"And yet the Tea Party thugs were demanding government "do whatever it takes" post-9/11... "
You knew about the Tea Party in late 2001? What else did you know about that was still in the future? Lemme guess, you knew about Katrina and didn't warn us? You bastard!
Sure it tells you a lot by itself, but might there be a deeper reason? And why do you need it in realtime rather than delayed?
Let's think about that.
I'm guessing it's due to some realities of data storage and the legalities of interception.
Apparently you can store full data from a bitstream that might have something of interest, but you can't look at it or analyze it without a warrant if it includes a US citizen, etc, etc.
The full data of everything would be like swallowing a whale, it's just too much to manage even for an agency with a huge budget.
But maybe you could store it for a very short time, provided after that you erased the vast majority of it and transferred the interesting stuff to long term storage. You then reuse your short term store for the next whale gulp. No warrant needed yet.
If you knew what data might be interesting you could do this. But, you have a chicken and egg problem. In order to extract the call information about what number/place/duration etc. you have to look at that data blob in short term store.
Now you have a problem. It might have things in it that require a warrant. In fact, most of it is between US citizens and so you need a warrant (maybe lots of warrant) just to figure out what part of it you want to keep.
But, what if you could get the call origination info, duration, etc under a lesser standard than is required for a full wiretap?
You'd know which of that data stream you should store and then could safely look at before you triggered the need for a warrant.
You'd only have to store the whole datastream for the time it takes you to process the metadata and do database lookups to see if a part of it's something you're interested in.
You'd save only the tiny part of the whale size data that you really cared about, and erase the rest all without needing a full warrant for content.
And, in fact, if you identify someone new involved in the call who might complicate the legality, the metadata identifies them or at least links them to someone of interest, so you can automatically request a warrant. (I'm guessing it's just that automated.)
So the metadata might be what makes this whole broad monitoring enterprise possible. Without that you have to get warrants beforehand for everything and everybody, and you have to store impossibly large amounts of data.
Now, with the interesting stuff that is covered by existing or newly requested warrants sifted out of the incoming stream, you can analyze, crack encryption, etc to your hearts content.
And, if you already had the metadata and just a suspicion that the data might be interesting at some point, you don't need to get a warrant as you're just storing it. You only cross that threshold when you start to analyze it. and that can be a year, two years, a decade down the road. Encryption from ten years ago is now easy meat comparatively on modern machines.
So, you've solved both the legal niceties and the problem of having to store mostly useless junk. Just by having a continuous stream of realtime metadata.
You don't even have to store all the metadata. Any that concerns something that isn't flagged can be pitched as you chucked that data anyway.
That would explain why the metadata was characterized as crucial. And it would explain why they might want to know that I called Aunt Mary last night. Not so they can tap it, but so they can yawn at it and pitch it into the bit bucket while keeping the call from the Sinaloa cartel to Al Shabab.
No. He said that he had information that would be worth lots of money. Crucial difference.
It may be true, but people say many things. What he's revealed so far isn't that big of a revelation or surprise and probably wasn't worth all that much money.
You aren't the first to say that. I've got people on my facebook feed already loudly saying that he's just a Bush era plant to create another fake scandal targeting the Obama administration to distract everyone from something else.
Of course, this is from the same people who regularly says that the right is just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists. (Funny, I somewhat agree with them, but unlike them I acknowledge that there just might be a left wing conspiracy theorist or two out there.;)
Of course he didn't lie when he said it was inaccurate.
There is likely a spelling error or two in it or a deviation from proper formatting for that sort of document (maybe introduced to Bowdlerize the specific copy).
Thus, the document is inaccurate. QED
Inaccurate is a meaningless word in the same way that "improved" is when applied to advertisements. It's defined to be meaningless, but warm and fuzzy feeling.
"The kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible."
Good to know. I'm sure the Passenger Pigeon, dodo and quite a number of other extinct species will be happy to know this and suddenly spring back into existence.
Uh... We seem to have controlled some of them pretty thoroughly.
Unlikely. GMO resistant weeds use a variety of adaptations to minimize the effects of glyphosate. This one would just have to happen to develop the exact same genetic sequence as the Monsanto variety to be mistaken for it.
It's probably some that didn't get destroyed after they stopped the tests and has been there all these years.
Nowadays genetic matching is relatively cheap and fast, so you can do pretty definite matches to a known strain.
So, tell me how a cruise missile that's autonomously guiding itself via GPS or TERCOM toward a target after being launched isn't already a "killer robot"?
It was commanded to launch, yes, but isn't a robot that's being commanded to head out on a mission where it could kill just being given a longer lifetime to act?
You can bring up the choices robots have to attack or not based on what target it sees, but how is this different from existing CAPTOR mines that can ignore one type of ship and go after another?
I think this Pandora's box has already been open for a long time.
You're telling me that you got 660mSieverts behind shielding designed to protect a nonliving robot with at least somewhat rad hardened electronics? (And was traveling in a fairly quiet solar period.)
And (though I don't see the specifics to back up the shielding info for the deep space capsule in TFA) that a capsule that's largely a follow on from Orion that was mostly designed for a few day trip for a return to the moon provides inadequate shielding for deep space or Mars missions? Especially when they're limited in speed because they're only powered by chemical rockets?
Who'da thunk it.
This is why I'd rather go back to the moon to learn how to run space bases only a couple days away from home where there's lots of nice lunar soil to hide from the radiation under.
Then, design much larger more heavily shielded Mars and deep space craft once we have the easier challenges of lunar operations understood.
They broke into a company that was handling credit card transactions and was poorly secured. Stratfor would have done well to invest in some decent sysadmins years ago.
Even worse, in their eyes, Stratfor had discounted Barrett Brown and the claim that anonymous would bring down the Mexican cartels as wishful thinking fantasy (which it indeed was).
Then, they found all sorts of "spook speak" in emails and convinced themselves that they had found their way into something more secret than the CIA, NSA, DEVGRU and Spetznatz combined.
They probably talked back and forth, and how important it was went up each time they talked about it.
They harvested a bunch of credit card data, password hashes, etc, and posted it. Boom, a bunch of bogus charges were made on them. Big surprise.
Then, they told a tale about how the emails they found were going to be a bombshell that would make the Wikileaks diplomatic cables leak look tame.
A lot of the emails were the same sort of innuendo, opinion and unsubstantiated rumors that a lot of journalists have to sift through.
And, no surprise again, even that turned out to be a damp squib. About the most they got is that the Stratfor source ME1 may be Hilal Kashan, someone that every Mideast journalist in existence uses as a source. Big, hairy deal.
But, after very little came of it, some are still claiming that it identified Elvis and JFK along with which 7-11 they're working at. "Just wait till we release more."
If I want that level of information I can go by Above Top Secret or such.
So after all the hoorah, it seems they broke into a not so secret as they thought, web site and committed a not so serious as the feds portrayed it, crime.
Can we all go back to something important like wondering what the naked Natalie Portman statue will look like?
They weren't free of it. The mice had only one fifth of the carbon 14 normally in them.
That's quite an improvement and allowed tracking of tagged substances. But it's still a long way from free or near enough to do truly low radiation studies. It also doesn't address the other radio-isotopes.
It's extremely experimentally difficult to raise animals free of radionuclides. Everything they eat drink or breathe has to be isotopically free of multiple radionuclides. You have to do that for at least a couple generations so that mothers don't pass on so much of the radionuclides from their own blood and tissues to the developing fetuses inside them, or the eggs they lay.
It's been proposed to set up a laboratory to do this for the purpose of setting baselines for radiation standards by comparing what the effect of nearly zero radiation on life is.
The cost would be quite high and as yet there hasn't been a lot of support for it especially from the UN.
"I was assuming the parent poster wasn't so much a terrorist as a mischievous prankster"
How do you tell the difference? A dirty bomb is mostly a weapon of mass distraction. The response is likely what shuts down an important area, rather than the actual danger.
Doing it with a sizable number of relatively harmless sources spread out over a block or two will keep them guessing what the danger and scope is for a bit, even if each one isn't particularly dangerous. It doesn't have the extended clean up phase, but they still have to evacuate, check people as they exit, and then determine what the devil is going on. It also gets a lot of attention.
The individuals who placed them can just claim it was a prank that got out of hand. You'll probably still get jailed, but it'd be hard to justify a life term for it.
At the same time, AQAP, for example issues a claim of responsibility. No one is really sure what the straight of it is. More confusion, disruption and doubt.
Maybe they can still link those who placed the sources to a higher level group, but it's still a lot easier to recruit pranksters than hard core murderers.
You can also use several of this sort of incident to get people to stop reacting to it (alert fatigue), and then release something that initially looks similar to the detectors but is really much more dangerous.
Is that "fact" like the three copies of Windows 8 that Microsoft counts me as having "bought"?
I bought three 802.11AC routers from Newegg and automagically had three copies of Win8 added to my cart which were included in the price, but also had an automatic rebate that was applied immediately. That was just before MS came out with the surprisingly large sales figures. I was only one of many.
Just because it's said by a company you rather like doesn't mean it's not misleading. For example, how much credence would you give something similar said by Apple?
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a farmer friend who has hundreds of filthy sows that he rules over.
If I use this for all my writing will it make me as k3wL as if I used 1337 speak?
Capital idea.
As long as we also send you to Venus.
Cordwainer Smith got there many years earlier with Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons.
In the story, looking up the words Littul Kittons in an electronic encyclopedia acted as a tripwire for a planet's security services.
That would be "Rarely", "Damn Rarely", and "What's that?"
Quoth the mods: "-1, Insufficiently absolutist"
"You can always tell who the mentally handicapped people are by their belief in freedom."
Really? I always thought it was determined by medical, psychological and educational professionals nowadays.
Amazing the people we'll have to reclassify if belief sets determine whether you're mentally handicapped. All that research out the window.
"A few things scare me about this topic so far "
Let me sum up what scares you more simply: "Not everyone agrees with me on an issue that is a lot more nuanced than I portrayed it."
"And yet the Tea Party thugs were demanding government "do whatever it takes" post-9/11... "
You knew about the Tea Party in late 2001? What else did you know about that was still in the future? Lemme guess, you knew about Katrina and didn't warn us? You bastard!
Wait a minute. I'm an overweight SUV driver.
Cool! I must be getting double vengeance on all the Japanese Lilac trees here that are blooming and making me sneeze and wheeze!
Sure it tells you a lot by itself, but might there be a deeper reason? And why do you need it in realtime rather than delayed?
Let's think about that.
I'm guessing it's due to some realities of data storage and the legalities of interception.
Apparently you can store full data from a bitstream that might have something of interest, but you can't look at it or analyze it without a warrant if it includes a US citizen, etc, etc.
The full data of everything would be like swallowing a whale, it's just too much to manage even for an agency with a huge budget.
But maybe you could store it for a very short time, provided after that you erased the vast majority of it and transferred the interesting stuff to long term storage. You then reuse your short term store for the next whale gulp. No warrant needed yet.
If you knew what data might be interesting you could do this. But, you have a chicken and egg problem. In order to extract the call information about what number/place/duration etc. you have to look at that data blob in short term store.
Now you have a problem. It might have things in it that require a warrant. In fact, most of it is between US citizens and so you need a warrant (maybe lots of warrant) just to figure out what part of it you want to keep.
But, what if you could get the call origination info, duration, etc under a lesser standard than is required for a full wiretap?
You'd know which of that data stream you should store and then could safely look at before you triggered the need for a warrant.
You'd only have to store the whole datastream for the time it takes you to process the metadata and do database lookups to see if a part of it's something you're interested in.
You'd save only the tiny part of the whale size data that you really cared about, and erase the rest all without needing a full warrant for content.
And, in fact, if you identify someone new involved in the call who might complicate the legality, the metadata identifies them or at least links them to someone of interest, so you can automatically request a warrant. (I'm guessing it's just that automated.)
So the metadata might be what makes this whole broad monitoring enterprise possible. Without that you have to get warrants beforehand for everything and everybody, and you have to store impossibly large amounts of data.
Now, with the interesting stuff that is covered by existing or newly requested warrants sifted out of the incoming stream, you can analyze, crack encryption, etc to your hearts content.
And, if you already had the metadata and just a suspicion that the data might be interesting at some point, you don't need to get a warrant as you're just storing it. You only cross that threshold when you start to analyze it. and that can be a year, two years, a decade down the road. Encryption from ten years ago is now easy meat comparatively on modern machines.
So, you've solved both the legal niceties and the problem of having to store mostly useless junk. Just by having a continuous stream of realtime metadata.
You don't even have to store all the metadata. Any that concerns something that isn't flagged can be pitched as you chucked that data anyway.
That would explain why the metadata was characterized as crucial. And it would explain why they might want to know that I called Aunt Mary last night. Not so they can tap it, but so they can yawn at it and pitch it into the bit bucket while keeping the call from the Sinaloa cartel to Al Shabab.
I've released a file which contains the complete plans for the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator which can blow up the earth.
The file is encrypted, and if the local parking meter attendants put anymore tickets on my suburban, I'll release the passphrase.
I really, really will!
That is all.
No. He said that he had information that would be worth lots of money. Crucial difference.
It may be true, but people say many things. What he's revealed so far isn't that big of a revelation or surprise and probably wasn't worth all that much money.
You aren't the first to say that. I've got people on my facebook feed already loudly saying that he's just a Bush era plant to create another fake scandal targeting the Obama administration to distract everyone from something else.
Of course, this is from the same people who regularly says that the right is just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists. (Funny, I somewhat agree with them, but unlike them I acknowledge that there just might be a left wing conspiracy theorist or two out there. ;)
Of course he didn't lie when he said it was inaccurate.
There is likely a spelling error or two in it or a deviation from proper formatting for that sort of document (maybe introduced to Bowdlerize the specific copy).
Thus, the document is inaccurate. QED
Inaccurate is a meaningless word in the same way that "improved" is when applied to advertisements. It's defined to be meaningless, but warm and fuzzy feeling.
Obama definitely has had words of condemnation for those who voted for Romney.
"GMO resistant weeds "
Roundup resistant weeds, obviously.
Too little coffee and cannot brain this morning...
"The kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible."
Good to know. I'm sure the Passenger Pigeon, dodo and quite a number of other extinct species will be happy to know this and suddenly spring back into existence.
Uh... We seem to have controlled some of them pretty thoroughly.
Unlikely. GMO resistant weeds use a variety of adaptations to minimize the effects of glyphosate. This one would just have to happen to develop the exact same genetic sequence as the Monsanto variety to be mistaken for it.
It's probably some that didn't get destroyed after they stopped the tests and has been there all these years.
Nowadays genetic matching is relatively cheap and fast, so you can do pretty definite matches to a known strain.
So, tell me how a cruise missile that's autonomously guiding itself via GPS or TERCOM toward a target after being launched isn't already a "killer robot"?
It was commanded to launch, yes, but isn't a robot that's being commanded to head out on a mission where it could kill just being given a longer lifetime to act?
You can bring up the choices robots have to attack or not based on what target it sees, but how is this different from existing CAPTOR mines that can ignore one type of ship and go after another?
I think this Pandora's box has already been open for a long time.
You're telling me that you got 660mSieverts behind shielding designed to protect a nonliving robot with at least somewhat rad hardened electronics? (And was traveling in a fairly quiet solar period.)
And (though I don't see the specifics to back up the shielding info for the deep space capsule in TFA) that a capsule that's largely a follow on from Orion that was mostly designed for a few day trip for a return to the moon provides inadequate shielding for deep space or Mars missions? Especially when they're limited in speed because they're only powered by chemical rockets?
Who'da thunk it.
This is why I'd rather go back to the moon to learn how to run space bases only a couple days away from home where there's lots of nice lunar soil to hide from the radiation under.
Then, design much larger more heavily shielded Mars and deep space craft once we have the easier challenges of lunar operations understood.
They broke into a company that was handling credit card transactions and was poorly secured. Stratfor would have done well to invest in some decent sysadmins years ago.
Even worse, in their eyes, Stratfor had discounted Barrett Brown and the claim that anonymous would bring down the Mexican cartels as wishful thinking fantasy (which it indeed was).
Then, they found all sorts of "spook speak" in emails and convinced themselves that they had found their way into something more secret than the CIA, NSA, DEVGRU and Spetznatz combined.
They probably talked back and forth, and how important it was went up each time they talked about it.
They harvested a bunch of credit card data, password hashes, etc, and posted it. Boom, a bunch of bogus charges were made on them. Big surprise.
Then, they told a tale about how the emails they found were going to be a bombshell that would make the Wikileaks diplomatic cables leak look tame.
A lot of the emails were the same sort of innuendo, opinion and unsubstantiated rumors that a lot of journalists have to sift through.
And, no surprise again, even that turned out to be a damp squib. About the most they got is that the Stratfor source ME1 may be Hilal Kashan, someone that every Mideast journalist in existence uses as a source. Big, hairy deal.
But, after very little came of it, some are still claiming that it identified Elvis and JFK along with which 7-11 they're working at. "Just wait till we release more."
If I want that level of information I can go by Above Top Secret or such.
So after all the hoorah, it seems they broke into a not so secret as they thought, web site and committed a not so serious as the feds portrayed it, crime.
Can we all go back to something important like wondering what the naked Natalie Portman statue will look like?
They weren't free of it. The mice had only one fifth of the carbon 14 normally in them.
That's quite an improvement and allowed tracking of tagged substances. But it's still a long way from free or near enough to do truly low radiation studies. It also doesn't address the other radio-isotopes.
It's extremely experimentally difficult to raise animals free of radionuclides. Everything they eat drink or breathe has to be isotopically free of multiple radionuclides. You have to do that for at least a couple generations so that mothers don't pass on so much of the radionuclides from their own blood and tissues to the developing fetuses inside them, or the eggs they lay.
It's been proposed to set up a laboratory to do this for the purpose of setting baselines for radiation standards by comparing what the effect of nearly zero radiation on life is.
The cost would be quite high and as yet there hasn't been a lot of support for it especially from the UN.
"I was assuming the parent poster wasn't so much a terrorist as a mischievous prankster"
How do you tell the difference? A dirty bomb is mostly a weapon of mass distraction. The response is likely what shuts down an important area, rather than the actual danger.
Doing it with a sizable number of relatively harmless sources spread out over a block or two will keep them guessing what the danger and scope is for a bit, even if each one isn't particularly dangerous. It doesn't have the extended clean up phase, but they still have to evacuate, check people as they exit, and then determine what the devil is going on. It also gets a lot of attention.
The individuals who placed them can just claim it was a prank that got out of hand. You'll probably still get jailed, but it'd be hard to justify a life term for it.
At the same time, AQAP, for example issues a claim of responsibility. No one is really sure what the straight of it is. More confusion, disruption and doubt.
Maybe they can still link those who placed the sources to a higher level group, but it's still a lot easier to recruit pranksters than hard core murderers.
You can also use several of this sort of incident to get people to stop reacting to it (alert fatigue), and then release something that initially looks similar to the detectors but is really much more dangerous.
Is that "fact" like the three copies of Windows 8 that Microsoft counts me as having "bought"?
I bought three 802.11AC routers from Newegg and automagically had three copies of Win8 added to my cart which were included in the price, but also had an automatic rebate that was applied immediately. That was just before MS came out with the surprisingly large sales figures. I was only one of many.
Just because it's said by a company you rather like doesn't mean it's not misleading. For example, how much credence would you give something similar said by Apple?