Any cites for that so-called fact. MAC's are closed systems with a much more engineered life span than a clone PC. As stated previously no parts to be swapped any failure is the end of life for a MAC. The anomaly of MAC's upswing could be attributed to the absolute lack of any upgrade path.
"No parts"? You're just wrong. Every Mac I've ever owned has had non-proprietary upgrade-paths for both the HD and RAM. In almost every case the upgrade path used the same parts PC makers use (SCSI is an exception).
It's true a lot of the parts are proprietary, and the only place to get them is Apple, but a) if "the only place to get them is Apple" you can get them and b) the PCs relevant to the article (PCs shipped by big companies) there tend to be a lot of proprietary parts.
How has this not been downmodded for being over-rated? I know he's only at 2 due to karm-bonus, but whenever I post anything near this ridiculous it gets knocked down to 1 within an hour.
This is a thread about shipments of PCs from companies like Dell. Your homebuilt does not count. Yeah you know how to get replacement parts for even the proprietary bits of those, and you don't know how to get replacement parts for Macs; but that doesn't imply you're a super-genius who can upgrade his computer and Mac-users are all total losers who can't. It implies you have never gone to an Apple Store.
As long as he's a Canadian Agent acting under orders from his government that are legal under international law then yes.
The weird thing is that we never violate the letter of this particular requirement, and we only violate the spirit once every couple decades. It is literally true that we violate the international rule against attacking countries for BS the President made up more often then we violate the rule on when you can arrest their officials. In fact the only time I can think of was the war to remove Noriega, followed by him being arrested by the US, but that was covered by a loophole because the guys we put in charge of Panama agreed to waive his immunity.
Doesn't matter. The Bank was arguing that it can't be penalized by the US for following Cayman (and Canadian) law in the Caymans and Canada. The Court ruled "Fuck them."
So Cisco opens this wonderful, super-secure, NSA-free-site in Toronto. The NSA gets the US legal system to impose some penalty on Cisco until it's servers are no longer NSA-free. If Cisco goes to Court claiming they can't be forced to violate Canadian law they will be laughed out of court.
Same goes for Google's new, secure, NSA-proof product. Google has US operations, and as long as those operations exist US courts will be able to bully the fuck out of Google.
It's not a very sensible "thought." If the US can bully Cisco the US can bully Cisco. It doesn't matter where the designers are.
CISCO does business in the US. That means it has bank accounts here. The court isn;t gonna give a shit that the designer isn;t subject top it's jurisdiction, it's just gonna fine CISCO and seize the bank account.
But according to their internal standards if they're 51% sure you're Canadian they can collect whatever info they want. Since most people who use a.ca email address are Canadian then they can collect your data. If it turns out you aren't Canadian they were acting in good faith, so they can still use the data at trial.
Now you can disagree with the standards all you want, or think they shouldn't have the right to spy on Canadians, but until the Supreme Court (which appointed the guys who wrote the damn standard) rules that you're right the NSA can read anything from an account you have hosted in Canada with out even a FISA Court rubber-stamp.
They're bitching about voting with their feet, but that doesn't make it a credible threat. Business is always bitching about something.
The problem Silicon Valley has is there's nowhere to go, and even if they leave they still have to obey US Laws or lose the US Market. And by "US Market" I don't just mean customers in the US. I mean suppliers in the US, US banks, etc. Canadian banks were just ordered to a) violate Canadian privacy laws by collecting data on precisely which of their customers is a US citizen and disclose that info to the US IRS, or b) lose 30% of every transaction in the US to aforementioned IRS. Very few people believe they'll follow Canadian law.
Also, as mentioned in the original post, companies like Cisco are considering moving their R&D to Canada where they will not be forced to include backdoors for the NSA. As someone whose main business is networking gear, I can see this as being a big selling feature to Cisco.
Whether the actual data that is routed through the US is safe or not doesnt matter as much as being able to assure your customers that your devices dont contain NSA backdoors.
Cisco is a US company. It's bank accounts are in the US. A lot of it's people are in the US. It's customers are all in the US. If the NSA has the juice to force Cisco to implement a back-door then it doesn't matter where the routers are designed, the backdoor will be implemented.
I believe there have actually been cases where banks tried to conceal their Canadian customers data because Canadian law said that was their duty, but the US got it anyway because they had bank accounts on this side of the border the US Courts got freeze.
I suspect that Cisco knows this, they're just thinking that if they have significant Canadian operations people will think that they magically became immune to the NSA.
You don't understand your system very well if you think Harper isn't de facto King. He's got a majority in Parliament. Two of your core Constitutional principles (Parliamentary Sovereignty, and Unity of Powers), mean he could re-write the laws on a whim. As long as his Tory backbenchers supported him he's fine. The restrictions on his power are that a) a parliament only last five years, so he needs to not piss people off or he'll lose and stop being King, b) Canada is a Federal system and there are certain things the federal Parliament simply cannot do, and c) the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The privacy bit of c) is the only thing really relevant here, and it is stronger in some ways (it doesn't just apply to Canadians), but it's weaker in practice because the Canadian Courts have a narrower definition of "unreasonable search."
If some guy was setting up a social network in Canada to replace facebook, and some CanMail company was replacing gmail, you would have an excellent point. Nobody is talking about hiring Canadian companies to host their data in a format that they can't access from their office in the Valley.
They're talking about a) building server-farms they own, or b) hiring Canadian server-farms. In either case if the Canadians start protecting data the Feds can simply get a FISA order sent to the main office, and since the main office can access that data the Feds will get their hands on it. The Canadians running the server-farm have no idea what the data is being sent to the Valley for, they just some guy's account is being accessed from HQ. For all they know he's visiting HQ, or some tech support drone has been granted temporary access.
Canadian operations are firmly within the jurisdiction of the NSA.
So? They don't seem to let that keep them from spying in the US.
They do plenty of things in the US they wouldn't do in Canada. Bother with FISA warrants for one thing. Another is they actually try to figure out whether you're American before spying on you.
Granted they don't have to work hard to fulfill either requirement, but something is always harder to do then nothing. And in Canada they have to do precisely nothing.
moving out of country makes you more hackable
Not necessarily. Hacking is easier when you can operate inside US operations, with the cooperation of management.
You do realize the management in Canada is Stephen Harper? AKA: the guy who tried to send Canadian troops to Iraq?
The NSA can get his help to do anything simply by muttering the word "Islamo-Fascist" three times. And he's got a lot more powers then the US Government.
Harper will probably lose the next election, but he's got a majorioty so he can delay that thru 2015 if he wants. And his potential replacement (Trudeau Jr.) is a little better, but still isn't likely to send a "fuck the NSA letter" to Obama.
No country that recognizes the US as a sovereign entity is technically allowed to apply their internal laws to agents of the US Government. The definition of a sovereign entity is that it is the fucking law in your little bailiwick. If other countries have a problem with what a sovereign country they can do damn near anything (nuclear weapons, diplomatic notes, the random shit the Indians are doing to protest their Consul being arrested, etc.), except apply their domestic law codes to the agents of that country. International Tribunals are permissible, but Canada arresting an NSA guy because of something he did in Canada that was legal under both US Law and international law is not.
In other words if you;re talking about what the NSA can legally do the only things that are relevant are a) the Constitution, b) the specific statutes Congress has passed authorizing the NSA, c) the orders/regulations issued by the President, and d) international treaties which the US has ratified. If the Fourth Amendment says we can hack Canada, and Congress says hacking Canada is the NSA's job, and the President (or his appointees) hack Canada the NSA dudes who hack Canada can;t be punished for anything by Canada.
What did you want Kaplan to say? Kaplan actually wrote that Snowden only worked at Booz-Hamilton for three months. You're arguing that's FUD because Snowden worked for the CIA/NSA in various capacities for years before that. Which means you're claiming Kaplan;s article would be less FUDdish if it included some line like "After working for the NSA every day for almost 7 years, one Tuesday Ed Snowden realized that spying was Evil (but he just hadn't noticed that before because he was totally stupid), therefore he immediately implemented an elaborate six-month plan to expose everything the NSA is doing to everyone." Kaplan's case is that tSnopwden's claimed love of privacy rights could easily be cover for an idiotic attempt to betray the US to Russia, and the second line fits that much better then the bit Kaplan included in his article.
The case is actually fairly tight. The only counters that work logically are to assert either a) NSA Snooping was so bad that exposing it is worth all other damage (and Snowden should get clemency), b) all spying is evil therefore governments should immediately ban themselves from doing it and grant guys like Snowden clemency, or c) due to a combination of a) and b) we should ignore the possibility that Snowden intended to hurt the US. There is no d), Congress amends the Constitution to retroactively legalize outing the NSA.
That's the first time I've ever heard of the 3/5 compromise as a "limit" to slavery. The people who would have benefited from a limit on slavery don't remember the 3/5 compromise as a "limit on slavery," which would have (by definition) increased their freedom. They remember it as George Washington insisting that a black person is only 3/5 as important as a white. The 1808 import ban didn't actually free any slaves, or encourage anybody to free their slaves. It didn't even stop much new slaving, because the Brits sicced their Navy on the slave trade in 1819.
Your last sentence contradicts your thesis. If no Constitution that didn't protect South Carolina's right to literally enslave most of it's residents could possibly be ratified, then the Constitution must necessarily have protected slavery in South Carolina or it would not have been ratified.
I'll admit that it's ended up as a pretty strong protection of freedom after 28 Amendments, and that in 1789 it was radically Progressive and extremely pro-freedom as Constitutions went. The brilliant thing about the Constitution is not that it protected this modern idea of Universal Freedom for the human race, it's that it is the only Constitution of the period that tried to strike a balance between the power of the individual citizen and the government, and didn't result in a government so weak that the country collapsed.
The OP is firmly of the opinion that the government should never have secrets unless it can prove, conclusively, that Bad Things Will Happen if those secrets are spilled. The founders clearly had other ideas because they decided they couldn't deliberate if the deliberations weren't secret, so they refused to even take minutes, and only one guy put anything significant a diary.
Your analogy fails because he didn't need to commit the felony of outing Australian spying on Indonesia to expose mass data collection of private citizens.
That's kinda the entire point of Kaplan's blog post. Yes Snowden may have helped further the cause of freedom by ending PRISM, etc.; but he also committed some felonies that had nothing to do with PRISM.
That's precisely my point. They are using the exact same word but mean completely different things.
In the same way "majority" means one thing to mathematicians, but to folks who study things like discrimination it means something related (generally, in modern Democratic states, it's virtually impossible for a group that's under 50% of the population to oppress everyone else), but it doesn't mean exactly the same thing. Women are a majority by the mathematical definition, but by the other definition they are a minority.
There's a conversation about Republicans between an Irishman and an American. The Irishman is talking about Socialists who don't go to Church (but swear they're Catholic), want to fire Queen Elizabeth, and sympathize with terrorists. The American is talking about Capitalists who go to an extremely Protestant Church for six hours a week, have a very poorly concealed crush on the Queen, and think that freedom doesn't apply to anyone the government has deemed a terrorist. Then an Aussie shows up, and he's talking about somebody completely different. Whose lying?
If you're talking about political terms the context changes the definition all the time. You can choose between a) living on a high horse and never communicating with people, or b) ignoring the etymology of every word in favor of it's common usage in the political sub-group you're discussing.
If the Constitution proper wasn't almost always on the side of government you'd probably be able to name a major-pro-freedom court case that turned on the Constitution Proper rather then an Amendment. The only things you'll find are cases about which level of government had the power to do something -- the states or the Feds -- rather then whether something was so evil the Constitution banned it completely. Hell the Constitution proper regulates slavery. It's just not the paean to freedom American Jingoists like to pretend.
The Amendments are a significant improvement, but a) that's the Amendments not the Constitution proper, and b) Amendments after the fact don't magically change a pro-slavery document into an anti-slavery document.
There is no American law which prevents America from spying on non-Americans. We've signed no treaty that says we won;t spy on foreign countries. That means it is by definition legal for us to do so.
The laws in the article you linked to are all non-American, mostly from the Commonwealth Realms.
So? That's the whole point. American exceptionalism is thinking that Americans can break laws in other countries and get away with it because they're special. That's why the world hates Americans. They have double standards. They can break laws in other countries but if others come to America, woe betides them is they break the law.
It's not exceptionalism if everyone does it. It may be morally wrong if everyone does it, but it is by definition not exceptionalism.
The UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were actually part of our intelligence alliance, so they were involved in every spy op we were. the French, Israelis, and Russians have spying institutions that are literally legendary. It's against common sense to take a laptop you like to China because you know they'll install malware on it in violation of the laws of your home country. Which means I've already changed "exceptionalism" to "nine-inism."
Good luck naming a country with a foreign policy not based around being very quiet so everyone else will forget they exist which actually has a law banning spying on foreign countries.
So the Cubans would turn him over to the US under what circumstances? Because I'm pretty sure that they've been pissed at us since we tried to assassinate Castro in the 60s. Just because the list short, that doesn't mean he has to end up in fucking Russia.
As for the logic and intelligence of Snowden, what about his actions makes you think he's actually good at this? He brought a major controversy to China, a state that hates controversy. In a system of government that is designed so that conflicts with the Executive can be resolved by the Legislative he complained directly to the media, which ensured the Legislative was on the Executive's side and that he would fail.
He's basically ensured that a) he will never leave Russia, b) everyone will claim to have solved the NSA privacy violations but make a point of not solving them, c) a lot of countries who don't like the US know how our SigInt ops work, and d) a lot of countries that liked the US know we're spying on them. Basically this is only a win for him if, for the entire time, his goal was to defect to Russia.
There is no American law which prevents America from spying on non-Americans. We've signed no treaty that says we won;t spy on foreign countries. That means it is by definition legal for us to do so.
The laws in the article you linked to are all non-American, mostly from the Commonwealth Realms.
I was very careful not to accuse him of anything. My chain of logic is probable cause, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
So I'm a bootlicker engaged in a smear campaign, but the shining jewel of privacy activism is in no way a hypocrite for staying in a country that doesn't actually enforce privacy rights.
As for spying on non-hostile countries, don't you understand that this is fucking America. We don't fight fair. Unlike the French, Russians, and Chinese we don't pretend to be fair. If other countries don't like it they should have included some explicit language on espionage in the UN Charter rather then relying solely on the abstract BS that could mean anything.
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I've never had a Mac desktop that wasn't my primary desktop machine for five years.
I've never heard a PC guy say his primary desktop machine is five years old, even if it's one he built himself and is continually upgrading.
Any cites for that so-called fact. MAC's are closed systems with a much more engineered life span than a clone PC. As stated previously no parts to be swapped any failure is the end of life for a MAC. The anomaly of MAC's upswing could be attributed to the absolute lack of any upgrade path.
"No parts"? You're just wrong. Every Mac I've ever owned has had non-proprietary upgrade-paths for both the HD and RAM. In almost every case the upgrade path used the same parts PC makers use (SCSI is an exception).
It's true a lot of the parts are proprietary, and the only place to get them is Apple, but a) if "the only place to get them is Apple" you can get them and b) the PCs relevant to the article (PCs shipped by big companies) there tend to be a lot of proprietary parts.
How has this not been downmodded for being over-rated? I know he's only at 2 due to karm-bonus, but whenever I post anything near this ridiculous it gets knocked down to 1 within an hour.
This is a thread about shipments of PCs from companies like Dell. Your homebuilt does not count. Yeah you know how to get replacement parts for even the proprietary bits of those, and you don't know how to get replacement parts for Macs; but that doesn't imply you're a super-genius who can upgrade his computer and Mac-users are all total losers who can't. It implies you have never gone to an Apple Store.
As long as he's a Canadian Agent acting under orders from his government that are legal under international law then yes.
The weird thing is that we never violate the letter of this particular requirement, and we only violate the spirit once every couple decades. It is literally true that we violate the international rule against attacking countries for BS the President made up more often then we violate the rule on when you can arrest their officials. In fact the only time I can think of was the war to remove Noriega, followed by him being arrested by the US, but that was covered by a loophole because the guys we put in charge of Panama agreed to waive his immunity.
Doesn't matter. The Bank was arguing that it can't be penalized by the US for following Cayman (and Canadian) law in the Caymans and Canada. The Court ruled "Fuck them."
So Cisco opens this wonderful, super-secure, NSA-free-site in Toronto. The NSA gets the US legal system to impose some penalty on Cisco until it's servers are no longer NSA-free. If Cisco goes to Court claiming they can't be forced to violate Canadian law they will be laughed out of court.
Same goes for Google's new, secure, NSA-proof product. Google has US operations, and as long as those operations exist US courts will be able to bully the fuck out of Google.
It's not a very sensible "thought." If the US can bully Cisco the US can bully Cisco. It doesn't matter where the designers are.
CISCO does business in the US. That means it has bank accounts here. The court isn;t gonna give a shit that the designer isn;t subject top it's jurisdiction, it's just gonna fine CISCO and seize the bank account.
But according to their internal standards if they're 51% sure you're Canadian they can collect whatever info they want. Since most people who use a .ca email address are Canadian then they can collect your data. If it turns out you aren't Canadian they were acting in good faith, so they can still use the data at trial.
Now you can disagree with the standards all you want, or think they shouldn't have the right to spy on Canadians, but until the Supreme Court (which appointed the guys who wrote the damn standard) rules that you're right the NSA can read anything from an account you have hosted in Canada with out even a FISA Court rubber-stamp.
They're bitching about voting with their feet, but that doesn't make it a credible threat. Business is always bitching about something.
The problem Silicon Valley has is there's nowhere to go, and even if they leave they still have to obey US Laws or lose the US Market. And by "US Market" I don't just mean customers in the US. I mean suppliers in the US, US banks, etc. Canadian banks were just ordered to a) violate Canadian privacy laws by collecting data on precisely which of their customers is a US citizen and disclose that info to the US IRS, or b) lose 30% of every transaction in the US to aforementioned IRS. Very few people believe they'll follow Canadian law.
Also, as mentioned in the original post, companies like Cisco are considering moving their R&D to Canada where they will not be forced to include backdoors for the NSA. As someone whose main business is networking gear, I can see this as being a big selling feature to Cisco.
Whether the actual data that is routed through the US is safe or not doesnt matter as much as being able to assure your customers that your devices dont contain NSA backdoors.
Cisco is a US company. It's bank accounts are in the US. A lot of it's people are in the US. It's customers are all in the US. If the NSA has the juice to force Cisco to implement a back-door then it doesn't matter where the routers are designed, the backdoor will be implemented.
I believe there have actually been cases where banks tried to conceal their Canadian customers data because Canadian law said that was their duty, but the US got it anyway because they had bank accounts on this side of the border the US Courts got freeze.
I suspect that Cisco knows this, they're just thinking that if they have significant Canadian operations people will think that they magically became immune to the NSA.
You don't understand your system very well if you think Harper isn't de facto King. He's got a majority in Parliament. Two of your core Constitutional principles (Parliamentary Sovereignty, and Unity of Powers), mean he could re-write the laws on a whim. As long as his Tory backbenchers supported him he's fine. The restrictions on his power are that a) a parliament only last five years, so he needs to not piss people off or he'll lose and stop being King, b) Canada is a Federal system and there are certain things the federal Parliament simply cannot do, and c) the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The privacy bit of c) is the only thing really relevant here, and it is stronger in some ways (it doesn't just apply to Canadians), but it's weaker in practice because the Canadian Courts have a narrower definition of "unreasonable search."
If some guy was setting up a social network in Canada to replace facebook, and some CanMail company was replacing gmail, you would have an excellent point. Nobody is talking about hiring Canadian companies to host their data in a format that they can't access from their office in the Valley.
They're talking about a) building server-farms they own, or b) hiring Canadian server-farms. In either case if the Canadians start protecting data the Feds can simply get a FISA order sent to the main office, and since the main office can access that data the Feds will get their hands on it. The Canadians running the server-farm have no idea what the data is being sent to the Valley for, they just some guy's account is being accessed from HQ. For all they know he's visiting HQ, or some tech support drone has been granted temporary access.
Canadian operations are firmly within the jurisdiction of the NSA.
So? They don't seem to let that keep them from spying in the US.
They do plenty of things in the US they wouldn't do in Canada. Bother with FISA warrants for one thing. Another is they actually try to figure out whether you're American before spying on you.
Granted they don't have to work hard to fulfill either requirement, but something is always harder to do then nothing. And in Canada they have to do precisely nothing.
moving out of country makes you more hackable
Not necessarily. Hacking is easier when you can operate inside US operations, with the cooperation of management.
You do realize the management in Canada is Stephen Harper? AKA: the guy who tried to send Canadian troops to Iraq?
The NSA can get his help to do anything simply by muttering the word "Islamo-Fascist" three times. And he's got a lot more powers then the US Government.
Harper will probably lose the next election, but he's got a majorioty so he can delay that thru 2015 if he wants. And his potential replacement (Trudeau Jr.) is a little better, but still isn't likely to send a "fuck the NSA letter" to Obama.
No country that recognizes the US as a sovereign entity is technically allowed to apply their internal laws to agents of the US Government. The definition of a sovereign entity is that it is the fucking law in your little bailiwick. If other countries have a problem with what a sovereign country they can do damn near anything (nuclear weapons, diplomatic notes, the random shit the Indians are doing to protest their Consul being arrested, etc.), except apply their domestic law codes to the agents of that country. International Tribunals are permissible, but Canada arresting an NSA guy because of something he did in Canada that was legal under both US Law and international law is not.
In other words if you;re talking about what the NSA can legally do the only things that are relevant are a) the Constitution, b) the specific statutes Congress has passed authorizing the NSA, c) the orders/regulations issued by the President, and d) international treaties which the US has ratified. If the Fourth Amendment says we can hack Canada, and Congress says hacking Canada is the NSA's job, and the President (or his appointees) hack Canada the NSA dudes who hack Canada can;t be punished for anything by Canada.
What did you want Kaplan to say? Kaplan actually wrote that Snowden only worked at Booz-Hamilton for three months. You're arguing that's FUD because Snowden worked for the CIA/NSA in various capacities for years before that. Which means you're claiming Kaplan;s article would be less FUDdish if it included some line like "After working for the NSA every day for almost 7 years, one Tuesday Ed Snowden realized that spying was Evil (but he just hadn't noticed that before because he was totally stupid), therefore he immediately implemented an elaborate six-month plan to expose everything the NSA is doing to everyone." Kaplan's case is that tSnopwden's claimed love of privacy rights could easily be cover for an idiotic attempt to betray the US to Russia, and the second line fits that much better then the bit Kaplan included in his article.
The case is actually fairly tight. The only counters that work logically are to assert either a) NSA Snooping was so bad that exposing it is worth all other damage (and Snowden should get clemency), b) all spying is evil therefore governments should immediately ban themselves from doing it and grant guys like Snowden clemency, or c) due to a combination of a) and b) we should ignore the possibility that Snowden intended to hurt the US. There is no d), Congress amends the Constitution to retroactively legalize outing the NSA.
That's the first time I've ever heard of the 3/5 compromise as a "limit" to slavery. The people who would have benefited from a limit on slavery don't remember the 3/5 compromise as a "limit on slavery," which would have (by definition) increased their freedom. They remember it as George Washington insisting that a black person is only 3/5 as important as a white. The 1808 import ban didn't actually free any slaves, or encourage anybody to free their slaves. It didn't even stop much new slaving, because the Brits sicced their Navy on the slave trade in 1819.
Your last sentence contradicts your thesis. If no Constitution that didn't protect South Carolina's right to literally enslave most of it's residents could possibly be ratified, then the Constitution must necessarily have protected slavery in South Carolina or it would not have been ratified.
I'll admit that it's ended up as a pretty strong protection of freedom after 28 Amendments, and that in 1789 it was radically Progressive and extremely pro-freedom as Constitutions went. The brilliant thing about the Constitution is not that it protected this modern idea of Universal Freedom for the human race, it's that it is the only Constitution of the period that tried to strike a balance between the power of the individual citizen and the government, and didn't result in a government so weak that the country collapsed.
That's kinda my point.
The OP is firmly of the opinion that the government should never have secrets unless it can prove, conclusively, that Bad Things Will Happen if those secrets are spilled. The founders clearly had other ideas because they decided they couldn't deliberate if the deliberations weren't secret, so they refused to even take minutes, and only one guy put anything significant a diary.
Your analogy fails because he didn't need to commit the felony of outing Australian spying on Indonesia to expose mass data collection of private citizens.
That's kinda the entire point of Kaplan's blog post. Yes Snowden may have helped further the cause of freedom by ending PRISM, etc.; but he also committed some felonies that had nothing to do with PRISM.
That's precisely my point. They are using the exact same word but mean completely different things.
In the same way "majority" means one thing to mathematicians, but to folks who study things like discrimination it means something related (generally, in modern Democratic states, it's virtually impossible for a group that's under 50% of the population to oppress everyone else), but it doesn't mean exactly the same thing. Women are a majority by the mathematical definition, but by the other definition they are a minority.
There's a conversation about Republicans between an Irishman and an American. The Irishman is talking about Socialists who don't go to Church (but swear they're Catholic), want to fire Queen Elizabeth, and sympathize with terrorists. The American is talking about Capitalists who go to an extremely Protestant Church for six hours a week, have a very poorly concealed crush on the Queen, and think that freedom doesn't apply to anyone the government has deemed a terrorist. Then an Aussie shows up, and he's talking about somebody completely different. Whose lying?
If you're talking about political terms the context changes the definition all the time. You can choose between a) living on a high horse and never communicating with people, or b) ignoring the etymology of every word in favor of it's common usage in the political sub-group you're discussing.
If the Constitution proper wasn't almost always on the side of government you'd probably be able to name a major-pro-freedom court case that turned on the Constitution Proper rather then an Amendment. The only things you'll find are cases about which level of government had the power to do something -- the states or the Feds -- rather then whether something was so evil the Constitution banned it completely. Hell the Constitution proper regulates slavery. It's just not the paean to freedom American Jingoists like to pretend.
The Amendments are a significant improvement, but a) that's the Amendments not the Constitution proper, and b) Amendments after the fact don't magically change a pro-slavery document into an anti-slavery document.
There is no American law which prevents America from spying on non-Americans. We've signed no treaty that says we won;t spy on foreign countries. That means it is by definition legal for us to do so.
The laws in the article you linked to are all non-American, mostly from the Commonwealth Realms.
So? That's the whole point. American exceptionalism is thinking that Americans can break laws in other countries and get away with it because they're special. That's why the world hates Americans. They have double standards. They can break laws in other countries but if others come to America, woe betides them is they break the law.
It's not exceptionalism if everyone does it. It may be morally wrong if everyone does it, but it is by definition not exceptionalism.
The UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were actually part of our intelligence alliance, so they were involved in every spy op we were. the French, Israelis, and Russians have spying institutions that are literally legendary. It's against common sense to take a laptop you like to China because you know they'll install malware on it in violation of the laws of your home country. Which means I've already changed "exceptionalism" to "nine-inism."
Good luck naming a country with a foreign policy not based around being very quiet so everyone else will forget they exist which actually has a law banning spying on foreign countries.
Damn, what are the odds I'd let loose that rant on an Israeli.
So the Cubans would turn him over to the US under what circumstances? Because I'm pretty sure that they've been pissed at us since we tried to assassinate Castro in the 60s. Just because the list short, that doesn't mean he has to end up in fucking Russia.
As for the logic and intelligence of Snowden, what about his actions makes you think he's actually good at this? He brought a major controversy to China, a state that hates controversy. In a system of government that is designed so that conflicts with the Executive can be resolved by the Legislative he complained directly to the media, which ensured the Legislative was on the Executive's side and that he would fail.
He's basically ensured that a) he will never leave Russia, b) everyone will claim to have solved the NSA privacy violations but make a point of not solving them, c) a lot of countries who don't like the US know how our SigInt ops work, and d) a lot of countries that liked the US know we're spying on them. Basically this is only a win for him if, for the entire time, his goal was to defect to Russia.
There is no American law which prevents America from spying on non-Americans. We've signed no treaty that says we won;t spy on foreign countries. That means it is by definition legal for us to do so.
The laws in the article you linked to are all non-American, mostly from the Commonwealth Realms.
I was very careful not to accuse him of anything. My chain of logic is probable cause, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
So I'm a bootlicker engaged in a smear campaign, but the shining jewel of privacy activism is in no way a hypocrite for staying in a country that doesn't actually enforce privacy rights.
As for spying on non-hostile countries, don't you understand that this is fucking America. We don't fight fair. Unlike the French, Russians, and Chinese we don't pretend to be fair. If other countries don't like it they should have included some explicit language on espionage in the UN Charter rather then relying solely on the abstract BS that could mean anything.