Yeah, but nobody seriously argues over whether he committed a crime on Slashdot. They argue over whether he will be pardoned, so he can come home to a triumphal parade.
And whether he gets that pardon depends on the poll numbers.
The NSA is a Signals Intelligence Agency. that means it's entire job is to tap the signals of foreign states, and other actors who can affect US policy. As a Head of Government that is Angie Merkel, by definition. If you have a specific US Statute that says allied countries don't get spied on then feel free to quote it.
Since no such statute exists, the statutes authorizing the NSA (by definition) require it to spy on people like Angie Merkel.
Note: treaties are irrelevant. A valid, signed, and ratified treaty can only affect the actual actions of the US Government if a) the President wants to obey the Treaty, and the Treaty is something the President can do on his own, or b) Congress passes a statute.
If you have a treaty that specifically says, flat-out, no fucking spying ( as opposed to a treaty that bans abstract BS such as "hostile actions") then you have proven Congress were dicks for not passing a statute. You have not proven that the statute authorizing the NSA bans spying on Allied states.
As for Merkel's reaction: Who cares?
She needs the US National Security establishment because Putin just got ambitious, and Putin's buddies spied on her a lot worse then the NSA did.
She could probably afford her own national security establishment, but doing something like that would require her to spend lots of money on things like Strategic Transport Aircraft, military relationships with Poland/Lithuania/etc., Strategic Bombers, etc. Since she's too cheap to do that shit, she's dependent on us, and we'll apologize profusely for the camers and then carry on spying as usual.
It doesn't work to blame Snowden for ending up in Putin's Russia when it was Clinton's State Department who canceled his passport on his way to South America. And for having the president of Ecuador's plane forced down because he might have been carrying Snowden on board.
You do realize that there's no angels who come down to heaven and smite countries that let you fly without the proper paperwork? So if Putin just told his airline that they "accidentally forgot" to scan Snowden's passport Ed would be in Cuba today?
In other words Clinton may have signed the paper Putin used to rationalize keeping Snowden as his pet, but Putin's the one who decided he wanted a Snowden pet.
Snowden chose to be the guy whose face was ion these press releases. he chose to do it from Hong Kong. I honestly can't figure out why in God's name he thought Hong Kong would be a good place to do this (it's not like the Chinese are going to want an information freedom activist inside their country), but he chose to do that. Then he ended up in Russia.
He's playing the geopolitical game, it's not necessarily his fault that he lost this fight, but it is definitely his fault that he chose a fight he could not win.
BTW, has it occurred to you that the people actually stopping him from getting on the flight were all Russian? If Putin's people wave him through regardless of his US Passport then he's safe in Cuba.
"NSA Charter?" Where are you from? In the US the only organizations that have charters are cities. The NSA is authorized by a combination of statutes passed by Congress, and Executive Orders signed by various Presidents. There is no charter.
I'd guess you're not from the UK because you refer to Merkel as a "Head of State." She isn't The Germans have a system similar to the British/Canadian/Irish/Indian etc. system whereby there's a powerless head of state (in Germany's case President Joachim Gauck), and a powerful Head of Government (Merkel) who does all the actual work.
As for the equivalent of the NSA charter: the NSA is a Signals Intelligence Agency. That means they get information (both licitly and illicitly) by tapping other country's signals.
Merkel is a Head of Government, therefore tapping her phone is, indeed, the NSA's entire job. It is a signals intelligence agency. Her conversations are intelligence, and her phone communicates via a system of electronic signals.
It's not just the spy bureaucracy. According to polls most of the American people do not approve of his actions.
Which is why calls were 100 to 1 against telecom immunity in 2008, from across the ideological spectrum. Because if there's one thing a majority of Americans want, it's corrupt unaccountable Big Brother spying on the entire planet. And that's before getting to the naked hackery of NBC's polling. You run a poll asking 'do you support Snowden taking classified documents to Putin's Russia?!?!?' and are surprised at the results? How about 'do you support whisteblowers when they reveal top officials breaking the law hundreds of times a second every day of the week'?
Dude, welcome to fucking politics. If you were right, and the American people were so far behind you that they didn't care what he told Putin, the poll wouldn't say what it said. Most American people simply aren;t true believers. They'll default to "I am an independent thinker, therefore I must oppose some of what Snowden does and support the rest."
Moreover they tend to be extremely confused about basic facts:
Spying on people like Angie Merkel is the entire reason we instructed our Congress to spend $30-$40 per person on an NSA. Period. End of story. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Is this perfromance art, or did you bring enough hallucenegic drugs for everybody? Cuz you're on some mighty powerful acid if you're seriously suggesting we need to spend hundreds of billions to tap the personal communications of our closest allies.
You sure you ain't on acid?
The NSA budget is $11-12 Billion in total. Even assuming you meant a 10-year budget window, and that all the money went to tapping her phone, we're nowhere near $200 Billion.
It doesn't help that he ended up in Russia.
It doesn't work to blame Snowden for ending up in Putin's Russia when it was Clinton's State Department who canceled his passport on his way to South America. And for having the president of Ecuador's plane forced down because he might have been carrying Snowden on board.
And if he was a little bit smarter he probably never would have gotten on a plane to Russia.
Like many people who oppose one of America's policies, he apparently divided the world into two camps. As an anti-American he thought Putin would protect him for a few hours. That turned out to be total BS. He'd have been a lot better off flying direct to someplace in Latin America, where anti-American political leaders would have protected him without using him.
I'm not arguing he had good options. But his bad options all flowed from his initial decision to flee to an oppressive state in the wrong hemisphere, where he revealed the info via the media.
Under our system of Checks and Balances Congress should have been his first try. If he's going some country besides the US it's up to him to understand that all those countries are full of real human beings, who are just as complicated as white Americans, and therefore their politics will be exactly as complicated as the BS that goes on in DC. Which means that an anti-American government activist depending on their goodwill had damn well better know exactly how all political actors in the country will act.
And if he fucks it up (as he did by assuming the Chinese would protect him, and risk their exports; or by assuming Putin would ignore a revocation of his passport), it's on him. He took the risk and he lost.
"Often" is a relative term. In a country of 300 million people even 300 times is a 1 in a million chance.
Moreover all evidence is from the Bush years. This means that one of two things has happened:
1) Obama doesn't do this shit.
2) Obama is way better at keeping this shit under wraps then Bush was.
Even if true 1) doesn't necessarily mean Obama's a nice guy. He could simply have decided the risk of being caught, and pissing everyone off, out-weighed the benefits.
Russia would be tough, but Snowden only wound up in Russia after he was left with no other options. So if he kept a low profile, he'd never have wound up in Russia.
If he'd actually kept a low profile he'd still be in Hawaii, and he'd be anonymous.
If he'd stayed in Hong Kong he would have been similarly immure to extraordinary rendition.
Hell, let's say he'd had half the brainpower his supporters think he has, and he'd started out in some leftist Latin American country like Peru. Precisely how many extraordinary renditions happen in those countries?
If you think the US doesn't have the power to take it's own citizens from many, many countries in the world and just make them disappear, you're living in a delusion, The US has a golden ticket that the lawyers have been ever-expanding their justification to do anything.
Dude, apparently you did not read what I wrote.
I haven;t said anything about the legal powers of the United States Government in this thread. What I've said is that the US would be unwilling to use them against a white man in Russia.
BTW, if you were bothering to use your reading comprehension skills, instead of seeing "anti-Snowden, discusses extraordinary rendition," and then ranting on auto-pilot you'd note that my argument is basically that the US Government are racist bullies who fear Vladimir Putin.
If you some evidence that the US Government has extraordinarily rendered whites (and no, Arabs don't count), or that it's done anything in a country that has actual geopolitical power (ie: a Security Council member) feel free to present it.
Dude, if you're reading law books to understand international law you're a moron. The laws in International Law Books aren't there because God ordained them, they're there because that was the exact BS that would allow two countries to avoid nuking each-other that Tuesday. This means that if those two countries change their minds on Wednesday International Law changes even if nobody bothers to go back and amend the treaty.
In this case Pakistan has precisely as much sovereignty over Abbotabod as it is willing and able to defend. That turns out to be virtually none. The text of the treaties is irrelevant. What is relevant is that a) we did it, and b) the Pakistanis let us get away with it. That isn't necessarily fair, but life isn;t fair. Deal. Hello, it is also quite unfair that Pakistan supports numerous terrorist groups who murder Indians, and you don't seem to be particularly incensed about that.
As for the US Code, you do realize that every section of the code is inferior to the US Constitution? And under the US Constitution it was the President's entire job to attack Al Qaeda? Which means that if you're right and the US Code bans attacking OBL then it logically follows that the US Code is Unconstitutional.
I didn't argue we were magical saints who have never done anything wrong. That would be stupid.
I argued that this particular wrong (Extraordinary Rendition of a white male from a major power to some third country nobody can name because it does not exist) is not the kind of evil thing the US does.
Are you arguing extraordinary rendition is not like kidnapping because kidnapping involves showing probable cause to a judge, grand jury hearings, etc.?
Or are you arguing we routinely extradite people from Canada without going through any of that stuff? Because every extradition is an ordinary rendition.
Because if it's not one of the two, you have quite clearly misunderstood everything I said in that post.
He could easily arrange it so that only the reporters got his copy of those documents, by storing them all on a single thumb drive, and he's probably got them encrypted pretty thoroughly. He knows enough about political reality that he probably did precisely that.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out he's let stuff slip to the Russians. They probably have cameras on him 24/7, and they control who gets to talk to him, which means that if the head of the FSB is really curious about some technical trick they can send somebody over to weedle it out of him. They may even have made "privileges" like not being sent to a "special apartment" with no heat in Moscow in January were dependent on him leaking some things. Whether that rises to the level of espionage is not something I'm equipped to say.
It's not just the spy bureaucracy. According to polls most of the American people do not approve of his actions. And this is a democracy, so that matters.
Snowden's core problem is that the American people approve of a good half of the programs Greenwald has outed. Spying on people like Angie Merkel is the entire reason we instructed our Congress to spend $30-$40 per person on an NSA. Period. End of story. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Same goes for most of the other NSA revelations (spying on Brazil's government, helping the Aussies spy on Indonesia, etc.). Pretty much the only thing he's revealed that most Americans actually care about was the mass surveillance on US Citizens, and a lot of that was oversold.
It doesn't help that he ended up in Russia. With the Crimea mess he just looks like Putin's puppet. To an extent that can be blamed on the "spy bureaucracy," but if Snowden knew he was gonna piss of the State Department, and he knew that he'd only be allowed to travel if State didn't revoke his documents, then he probably should not have gone through Moscow. Moreover I suspect our spy bureaucracy is actually good enough to get the timing right on that. There wasn't that much time between boarding a plane in HK and switching flights. I suspect the Chinese didn't want him, so they let him through with revoked documents, and then Putin him decided to keep him in a glass box.
To an extent I sympathize with him, but what's that old saying about the Game of Thrones? You win or you die? Snowden could have chosen to leak his documents anonymously through a Congressman. Amash would have loved to blame Obama for evil. Wyden is always good on these issues. And he probably could have done so anonymously, because the NSA can't piss off Congress or they all get fired, and Congress doesn't like it when the Executive branch hinders them in their core duty of making life difficult of said Executive branch. But he went through the media, which meant nobody in power in the US had any particular reason to protect him, so now he's Putin's bitch. It would be nice if this was Star Trek and shit like this didn't happen, but it ain't.
If it wasn't for that last paragraph I'd have found your post quite persuasive.
A rendition is when you arrest somebody in a second country and immediately turn them over to a third. It generally looks a lot like a kidnapping, but with legal paperwork done in the second country, because all arrests are basically legal kidnappings. An Extraordinary Rendition is done outside of the legal system of the second country. It looks even more like a kidnapping then a normal rendition, because there's no paperwork for the second country's legal system involved. They almost never happen because they're PR nightmares and good fucking luck getting cooperation from said second country's legal system in the future.
Which means you're arguing that a) the US has the power to kidnap people in Russia, b) that a country exists that would claim jurisdiction over Ed Snowden, and c) there's a chance in hell that any US policy-maker would do this to a white man. By my count absolutely none of these things is true. All of our other extraordinary renditions have been to countries where the victim was born.
"Double jeopardy" in the US is not intended to prevent people from being tried twice if they are found innocent once. It's specifically intended to keep a single level of government from repeatedly trying somebody for the same crime. This means that if you are accused of kidnapping someone in South Dakota, and the body is found in North Dakota, you could be tried three different times. Once by each Dakota, and a third time by the Feds. The protection does what the founders intended it to do quite well: no President bothers trying to harass his opponents with constant legal charges.
The fact that you can be tried by the state and the Feds also militates against the major anti-freedom feature of the US System that exists in practice: the fact this it is generally easy to oppress people with minimal interference from the Courts if the Feds can't come in and bust heads. For example, police accused of beating innocent people are found innocent at the state level, and convicted by Federal Courts of Civil Rights Violations.
As for your point that even people found innocent by the Courts can be punished by their neighbors, under the US System that is freedom. In some ways this is the worst aspect of our system. Most of the horribly oppressive things that happen in the US aren't done by the government itself, but are done by private citizens using their own freedom as cover to oppress others. But until somebody gets 38 states to ratify an amendment to the contrary, Casey Anthony's neighbors are not legally required to treat her like a good mother who suffered a tragic accident just because the Jury found her Not Guilty (Innocent is not a Jury verdict allowed in the US).
That sounds great in theory. It gets really difficult to enforce at an individual level. Particularly if you're trying to do so algorithmically.
Yeah google clearly has to try to stop people from finding out this guy's House was foreclosed on, and he had a tax debt, but how do they block just pages about this specific Mario Costeja GonzÃlez? I'm not saying it's impossible for them to do, or unreasonable for people to expect them to do it, it's just really hard to see how they pull it off.
Moreover it's gonna be even trickier if famous people start demanding google censor any results including their crimes. OJ Simpson, for example, was found innocent of murdering his wife. All stories on his armed robbery mention that innocence. Does that mean he has a right to block all pages mentioning either crime in Europe?
For somebody who insists on including a dig about dictionary definitions in every single post he makes, your grasp of legal terminology sucks. Trusts are only illegal if you try to use them to start a monopoly. Whether you succeed is actually irrelevant to the law. The attempt is the illegal thing. And it doesn't just apply to trusts.
You might be right about Amazon's overall market-share. But Amazon's overall marketshare is irreverent. Bringing it up is like arguing that MS had no monopoly on Operating Systems because most software revenue went to other companies. We're arguing eBooks. Amazon's market share is roughly 2/3, and is rising fast because most other entrants to the market (notable Kobo and BN.com) have stopped investing in the us completely, and Apple only cares about selling shit to iPad users.
That's pretty damn close to being a monopoly even by the economic definition, and by the legal definition the crime isn't having some magical percentage of market-share, it's being a dick about using that market share to screw competition to maintaining (and increase) market share. Any profits from that activity are by legal definition monopoly profits. Which means if Amazon gets it's price cut, and Hachette refuses to give the other eBook publishers a similar deal, Amazon has used it's market power to entrench itself; which is highly illegal.
Hell, Amazon publishes a lot of books. By making it difficult for Hachette to sell eBooks on it's site it increases it's own Amazon/self-published eBook market share. In this case it's an anti-trust violation even if Hachette turns around and gives Apple the same deal, because that weakens the competition in the publishing market.
I suspect the government will wait and see what happens. If Hachette manages to win the PR battle, and/or Kobo decides that if Amazon won't give the people JK Rowling it will, then everything's fine. If Amazon manages to get it's price it may not be happy.
BTW, you're veering well into troll territory again. Arguing definitions only works when you know the subject so well that you can be 110% sure the other guy isn't gonna say "Dude, I'm from Europe, here the names Elk and Moose are reversed." And you're claiming you didn't know "trust fund babies" are called that because they have Trusts filled with Funds.
The arrogance permeates the culture. And your post is actually a pretty good example.
The question we're arguing is "Is HealthCare.gov the most complicated database front end ever made?"
For example a retail bank needs two tables in it's accounts database. One for the account, a second to record the transactions. The DB needs a customer table (name, address, phone, address, ect), transaction table, account type table, account table, interest rate table, payee table, payroll tables (complete with more account data from other banks, employee names, etc) etc. There's a LOT of data involved, and this still doesn't include the cutesie stuff banks throw in like customer preferences.
So you have six tables. That's a somewhat complicated database, which makes the front end moderately complicated. The actual amount of data in the databases is totally irrelevant, and the fact you're even bringing it up suggests that you're too arrogant to actually read the post your responding to.
Moreover how many tables do you think HealthCare.gov has? It has to have at least a table of Zip Codes, insurers, plans offered by the insurers, and income cut-offs. Then it needs to access other databases (primarily Social Security, but also the IRS). Additionally it has to have a table or two to handle user accounts whose data hasn't been sent off to an insurer yet.
Which means HealthCare.gov has as many tables internally as your databases do, and it's front-end has to be able to communicate with quite a few other databases whose contents make yours look like a shopping list.
The database may be queried by other databases (ie: the guy approving loans), but it is not actually a part of those databases. Actually, different systems maintain different databases. For example the Internet Banking side will maintain it's own database. the ATM side will have it's own side. Then there's the credit card system, ACH systems, wire systems, the core system itself and others. All of these systems must interact with eachother. For example, the a customer may log into the Internet banking side, which will have to hit the core to get the current balance, EOD balance from yesterday, unprocessed transactions, processed transactions, interest rates, any messages from the bank, and so on. It also has to be able to inject transactions such as payroll into the core system, wires into the wire system and so on. Of course, all of these systems are different. The ACH system uses a flat text file. The core is usually an UNIX based system with a terminal interface. The Internet Banking is probably an Apache Tomcat connecting to a MSSQL system. Then, there is the bank end that is comprised of DB front-ends, screen scrapers, batch files, transaction injectors and so on.
You could probably convince a bunch of PHB-English Majors your database is more complicated because you have six different, totally unrelated databases in the same file, but don't try that shit in front of engineers. Not just different DB's but completely different architectures. And, of course, different states have different laws. For example, all states that take income taxes have a different method to pay them. Then their are business taxes, both federal and for all 50 states, loan laws, interest rate laws etc.
And there is much much more, but this is getting out of hand. Suffice to say that you have no friggin' clue as to what you are talking about when it comes to everything a bank does, much less when it comes to tying all those systems together.
Compare that to the ACA system which involves user data, finance data, what companies are available per state, what plans available per company, and an interface system to communicate between the handful of ACA authorized insurance companies per state and the back-office system. Many states
eBooks are a bonanza for publishers and authors right now. They're pretty good for the minor players in the eBookstore market (ie: BN.com, the iBookstore, etc.), but terrible for Amazon. Why? Amazon discounts, and the discount comes entirely from Amazon's margin.
The publisher's recommended price for an eBook is called the list price. The way a company like Amazon get eBooks is that it decides how many copies it's likely to sell, and then send the publisher 70% of list price times the number of copies. An eBook I was recently interested in purchasing, for example, is Firethorn by Sarah Micklem. List price is $16.99, which is the price both Apple and BN charge. This means that Amazon is paying $11.89 per copy. If they give a 20% discount off list price they would only charge $13.79, which would mean all their overhead (including Jeff Bezos salary) would have to be covered by $1.90. And 20% discounts are quite common. My current read ("Like a Mighty Army," by David Weber) is listed at $14.99, but Amazon sells it for $12.99. But Firethorn is a bit different.
Their price? $6.83. They lose $5.06 whenever anybody buys that book. It's a 60% discount, and 30 of those percentage points are a loss to Amazon. I wouldn't be surprised to find out they're getting a special deal of some sort with this book, but OTOH I also wouldn't be surprised if they're just eating the five bucks.
If Amazon can convince Hachette to reduce their portion of the sale to 60% then Amazon can increase it's standard discount to 25% and still increase eBook revenue by roughly a third (it goes from 10% of list price to 15%). Then they could seriously consider doing things Wall Street loves like paying dividends.
For years Wall Street has allowed Amazon to spend all it's money on growth. Wall Street's idea was that eventually Amazon would be really big,. and pay off lots of dividends, and everyone would get rich. And it didn't happen. Recently Wall Street got kinda sick of waiting so the stock's dropped roughly 20% in a year.
Bezos says he's gonna use most of the money he stops paying Hachette to cut prices. But Wall Street is not gonna be happy if he does that, because that will mean he's chosen growth (ie: more eBook sales to happy consumers), over paying Wall Street. Again.
And what makes you think they'll cut prices? Their prices are already lower then everyone else. Bezos is not running a charity.
Basically the long-term result of this for consumers is less published books, because the author's cut comes from the publisher's cut. If you pay less for something (ie: royalties to authors) you get less of it.
If you think self-publishing will actually work you probably don;t mind because self-published stuff will fill the gap.
I suspect what they're actually fighting for is the right to send dividends to Wall St. Their current prices are at break-even level, and they don't want to increase prices, so they'll cut their costs.
In other words we could be in stage 1 of Amazon's version of the WalMart plan: low prices keep everyone else out of the market.
But even no public policy is de facto a public policy that the last set of crooks should keep all their ill-gotten gains, and if they did their crookedness right they will also have the opportunity to increase their gains.
The problem analytic folks have is that the worlds problems are generally people. And those people aren't gonna look at your beautifully-crafted piece of logic proving their Social Security needs to be cut and say "Well that makes sense, I guess I won't be taking my grandson to Disney World anytime soon." Since most taxpayers think they're taxed enough to solve the problem we either have to engage in a bunch of political BS backscratching/half-truths/lies or just sit on our asses as the trust fund's expiration date approaches.
You insistence on the one-supplier principle is undercut by your own evidence. If Sperry-Rand and IBM are sharing patents then there are, by definition, two suppliers. And you didn't show that IBM was the sole supplier for the Personal Computing market, which didn't even exist when IBM got it's patent. What happened in IBM's case was the government saw a company with the potential to illegally monopolize a market, and forced it to agree not to do so.
Moreover I was alive in 1999. I can tell you there were a bevy of alternatives to MS Windows. I used Macs. Most of the folks on Slashdot who were around then used some variety of open source UNIX, generally LINUX but occasionally a BSD. BeOS existed. Which handily proves that the mere existence of BN.com won;t save Amazon if Amazon has too much market power.
As for "basic economics," you're forgetting that the strategies of a monopoly are orthogonal supply and demand. If you have a very low cost product, and you've got a monopoly on the low-cost version, you can keep margins high and keep prices low at the same time. You can also dictate the supply. You can choose to flood the market (which makes money in the short term, but adds large downside risk if the market turns and you have excess capacity you can't get rid of without blowing your monopoly), or you can intentionally not fulfill demand.
In this case Amazon is keeping prices low to keep it's lead in the marketplace. But it has no margins because it set it's prices too low. So it's got little choice but to a) raise prices, or b) squeeze it's suppliers for lower costs. It's choosing b). In the short term the result is lowered supply (fewer Hachette books available). If it works this will probably result in permanently lowered supply (the way Royalties work authors would be paid less if Hachette's cut went down, permanently lowering supply), prices would stay artificially low, and profits would be artificially high.
If the market;'s working what will happen is either a) all other companies will get this discount like the day after Hachette gives it to Amazon, b) Amazon gives up, or c) Hachette will just not be carried by Amazon and not suffer. If the market is not working then Hachette caves, Apple can't force the discount, and it's got a very clear case of monopoly profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but nobody seriously argues over whether he committed a crime on Slashdot. They argue over whether he will be pardoned, so he can come home to a triumphal parade.
And whether he gets that pardon depends on the poll numbers.
Dude,
Don't be intentionally stupid.
The NSA is a Signals Intelligence Agency. that means it's entire job is to tap the signals of foreign states, and other actors who can affect US policy. As a Head of Government that is Angie Merkel, by definition. If you have a specific US Statute that says allied countries don't get spied on then feel free to quote it.
Since no such statute exists, the statutes authorizing the NSA (by definition) require it to spy on people like Angie Merkel.
Note: treaties are irrelevant. A valid, signed, and ratified treaty can only affect the actual actions of the US Government if a) the President wants to obey the Treaty, and the Treaty is something the President can do on his own, or b) Congress passes a statute.
If you have a treaty that specifically says, flat-out, no fucking spying ( as opposed to a treaty that bans abstract BS such as "hostile actions") then you have proven Congress were dicks for not passing a statute. You have not proven that the statute authorizing the NSA bans spying on Allied states.
As for Merkel's reaction:
Who cares?
She needs the US National Security establishment because Putin just got ambitious, and Putin's buddies spied on her a lot worse then the NSA did.
She could probably afford her own national security establishment, but doing something like that would require her to spend lots of money on things like Strategic Transport Aircraft, military relationships with Poland/Lithuania/etc., Strategic Bombers, etc. Since she's too cheap to do that shit, she's dependent on us, and we'll apologize profusely for the camers and then carry on spying as usual.
The bill of rights only protects US Citizens from searches. It doesn't protect Angie Merkel.
Which means that his status as Bill of Rights hero is irrelevent to the question "Is revealing a tap on Angela Merkel's phone illegal?"
It doesn't work to blame Snowden for ending up in Putin's Russia when it was Clinton's State Department who canceled his passport on his way to South America. And for having the president of Ecuador's plane forced down because he might have been carrying Snowden on board.
You do realize that there's no angels who come down to heaven and smite countries that let you fly without the proper paperwork? So if Putin just told his airline that they "accidentally forgot" to scan Snowden's passport Ed would be in Cuba today?
In other words Clinton may have signed the paper Putin used to rationalize keeping Snowden as his pet, but Putin's the one who decided he wanted a Snowden pet.
Snowden chose to be the guy whose face was ion these press releases. he chose to do it from Hong Kong. I honestly can't figure out why in God's name he thought Hong Kong would be a good place to do this (it's not like the Chinese are going to want an information freedom activist inside their country), but he chose to do that. Then he ended up in Russia.
He's playing the geopolitical game, it's not necessarily his fault that he lost this fight, but it is definitely his fault that he chose a fight he could not win.
BTW, has it occurred to you that the people actually stopping him from getting on the flight were all Russian? If Putin's people wave him through regardless of his US Passport then he's safe in Cuba.
"NSA Charter?" Where are you from? In the US the only organizations that have charters are cities. The NSA is authorized by a combination of statutes passed by Congress, and Executive Orders signed by various Presidents. There is no charter.
I'd guess you're not from the UK because you refer to Merkel as a "Head of State." She isn't The Germans have a system similar to the British/Canadian/Irish/Indian etc. system whereby there's a powerless head of state (in Germany's case President Joachim Gauck), and a powerful Head of Government (Merkel) who does all the actual work.
As for the equivalent of the NSA charter: the NSA is a Signals Intelligence Agency. That means they get information (both licitly and illicitly) by tapping other country's signals.
Merkel is a Head of Government, therefore tapping her phone is, indeed, the NSA's entire job. It is a signals intelligence agency. Her conversations are intelligence, and her phone communicates via a system of electronic signals.
Which is why calls were 100 to 1 against telecom immunity in 2008, from across the ideological spectrum. Because if there's one thing a majority of Americans want, it's corrupt unaccountable Big Brother spying on the entire planet. And that's before getting to the naked hackery of NBC's polling. You run a poll asking 'do you support Snowden taking classified documents to Putin's Russia?!?!?' and are surprised at the results? How about 'do you support whisteblowers when they reveal top officials breaking the law hundreds of times a second every day of the week'?
Dude, welcome to fucking politics. If you were right, and the American people were so far behind you that they didn't care what he told Putin, the poll wouldn't say what it said. Most American people simply aren;t true believers. They'll default to "I am an independent thinker, therefore I must oppose some of what Snowden does and support the rest."
Moreover they tend to be extremely confused about basic facts:
Is this perfromance art, or did you bring enough hallucenegic drugs for everybody? Cuz you're on some mighty powerful acid if you're seriously suggesting we need to spend hundreds of billions to tap the personal communications of our closest allies.
You sure you ain't on acid?
The NSA budget is $11-12 Billion in total. Even assuming you meant a 10-year budget window, and that all the money went to tapping her phone, we're nowhere near $200 Billion.
It doesn't work to blame Snowden for ending up in Putin's Russia when it was Clinton's State Department who canceled his passport on his way to South America. And for having the president of Ecuador's plane forced down because he might have been carrying Snowden on board.
And if he was a little bit smarter he probably never would have gotten on a plane to Russia.
Like many people who oppose one of America's policies, he apparently divided the world into two camps. As an anti-American he thought Putin would protect him for a few hours. That turned out to be total BS. He'd have been a lot better off flying direct to someplace in Latin America, where anti-American political leaders would have protected him without using him.
I'm not arguing he had good options. But his bad options all flowed from his initial decision to flee to an oppressive state in the wrong hemisphere, where he revealed the info via the media.
Under our system of Checks and Balances Congress should have been his first try. If he's going some country besides the US it's up to him to understand that all those countries are full of real human beings, who are just as complicated as white Americans, and therefore their politics will be exactly as complicated as the BS that goes on in DC. Which means that an anti-American government activist depending on their goodwill had damn well better know exactly how all political actors in the country will act.
And if he fucks it up (as he did by assuming the Chinese would protect him, and risk their exports; or by assuming Putin would ignore a revocation of his passport), it's on him. He took the risk and he lost.
"Often" is a relative term. In a country of 300 million people even 300 times is a 1 in a million chance.
Moreover all evidence is from the Bush years. This means that one of two things has happened:
1) Obama doesn't do this shit.
2) Obama is way better at keeping this shit under wraps then Bush was.
Even if true 1) doesn't necessarily mean Obama's a nice guy. He could simply have decided the risk of being caught, and pissing everyone off, out-weighed the benefits.
Are you kidding me?
Russia would be tough, but Snowden only wound up in Russia after he was left with no other options. So if he kept a low profile, he'd never have wound up in Russia.
If he'd actually kept a low profile he'd still be in Hawaii, and he'd be anonymous.
If he'd stayed in Hong Kong he would have been similarly immure to extraordinary rendition.
Hell, let's say he'd had half the brainpower his supporters think he has, and he'd started out in some leftist Latin American country like Peru. Precisely how many extraordinary renditions happen in those countries?
If you think the US doesn't have the power to take it's own citizens from many, many countries in the world and just make them disappear, you're living in a delusion, The US has a golden ticket that the lawyers have been ever-expanding their justification to do anything.
Dude, apparently you did not read what I wrote.
I haven;t said anything about the legal powers of the United States Government in this thread. What I've said is that the US would be unwilling to use them against a white man in Russia.
BTW, if you were bothering to use your reading comprehension skills, instead of seeing "anti-Snowden, discusses extraordinary rendition," and then ranting on auto-pilot you'd note that my argument is basically that the US Government are racist bullies who fear Vladimir Putin.
If you some evidence that the US Government has extraordinarily rendered whites (and no, Arabs don't count), or that it's done anything in a country that has actual geopolitical power (ie: a Security Council member) feel free to present it.
Dude, if you're reading law books to understand international law you're a moron. The laws in International Law Books aren't there because God ordained them, they're there because that was the exact BS that would allow two countries to avoid nuking each-other that Tuesday. This means that if those two countries change their minds on Wednesday International Law changes even if nobody bothers to go back and amend the treaty.
In this case Pakistan has precisely as much sovereignty over Abbotabod as it is willing and able to defend. That turns out to be virtually none. The text of the treaties is irrelevant. What is relevant is that a) we did it, and b) the Pakistanis let us get away with it. That isn't necessarily fair, but life isn;t fair. Deal. Hello, it is also quite unfair that Pakistan supports numerous terrorist groups who murder Indians, and you don't seem to be particularly incensed about that.
As for the US Code, you do realize that every section of the code is inferior to the US Constitution? And under the US Constitution it was the President's entire job to attack Al Qaeda? Which means that if you're right and the US Code bans attacking OBL then it logically follows that the US Code is Unconstitutional.
I didn't argue we were magical saints who have never done anything wrong. That would be stupid.
I argued that this particular wrong (Extraordinary Rendition of a white male from a major power to some third country nobody can name because it does not exist) is not the kind of evil thing the US does.
Are you arguing extraordinary rendition is not like kidnapping because kidnapping involves showing probable cause to a judge, grand jury hearings, etc.?
Or are you arguing we routinely extradite people from Canada without going through any of that stuff? Because every extradition is an ordinary rendition.
Because if it's not one of the two, you have quite clearly misunderstood everything I said in that post.
I doubt the governments got the documents.
He could easily arrange it so that only the reporters got his copy of those documents, by storing them all on a single thumb drive, and he's probably got them encrypted pretty thoroughly. He knows enough about political reality that he probably did precisely that.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out he's let stuff slip to the Russians. They probably have cameras on him 24/7, and they control who gets to talk to him, which means that if the head of the FSB is really curious about some technical trick they can send somebody over to weedle it out of him. They may even have made "privileges" like not being sent to a "special apartment" with no heat in Moscow in January were dependent on him leaking some things. Whether that rises to the level of espionage is not something I'm equipped to say.
It's not just the spy bureaucracy. According to polls most of the American people do not approve of his actions. And this is a democracy, so that matters.
Snowden's core problem is that the American people approve of a good half of the programs Greenwald has outed. Spying on people like Angie Merkel is the entire reason we instructed our Congress to spend $30-$40 per person on an NSA. Period. End of story. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Same goes for most of the other NSA revelations (spying on Brazil's government, helping the Aussies spy on Indonesia, etc.). Pretty much the only thing he's revealed that most Americans actually care about was the mass surveillance on US Citizens, and a lot of that was oversold.
It doesn't help that he ended up in Russia. With the Crimea mess he just looks like Putin's puppet. To an extent that can be blamed on the "spy bureaucracy," but if Snowden knew he was gonna piss of the State Department, and he knew that he'd only be allowed to travel if State didn't revoke his documents, then he probably should not have gone through Moscow. Moreover I suspect our spy bureaucracy is actually good enough to get the timing right on that. There wasn't that much time between boarding a plane in HK and switching flights. I suspect the Chinese didn't want him, so they let him through with revoked documents, and then Putin him decided to keep him in a glass box.
To an extent I sympathize with him, but what's that old saying about the Game of Thrones? You win or you die? Snowden could have chosen to leak his documents anonymously through a Congressman. Amash would have loved to blame Obama for evil. Wyden is always good on these issues. And he probably could have done so anonymously, because the NSA can't piss off Congress or they all get fired, and Congress doesn't like it when the Executive branch hinders them in their core duty of making life difficult of said Executive branch. But he went through the media, which meant nobody in power in the US had any particular reason to protect him, so now he's Putin's bitch. It would be nice if this was Star Trek and shit like this didn't happen, but it ain't.
If it wasn't for that last paragraph I'd have found your post quite persuasive.
A rendition is when you arrest somebody in a second country and immediately turn them over to a third. It generally looks a lot like a kidnapping, but with legal paperwork done in the second country, because all arrests are basically legal kidnappings. An Extraordinary Rendition is done outside of the legal system of the second country. It looks even more like a kidnapping then a normal rendition, because there's no paperwork for the second country's legal system involved. They almost never happen because they're PR nightmares and good fucking luck getting cooperation from said second country's legal system in the future.
Which means you're arguing that a) the US has the power to kidnap people in Russia, b) that a country exists that would claim jurisdiction over Ed Snowden, and c) there's a chance in hell that any US policy-maker would do this to a white man. By my count absolutely none of these things is true. All of our other extraordinary renditions have been to countries where the victim was born.
"Double jeopardy" in the US is not intended to prevent people from being tried twice if they are found innocent once. It's specifically intended to keep a single level of government from repeatedly trying somebody for the same crime. This means that if you are accused of kidnapping someone in South Dakota, and the body is found in North Dakota, you could be tried three different times. Once by each Dakota, and a third time by the Feds. The protection does what the founders intended it to do quite well: no President bothers trying to harass his opponents with constant legal charges.
The fact that you can be tried by the state and the Feds also militates against the major anti-freedom feature of the US System that exists in practice: the fact this it is generally easy to oppress people with minimal interference from the Courts if the Feds can't come in and bust heads. For example, police accused of beating innocent people are found innocent at the state level, and convicted by Federal Courts of Civil Rights Violations.
As for your point that even people found innocent by the Courts can be punished by their neighbors, under the US System that is freedom. In some ways this is the worst aspect of our system. Most of the horribly oppressive things that happen in the US aren't done by the government itself, but are done by private citizens using their own freedom as cover to oppress others. But until somebody gets 38 states to ratify an amendment to the contrary, Casey Anthony's neighbors are not legally required to treat her like a good mother who suffered a tragic accident just because the Jury found her Not Guilty (Innocent is not a Jury verdict allowed in the US).
That sounds great in theory. It gets really difficult to enforce at an individual level. Particularly if you're trying to do so algorithmically.
Yeah google clearly has to try to stop people from finding out this guy's House was foreclosed on, and he had a tax debt, but how do they block just pages about this specific Mario Costeja GonzÃlez? I'm not saying it's impossible for them to do, or unreasonable for people to expect them to do it, it's just really hard to see how they pull it off.
Moreover it's gonna be even trickier if famous people start demanding google censor any results including their crimes. OJ Simpson, for example, was found innocent of murdering his wife. All stories on his armed robbery mention that innocence. Does that mean he has a right to block all pages mentioning either crime in Europe?
For somebody who insists on including a dig about dictionary definitions in every single post he makes, your grasp of legal terminology sucks. Trusts are only illegal if you try to use them to start a monopoly. Whether you succeed is actually irrelevant to the law. The attempt is the illegal thing. And it doesn't just apply to trusts.
You might be right about Amazon's overall market-share. But Amazon's overall marketshare is irreverent. Bringing it up is like arguing that MS had no monopoly on Operating Systems because most software revenue went to other companies. We're arguing eBooks. Amazon's market share is roughly 2/3, and is rising fast because most other entrants to the market (notable Kobo and BN.com) have stopped investing in the us completely, and Apple only cares about selling shit to iPad users.
That's pretty damn close to being a monopoly even by the economic definition, and by the legal definition the crime isn't having some magical percentage of market-share, it's being a dick about using that market share to screw competition to maintaining (and increase) market share. Any profits from that activity are by legal definition monopoly profits. Which means if Amazon gets it's price cut, and Hachette refuses to give the other eBook publishers a similar deal, Amazon has used it's market power to entrench itself; which is highly illegal.
Hell, Amazon publishes a lot of books. By making it difficult for Hachette to sell eBooks on it's site it increases it's own Amazon/self-published eBook market share. In this case it's an anti-trust violation even if Hachette turns around and gives Apple the same deal, because that weakens the competition in the publishing market.
I suspect the government will wait and see what happens. If Hachette manages to win the PR battle, and/or Kobo decides that if Amazon won't give the people JK Rowling it will, then everything's fine. If Amazon manages to get it's price it may not be happy.
BTW, you're veering well into troll territory again. Arguing definitions only works when you know the subject so well that you can be 110% sure the other guy isn't gonna say "Dude, I'm from Europe, here the names Elk and Moose are reversed." And you're claiming you didn't know "trust fund babies" are called that because they have Trusts filled with Funds.
Finance guys are so cute.
I was an IT guy so....
Doesn't matter.
The arrogance permeates the culture. And your post is actually a pretty good example.
The question we're arguing is "Is HealthCare.gov the most complicated database front end ever made?"
For example a retail bank needs two tables in it's accounts database. One for the account, a second to record the transactions.
The DB needs a customer table (name, address, phone, address, ect), transaction table, account type table, account table, interest rate table, payee table, payroll tables (complete with more account data from other banks, employee names, etc) etc. There's a LOT of data involved, and this still doesn't include the cutesie stuff banks throw in like customer preferences.
So you have six tables. That's a somewhat complicated database, which makes the front end moderately complicated. The actual amount of data in the databases is totally irrelevant, and the fact you're even bringing it up suggests that you're too arrogant to actually read the post your responding to.
Moreover how many tables do you think HealthCare.gov has? It has to have at least a table of Zip Codes, insurers, plans offered by the insurers, and income cut-offs. Then it needs to access other databases (primarily Social Security, but also the IRS). Additionally it has to have a table or two to handle user accounts whose data hasn't been sent off to an insurer yet.
Which means HealthCare.gov has as many tables internally as your databases do, and it's front-end has to be able to communicate with quite a few other databases whose contents make yours look like a shopping list.
The database may be queried by other databases (ie: the guy approving loans), but it is not actually a part of those databases.
Actually, different systems maintain different databases. For example the Internet Banking side will maintain it's own database. the ATM side will have it's own side. Then there's the credit card system, ACH systems, wire systems, the core system itself and others. All of these systems must interact with eachother. For example, the a customer may log into the Internet banking side, which will have to hit the core to get the current balance, EOD balance from yesterday, unprocessed transactions, processed transactions, interest rates, any messages from the bank, and so on. It also has to be able to inject transactions such as payroll into the core system, wires into the wire system and so on.
Of course, all of these systems are different. The ACH system uses a flat text file. The core is usually an UNIX based system with a terminal interface. The Internet Banking is probably an Apache Tomcat connecting to a MSSQL system. Then, there is the bank end that is comprised of DB front-ends, screen scrapers, batch files, transaction injectors and so on.
You could probably convince a bunch of PHB-English Majors your database is more complicated because you have six different, totally unrelated databases in the same file, but don't try that shit in front of engineers.
Not just different DB's but completely different architectures. And, of course, different states have different laws. For example, all states that take income taxes have a different method to pay them. Then their are business taxes, both federal and for all 50 states, loan laws, interest rate laws etc.
And there is much much more, but this is getting out of hand. Suffice to say that you have no friggin' clue as to what you are talking about when it comes to everything a bank does, much less when it comes to tying all those systems together.
Compare that to the ACA system which involves user data, finance data, what companies are available per state, what plans available per company, and an interface system to communicate between the handful of ACA authorized insurance companies per state and the back-office system. Many states
eBooks are a bonanza for publishers and authors right now. They're pretty good for the minor players in the eBookstore market (ie: BN.com, the iBookstore, etc.), but terrible for Amazon. Why? Amazon discounts, and the discount comes entirely from Amazon's margin.
The publisher's recommended price for an eBook is called the list price. The way a company like Amazon get eBooks is that it decides how many copies it's likely to sell, and then send the publisher 70% of list price times the number of copies. An eBook I was recently interested in purchasing, for example, is Firethorn by Sarah Micklem. List price is $16.99, which is the price both Apple and BN charge. This means that Amazon is paying $11.89 per copy. If they give a 20% discount off list price they would only charge $13.79, which would mean all their overhead (including Jeff Bezos salary) would have to be covered by $1.90. And 20% discounts are quite common. My current read ("Like a Mighty Army," by David Weber) is listed at $14.99, but Amazon sells it for $12.99. But Firethorn is a bit different.
Their price? $6.83. They lose $5.06 whenever anybody buys that book. It's a 60% discount, and 30 of those percentage points are a loss to Amazon. I wouldn't be surprised to find out they're getting a special deal of some sort with this book, but OTOH I also wouldn't be surprised if they're just eating the five bucks.
If Amazon can convince Hachette to reduce their portion of the sale to 60% then Amazon can increase it's standard discount to 25% and still increase eBook revenue by roughly a third (it goes from 10% of list price to 15%). Then they could seriously consider doing things Wall Street loves like paying dividends.
Amazon stock doesn't pay dividends.
That's kinda my point.
For years Wall Street has allowed Amazon to spend all it's money on growth. Wall Street's idea was that eventually Amazon would be really big,. and pay off lots of dividends, and everyone would get rich. And it didn't happen. Recently Wall Street got kinda sick of waiting so the stock's dropped roughly 20% in a year.
Bezos says he's gonna use most of the money he stops paying Hachette to cut prices. But Wall Street is not gonna be happy if he does that, because that will mean he's chosen growth (ie: more eBook sales to happy consumers), over paying Wall Street. Again.
And what makes you think they'll cut prices? Their prices are already lower then everyone else. Bezos is not running a charity.
Basically the long-term result of this for consumers is less published books, because the author's cut comes from the publisher's cut. If you pay less for something (ie: royalties to authors) you get less of it.
If you think self-publishing will actually work you probably don;t mind because self-published stuff will fill the gap.
Don't speak too soon.
I suspect what they're actually fighting for is the right to send dividends to Wall St. Their current prices are at break-even level, and they don't want to increase prices, so they'll cut their costs.
In other words we could be in stage 1 of Amazon's version of the WalMart plan: low prices keep everyone else out of the market.
To an extent that's true.
But even no public policy is de facto a public policy that the last set of crooks should keep all their ill-gotten gains, and if they did their crookedness right they will also have the opportunity to increase their gains.
The problem analytic folks have is that the worlds problems are generally people. And those people aren't gonna look at your beautifully-crafted piece of logic proving their Social Security needs to be cut and say "Well that makes sense, I guess I won't be taking my grandson to Disney World anytime soon." Since most taxpayers think they're taxed enough to solve the problem we either have to engage in a bunch of political BS backscratching/half-truths/lies or just sit on our asses as the trust fund's expiration date approaches.
You insistence on the one-supplier principle is undercut by your own evidence. If Sperry-Rand and IBM are sharing patents then there are, by definition, two suppliers. And you didn't show that IBM was the sole supplier for the Personal Computing market, which didn't even exist when IBM got it's patent. What happened in IBM's case was the government saw a company with the potential to illegally monopolize a market, and forced it to agree not to do so.
Moreover I was alive in 1999. I can tell you there were a bevy of alternatives to MS Windows. I used Macs. Most of the folks on Slashdot who were around then used some variety of open source UNIX, generally LINUX but occasionally a BSD. BeOS existed. Which handily proves that the mere existence of BN.com won;t save Amazon if Amazon has too much market power.
As for "basic economics," you're forgetting that the strategies of a monopoly are orthogonal supply and demand. If you have a very low cost product, and you've got a monopoly on the low-cost version, you can keep margins high and keep prices low at the same time. You can also dictate the supply. You can choose to flood the market (which makes money in the short term, but adds large downside risk if the market turns and you have excess capacity you can't get rid of without blowing your monopoly), or you can intentionally not fulfill demand.
In this case Amazon is keeping prices low to keep it's lead in the marketplace. But it has no margins because it set it's prices too low. So it's got little choice but to a) raise prices, or b) squeeze it's suppliers for lower costs. It's choosing b). In the short term the result is lowered supply (fewer Hachette books available). If it works this will probably result in permanently lowered supply (the way Royalties work authors would be paid less if Hachette's cut went down, permanently lowering supply), prices would stay artificially low, and profits would be artificially high.
If the market;'s working what will happen is either a) all other companies will get this discount like the day after Hachette gives it to Amazon, b) Amazon gives up, or c) Hachette will just not be carried by Amazon and not suffer. If the market is not working then Hachette caves, Apple can't force the discount, and it's got a very clear case of monopoly profits.