or use.
It sounds like a carefully worded statement that leaves open the possibility that they planted an old fashioned bug to listen to her in her home, or a GPS tracker on her car, or secretly searched her house, or one of the other many ways they can secretly keep someone under surveillance.
Why not a simple "We have never had Ms Attkisson under any surveillance or covertly obtained any information about her"?
Besides, if she used a Verizon Business cell phone, or if the same cell phone meta-data order that was leaked to the press was given to all of the carriers, then the government *did* seek information concerning telephones used by her.
If 1 in 3 robberies involve stealing a tracking device that can lead police back to the culprit, shouldn't that be making the job of police much easier?
Instead of a "kill-switch", shouldn't law enforcement be asking for a tracking beacon that can be turned on to help track down all of these stolen phones? (I know Apple's kill-switch does enable GPS tracking, but that doesn't seem to be what the Attorney General is asking for). It's not like criminals are going to say "Oh geeze, I can't sell a stolen cell phone anymore, guess I should finish up my degree and get a real job" -- They are still going to be committing crimes, but will steal cash and expensive purses instead of cell phones.
Last time I checked, all oversight connected with these sorts of things consist of are guidelines for the users to follow. IF you come across personal data, you are SUPPOSED to report it so it get's cleaned.... that's just not enough. You can sift through personal data all day and just not tell anyone and there's a high probability nobody will ever know.
You are basically asked nicely not to abuse the power these systems give. There is no actual, active oversight nor are there any actual barriers in place.
That's how most "oversight" works in the corporate world. What's important to the regulatory bodies is that you have a *procedure* in plan to do something. Whether or not your employees actually follow the procedure or that the procedure actually accomplishes what it's supposed to is not as important as having the written procedure. I've been through more than one audit where the auditor just leafs through the procedure book, if something is missing, we get docked, but they don't actually watch the employees or even talk to them to find out if they are doing what they are supposed to.
I instantly believe you. It's not as if it's the government's fault that people are so distrusting of it or anything; it couldn't be!
Funny, you instantly believed a 29-year-old who ran to Hong Kong to make outlandish claims about surveillance...
You mean the outlandish claim that millions of citizens had their phone "metadata" tracked and compiled by the NSA from Verizon? The outlandish claim that is so outlandish that the government sources actually had to say "Whatcha so upset about? We've been doing it for years!"
With BestBuny now hosting Apple stores, Samsung stores, Microsoft stores, and god knows how many more; I'm wondering if there will be any space left for me to just buy the goddamned blu-ray movie and ink cartridge that I came for.
Just buy them from Amazon instead. I haven't set foot in a Best Buy in years. Based on the number of times my parents visit the store (they bought their digital camera, a laptop and a tablet there), BestBuy must cater to an older demographic and once that demographic fades away, I'm not sure who will shop at BB.
use data to find people living in the USA who are here to cause us harm in the future?
If there were some way to ensure that's what the data is really used for that would be a laudable goal. But there's no way to prevent it from abuses. Maybe next election it will be used to find everyone that's ever contributed to a Tea Party candidate so the IRS can scrutinize their taxes, or maybe to track down everyone that's ever attended a Green Party meeting, or some other political means.
There's a lot of ways the data can be abused (if not by the current government, then a future one), and few ways to prevent the abuse.
So someone asks you some questions. So what? If you went overseas, you were clearly fine with not only being questioned by the TSA, but having your personal property searched (without a warrant!) and even having your person scanned or physically scrutinized.
Well actually no, TSA didn't question me or go through my personal property other than an X-ray. US Customs asked if I was bringing back any restricted or taxable items, but they didn't question me about what else I had with me. They didn't even open my checked bag (or if they did, they reset the "opened by TSA indicator" on my lock and replaced the zip-tie on the zippers with another one just like mine.
If the NSA can flag your purchases, it also knows enough about you to know what you are doing with said purchases. So just ignore them (like they are ignoring you).
I'm supposed to be comfortable with surveilllance that is so detailed that not only do they know what I'm purchasing, but they also know what I'm doing with the purchases?
say you do buy something that sets off a terrorist warning. chances are lots of other people are buying the exact same thing and setting off the same warning. its impossible for people to manually go through all the data and question everyone. even if they wanted to, they can't just question you for no reason. they just pass the info to the FBI. and they don't have enough people to question tens of thousands of people a year over what they buy. if they really did this it would be all over the internet
that's why in 2013 we have software that scans this data to find patterns
Right - they use datamining software to look for patterns, They can use very loose criteria that flags a million people, or they can tune the algorithms to tighten the criteria of what is flagged as "suspicious" until only 1000, or 100, or 10 people are flagged, and they'll keep tuning until they have a reasonable number of people to scrutinize and/or question.
Datamining works, but it's not exact - it can pick 1000 people out of 100 million that are likely going to do something, but not with 100% certainty. Especially since real terrorists know that they may be observed, so they take great pains to anonymize their behavior or make it conform to "normal".
The big question is - how many innocent Americans are scrutinized (wiretaps, email disclosure, sneak-and-peek warrants, etc) or questioned without having done anything wrong at all? No one can tell you since all of these activities are authorized by a secret court and it's illegal for a provider to disclose that a warrant has been served. Maybe it's 10 americans, maybe it's 1000, maybe it's a million, only the FISA court knows and they aren't telling anyone.
I just can't stop myself. If you don't have anything to hide you have nothing to worry about.
There, I said it. Here come the downmodders.
Since once the NSA has the data it likely never gets deleted, how do you know if you have something you want to hide from a government 10, 15, 20 years into the future? Are you sure that none of the people or groups that you associate with now won't be deemed an enemy of the state at any point in the future? Maybe some ordinary every day activity you do today will bring you under suspicion in the future, like going to church (or one particular church), or the gun range, or spending time in a Makerspace.
Do you know how much information the Staples inventory system has? Does it store things like the phone's Mobile Identification Number? It certainly logged the time the phone was sold and the location, perhaps flagging your cash transaction. Hopefully you smiled at the various cameras in-store and in the parking lot that recorded you driving up and buying the phone.;-)
Buying with cash is definitely important.
I almost brought up the same point about the cameras, but then I realized that if the goal is to keep broad surveillance from tracking him, cycling through disposable phones will do this unless Staples is turning over security camera footage to the NSA for facial recognition.
If the phone was used to commit a crime, the government could probably track it back to him through security camera footage, but they aren't going to be able to track his past few years of movement based on his cell phone records.
say the NSA is tracking 500 million people worldwide do you really think that there is a guy sitting in the NSA tracking you for no reason? out of all the tens of millions of people? what makes you so important?
Since they won't reveal exactly what they are tracking or what behaviors might warrant further scrutiny and investigation, how would I know if a guy at the NSA is tracking me? Maybe my purchase history will set off some "terrorist warning" alert and now they are digging through my past history records. Maybe they are going to send the guys in black SUV's to bring me in for questioning to ask me why I made a trip overseas, then made repeated purchases at Radio Shack and Home Depot *and* I turned my cell phone off for 3 days so I must be up to something nefarious.
If you think that wouldn't happen, then why are the combing through the data if they aren't going to scrutinize and/or question people who have suspicious behavior. And if they *are* doing that, then they are also going to find innocent users who did nothing wrong, yet are forced to explain themselves to the government and maybe even prove that they did nothing wrong.
yes, that is trivial to understand the basic binary numbering system employed, play direction, and demarcation of scan line and frames.
what would be hard to comprehend, on the other hand, is that business in lower left quadrant of location of earth by bearing to pulsars.
I can't even pick out the 1's and 0's in that top waveform. Are the waveforms below it related to the top one? Why is the first part of the wave a perfect and uniform triangle wave followed by a clear and steady zero-level, then it degrades into a much noisier signal? What do I, I- and II mean? Do I rotate the disk clockwise or counter clockwise to read it?
I am hereby setting up a crowd funded effort to bomb and destroy this radio dish. I don't want any aliens appearing on my front doorstep. We've all seen the movies, this never ends well.
Seriously though, it seems to me incredibly arrogant and self centred for a private group of people to try and contact aliens, because the potential results of aliens turning up could be catastrophic, and that's a decision that all mankind should make together, not some private group.
The only reason I'm not concerned is that I think this has precisely a zero point zero chance of success.
Who the hell are you to stop them?
Talk about "incredibly arrogant and self-centred"...
What are you doing to do about the past 100 years of radio broadcasts (including high powered military radars) emanating from our planet? If the Aliens are looking for us, they don't need us to emit a beacon to find us.
Why do I have this indelible image in my mind... a bunch of Indians come together and crowd-source wood to build a big bonfire on the shore - hoping it may be a guiding beacon to travelers coming from far out at sea.
Anytime two societies meet, it usually doesn't end well for the less advanced one. They could possibly come in star ships...we can barely put a man in orbit.
An Alien civilization that can cross the Galaxy in a Starship to come see us is probably not going to find any natural resources or living space that they can't already find elsewhere. There'd be little reason to take over Earth, unless they see us as a threat, and that's doubtful.
The deep ocean is a dangerous place. The jungle is a dangerous place.
To think whatever might be lurking in deep space is all warm and fuzzy, ready to submit to our dominion, or tenderly treat us like children, eager to school us in the secrets of the universe, seems a bit naive.
You'd have a much better chance of thrusting your hand in the ocean at random and retrieving a fish than pointing a radio telescope at a random star system and finding an intelligent civilization
You don't compress the image, you present pure sequence of pixels with scan line and frame completion markers as on the Voyager Golden Record. Have a look at it, the instructions to "play" the disk are engraved on the disk and are crystal clear even to young teen: I was 13 when I first saw it and system was obvious.
Sure, start things out with your pulses, then go to diagrams and pictures like the Voyager Golden Record
This project solves BOTH of those problems at once.
The same scientist(s) who came up with the "hailing message" with enough basic information to help the Aliens decode and understand the message.
What good is sending thousands of random tweets? What are the aliens going to be with messages like "I luv aliens" and "f1rst post!". Even sending the contents of a random novel would be better since it would give a coherent sample of text that aliens could analyze to try to learn our language -- sending a large body of unrelated short messages (in multiple languages?) is not going to help.
Why dilute the value of the data by sending along so much useless extraneous data from anyone willing to pay 99 cents to send it? If you believe it's important to send a message to aliens, it should be important enough to not send "garbage". The organizers should just ask for donations without promising to send messages.
How would an alien decode the.jpeg,.bmp, or whatever else we send them.
Let's just send out BluRay streams. Everyone in the galaxy knows that these have to be licensed + players constantly updated, so the aliens will know what to do.
In the 18 years it will take for the signals to reach the alien civilization on Gliese 526, the MPAA's reach will include the entire Galaxy, and relations with the alien civilization will be soured when each member of their society is fined $150,000 and extradited to the USA for punishment after receiving the and decoding the movie stream.
They should release the binary contents of the haling message and message content as a codebreaking challenge and see if anyone here on earth can decode it.
The same crap comes up in regards to stuff like license plate readers. You can't plug the flow of information to fix your problems, ALL you can do is define how and when the information is used in other processes, like when it is admissible in court, for example. If you don't have faith in due process after all, it doesn't really matter what information is present. So, what has anyone actually DONE to any of you (U.S. citizens) with the information the NSA gathered?
How could anyone possibly know what the use of this data has done when they don't even know the extent of the data collection, the parties that are compelled to turn over the data aren't allowed to tell anyone that the data has been requested or who requested it, and even if it were used against them, the secrecy of the data is deemed so important to national security that it cannot be revealed to you.
That's the whole problem with this secret court, no one can challenge its rulings because they are secret.
The problem with that amendment is the "against UNREASONABLE searches" bit. With the culture of fear created after 9/11, a significant portion of the population feels that this is reasonable if done in the name of fighting Teh Terrorists(tm), which has thus far made the surveillance at least appear constitutional.
In my reading, even a reasonable seizure should be covered under a warrant supported by probable cause. It would be hard even for a secret FISA judge to claim that there's probable cause to search the records of millions of Americans who are not suspected of committing any crime.
Same argument supports the second amendment as well. If the Framers intended for me to own an M4, they'd have specified it. No, the principle's the thing here. Do we have a right to privacy in our affairs or not? I read the 4th amendment to say we do. I also read the 2nd amendment to say we have a right to own modern firearms.
What's your interpretation of the "well regulated militia" part?
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is the justice department denial so specific:
Because they're refuting a specific accusal?
Seriously, what kind of logic is this? The justice department didn't say that they didn't try to poison her! They must have!
If think it's more like if she was found poisoned, and the Justice department said "I have no knowledge the DoJ had any involvement with poisoning her food or by poisoning her with toxic gas. We have no comment on whether or not we poisoned her with an injection toxin or through a contact poison".
Why is the justice department denial so specific:
To our knowledge, the Justice Department has never compromised Ms. Attkisson’s computers, or otherwise sought any information from or concerning any telephone, computer, or other media device she may own or use.
It sounds like a carefully worded statement that leaves open the possibility that they planted an old fashioned bug to listen to her in her home, or a GPS tracker on her car, or secretly searched her house, or one of the other many ways they can secretly keep someone under surveillance.
Why not a simple "We have never had Ms Attkisson under any surveillance or covertly obtained any information about her"?
Besides, if she used a Verizon Business cell phone, or if the same cell phone meta-data order that was leaked to the press was given to all of the carriers, then the government *did* seek information concerning telephones used by her.
If 1 in 3 robberies involve stealing a tracking device that can lead police back to the culprit, shouldn't that be making the job of police much easier?
Instead of a "kill-switch", shouldn't law enforcement be asking for a tracking beacon that can be turned on to help track down all of these stolen phones? (I know Apple's kill-switch does enable GPS tracking, but that doesn't seem to be what the Attorney General is asking for). It's not like criminals are going to say "Oh geeze, I can't sell a stolen cell phone anymore, guess I should finish up my degree and get a real job" -- They are still going to be committing crimes, but will steal cash and expensive purses instead of cell phones.
Last time I checked, all oversight connected with these sorts of things consist of are guidelines for the users to follow. IF you come across personal data, you are SUPPOSED to report it so it get's cleaned.... that's just not enough. You can sift through personal data all day and just not tell anyone and there's a high probability nobody will ever know.
You are basically asked nicely not to abuse the power these systems give. There is no actual, active oversight nor are there any actual barriers in place.
That's how most "oversight" works in the corporate world. What's important to the regulatory bodies is that you have a *procedure* in plan to do something. Whether or not your employees actually follow the procedure or that the procedure actually accomplishes what it's supposed to is not as important as having the written procedure. I've been through more than one audit where the auditor just leafs through the procedure book, if something is missing, we get docked, but they don't actually watch the employees or even talk to them to find out if they are doing what they are supposed to.
I instantly believe you. It's not as if it's the government's fault that people are so distrusting of it or anything; it couldn't be!
Funny, you instantly believed a 29-year-old who ran to Hong Kong to make outlandish claims about surveillance...
You mean the outlandish claim that millions of citizens had their phone "metadata" tracked and compiled by the NSA from Verizon? The outlandish claim that is so outlandish that the government sources actually had to say "Whatcha so upset about? We've been doing it for years!"
With BestBuny now hosting Apple stores, Samsung stores, Microsoft stores, and god knows how many more; I'm wondering if there will be any space left for me to just buy the goddamned blu-ray movie and ink cartridge that I came for.
Just buy them from Amazon instead. I haven't set foot in a Best Buy in years. Based on the number of times my parents visit the store (they bought their digital camera, a laptop and a tablet there), BestBuy must cater to an older demographic and once that demographic fades away, I'm not sure who will shop at BB.
isn't that the whole point of the program?
use data to find people living in the USA who are here to cause us harm in the future?
If there were some way to ensure that's what the data is really used for that would be a laudable goal. But there's no way to prevent it from abuses. Maybe next election it will be used to find everyone that's ever contributed to a Tea Party candidate so the IRS can scrutinize their taxes, or maybe to track down everyone that's ever attended a Green Party meeting, or some other political means.
There's a lot of ways the data can be abused (if not by the current government, then a future one), and few ways to prevent the abuse.
So someone asks you some questions. So what? If you went overseas, you were clearly fine with not only being questioned by the TSA, but having your personal property searched (without a warrant!) and even having your person scanned or physically scrutinized.
Well actually no, TSA didn't question me or go through my personal property other than an X-ray. US Customs asked if I was bringing back any restricted or taxable items, but they didn't question me about what else I had with me. They didn't even open my checked bag (or if they did, they reset the "opened by TSA indicator" on my lock and replaced the zip-tie on the zippers with another one just like mine.
If the NSA can flag your purchases, it also knows enough about you to know what you are doing with said purchases. So just ignore them (like they are ignoring you).
I'm supposed to be comfortable with surveilllance that is so detailed that not only do they know what I'm purchasing, but they also know what I'm doing with the purchases?
say you do buy something that sets off a terrorist warning. chances are lots of other people are buying the exact same thing and setting off the same warning. its impossible for people to manually go through all the data and question everyone. even if they wanted to, they can't just question you for no reason. they just pass the info to the FBI. and they don't have enough people to question tens of thousands of people a year over what they buy. if they really did this it would be all over the internet
that's why in 2013 we have software that scans this data to find patterns
Right - they use datamining software to look for patterns, They can use very loose criteria that flags a million people, or they can tune the algorithms to tighten the criteria of what is flagged as "suspicious" until only 1000, or 100, or 10 people are flagged, and they'll keep tuning until they have a reasonable number of people to scrutinize and/or question.
Datamining works, but it's not exact - it can pick 1000 people out of 100 million that are likely going to do something, but not with 100% certainty. Especially since real terrorists know that they may be observed, so they take great pains to anonymize their behavior or make it conform to "normal".
The big question is - how many innocent Americans are scrutinized (wiretaps, email disclosure, sneak-and-peek warrants, etc) or questioned without having done anything wrong at all? No one can tell you since all of these activities are authorized by a secret court and it's illegal for a provider to disclose that a warrant has been served. Maybe it's 10 americans, maybe it's 1000, maybe it's a million, only the FISA court knows and they aren't telling anyone.
I just can't stop myself. If you don't have anything to hide you have nothing to worry about.
There, I said it. Here come the downmodders.
Since once the NSA has the data it likely never gets deleted, how do you know if you have something you want to hide from a government 10, 15, 20 years into the future? Are you sure that none of the people or groups that you associate with now won't be deemed an enemy of the state at any point in the future? Maybe some ordinary every day activity you do today will bring you under suspicion in the future, like going to church (or one particular church), or the gun range, or spending time in a Makerspace.
Brian, I assume you paid in cash.
Do you know how much information the Staples inventory system has? Does it store things like the phone's Mobile Identification Number? It certainly logged the time the phone was sold and the location, perhaps flagging your cash transaction. Hopefully you smiled at the various cameras in-store and in the parking lot that recorded you driving up and buying the phone. ;-)
Buying with cash is definitely important.
I almost brought up the same point about the cameras, but then I realized that if the goal is to keep broad surveillance from tracking him, cycling through disposable phones will do this unless Staples is turning over security camera footage to the NSA for facial recognition.
If the phone was used to commit a crime, the government could probably track it back to him through security camera footage, but they aren't going to be able to track his past few years of movement based on his cell phone records.
say the NSA is tracking 500 million people worldwide
do you really think that there is a guy sitting in the NSA tracking you for no reason? out of all the tens of millions of people? what makes you so important?
Since they won't reveal exactly what they are tracking or what behaviors might warrant further scrutiny and investigation, how would I know if a guy at the NSA is tracking me? Maybe my purchase history will set off some "terrorist warning" alert and now they are digging through my past history records. Maybe they are going to send the guys in black SUV's to bring me in for questioning to ask me why I made a trip overseas, then made repeated purchases at Radio Shack and Home Depot *and* I turned my cell phone off for 3 days so I must be up to something nefarious.
If you think that wouldn't happen, then why are the combing through the data if they aren't going to scrutinize and/or question people who have suspicious behavior. And if they *are* doing that, then they are also going to find innocent users who did nothing wrong, yet are forced to explain themselves to the government and maybe even prove that they did nothing wrong.
Here you go: 01101000 01110100 01110100 01110000 00111010 00101111 00101111 01110111 01110111 01110111 00101110 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110100 01110101 01100010 01100101 00101110 01100011 01101111 01101101 00101111 01110111 01100001 01110100 01100011 01101000 00111111 01110110 00111101 01000100 01000101 00101101 00111000 01111001 01001111 00110011 01100110 01101110 01001010 00110100
Those are going to be some pretty pissed off aliens, maybe they really are going to come and destroy us.
yes, that is trivial to understand the basic binary numbering system employed, play direction, and demarcation of scan line and frames.
what would be hard to comprehend, on the other hand, is that business in lower left quadrant of location of earth by bearing to pulsars.
I can't even pick out the 1's and 0's in that top waveform. Are the waveforms below it related to the top one? Why is the first part of the wave a perfect and uniform triangle wave followed by a clear and steady zero-level, then it degrades into a much noisier signal? What do I, I- and II mean? Do I rotate the disk clockwise or counter clockwise to read it?
I am hereby setting up a crowd funded effort to bomb and destroy this radio dish. I don't want any aliens appearing on my front doorstep. We've all seen the movies, this never ends well.
Seriously though, it seems to me incredibly arrogant and self centred for a private group of people to try and contact aliens, because the potential results of aliens turning up could be catastrophic, and that's a decision that all mankind should make together, not some private group.
The only reason I'm not concerned is that I think this has precisely a zero point zero chance of success.
Who the hell are you to stop them?
Talk about "incredibly arrogant and self-centred"...
What are you doing to do about the past 100 years of radio broadcasts (including high powered military radars) emanating from our planet? If the Aliens are looking for us, they don't need us to emit a beacon to find us.
Why do I have this indelible image in my mind... a bunch of Indians come together and crowd-source wood to build a big bonfire on the shore - hoping it may be a guiding beacon to travelers coming from far out at sea.
Anytime two societies meet, it usually doesn't end well for the less advanced one. They could possibly come in star ships...we can barely put a man in orbit.
An Alien civilization that can cross the Galaxy in a Starship to come see us is probably not going to find any natural resources or living space that they can't already find elsewhere. There'd be little reason to take over Earth, unless they see us as a threat, and that's doubtful.
The deep ocean is a dangerous place. The jungle is a dangerous place.
To think whatever might be lurking in deep space is all warm and fuzzy, ready to submit to our dominion, or tenderly treat us like children, eager to school us in the secrets of the universe, seems a bit naive.
You'd have a much better chance of thrusting your hand in the ocean at random and retrieving a fish than pointing a radio telescope at a random star system and finding an intelligent civilization
why does'nt our moon have life?
It may, there could still be dormant microbes leftover in the garbage we've left behind.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/bacteria-survive-nearly-three-years-on-the-moon/9931.html
You don't compress the image, you present pure sequence of pixels with scan line and frame completion markers as on the Voyager Golden Record. Have a look at it, the instructions to "play" the disk are engraved on the disk and are crystal clear even to young teen: I was 13 when I first saw it and system was obvious.
Sure, start things out with your pulses, then go to diagrams and pictures like the Voyager Golden Record
Crystal clear? Really?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sounds_of_Earth_Record_Cover_-_GPN-2000-001978.jpg
Who decides what's "useful"? How do you fund it?
This project solves BOTH of those problems at once.
The same scientist(s) who came up with the "hailing message" with enough basic information to help the Aliens decode and understand the message.
What good is sending thousands of random tweets? What are the aliens going to be with messages like "I luv aliens" and "f1rst post!". Even sending the contents of a random novel would be better since it would give a coherent sample of text that aliens could analyze to try to learn our language -- sending a large body of unrelated short messages (in multiple languages?) is not going to help.
Why dilute the value of the data by sending along so much useless extraneous data from anyone willing to pay 99 cents to send it? If you believe it's important to send a message to aliens, it should be important enough to not send "garbage". The organizers should just ask for donations without promising to send messages.
How would an alien decode the .jpeg, .bmp, or whatever else we send them.
Let's just send out BluRay streams. Everyone in the galaxy knows that these have to be licensed + players constantly updated, so the aliens will know what to do.
In the 18 years it will take for the signals to reach the alien civilization on Gliese 526, the MPAA's reach will include the entire Galaxy, and relations with the alien civilization will be soured when each member of their society is fined $150,000 and extradited to the USA for punishment after receiving the and decoding the movie stream.
They should release the binary contents of the haling message and message content as a codebreaking challenge and see if anyone here on earth can decode it.
The same crap comes up in regards to stuff like license plate readers. You can't plug the flow of information to fix your problems, ALL you can do is define how and when the information is used in other processes, like when it is admissible in court, for example. If you don't have faith in due process after all, it doesn't really matter what information is present. So, what has anyone actually DONE to any of you (U.S. citizens) with the information the NSA gathered?
How could anyone possibly know what the use of this data has done when they don't even know the extent of the data collection, the parties that are compelled to turn over the data aren't allowed to tell anyone that the data has been requested or who requested it, and even if it were used against them, the secrecy of the data is deemed so important to national security that it cannot be revealed to you.
That's the whole problem with this secret court, no one can challenge its rulings because they are secret.
The problem with that amendment is the "against UNREASONABLE searches" bit. With the culture of fear created after 9/11, a significant portion of the population feels that this is reasonable if done in the name of fighting Teh Terrorists(tm), which has thus far made the surveillance at least appear constitutional.
In my reading, even a reasonable seizure should be covered under a warrant supported by probable cause. It would be hard even for a secret FISA judge to claim that there's probable cause to search the records of millions of Americans who are not suspected of committing any crime.
Same argument supports the second amendment as well. If the Framers intended for me to own an M4, they'd have specified it. No, the principle's the thing here. Do we have a right to privacy in our affairs or not? I read the 4th amendment to say we do. I also read the 2nd amendment to say we have a right to own modern firearms.
What's your interpretation of the "well regulated militia" part?
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.