When Obama said: "If you like your plan you can keep it," — he meant to say: "If I like your plan, you can keep it." The millions, whose plans aren't, in Obama's omniscient and benevolent opinion, good enough — because they don't cover, say, obesity counseling, or contraception, or gender-changes — are out of luck...
There is no corresponding correction to "death panels" because those are imaginary.
No, they aren't. There always are patients, who could be kept alive at high costs but without much, if any, prospect of recovering. When and whether to "pull the plug" on them is currently up to the patients and/or their families. Once the government becomes the single payer — which is what Obama and you dream about — the decision will be the government's. It is unlikely, that it will be a single shirley sharrod deciding — more like a panel of them. "Death panel" is a perfectly apt term describing the outfit...
If the IRS is already used today to suppress opposition, why wouldn't the next charismatic demagogue in the White House use these panels to an even graver effect? No, not even against the opposition figures themselves — too obvious...
"Hey, if you'd like your mother to be approved for surgery, rather than referred to End of Life Counseling, do not talk about this and that in your next public appearance. Do we understand each other?"
If it's outside the bounds of the constitution as myself and many like minded individuals believe
Collecting meta-data is not outside the bounds of the Constitution. NSA may be doing some other things, that are, but metadata collection is perfectly legal and constitutional. Most of the people would like it to be otherwise — so much so, there is talk about morale at the NSA to be dropping. But it is legal.
Without a warrant they couldn't even open a letter because you had a right to privacy/unreasonable search and seizure, and that right still exists.
But with a warrant they could. Not any more — today practical encryption is available to all and it easy enough to use to frustrate the best decryption efforts the government currently has (otherwise they wouldn't be bothering with demands for keys, for example).
That letter was encrypted by an envelope.
Yes, and so it is today. The article — any my comment — are about the meta-data, which was always available on the envelope and did not require a warrant to record. NSA just did not have the means of recording all of it before (from each envelope). But we did censor some mail even before NSA was created.
They are saying you don't have the right to an envelope
They always had the right to read the envelope — and even the entire postal card. Worse, lower-cost "media mail" could even be legally opened and examined without warrant. Read the explanations on the EFF Privacy page.
or that they should be able to open all envelopes because envelopes contain evil missives
No, opening envelopes would allow them to get not just the meta-data, but the actual data (content). While the NSA may be doing that as well, the discussion is about their collection of meta-data — what's written on the "envelopes" rather than, what's inside them.
Say, a government project delayed, over budget, and under-delivering... But it would bring health-insu..., errr, never mind, broadband to millions of the poor! Only a racist can object...
"How can I spy without spying on a particular subset of people I'm not supposed to spy on?"
But that's the very rub... To even know, who to spy on, he has to spy on all. It used to be much harder to wage war and even to commit one-time atrocities — it used to require a state's backing. The pool of people to, possibly, have such a backing was relatively narrow.
Not any more. Conventional explosives can be made cheaply and easily — the information on making them is easily transfered electronically (the clowns searching our data at the border-crossings are just justifying their own jobs). Deadly poisons can be created at home too — easier than growing one's own marijuana or cooking meth. Compared to such dangers, an occasional shooter — even with an "assault" rifle — that the usually libertine-minded people wish to see outlawed, are merely a nuisance.
More importantly, a conspiracy requires communication, but it is only in the past two decades that strong encryption is available to the masses — before that it was possible to listen and read, what the suspects are saying and writing. Now, if properly done, it requires cooperation not just from the service-providers, but the suspects themselves. This was always anticipated by the government — they treated encryption as a weapon and not for nothing. When the genie was out of the lamp, Clinton's Administration — twenty years ago — tried to compel the use of NSA-approved, explicitly "backdoored" technology, but failed.
So, given the possibility, that
just about anyone may be up to no good — with means to do it;
thanks to encryption, it is often technically impossible to obtain actual data — the contents of a letter or a phone call — when reasonable suspicion justifies a formal warrant;
the only two choices remain: rely on the (legally-collected) meta-data — when was a message sent, from where, how long was it, what were the headers — collected about everyone, or simply accept the increased risks to life and health of all residents of the country.
The second option is up to the said residents themselves (that's you and me) — whose representatives in Congress can tell the Admiral just that, if they want to. But, as long as he has that job, he sees no other way to do it, but to collect the metadata. Do you?
None of the angry comments in this thread so far are offering a viable alternative — maybe, we really ought to stop trying to prevent a terrorist act and try to build up instead the perception, that punishment will be inevitable afterwards, for example. But NSA are currently charged with prevention...
The first thing I imagined was a Beowulf cluster... But, yeah, a drone-carrier of sorts does seem interesting. A separate person may need to work in the truck to load the drones returning for more.
I doubt, it will catch-on though — to fully develop such a hybrid concept will take about as long as to develop drones capable of covering the same area from the existing distribution centers.
Apparently they want everybody to go to church but also be working 10 hour days, 7 days a week.
The world is a strange place.
It sure seems like you found — on your own — the facts, that contradict your theory. Maybe, "the world" is alright, but your theory is "strange" (or, to put it less politely, incorrect)?
I'm pretty sure, that chart refers to traditional fuel-powered aircraft — one with provisions for a human crew (and its safety with all the redundancies), etc. The drones discussed will be very light and, possibly, electrical (their fuel cells recharged off of cleaner and more efficient power plants). They would still pollute more per mile, but, traveling by straight line, they'll travel many fewer miles. They will also not be idling at each house nor at red-lights, and not slowing down other vehicles (causing them to pollute more).
My parcels tend to arrive very late in the day — I stare at the "On truck for delivery" status on the tracking page all day perhaps, because we live at the ending portion of the delivery trucks' routes. With drones the item should make it here hours earlier, because each round trip for a flying drone would be well under an hour — and they'd be able to buy a lot of the little drones with the money saved on trucks.
Though Amazon may benefit from its own fleet, the first users of this method ought to be postal carriers — such as, indeed, the DHL.
While the unionized UPS and USPS may have to contend with the "replacing people with robots" nonsense first, freer companies like FedEx may complement (if not outright replace) their local delivery trucks with drones some day (hopefully — soon). Instead of "On truck for delivery" the parcel-tracking page would say "In flight to destination, ETA 3 minutes" or some such.
I'll be happy to install a homing mat in my backyard... It will reduce traffic and pollution, quicken the delivery, and reduce theft of the items left on the easily-accessed porches (rather than the harder to access backyards).
Sure. But the collapse of Enron had the same effect on the multitudes of smaller companies linked to them — yet, Bush allowed that firm to go under at the beginning of his presidency. If, indeed, he (or the GOP as a whole) where as beholden to the "Coproratocracy" as is so frequently alleged, it would've all been rather different, wouldn't it?
The Bush and Obama administrations have bailed out many large nonunionised financial firms, so it would seem that unionised workforces are not the distinction.
Even Lehman Brothers was allowed to go under as late as September 2008 — under Bush. The subsequent TARP was a bow to Congress, that was already Democrat dominated (since 2006). Though ill-advised in this Libertarian's opinion, as of a year ago (last figures on Wikipedia), the taxpayers recovered 97% of the monies given to the evil "banksters" under the program. Compare to the figures of the auto-bailout and recognize the error of your ways...
Do you have a hypothesis that is less contradicted by the evidence?
Go back to the auto-bailout (and the subsequent cash-for-clankers fraud). Nothing represented as blatant a wealth-transfer from taxpayers to "workers" (or, indeed, to anyone else) in recent history.
Whether or not these bailouts are actually good for the citizenry as a whole is entirely another matter. Since national elections are funded on the backs of the Corporatocracy, instead of publicly (and evenly) funded, it would appear prudent at this juncture to assume it will continue.
The Evil Corporations[TM] aren't the problem — GM was bailed out against the wish, desires, and the better judgement of executives and bankers nation- (and world-wide). No, the bailing out of the auto-industry profited unions — not corporations.
Freshly elected Bush, enjoying the support of the his party's majority in Congress, did not bail-out Enron in 2001. Likewise MCI got liquidated in 2006. What made GM and Chrysler different? Unionized work-force — that's what. But blaming "unionocracy" just does not have the same ring to it, does it?
Indeed, you are right. But 2 years is still quite long — a large number of host-keys, individual ssh key-pairs, some SSL-certificates and PGP keys got created...
it is much easier to prevent the removal of a back door when the code base is owned by a private organization with identifiable representatives
Linux (and BSD) committers are just as identifiable. Although the codebase is open to all, very few people go through it. If it follows the documented coding style, compiles, and "works", there is simply no reason to keep reviewing it — for most people. The Debian hole I cited earlier remained open from 2006 to 2013 — more years, than Turing spent working on Enigma.
In the Linux community, being international, such pressure would be more difficult to apply.
Maybe, but I would not count on it. Which country would you consider unlikely to cooperate with the US on such matter — without itself being an even greater threat to liberty (like China or Cuba)? The entire Western world's spooks cooperate with the US. As does Russia — to some extent, at least. Who would not help their American colleagues in exchange for Americans helping them — a little? Someone like Sweden? Well, they did hit Assange with rape charges, when he made himself an overly tiresome nuisance to the Americans...
Its interesting to note that Microsoft's anti trust settlement was negotiated and overseen by a member of the FISA court. The mandate to open APIs and source probably stopped short of revealing all the built-in back doors.
In other words, Microsoft, probably, was coerced into it. A similar coercion — or conviction, or fooling — can be applied to an open-source project's participant. Whether it is easier or harder to do, I would not know.
must be using operating systems whose code can be reviewed and modified without Microsoft or any other third party's blessing
Though I agree, that a corporation can be forced by an authoritarian government to put a backdoor into their product, I don't believe, open-source software is immune against backdoors either.
There are scores of people with commit-access to Linux kernel, for example. If the NSA — or its counterpart from any other rich country in the world — put their mind to it, they could use any one (or more) of them to weaken the security functionality in there.
It does not need to be obvious — making the/dev/random's output slightly less random, for example, may reduce the time it takes to tap an ssh or ssl connection with this host from many years down to days. Same goes for PGP-keys generated on the affected host... Nor does it need to involve blatant coercion — the committer may simply receive a patch by e-mail with a fix to some other bug or an improvement, and fail to spot the weakening.
It could, in fact, have already been done years ago for all we know. Who knows, if this little problem was not deliberately introduced? And even if it was not — who knows, whether various security agencies exploited it from 2006 to 2013 the way Alan Turing et al exploited mistakes of the German radio-operators during WW2?
Is it easier to plant a backdoor into an open-source project than a closed-source one — and keep it there for a useful period of time? I'm not at all sure, what I'd bet on, to be perfectly honest. Both can done and, by all appearances, both have been done...
Progressives are under no illusion about the Democrats in general and Obama in particular being corporatist sell-outs.
Your use of the word "corporation" and its derivations as a dirty one reveals naiveté at best. There is nothing wrong with corporations — they are merely a way to organize large number of people into doing useful things. There is nothing inherently wrong with them — they certainly are more efficient than collective farms or kibbutzes, for example.
The complete lack of prosecutions of Wall Street by the Obama Administration says all that needs to be said to make that case.
Well, your "case" falls apart, once you learn facts: people, who've committed actual financial crimes (like insider trading or running a Ponzi-scheme) really do get prosecuted. Bush's Justice Department has done it (Bernard Madoff and Martha Stuart being the most publicized cases), and so did Obama's.
What you and yours may be lamenting is absence of prosecution for some vaguely-specified misdeeds, like "the massive Wall Street crime wave that devastated the economy". Huh? We are not a banana republic, where the Dear Leader would organize a show-trial every once in a while to channel popular anger away from his own incompetence. Not yet...
Winning our democracy, our economy, our society back from corporate control
There you go again with the "evil corporations". Corporations want nothing else but maximize shareholder value. This is best achieved in a healthy, well-run country — they are not your enemy. (Except for those corporations, who profit from government spending — which requires higher taxes. But, somehow, I'm afraid, lowering taxes is not on your list of priorities...)
That's not, how it works, dear. You make a statement, you provide proof. Sending your opponent to do the research in support of your own point is a wrong way to conduct a discussion -- whatever I find and manage to debunk, you can always claim, you had something else in mind. No, the burden of proof is on you.
Or you could just take a 1st year course on macro-economics.
That most of the academics are erring on the side of the bigger government is a known fact — themselves being paid by the government (either directly or via college), most of them sincerely appreciate it. Fortunately, economic professors don't make most economists.
I doubt any parent intends to kill their child by leaving them unattended in a hot car, but they do, and society has a need to punish them for their negligent actions.
It is possible, that negligence — causing bad things to happen without any intent — should be punished. But, in your example, the charges brought up against such parents currently are murder (or involuntary homicide, whatever the fine distinction), when it should be just that — negligence.
Switching to "my" system would raise the punishment for some things, while lowering it for some others. But none of it matters to the case in TFA: the man is not charged with anything but theft.
Slashdot Mirror
When Obama said: "If you like your plan you can keep it," — he meant to say: "If I like your plan, you can keep it." The millions, whose plans aren't, in Obama's omniscient and benevolent opinion, good enough — because they don't cover, say, obesity counseling, or contraception, or gender-changes — are out of luck...
No, they aren't. There always are patients, who could be kept alive at high costs but without much, if any, prospect of recovering. When and whether to "pull the plug" on them is currently up to the patients and/or their families. Once the government becomes the single payer — which is what Obama and you dream about — the decision will be the government's. It is unlikely, that it will be a single shirley sharrod deciding — more like a panel of them. "Death panel" is a perfectly apt term describing the outfit...
If the IRS is already used today to suppress opposition, why wouldn't the next charismatic demagogue in the White House use these panels to an even graver effect? No, not even against the opposition figures themselves — too obvious...
"Hey, if you'd like your mother to be approved for surgery, rather than referred to End of Life Counseling, do not talk about this and that in your next public appearance. Do we understand each other?"
Taking Telstra "aside" in this context is like attempting to calculate a helicopter's flight ignoring air-resistance...
Oh, and then one asks, who but the government has created the "local incumbent monopolist" in the first place...
Collecting meta-data is not outside the bounds of the Constitution. NSA may be doing some other things, that are, but metadata collection is perfectly legal and constitutional. Most of the people would like it to be otherwise — so much so, there is talk about morale at the NSA to be dropping. But it is legal.
And today they can not do it even with a warrant — if trivially easy encryption was used. And that's the difference, I'm talking about.
But with a warrant they could. Not any more — today practical encryption is available to all and it easy enough to use to frustrate the best decryption efforts the government currently has (otherwise they wouldn't be bothering with demands for keys, for example).
Yes, and so it is today. The article — any my comment — are about the meta-data, which was always available on the envelope and did not require a warrant to record. NSA just did not have the means of recording all of it before (from each envelope). But we did censor some mail even before NSA was created.
They always had the right to read the envelope — and even the entire postal card. Worse, lower-cost "media mail" could even be legally opened and examined without warrant. Read the explanations on the EFF Privacy page.
No, opening envelopes would allow them to get not just the meta-data, but the actual data (content). While the NSA may be doing that as well, the discussion is about their collection of meta-data — what's written on the "envelopes" rather than, what's inside them.
Say, a government project delayed, over budget, and under-delivering... But it would bring health-insu..., errr, never mind, broadband to millions of the poor! Only a racist can object...
But that's the very rub... To even know, who to spy on, he has to spy on all. It used to be much harder to wage war and even to commit one-time atrocities — it used to require a state's backing. The pool of people to, possibly, have such a backing was relatively narrow.
Not any more. Conventional explosives can be made cheaply and easily — the information on making them is easily transfered electronically (the clowns searching our data at the border-crossings are just justifying their own jobs). Deadly poisons can be created at home too — easier than growing one's own marijuana or cooking meth. Compared to such dangers, an occasional shooter — even with an "assault" rifle — that the usually libertine-minded people wish to see outlawed, are merely a nuisance.
More importantly, a conspiracy requires communication, but it is only in the past two decades that strong encryption is available to the masses — before that it was possible to listen and read, what the suspects are saying and writing. Now, if properly done, it requires cooperation not just from the service-providers, but the suspects themselves. This was always anticipated by the government — they treated encryption as a weapon and not for nothing. When the genie was out of the lamp, Clinton's Administration — twenty years ago — tried to compel the use of NSA-approved, explicitly "backdoored" technology, but failed.
So, given the possibility, that
the only two choices remain: rely on the (legally-collected) meta-data — when was a message sent, from where, how long was it, what were the headers — collected about everyone, or simply accept the increased risks to life and health of all residents of the country.
The second option is up to the said residents themselves (that's you and me) — whose representatives in Congress can tell the Admiral just that, if they want to. But, as long as he has that job, he sees no other way to do it, but to collect the metadata. Do you?
None of the angry comments in this thread so far are offering a viable alternative — maybe, we really ought to stop trying to prevent a terrorist act and try to build up instead the perception, that punishment will be inevitable afterwards, for example. But NSA are currently charged with prevention...
Haterz gonna hate...
The first thing I imagined was a Beowulf cluster... But, yeah, a drone-carrier of sorts does seem interesting. A separate person may need to work in the truck to load the drones returning for more.
I doubt, it will catch-on though — to fully develop such a hybrid concept will take about as long as to develop drones capable of covering the same area from the existing distribution centers.
It sure seems like you found — on your own — the facts, that contradict your theory. Maybe, "the world" is alright, but your theory is "strange" (or, to put it less politely, incorrect)?
I'm pretty sure, that chart refers to traditional fuel-powered aircraft — one with provisions for a human crew (and its safety with all the redundancies), etc. The drones discussed will be very light and, possibly, electrical (their fuel cells recharged off of cleaner and more efficient power plants). They would still pollute more per mile, but, traveling by straight line, they'll travel many fewer miles. They will also not be idling at each house nor at red-lights, and not slowing down other vehicles (causing them to pollute more).
My parcels tend to arrive very late in the day — I stare at the "On truck for delivery" status on the tracking page all day perhaps, because we live at the ending portion of the delivery trucks' routes. With drones the item should make it here hours earlier, because each round trip for a flying drone would be well under an hour — and they'd be able to buy a lot of the little drones with the money saved on trucks.
Everything is unionized in Germany, so the unions wield nowhere near as much power over there as here.
Though Amazon may benefit from its own fleet, the first users of this method ought to be postal carriers — such as, indeed, the DHL.
While the unionized UPS and USPS may have to contend with the "replacing people with robots" nonsense first, freer companies like FedEx may complement (if not outright replace) their local delivery trucks with drones some day (hopefully — soon). Instead of "On truck for delivery" the parcel-tracking page would say "In flight to destination, ETA 3 minutes" or some such.
I'll be happy to install a homing mat in my backyard... It will reduce traffic and pollution, quicken the delivery, and reduce theft of the items left on the easily-accessed porches (rather than the harder to access backyards).
Sure. But the collapse of Enron had the same effect on the multitudes of smaller companies linked to them — yet, Bush allowed that firm to go under at the beginning of his presidency. If, indeed, he (or the GOP as a whole) where as beholden to the "Coproratocracy" as is so frequently alleged, it would've all been rather different, wouldn't it?
Even Lehman Brothers was allowed to go under as late as September 2008 — under Bush. The subsequent TARP was a bow to Congress, that was already Democrat dominated (since 2006). Though ill-advised in this Libertarian's opinion, as of a year ago (last figures on Wikipedia), the taxpayers recovered 97% of the monies given to the evil "banksters" under the program. Compare to the figures of the auto-bailout and recognize the error of your ways...
Go back to the auto-bailout (and the subsequent cash-for-clankers fraud). Nothing represented as blatant a wealth-transfer from taxpayers to "workers" (or, indeed, to anyone else) in recent history.
The Evil Corporations[TM] aren't the problem — GM was bailed out against the wish, desires, and the better judgement of executives and bankers nation- (and world-wide). No, the bailing out of the auto-industry profited unions — not corporations.
Freshly elected Bush, enjoying the support of the his party's majority in Congress, did not bail-out Enron in 2001. Likewise MCI got liquidated in 2006. What made GM and Chrysler different? Unionized work-force — that's what. But blaming "unionocracy" just does not have the same ring to it, does it?
Whatcha think you doing, smarty pants?
Indeed, you are right. But 2 years is still quite long — a large number of host-keys, individual ssh key-pairs, some SSL-certificates and PGP keys got created...
Linux (and BSD) committers are just as identifiable. Although the codebase is open to all, very few people go through it. If it follows the documented coding style, compiles, and "works", there is simply no reason to keep reviewing it — for most people. The Debian hole I cited earlier remained open from 2006 to 2013 — more years, than Turing spent working on Enigma.
Maybe, but I would not count on it. Which country would you consider unlikely to cooperate with the US on such matter — without itself being an even greater threat to liberty (like China or Cuba)? The entire Western world's spooks cooperate with the US. As does Russia — to some extent, at least. Who would not help their American colleagues in exchange for Americans helping them — a little? Someone like Sweden? Well, they did hit Assange with rape charges, when he made himself an overly tiresome nuisance to the Americans...
In other words, Microsoft, probably, was coerced into it. A similar coercion — or conviction, or fooling — can be applied to an open-source project's participant. Whether it is easier or harder to do, I would not know.
Though I agree, that a corporation can be forced by an authoritarian government to put a backdoor into their product, I don't believe, open-source software is immune against backdoors either.
There are scores of people with commit-access to Linux kernel, for example. If the NSA — or its counterpart from any other rich country in the world — put their mind to it, they could use any one (or more) of them to weaken the security functionality in there.
It does not need to be obvious — making the /dev/random's output slightly less random, for example, may reduce the time it takes to tap an ssh or ssl connection with this host from many years down to days. Same goes for PGP-keys generated on the affected host... Nor does it need to involve blatant coercion — the committer may simply receive a patch by e-mail with a fix to some other bug or an improvement, and fail to spot the weakening.
It could, in fact, have already been done years ago for all we know. Who knows, if this little problem was not deliberately introduced? And even if it was not — who knows, whether various security agencies exploited it from 2006 to 2013 the way Alan Turing et al exploited mistakes of the German radio-operators during WW2?
Is it easier to plant a backdoor into an open-source project than a closed-source one — and keep it there for a useful period of time? I'm not at all sure, what I'd bet on, to be perfectly honest. Both can done and, by all appearances, both have been done...
Your use of the word "corporation" and its derivations as a dirty one reveals naiveté at best. There is nothing wrong with corporations — they are merely a way to organize large number of people into doing useful things. There is nothing inherently wrong with them — they certainly are more efficient than collective farms or kibbutzes, for example.
Well, your "case" falls apart, once you learn facts: people, who've committed actual financial crimes (like insider trading or running a Ponzi-scheme) really do get prosecuted. Bush's Justice Department has done it (Bernard Madoff and Martha Stuart being the most publicized cases), and so did Obama's.
What you and yours may be lamenting is absence of prosecution for some vaguely-specified misdeeds, like "the massive Wall Street crime wave that devastated the economy". Huh? We are not a banana republic, where the Dear Leader would organize a show-trial every once in a while to channel popular anger away from his own incompetence. Not yet...
There you go again with the "evil corporations". Corporations want nothing else but maximize shareholder value. This is best achieved in a healthy, well-run country — they are not your enemy. (Except for those corporations, who profit from government spending — which requires higher taxes. But, somehow, I'm afraid, lowering taxes is not on your list of priorities...)
That's not, how it works, dear. You make a statement, you provide proof. Sending your opponent to do the research in support of your own point is a wrong way to conduct a discussion -- whatever I find and manage to debunk, you can always claim, you had something else in mind. No, the burden of proof is on you.
That most of the academics are erring on the side of the bigger government is a known fact — themselves being paid by the government (either directly or via college), most of them sincerely appreciate it. Fortunately, economic professors don't make most economists.
No way, no how! Such a thing could only have happened during a RethugliKKKan Presidency. You must've gotten the date wrong.
It is possible, that negligence — causing bad things to happen without any intent — should be punished. But, in your example, the charges brought up against such parents currently are murder (or involuntary homicide, whatever the fine distinction), when it should be just that — negligence.
Switching to "my" system would raise the punishment for some things, while lowering it for some others. But none of it matters to the case in TFA: the man is not charged with anything but theft.