("America has no functioning democracy at this moment"--former U.S. president Jimmy Carter). What data on the U.S. population should be legally in government hands? Note that the telecom companies like ATT, verizon and sprint have large stores of domestic call records. Google yahoo and microsoft have a good sized chunk of our emails, documents and search quarries. JP morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, wells fargo and citigroup have most of our credit card and loan data. Should this data, domestic call records and all, also be in the hands of the federal government? Does Google have more up to date information about flu outbreaks than the Center for Disease Control? Is it unreasonable to suspect that Goldman Sachs has better data on the U.S. economy than say the treasury department and federal reserve? A recent foia request by propublica for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a time period that the TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA resulted in the following response from the NSA (the supercomputing powerhouse) "There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately.... [the system is] a little antiquated and archaic." A former employee of the department of labor statistics said that the department's entire data set fits on a single hard drive. Note that in the 90â(TM)s the IRS was still using vacuum tube technology. The National Security Agency in the last couple of years just started building modern data centers in Utah. There is abundant evidence provided by the Thomas Drake prosecution and the 9-11 commission report that information management is a problem in the intelligence community. Does google have better information management technology than the NSA? If corporations do have better data on the U.S. economy and population than the U.S. government doesn't it make sense to be governed by these corporations, ie government sachs? Is it not true that he who has the information has the power? And of course doesn't that create a clear âoemoral hazardâand âoeregulatory captureâ situation as the corporations are run by the 1%? Regulatory capture is basically when the cops and judges are owned, the book "13 bankers" goes over the issue for wall street. Isnâ(TM)t corporate control of government part of what occupy wallstreet activists protested? What is reasonable in terms of government and corporate transparency and secrecy laws and what data on the U.S. population should the government have access to? What information should citizens have about their governments and corporations? Is U.S. law clear and consistent? In any logically inconsistent system one can arrive at any conclusion one likes--selective prosecution and "interpreting" the law. What is the role of the media in all this? A former NSA coworker noted to me that U.K.'s GCHQ can, by U.K. law, perform surveillance on U.S. citizens without a warrant and the U.K. shares that intelligence with the U.S., the English speaking countries have a cozy intelligence sharing agreement sometimes called "five eyes." An effective surveillance laundering strategy. Also, less friendly countries than the U.K. would be interested in data on the U.S. population in order to, for example, strategize a propaganda campaign. If foreign countries can "copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems" of the JSF (F-35) they can probably get their hands on our call record data and possibly a lot more. Is it a good situation for foreign governments to have more information on the U.S. population than the U.S. government has? On related issues you could see the google tech talk "secret history of silicon valley"--basically defense spending built much more of silicon valley than venture capital. There is pretty good evidence that the majority of U.S. tech gets its start as gov contracts (IBM and the contract for the 1890 census, Oracle and the CIA contract, Sun Micro and darpa money). A little less relate
Don't HFT strategies constantly submit and cancel bids very rapidly in order to gain market information and so naturally decrease bid/ask spread? Where this might hit the buy and holders is by distorting the market, for instance the last 6 years of s&p market volatility has been on the high side. Coincidentally, volatility increases the profitability of most HFT strategies. I've also heard a HFT guy argue for the value of price discovery produced by HFT, to that I ask do the value of things in the real world really change that much on such short time scales? Couldn't those engineers and quants have there time allocated much more productively for the benefit of others, or are they really that worthless?
Also see Jane Harman, U.S. congresswoman, who was taped making a deal with the Israel lobby to influence the "Justice" department on the Lawrence Franklin espionage case. Franklin was found guilty of passing top secret classified documents about U.S. policy on Iran to Israel and sentenced to over 12 years in prison. His sentence was later reduced to only 10 months house arrest. Bradley Manning on the other hand is only accused of handing over secret documents, no top secret ones, to wikileaks and yet is facing far more severe punishment and his motives are arguably to expose illegal acts rather than to aid a foreign power. A clear example of double standards in the U.S. "justice" system.
i agree litigation is part of the problem but it is not the only problem. the privacy laws are insane but they probably protect salaries more than interest of patients.
it is a combo of several problems. admin charges which includes insurance overhead is about 30%. most of the countries that do a lot better then us have substantial gov involvement, so your focus on gov involvement seems misplaced. according to census bureau docs on average work 50 hrs a week, not really that intense. residency is the ball crusher.
the Intelligence Community is not authorized to collect on US Persons, except where allowed by law or authorized by a properly adjudicated warrant from a court of law. I know people on Slashdot don't like to believe this, and prefer to imagine that the sole purpose of the Intelligence Community is spying on our own citizens instead of, you know, doing the jobs they've been charged to do.
I spent two years working at the NSA and while there a coworker (from GCHQ) noted that U.K.'s GCHQ can, by U.K. law, perform surveillance on U.S. citizens without a warrant and the U.K. shares that intelligence with the U.S., the English speaking countries have a cozy intelligence sharing agreement, sometimes called "five eyes." Pretty big loophole in the privacy laws. Realistically, even if a warrant is required the NSA has plenty of friendly judges willing to sign warrants when asked, it is not that strong an oversight. Also, large multinational corporations (DOW, coca-cola) have substantial influence over the U.S. government so when multinationals fund surveillance of U.S. citizens it is as if the federal gov is doing the surveillance.
Sometimes there just ain't enough work to keep all the bees busy and out of trouble, so might as well create another layer of bureaucracy, it's either that or build more prisons, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Also, wonder if they have any serious mole problems in the intelligence agencies, for instance Israel has a good deal of interest in what the U.S. military does, getting more data on employees might help with mole problems, not just whistle-blowers. Definitely would be better if there was much less secrecy in the U.S. gov in general, help with fraud.
The regulations accumulated like that as the result of some grievously bad deal that happened a long time ago on a project you've never heard of.
those regulations accumulated often as a result of the actions of lobbyists, those rules funnel money in the direction of the contractor. The regulations you site for the burger would have been written by the contract that wanted to supply the $200 burger and who has the lobbying power and inside friends to make it happen. You make the false assumption that the rules were written in good faith, they were not.
You sure the contractors lobbyist makes sure "the government" wants the double cheese burger in a way no one else wants it? "the government" ends up meaning some high level government employee who wants to cash in on the revolving door to the contractor. In the end watch where then money flows cause that is who is fucking shit up.
Are radio astronomy dishes still used for military electronic intelligence? For example see the "Flower Garden" bi-static reflector project in the cold war. Maybe this is all done with satellites now adays but just thought I'd ask. Could the Chinese dish be targeted at this use too? See "secret history of silicon valley" for description of the "Flower Garden" project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ
This is bad news. It means the media will no longer pay attention to this DOD mismanagement. The more people pay attention to fraud the less often it will take place. For other examples of fraud in the DOD see here:
http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html
I don't think we should make too many excuses for people who implement fraud. They should be punished for what they do. You seem to focus on the psychological aspect, the profession does not have the highest standard of scientific rigor and can be easily manipulated.
Men with no oversight are doing what they will in the name of national security because they've convinced themselves that they can't permit 9/11 to reoccur, and that it was their fault. They've driven themselves mad, falling into the mentality of "those who prefer security to freedom." It's not that they're innately cruel tyrants, or sadists, it's that they're paranoid and guilt-wracked—a horribly dangerous combination when you add on the "defend the collective" mentality that causes police officers to protect each other when corruption charges manifest.
Aha, appeal to authority! I see ad hominem isn't the only logical fallacy you know how to use. OBL was clear that he wanted to establish a global caliphate and was willing to use force. I'm not sure why you think a Harvard professor would know more about OBL's motivation than the man himself but if you insult me again perhaps you will convince me.
Ok, I'll try not to get angry, it just seems most of your positions are incredibly misinformed and so frustrating to respond to. There was the fact of the low ball estimate of 300,000 muslims killed by U.S. that Walt gave compared to the 10,000 U.S. killed by muslims, something that rightfully angers muslims. Of course you can question those statistics but most of them are based on U.S. or international organization estimates. If you have no trust in any organizations statistics then I guess there is no point in arguing because you have no data to back up your points. I tend to think it is relatively unlikely for a harvard professor who is focused on these issues to be substantially misinformed. Also, Osama bin Laden himself has voiced his agreement with some of Walts writings, for example the Mearsheimer-Walt report on the Israel lobby (a University of Chicago professor and a Harvard professor). So your statement that the "hardliners want to kill anyone who doesn't subscribe to their narrow interpretations, including other muslims" is a vast oversimplification of even their leaders opinions on the matter, there was a recent Brookings institute poll that shows the vast majority of the middle east population is very angry with both Israel and the U.S. I am sure you could find a few inflammatory quotes by Bin Laden but I could find equally inflammatory quotes by GW Bush. Most of that crap is just the propaganda they use, and both sides use it.
NSA is searching porn for steganography whether you are using it or not so you are having no impact on the search space. As far as an automated algorithm is concerned, image data is image data. The content of the image does not change the type of data it is. A jpg is a jpg. If the NSA is really concentrating their efforts at finding steganography on porn it would negate to some extent any advantage in using it.
Ok, I'll try to explain this to you one more time. Yes, image data is image data but if al-qaeda had a bias, say did not use porn to for their steganography then the NSA could put a lot more effort into looking at the images or users that did not have porn in their traffic, basically if they use anything that is different from the statistical norm of internet traffic the NSA could use that bias to help as a selector for further (still automated) analysis. So it is best to look like as average an internet user as possible for al-qaeda, that way the NSA gets swamped with false positives. Also the NSA is not omnipotent, they do have constraints on their compute power and capabilities. For instance I very, very much doubt they can break 2000 bit RSA (without something like side channel etc but that requires basically machine access). I really don't see why this is so difficult for you to understand, I'm trying to be nice about it this time though.
You are misrepresenting the facts of why these people are angry....You don't have a clue why these people are angry. Before you speak at least understand some basic facts, dumb ass.
No I'm not, although you may be speaking of a different set of "these people". Muslims who would otherwise be moderate and peaceable are angry for the reason you state. Hardliners want to kill anyone who doesn't subscribe to their narrow interpretations, including other muslims. OBL and his followers are the hardliner type.
Yes you are, at least according to a Harvard professors article "why they hate us" and most other well educated people.(see above)
The NSA does have people looking for steganography in internet traffic. It makes their job harder if you hide your messages in the most common types of data flowing across the internet.
I'm pretty sure the NSA knows there is a lot of porn on the net and has no more difficulty examining a pornographic image than any other image. I'm also pretty sure that their process of looking for steganography isn't limited to manually downloading images individually and examining them. You may have heard of automation. The NSA uses it.
Yes, I know jack ass, I worked at the NSA for 2 years. They have someone called the 'porn queen' who deals with a lot of steganography (if anyone breaks into the NSA they will find a huge stash of porn there too). And yes, it is automated the problem is you do not understand the first thing about cryptography or steganography. In cryptography you choose your key size so that even with automation there is no way of breaking it. Using the most common traffic on the internet, porn, for your steganography makes it less likely the NSA will find it even with automation because you are increasing the search space.
You seem to be unable to argue your point without including insults. Interesting.
"N.S.A. has a five-thousand-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial-recognition devices."--this is false as of a couple years ago~2009. They were experimenting with facial recognition (had some contractors working on it) but it was by no means widely implemented. There was only one office in the research building (R) of the ft meade campus that had an Iris scanner as far as I know and that was also just experimenting.
"The electric bill there is said to surpass seventy million dollars a year." Partially because the NSA mismanaged the power supply. Building compute farms without figuring out where to get the power to run them (while I was there they would have regular power outages). When google builds a data center the first thing they do is figure out where they will get the power (usually building near the supply ie a hydroelectric damn). Another thing to note is that in late 2007 NSA started looking at Hadoop which is an open source implementation of some of googles infrastructure, map-reduce in particular. Who knows how much google cooperates with the NSA, at least a little. I was at a meeting at the NSA that included Vint Cerf, a prominent google employee, and they were using a google search product internally. In general it is pretty hard to not witness fraud at the NSA. Here are some examples:
http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html
willing to kill people for no other reason than they are sinners in the eyes of your religion
You are misrepresenting the facts of why these people are angry. According to the article "Why they hate us" by Harvard professor Stephen Walt 288,000 is a low ball estimate for the number of Muslims killed by the U.S. in the last 30 years while Muslims have killed only 10,325 U.S. citizens. You don't have a clue why these people are angry. Before you speak at least understand some basic facts, dumb ass.
The fact that 25% of search engine requests are for porn is irrelevant since you can still upload and download non-pornographic images without arousing the slightest suspicion that you are using steganography.
The NSA does have people looking for steganography in internet traffic. It makes their job harder if you hide your messages in the most common types of data flowing across the internet. It forces them to search for the needle in a much bigger hay stack--obviously something of benefit to those hiding the message, dip shit.
Slashdot Mirror
("America has no functioning democracy at this moment"--former U.S. president Jimmy Carter). What data on the U.S. population should be legally in government hands? Note that the telecom companies like ATT, verizon and sprint have large stores of domestic call records. Google yahoo and microsoft have a good sized chunk of our emails, documents and search quarries. JP morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, wells fargo and citigroup have most of our credit card and loan data. Should this data, domestic call records and all, also be in the hands of the federal government? Does Google have more up to date information about flu outbreaks than the Center for Disease Control? Is it unreasonable to suspect that Goldman Sachs has better data on the U.S. economy than say the treasury department and federal reserve? A recent foia request by propublica for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a time period that the TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA resulted in the following response from the NSA (the supercomputing powerhouse) "There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately.... [the system is] a little antiquated and archaic." A former employee of the department of labor statistics said that the department's entire data set fits on a single hard drive. Note that in the 90â(TM)s the IRS was still using vacuum tube technology. The National Security Agency in the last couple of years just started building modern data centers in Utah. There is abundant evidence provided by the Thomas Drake prosecution and the 9-11 commission report that information management is a problem in the intelligence community. Does google have better information management technology than the NSA? If corporations do have better data on the U.S. economy and population than the U.S. government doesn't it make sense to be governed by these corporations, ie government sachs? Is it not true that he who has the information has the power? And of course doesn't that create a clear âoemoral hazardâand âoeregulatory captureâ situation as the corporations are run by the 1%? Regulatory capture is basically when the cops and judges are owned, the book "13 bankers" goes over the issue for wall street. Isnâ(TM)t corporate control of government part of what occupy wallstreet activists protested? What is reasonable in terms of government and corporate transparency and secrecy laws and what data on the U.S. population should the government have access to? What information should citizens have about their governments and corporations? Is U.S. law clear and consistent? In any logically inconsistent system one can arrive at any conclusion one likes--selective prosecution and "interpreting" the law. What is the role of the media in all this? A former NSA coworker noted to me that U.K.'s GCHQ can, by U.K. law, perform surveillance on U.S. citizens without a warrant and the U.K. shares that intelligence with the U.S., the English speaking countries have a cozy intelligence sharing agreement sometimes called "five eyes." An effective surveillance laundering strategy. Also, less friendly countries than the U.K. would be interested in data on the U.S. population in order to, for example, strategize a propaganda campaign. If foreign countries can "copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems" of the JSF (F-35) they can probably get their hands on our call record data and possibly a lot more. Is it a good situation for foreign governments to have more information on the U.S. population than the U.S. government has? On related issues you could see the google tech talk "secret history of silicon valley"--basically defense spending built much more of silicon valley than venture capital. There is pretty good evidence that the majority of U.S. tech gets its start as gov contracts (IBM and the contract for the 1890 census, Oracle and the CIA contract, Sun Micro and darpa money). A little less relate
Don't HFT strategies constantly submit and cancel bids very rapidly in order to gain market information and so naturally decrease bid/ask spread? Where this might hit the buy and holders is by distorting the market, for instance the last 6 years of s&p market volatility has been on the high side. Coincidentally, volatility increases the profitability of most HFT strategies. I've also heard a HFT guy argue for the value of price discovery produced by HFT, to that I ask do the value of things in the real world really change that much on such short time scales? Couldn't those engineers and quants have there time allocated much more productively for the benefit of others, or are they really that worthless?
Also see Jane Harman, U.S. congresswoman, who was taped making a deal with the Israel lobby to influence the "Justice" department on the Lawrence Franklin espionage case. Franklin was found guilty of passing top secret classified documents about U.S. policy on Iran to Israel and sentenced to over 12 years in prison. His sentence was later reduced to only 10 months house arrest. Bradley Manning on the other hand is only accused of handing over secret documents, no top secret ones, to wikileaks and yet is facing far more severe punishment and his motives are arguably to expose illegal acts rather than to aid a foreign power. A clear example of double standards in the U.S. "justice" system.
personally, I don't give two shits if its gov. run health care or private, I just care about the results and the results in the U.S. are compete crap.
i agree litigation is part of the problem but it is not the only problem. the privacy laws are insane but they probably protect salaries more than interest of patients.
it is a combo of several problems. admin charges which includes insurance overhead is about 30%. most of the countries that do a lot better then us have substantial gov involvement, so your focus on gov involvement seems misplaced. according to census bureau docs on average work 50 hrs a week, not really that intense. residency is the ball crusher.
What we get for our money: U.S. life expectancy is the lowest of any first world country (40th) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy ditto for U.S. infant mortality rates (34th) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate The U.S. is number 1 in health care spending as a percentage of gdp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_(PPP)_per_capita One of several reasons for the high cost of U.S. health care is that the U.S. pays it's doctors more as a percentage of GDP than any other country http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/how-much-do-doctors-in-other-countries-make/ Basically, we get crap but we pay through the nose. Unfortunately we may need societal failure to change anything, bring on the guillotines!
the Intelligence Community is not authorized to collect on US Persons, except where allowed by law or authorized by a properly adjudicated warrant from a court of law. I know people on Slashdot don't like to believe this, and prefer to imagine that the sole purpose of the Intelligence Community is spying on our own citizens instead of, you know, doing the jobs they've been charged to do.
I spent two years working at the NSA and while there a coworker (from GCHQ) noted that U.K.'s GCHQ can, by U.K. law, perform surveillance on U.S. citizens without a warrant and the U.K. shares that intelligence with the U.S., the English speaking countries have a cozy intelligence sharing agreement, sometimes called "five eyes." Pretty big loophole in the privacy laws. Realistically, even if a warrant is required the NSA has plenty of friendly judges willing to sign warrants when asked, it is not that strong an oversight. Also, large multinational corporations (DOW, coca-cola) have substantial influence over the U.S. government so when multinationals fund surveillance of U.S. citizens it is as if the federal gov is doing the surveillance.
Sometimes there just ain't enough work to keep all the bees busy and out of trouble, so might as well create another layer of bureaucracy, it's either that or build more prisons, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Also, wonder if they have any serious mole problems in the intelligence agencies, for instance Israel has a good deal of interest in what the U.S. military does, getting more data on employees might help with mole problems, not just whistle-blowers. Definitely would be better if there was much less secrecy in the U.S. gov in general, help with fraud.
What does this say about the hypocrisy of the Thomas Drake prosecution, a guy just trying to point out some of the mismanagement in DOD IT that he was privy to? http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/thomas-drake.html or what former CIO Kundra said about an IT cartel controlling U.S. gov IT. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218466/Outgoing_federal_CIO_warns_of_an_IT_cartel_?taxonomyId=13&pageNumber=1
The regulations accumulated like that as the result of some grievously bad deal that happened a long time ago on a project you've never heard of.
those regulations accumulated often as a result of the actions of lobbyists, those rules funnel money in the direction of the contractor. The regulations you site for the burger would have been written by the contract that wanted to supply the $200 burger and who has the lobbying power and inside friends to make it happen. You make the false assumption that the rules were written in good faith, they were not.
You sure the contractors lobbyist makes sure "the government" wants the double cheese burger in a way no one else wants it? "the government" ends up meaning some high level government employee who wants to cash in on the revolving door to the contractor. In the end watch where then money flows cause that is who is fucking shit up.
Are radio astronomy dishes still used for military electronic intelligence? For example see the "Flower Garden" bi-static reflector project in the cold war. Maybe this is all done with satellites now adays but just thought I'd ask. Could the Chinese dish be targeted at this use too? See "secret history of silicon valley" for description of the "Flower Garden" project. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ
The dirty little family secret is, uncle Sam is a child molester.
OJ got off cause he had money. Drake did not and was fighting the deep pockets of the USG.
This is bad news. It means the media will no longer pay attention to this DOD mismanagement. The more people pay attention to fraud the less often it will take place. For other examples of fraud in the DOD see here: http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html
I don't think we should make too many excuses for people who implement fraud. They should be punished for what they do. You seem to focus on the psychological aspect, the profession does not have the highest standard of scientific rigor and can be easily manipulated.
exactly
you don't point out that there is a hell of a lot of money sloshing around in all this, I doubt that these peoples motives are as pure, they are not just worried about 'national security.' Fraud in defense contracting is extremely common. See Boeing tanker contract fraud, BAE systems Bribery and the primary contractor for trailblazer, SAIC, has had previous fraud prosecutions for the FBI information system they worked on and the New York citytime contract: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110527/FREE/110529884 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/business/16tanker.html?_r=2 http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0210/US_settles_with_BAE_in_Saudi_bribery_case.html This kind of activity is very common in the defense department and more generally in corporate america, see the massive amount of fraud that at least partially caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The U.S. needs to attack white collar crime much more vigorously. http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/13-bankers-vrs-brooksley-born.html
There is a hell of a lot of money sloshing around in all this, I doubt that these peoples motives are as pure as you present them, they are not just worried about 'national security.' Fraud in defense contracting is extremely common. See Boeing tanker contract fraud, BAE systems Bribery and the primary contractor for trailblazer, SAIC, has had previous fraud prosecutions for the FBI information system they worked on and the New York citytime contract: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110527/FREE/110529884 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/business/16tanker.html?_r=2 http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0210/US_settles_with_BAE_in_Saudi_bribery_case.html This kind of activity is very common in the defense department and more generally in corporate america, see the massive amount of fraud that at least partially caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The U.S. needs to attack white collar crime much more vigorously. http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/13-bankers-vrs-brooksley-born.html
Men with no oversight are doing what they will in the name of national security because they've convinced themselves that they can't permit 9/11 to reoccur, and that it was their fault. They've driven themselves mad, falling into the mentality of "those who prefer security to freedom." It's not that they're innately cruel tyrants, or sadists, it's that they're paranoid and guilt-wracked—a horribly dangerous combination when you add on the "defend the collective" mentality that causes police officers to protect each other when corruption charges manifest.
you don't point out that there is a hell of a lot of money sloshing around in all this, I doubt that these peoples motives are as pure as you present them, they are not just worried about 'national security.' Fraud in defense contracting is extremely common. See Boeing tanker contract fraud, BAE systems Bribery and the primary contractor for trailblazer, SAIC, has had previous fraud prosecutions for the FBI information system they worked on and the New York citytime contract: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110527/FREE/110529884 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/business/16tanker.html?_r=2 http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0210/US_settles_with_BAE_in_Saudi_bribery_case.html This kind of activity is very common in the defense department and more generally in corporate america, see the massive amount of fraud that at least partially caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The U.S. needs to attack white collar crime much more vigorously. http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/13-bankers-vrs-brooksley-born.html
Aha, appeal to authority! I see ad hominem isn't the only logical fallacy you know how to use. OBL was clear that he wanted to establish a global caliphate and was willing to use force. I'm not sure why you think a Harvard professor would know more about OBL's motivation than the man himself but if you insult me again perhaps you will convince me.
Ok, I'll try not to get angry, it just seems most of your positions are incredibly misinformed and so frustrating to respond to. There was the fact of the low ball estimate of 300,000 muslims killed by U.S. that Walt gave compared to the 10,000 U.S. killed by muslims, something that rightfully angers muslims. Of course you can question those statistics but most of them are based on U.S. or international organization estimates. If you have no trust in any organizations statistics then I guess there is no point in arguing because you have no data to back up your points. I tend to think it is relatively unlikely for a harvard professor who is focused on these issues to be substantially misinformed. Also, Osama bin Laden himself has voiced his agreement with some of Walts writings, for example the Mearsheimer-Walt report on the Israel lobby (a University of Chicago professor and a Harvard professor). So your statement that the "hardliners want to kill anyone who doesn't subscribe to their narrow interpretations, including other muslims" is a vast oversimplification of even their leaders opinions on the matter, there was a recent Brookings institute poll that shows the vast majority of the middle east population is very angry with both Israel and the U.S. I am sure you could find a few inflammatory quotes by Bin Laden but I could find equally inflammatory quotes by GW Bush. Most of that crap is just the propaganda they use, and both sides use it.
NSA is searching porn for steganography whether you are using it or not so you are having no impact on the search space. As far as an automated algorithm is concerned, image data is image data. The content of the image does not change the type of data it is. A jpg is a jpg. If the NSA is really concentrating their efforts at finding steganography on porn it would negate to some extent any advantage in using it.
Ok, I'll try to explain this to you one more time. Yes, image data is image data but if al-qaeda had a bias, say did not use porn to for their steganography then the NSA could put a lot more effort into looking at the images or users that did not have porn in their traffic, basically if they use anything that is different from the statistical norm of internet traffic the NSA could use that bias to help as a selector for further (still automated) analysis. So it is best to look like as average an internet user as possible for al-qaeda, that way the NSA gets swamped with false positives. Also the NSA is not omnipotent, they do have constraints on their compute power and capabilities. For instance I very, very much doubt they can break 2000 bit RSA (without something like side channel etc but that requires basically machine access). I really don't see why this is so difficult for you to understand, I'm trying to be nice about it this time though.
You are misrepresenting the facts of why these people are angry. ...You don't have a clue why these people are angry. Before you speak at least understand some basic facts, dumb ass.
No I'm not, although you may be speaking of a different set of "these people". Muslims who would otherwise be moderate and peaceable are angry for the reason you state. Hardliners want to kill anyone who doesn't subscribe to their narrow interpretations, including other muslims. OBL and his followers are the hardliner type.
Yes you are, at least according to a Harvard professors article "why they hate us" and most other well educated people.(see above)
The NSA does have people looking for steganography in internet traffic. It makes their job harder if you hide your messages in the most common types of data flowing across the internet.
I'm pretty sure the NSA knows there is a lot of porn on the net and has no more difficulty examining a pornographic image than any other image. I'm also pretty sure that their process of looking for steganography isn't limited to manually downloading images individually and examining them. You may have heard of automation. The NSA uses it.
Yes, I know jack ass, I worked at the NSA for 2 years. They have someone called the 'porn queen' who deals with a lot of steganography (if anyone breaks into the NSA they will find a huge stash of porn there too). And yes, it is automated the problem is you do not understand the first thing about cryptography or steganography. In cryptography you choose your key size so that even with automation there is no way of breaking it. Using the most common traffic on the internet, porn, for your steganography makes it less likely the NSA will find it even with automation because you are increasing the search space.
You seem to be unable to argue your point without including insults. Interesting.
no, I'm just stating fact, you are a moron.
"N.S.A. has a five-thousand-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial-recognition devices."--this is false as of a couple years ago~2009. They were experimenting with facial recognition (had some contractors working on it) but it was by no means widely implemented. There was only one office in the research building (R) of the ft meade campus that had an Iris scanner as far as I know and that was also just experimenting. "The electric bill there is said to surpass seventy million dollars a year." Partially because the NSA mismanaged the power supply. Building compute farms without figuring out where to get the power to run them (while I was there they would have regular power outages). When google builds a data center the first thing they do is figure out where they will get the power (usually building near the supply ie a hydroelectric damn). Another thing to note is that in late 2007 NSA started looking at Hadoop which is an open source implementation of some of googles infrastructure, map-reduce in particular. Who knows how much google cooperates with the NSA, at least a little. I was at a meeting at the NSA that included Vint Cerf, a prominent google employee, and they were using a google search product internally. In general it is pretty hard to not witness fraud at the NSA. Here are some examples: http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html
willing to kill people for no other reason than they are sinners in the eyes of your religion
You are misrepresenting the facts of why these people are angry. According to the article "Why they hate us" by Harvard professor Stephen Walt 288,000 is a low ball estimate for the number of Muslims killed by the U.S. in the last 30 years while Muslims have killed only 10,325 U.S. citizens. You don't have a clue why these people are angry. Before you speak at least understand some basic facts, dumb ass.
The fact that 25% of search engine requests are for porn is irrelevant since you can still upload and download non-pornographic images without arousing the slightest suspicion that you are using steganography.
The NSA does have people looking for steganography in internet traffic. It makes their job harder if you hide your messages in the most common types of data flowing across the internet. It forces them to search for the needle in a much bigger hay stack--obviously something of benefit to those hiding the message, dip shit.