The Supreme Court really doesn't like to step on the toes of the other two parts of the government if it doesn't have to.
That sound like a problem to me. That means they are not independent, where I would think that they should not look at anybody else, but instead follow their own independent way that might agree with the other two, or might be the complete opposite of them.
If not, why have multiple parts?
Keep in mind that if they piss off both Obama 's faction and Boehner's faction they get fired. Boehnor impeaches, with the Obamans in the Democratic party supporting removal they all go away. Hell, if they just piss off 218 Congressman, 51 Senators, and the Pres they get screwed. 218 Congressman pass a budget with 19 Supreme Court Justices, Obama appoints 10 guys who promise to un-do everything, the 51 Senators confirm. They probably couldn't arrange it all within a week, but within a month? Easy.
This is why they are very reluctant to do things like over-turn ObamaCare. As long as nobody is particularly pissed at them they can do almost anything, but the minute they piss people off they become powerless.
I thought it was obvious, but the majority of congress critters were unaware of how pervasive NSA spying is.
I thought it was obvious, but Congress has been deliberately violating the 4th amendment since they granted retroactive immunity to telcos for violating wiretap laws in 2008. A bill which Senator Obama voted for.
All three branches of government are conspiring against the Constitution. The rule of law is well and truly dead in America.
I know Americans love to over-use hyperbole, but you do realize that we had Jim Crow? If American democracy can survive that particular travesty it can survive the NSA knowing that you have no life.
Congress is working on what exactly? Amending the Constitution? That's what it would take to make any of this generalized warrantless surveillance legal.
Technically it's not warrantless. The FISA Court grants warrants all the time. You're free to disagree with those warrants, but they do exist,
The Courts may go along with the warrants, or they may not. I'd lean towards them going along with the warrants. FISA Court Judges are Federal Judges appointed by Roberts to the FISA Court. This means they almost certainly agree with Roberts on damn near everything, and Roberts leads a fiarly cohesive faction of 5 votes. The other faction includes multiple people appointed by Obama, and Obama's Administration are the ones who get these warrants renewed.
Bush vs. Gore skipped every level of the Federal Court system. In theory Bush's Appeal should have been heard by a trial court judge, subject to appeal to the Appellate Court, who'd probably insist on deciding the case twice (once as a subset of the panel, and once en banc), and then the Supremes get to intervene.
This was justified by the fact we (as in the entire fucking country) really needed to know which idiot (Bush or Gore) to swear in, and the decision couldn't be delayed. Much as I hated that decision, it was probably the right one. Can you imagine the level of BS that would have happened if Al Gore's dream hadn't been crushed until inauguration day? As it was a certain asshole, who happened to look a lot like me, insisted on going around decribing Bush as "not my President" for sever4al months after the decision.
OTOH this particular case was really easy for the Courts to delay, because it's not like Chaos Reigns Supreme simply because the Feds have to delete an extra six or year of illegal metadata.
This is post is why Snowden will never be accepted as a non-traitor by just about anyone who has ever worked in government service.
The simple fact is the Chinese spy on more people, with more invasive software, 100% of the time; then the worst allegations against the NSA. The Russians are Russian. Belarus still calls it the KGB. Numerous other countries have surveillance apparatuses much worse then the US, even if the worst nightmares of the EFF are true.
And yet Snowden's partisans are on the internet claiming spying is "mostly the US" because if Wikileaks is too chicken to accuse the Chinese of spying clearly the Chinese never do it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying PRISM etc. is right, but if you can't acknowledge that the Chinese are way better at oppressing people with electronic surveillance tactics then the US something is wrong with you.
I'll agree he shouldn't be shot, but that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
But your last sentence got my creative juices flowing. Why are you assuming EITHER the government or the whistle-blower actually has to be right?
Snowden seems to have meant well, but just look at this result of his leak: now everyone knows that Australia spied on Indonesia. That's probably isn't a surprise to anyone whose thought about it. After Ausrtralia has spies, and all countries within thousands of miles of it are a) strong allies of Australia (NZ, US/French bits of the South Pacific), b) tiny countries with no military capabilities to speak of (Tonga, Nauru, etc.), c) both (Tonga and Nauru are both quite close to the Aussies), or d) Indonesia. Why the fuck would they spy on anyone but Indonesia?
In other words this scoop's major result won't be protecting the Indonesians from Aussie skullduggery, it will be preventing the Aussies from using these specific tactics again. Given that their tactics are shared by all Five Eyes, and that the biggest target of Five Eyes spying is probably China; this particular leak hurts Snowden's agenda of increasing information freedom, because it's fucking China.
What it doesn't hurt are Greenwald's twin goals of a) humiliating the Fiver Eyes for daring to detain his boyfriend, and b) selling lots of freelance news stories in Australia.
Snowden was really naive if he thought Greenwald was on his side, and when you're playing on this level that's a very wrong thing to be.
What is the Great Firewall if not a mass surveillance tool? And a mass surveillance tool the government actually uses -- Weibo has a "Reincarnation Party" of users who got deleted for violating various government standards. Last time I checked precisely nobody had claimed they got screwed because some NSA algorithm decided they voted Romney. Plenty said they got screwed by IRS Algorithms, but the IRS is not the NSA.
I will agree lots of aspects of this are new tech, and that among the world's democracies the US has by far the most troubling program, but that doesn't mean it's particularly unusual.
I don't think the technology itself is bad, but I also believe anyone with a brain knows it's going to be misused, and that's probably what people are afraid of.
The questions with any tech are whether it's abuses outweigh the uses. On most technology there's a lot of consensus -- ie: the fact that you can hammer either a nail or your sister's head does not mean hammers should be banned -- but on some -- like nuclear anything -- it's a lot trickier.
In the long-term facial recognition will probably end up on the "hammer" side. Most people already carry a little doohickey that can pinpoint their location to within a few hundred feet, drive a vehicle that's registered in their name on public roads, are constantly on various surveillance cameras, etc.
The masses got worried about PRISM, etc. for about a month; but then they figured Obama had only been 97% truthful with his "If you like your plan, you can keep it," line. As long as Feinstein waves some bill that includes the word "warrant" under their noses they ain't gonna care that they're being facially recognized. What they're gonna care about is that their local cop says it will help him solve crimes.
If they can get the false positive rate down, and they have all the other data they could get (ie: a surveillance camera network similar to London's, access to GPS networks, cell phone tower data); they could solve that problem by correlating data. They know where you live from your voter registration, they know your cell phone was at that home tower heading to this other tower, therefore they can probably figure out whether you're the guy in the brown coat or not.
The trouble with that is that they don't have any of that stuff set up into linked databases yet even in the UK. Stateside the Feds don't have access to any of it. They can get warrants for one guy's GPS, or his cell, and they can also use private security cameras to monitor said guy, but they don't have a national database putting all that shit together for everyone yet.
What this is most likely to be useful for is a lot less ambitious, and a lot less scary:
1) If we know the Secrets of Face Recognition then we'll have a pretty good idea of what the Chinese are doing when they implement their new national tracking/video/everything database in 2024. The disadvantage, of course, is that it's likely the Chinese will have stolen these secrets from us.
2) It will make investigating crimes with video evidence a lot easier. Even if the false-positive rate is too high for surveilling everyone cheaply, that doesn't mean it's too expensive to find known criminals. Let's say the tech allows you to dump 15 hours of surveillance tapes into a computer, and rule out 14 of those hours. Then your video analysts have a lot less work to do even if they have no clue whether the actual criminal is on the tape.
3) It will make locating other people easier. If you have a terrorist on your list, and your network gets 50-300 reports of him from your cameras in Detroit, and then it shoots to 500 a day for a, then you should probably have a video analyst or three analyze the Detroit video.
Note that while 2-3 will scare some people, most Americans aren't worried about the privacy of people the US government thinks are a) terrorists, or b) might be criminals.
The reason I accuse people of not reading or understanding my posts is because they don't. They have a script for how these debates go in their heads. Most of the time the script is accurate. But it's not for the posts I make, because I actually debate. That means I have changed my position when it is proven wrong, which means that you will have to actually think to prove my current position wrong.
As for your points, they didn't exist. Your argument was a paraphrase so far off that it was a lie, and supremely unfunny snark.
You expressed some distrust of the government, especially the high levels (like the Feds). That's not totally unjustified. It's certainly the main point of bad British sci-fi like 1984 and Clockwork Orange. However Slashdot is an American site. You should know that almost all actual oppression that America does to it's citizens is actually carried out by lower levels. In the most extreme cases it's actually individual assholes who do it. The government's involvement is restricted to carting away the corpses and telling the survivors, "that was stupid of you, you know we can't convince a Jury that giving a bunch of Indians blankets laced with smallpox is a crime, but you took the blankets anyway; clearly you are barbarians who did not deserve to live anyway."
So let's say you win this issue. Completely. 100%. Federal records can only be used in court cases after a ridiculously rigorous warrant process. Then let's say an asshole wins the White House. What happens?
He's got tons of asshole friends who don't have to prove anything to a Judge. They're dues-paying members of the Asshole Party, not public officials. They've got asshole allies in most state governments (even after a disastrous 2010 election Obama's Democrats controlled 13 states). The ridiculously complicated warrant process will be blamed by the Feds for their failure to catch any number of criminals. Which means our asshole President doesn't need any real powers top crush his opposition. He doesn't even need a super-secret, secure database of everything everyone does. He's got a political party. It has people in every City, suburb, small town, etc. It knows who the Asshole Party members are. It knows who isn't. It knows you aren't, and that you threatened to kill the Asshole Party volunteer who knocked on your door. The Party has a perfect excuse to start it's own militia (the Feds can't protect us due to that new warrant process), a bunch of willing asshole volunteers, states that will not prosecute, Feds who are under orders not to prosecute, etc.
And, unlike super-good database technology tracking everyone leading to Bad Things, this shit has actually happened. It was slightly different the Asshole Party of 1876 got the Anti-Assholes to agree to look the other way as they imposed Jim Crow on an unwilling South (at the time both South Carolina and Mississippi were majority black, and most other southern states were 40% black, so it's unlikely a fair referendum would have resulted in Jim Crow).
If I was talking about any individual case I would have linked directly to it. I'm talking about the principle under international law by which governments are not legally responsible in the same way everyone else is. They sovereigns so they are immune. This means that (by definition) their officials are immune. I'm sure that if you look at any tree in the forest you can prove it's not really a tree as defined by you, but that doesn't prove there ain't a forest.
Estonia convicted one of it's citizens of crimes against humanity committed while he was a KGB Agent. "Crimes Against Humanity" exist specifically because if they didn't nobody would have jurisdiction to prosecute them, which means the fact you're bringing one of them up proves that (in general) government officials can't be prosecuted for their actions as long as said actions follow the procedures set forth in their laws. Moreover the "citizen" thing is incredibly important here, because NSA and GHCQ snoops are citizens of the US and UK, not OPEC countries.
To actually win this argument you're gonna need an example of a mid-level (ie: felony, but not a Crime Against Humanity-level felony) crime, committed by a citizen of one country, working for his government, while acting under orders his lawful superiors said were lawful, that resulted in charges in another country. You've got a single example, which only counts if you assume that Extraordinary Rendition was "sporadic," rather then US government policy, because if it was US Government policy then it's a Crime Against Humanity and all this becomes irrelevant.
You think the exact same criminal code applies to you and a government employee following policy. This is ridiculous BS, which you know because several examples of governmental employees committing crimes and not being charged with anything have been brought up. The Constitutional basis for this has been brought up. Your response has been to say jack-squat.
So here's my last shot. Undercover police commit crimes all the time. They sell drugs to establish credibility. They buy drugs so they can nail a dealer for dealing. They offer to sell sex.. They never get charged with those crimes unless they haven't done the paperwork properly, and gotten permission from their bosses. These NSA guys? Did the paperwork. Same for GHCQ.
This applies the world over, in every country, and to international law. The only exceptions are gross human rights violations (ie: actually killing people, all the NSA has been accused of so-far is compiling a database that would be really useful if it had a death squad division). Having your work computer hacked doesn't count.
You really not helping your case by ignoring all the actual facts I mentioned. I never said the government wouldn't have more computational ability or resources then a campaign. I didn't even imply that. I said I'd worked with this kind of data on camapigns, and I'd learned it's not the kind of data that is trivial to turn into computer algorithms.
As for the "bad guys," that's a phrase that kinda implies you aren't actually reading my case. I didn't say the guys opposing our Stasified-British Government were bad guys. If the British state turns into a Stasi nightmare then those opposing it would be (by definition) good guys. In this case the good guys don't have to be psychic. They just have to be cautious. Everybody starts out using burner phones. Eventually people get sloppy, and then you find out roughly the number of calls that need to be made on a burner phone before the StasiBritState figures you out. Why? Because you know Bill made lots of calls and he's dead, but Amy isn't and she only makes five. This is how every resistance movement, ever, in the history of mankind, has operated. If the Stasi are doing this shit on the cheap and not aggressively changing their algorithms they will be figured out within six months.
Hell, you're so inept you agreed with my point. I'm saying that just HAVING the data is not enough to create a Stasi nightmare. They must also spend lots of money/manhours/etc. analyzing said data. You brought up huge budgets. There are campaigns with multi-Billion budgets, mostly spent in the last few months, for $10 Billion+ on an annuallized basis. Since you contrast this with government budgets you just agreed that my $10 Billion or so extra funding in the UK budget for GHCQ would be the minimum they would need to make this work.
You might actually have to think in your next post, rather then snarking, or you'll accidentally agree with me again.
Read a bit more carefully/ I didn't say one guy had been convicted, I said one crime had resulted in a conviction. And this was in Italy, which doesn't have a great criminal justice system. These are the people who once convicted Guy Stair Sainty of libel for pointing out that a guy with no connection to Portugal at all could not be King or Portugal; apparently mostly because said guy's lawyers convinced the Judge to send all the correspondence to a very old address so Sainty didn;t even know he was on trial.
Hyperpower or not is irrelevant. Russia has never been a hyper-power, Russia's KGB has done things worse then our CIA, and nobody went back and convicted those guys. The French behave worse then us in Africa on a fairly routine basis, and nobody has convicted those guys. Even as a hyper-power, countries like Cuba and Venezuela have no real fear of offending us, are clearly the target of CIA operations, and never have criminal trials.
Sovereign immunity is a very real thing. It means nobody can ever oppose a government without permission of that government. For example, to sue the US Government for violation of your Constitutional rights in US Court you have to get the government's permission. The government's response to your lawsuit constitutes permission. If they simply refuse to respond to the lawsuit your suit dies, because as sovereigns "fuck you" is a perfectly valid response to any and all complaints.
If one country get pissed a government agent of another country they don't get to arrest the agent. They get to make a big diplomatic stink.
1) isn't a crime. Seriously, there's no statute that says a government employee who breaks the Constitution goes to jail. Plenty that say he gets fired, but none that say he gets tried in a Court of Law.
2) is the default mode of operation in any large organization.
Act of War is a fairly specific charge. It's very well-defined. To my knowledge hacking isn't on the list unless said hacking does major damage to physical things. So hacking to get info would be fine, but hacking to shut down the Iranian nuclear program would be sketchy.
That said, I never said Italy or France couldn't make a big diplomatic fuss about the NSA/GHCQ/etc. They are sovereign states and they have the right to make a diplomatic fuss about anything they want. Since war is generally the logical extension of diplomacy that includes interpreting hacking as an Act of War.
What that does not do, however, is make it possible for anyone to arrest and charge an NSA agent for hacking.
Default deny or default grant is irrelevant. I specifically mentioned their powers were restricted solely by what their constitutions and other procedures required. If the globe's Constitutions are default deny, then the statement is true. Which means that as long as the hackers file the proper paperwork with their superiors they aren't criminally liable.
Moreover you're simply wrong on the facts. Many states have no enumerated powers. Canada's Constitution, for example, gives the Federal government supreme powers with two exceptions. Certain powers (16 of them, IIRC) are granted the provinces, and the "Charter of Rights and Freedoms" denies the government certain powers. In other words it's a default grant state. Most British colonies, France, former French colonies, etc. are all in "Default Grant" mode. The US is the unusual country here.
Hell, the UK Parliament could declare Cameron dictator, sell all his political opponents on the white slave markets of Morocco, and depose the Queen with a single act supported by 50% of the lower House plus one guy. They'd have to pass the bill over Lords' objections, but 50% of the House of Commons and one guy can do that shit. They won't do that, and if the Queen maneuvered right (and got some legal breaks) she could probably get Cameron officially fired and new elections scheduled before she herself got fired, but in the UK freedom is basically what you have until you piss off Parliament.
I said as long as the government follows it's procedures it is (by definition) not breaking the law. There's all kinds of paperwork required before the CIA can kill someone. As for the Fourth Amendment, it only governs the relationship between Americans and our government.
You can have your opinion all you want. But the simple fact is that Sovereign Immunity exists, and that in a career that has included enabling at least one instance of seven-figure mass murder, CIA agents have only been convicted of one crime. None of them will ever serve jail time for it.
The problem with using private contractors in this is that private contractors are fucking expensive. State-side they don't get government benefits, so they demand a higher salary then government drones. Their HR and other administrative stuff has to be paid for out of the money the government is spending on them.
So if you need 100k contractors to do data analysis on your Evil Spy Program you're gonna be spending $10-$20 Billion a year. You've also got 100k potential snitches.
If it's actually closer to the 300k number I mentioned, and they get paid Booz-Allen prices, we're talking a $50 Billion program.
I'm not saying we shouldn't stop the NSA, but I am saying that al this comparison to the Stasi is a bit overblown.
I'm not saying that the sides actually managed to agree, or that people weren't arguing the point. What I'm saying is that ordinary people really couldn't give two shits about it. The late 90s boom ended it, and it didn't really come to the fore until Boehnor won the Speakership in 2010. Deficits vs. taxes was one of those things pinheads in DC argue about, not something that directly affected their lives.
That's what happens in most of NATO to most issues. The Head of Government proposes something, it goes to the Legislature, there's a debate people pay attention to, and there's a vote in the Legislature. 99% of the time the government wins and everyone outside the capital goes back to ignoring the debate. 1% of the time the government loses, and the debate becomes a central issue in an election campaign that lasts a couple months.
If European parties had the exact same debate every day for four years they'd probably talk about their basic factual disagreements a lot more. At some point both sides run out of other arguments, so your choices are a) shut up and b) question the other guy's facts.
Have you ever actually dealt with that kind of data? I mean really dealt with it?
I have on political campaigns. Computers really cut down on the number of grunt-secretary-types you need, and if somebody's doing something predictable they can even do low-level analyst work. And you don't need to do that much analyses -- you're only really trying to figure out one thing, after all. And generally the data points (aka: people) you're talking aren't trying to thwart you. Either they love you in which case they want to make your database buetific, or they hate you and your database and just want you to go away. In the latter case they aree cooperating with you even if they tell "Fuck off, I believe in the Second Amendment and you are a fucking huge target," because the data the database needs on that dude is that he ain't voting Democratic.
But if I was a cop Out to Do Evil, and I was investigating people Out to Stop Me, it would be several orders of magnitude harder. The algorithm is predictable. The people I'm doing evil to aren't fucking morons. If they can confuse the prograkm's ties to video sensors siimply by changing hats between cameras they will start to do that shit. The only way I'll find out that is what they are, in fact, doing is by having an analyst go over all my video data. If I start taking down everyone whose made three calls to Yemen from the same phone number, people will start using burner phones for precisely two calls to Yemen, then exchanging them for a new number. If I don't have analysts going over the data from cell phone stares I won't know that.
And that assumes the technology actually works. Several of the databases I described would be too big for SQL. So you'd probably need a program that could a database in some fairly unique format, take the data from that and use it in a search query for a database of another format...
In theory it's all doable, but it's not trivial. The video-recognition database in particular doesn't seem to be possible with current computer technology, especially in fucking rainy Britain where it's always fucking raining, which means the face-recognition tech has to be able to tell like 5,000 different 120 lb Girls in yellow raincoats apart. From every angle, in every light condition, in the rain, etc. It would be pretty goddamn impressive if they created a product that could tell ethnicity by computer algorithm in all these weather conditions (ie: it can tell the Jamaican Londoner from the Pakistani from actual ethnic English people).
This is the kind of project that takes a big institution like the government 30,000 man-years. And even then there's only a 50-50 shot it works.
You do realize that the UK already has an obscene amount of data on it's people?
Londoners in particular, can be tracked individually by the police if they so choose. I don't think they even need a warrant. In theory they could decide they wanted to find out what some random hot chick does every day, and they'd be able to follow her everywhere she went for as long as she was in London.As long as she's in public she's on one of their cameras. For most people (ie: the ones who don't discuss their illegal activities by text message or email) that's a lot more threatening then anything that either GHCQ or the NSA could do on the internet. If you add in some stuff on their use of cell phone towers you get some things that are as threatening in theory, but in practice they won't become that big a deal. And it's not a big deal for pretty much the same reason the cameras aren't a big deal:
Analyzing that much data takes a lot of analysts. The Stasi employed one half of one percent of East Germany's population. To get that many analysts in the UK you'd need 300,000 of them. You only have 200k in your active duty military (altho with reserves that goes to 380k). With computers you could probably automate a some stuff, but as databases get more complex you a) need more database gurus to make sure the data/hardware/etc. all stays working, and b) need to have a lot of actual people looking at your results who are smart enough to notice garbage. You're still gonna need a literal British Army (~130k) of analysts. You only have 500k or so people employed in the Civil Service.
Yeah if you fuck up and break the law, you're truly fucked. They have everything. If you look like you broke the law the data could be great or (in rarer cases) it could really suck. There's a lot of it, so if you're innocent something probably shows you're innocent. Even if the cops hate you your barrister should get access to the data, and if he doesn't suck you will probably get off. If your barrister sucks, and the cops/prosecutors charge you anyway the data will make you look very guilty.
Sending malware counts as a crime, not legal surveillance.
If the victims knew the identities of the perpetrators they would be eligible for extradition under the standing treaties.
This has been repeated several times, but nobody has been able to name the treaty. In fact the last time I asked somebody brought up a non-governmental hacker.
This is a world of governments. What they do is legal, by definition, unless they have specific Constitutional or statutory bars on that particular behavior. Neither the US nor the UK has ever signed a treaty, or passed a law, that makes hacking in service of the government illegal.
Let me put it to you this way: If US officials can't get extradited to Venezuela for participating in that minor coup attempt Venezuela had a decade pr so back, why could they be extradited for hacking?
It's not like a) the Venezuela coup worked so the new government loved the coupsters, or b) the Venezuelan government would have refrained from charging the CIA officers they were accusing if they thought anyone (literally anyone) would take it seriously.
You apparently totally missed my point. The OP was not about tax-financed jobs, he was talking about debt-financed jobs. And if you cut government debt by firing government employees you don't reduce anybody's current tax burden, the only immediate effects on the economy is that demand for employment goes down and the supply of unemployed people goes up. In other words everybody gets a pay cut.
Bonds don't get paid off for decades, so in the long-term you could be right. OTOH after several decades of full employment I'd expect economic growth to be quite robust. If it it's above the deficit you never have to actually raise taxes to pay off the debt. If you fire a bunch of people to try to balance the budget in the short-term you end up in the Greece situation of decades of pure misery. If you try a couple years of really intense deficit spending, OTOH, only putting on the breaks when inflation gets high, you might get what you actually want without having to pay the price by jacking up the tax rate.
As for the "overhead" snark, that really depends on the sector. No sanely-run state lets the defense sector take care of itself. States that have extreme control over healthcare tend to have much lower administrative costs, because instead of having dozens of doctors offices negotiate prices with dozens of insurance companies; which means all sides are paying out the ass for negotiators and again paying out the ass for a guy who knows that when Dr. Grbic does a hysterectomy he gets $100, but Dr. Jones crack negotiating team got $150. From both sides, because Dr. Grbic's office has to know to bill the insurers different amounts.
One asshole in the provincial capital who decrees "Every one of you motherfuckers gets precisely $94.27 per historectomy, you will address the bills to 1 Fuckyou Ct, Toronto, On-fucking-tario, and if you fuck with the paperwork I'm calling the goddamn provincial police" saves a lot of overhead. Especially since the Toronto asshole probably only makes low six-figures ($150k is very high in the public sector, the Ontario equivalent of a Governor barely breaks $200k), whereas private-sector negotiating teams tend to involve MBAs who think $200k is entry-level and insist they need at least one entry-level assistant. There's a reason both US Medicare and Canadian Medicare (that's what they call their healthcare system, and they actually named it first), have lower administrative costs then the private sector.
It gets even more efficient when you eliminate the individual Doctor's office as a business. Since there's no billing to be done, and the fuck-you guy can now tell Doctors they only get a base salary, which is in-line with other government base salaries; systems like the VA tend to have very low costs. The VA actually also has the top user satisfaction rating, despite the fact it cares for a fairly sick population.
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That sound like a problem to me. That means they are not independent, where I would think that they should not look at anybody else, but instead follow their own independent way that might agree with the other two, or might be the complete opposite of them.
If not, why have multiple parts?
Keep in mind that if they piss off both Obama 's faction and Boehner's faction they get fired. Boehnor impeaches, with the Obamans in the Democratic party supporting removal they all go away. Hell, if they just piss off 218 Congressman, 51 Senators, and the Pres they get screwed. 218 Congressman pass a budget with 19 Supreme Court Justices, Obama appoints 10 guys who promise to un-do everything, the 51 Senators confirm. They probably couldn't arrange it all within a week, but within a month? Easy.
This is why they are very reluctant to do things like over-turn ObamaCare. As long as nobody is particularly pissed at them they can do almost anything, but the minute they piss people off they become powerless.
I thought it was obvious, but the majority of congress critters were unaware of how pervasive NSA spying is.
I thought it was obvious, but Congress has been deliberately violating the 4th amendment since they granted retroactive immunity to telcos for violating wiretap laws in 2008. A bill which Senator Obama voted for.
All three branches of government are conspiring against the Constitution. The rule of law is well and truly dead in America.
I know Americans love to over-use hyperbole, but you do realize that we had Jim Crow? If American democracy can survive that particular travesty it can survive the NSA knowing that you have no life.
Congress is working on what exactly? Amending the Constitution? That's what it would take to make any of this generalized warrantless surveillance legal.
Technically it's not warrantless. The FISA Court grants warrants all the time. You're free to disagree with those warrants, but they do exist,
The Courts may go along with the warrants, or they may not. I'd lean towards them going along with the warrants. FISA Court Judges are Federal Judges appointed by Roberts to the FISA Court. This means they almost certainly agree with Roberts on damn near everything, and Roberts leads a fiarly cohesive faction of 5 votes. The other faction includes multiple people appointed by Obama, and Obama's Administration are the ones who get these warrants renewed.
Bush vs. Gore skipped every level of the Federal Court system. In theory Bush's Appeal should have been heard by a trial court judge, subject to appeal to the Appellate Court, who'd probably insist on deciding the case twice (once as a subset of the panel, and once en banc), and then the Supremes get to intervene.
This was justified by the fact we (as in the entire fucking country) really needed to know which idiot (Bush or Gore) to swear in, and the decision couldn't be delayed. Much as I hated that decision, it was probably the right one. Can you imagine the level of BS that would have happened if Al Gore's dream hadn't been crushed until inauguration day? As it was a certain asshole, who happened to look a lot like me, insisted on going around decribing Bush as "not my President" for sever4al months after the decision.
OTOH this particular case was really easy for the Courts to delay, because it's not like Chaos Reigns Supreme simply because the Feds have to delete an extra six or year of illegal metadata.
This is post is why Snowden will never be accepted as a non-traitor by just about anyone who has ever worked in government service.
The simple fact is the Chinese spy on more people, with more invasive software, 100% of the time; then the worst allegations against the NSA. The Russians are Russian. Belarus still calls it the KGB. Numerous other countries have surveillance apparatuses much worse then the US, even if the worst nightmares of the EFF are true.
And yet Snowden's partisans are on the internet claiming spying is "mostly the US" because if Wikileaks is too chicken to accuse the Chinese of spying clearly the Chinese never do it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying PRISM etc. is right, but if you can't acknowledge that the Chinese are way better at oppressing people with electronic surveillance tactics then the US something is wrong with you.
I'll agree he shouldn't be shot, but that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
But your last sentence got my creative juices flowing. Why are you assuming EITHER the government or the whistle-blower actually has to be right?
Snowden seems to have meant well, but just look at this result of his leak: now everyone knows that Australia spied on Indonesia. That's probably isn't a surprise to anyone whose thought about it. After Ausrtralia has spies, and all countries within thousands of miles of it are a) strong allies of Australia (NZ, US/French bits of the South Pacific), b) tiny countries with no military capabilities to speak of (Tonga, Nauru, etc.), c) both (Tonga and Nauru are both quite close to the Aussies), or d) Indonesia. Why the fuck would they spy on anyone but Indonesia?
In other words this scoop's major result won't be protecting the Indonesians from Aussie skullduggery, it will be preventing the Aussies from using these specific tactics again. Given that their tactics are shared by all Five Eyes, and that the biggest target of Five Eyes spying is probably China; this particular leak hurts Snowden's agenda of increasing information freedom, because it's fucking China.
What it doesn't hurt are Greenwald's twin goals of a) humiliating the Fiver Eyes for daring to detain his boyfriend, and b) selling lots of freelance news stories in Australia.
Snowden was really naive if he thought Greenwald was on his side, and when you're playing on this level that's a very wrong thing to be.
What is the Great Firewall if not a mass surveillance tool? And a mass surveillance tool the government actually uses -- Weibo has a "Reincarnation Party" of users who got deleted for violating various government standards. Last time I checked precisely nobody had claimed they got screwed because some NSA algorithm decided they voted Romney. Plenty said they got screwed by IRS Algorithms, but the IRS is not the NSA.
I will agree lots of aspects of this are new tech, and that among the world's democracies the US has by far the most troubling program, but that doesn't mean it's particularly unusual.
Is this a bad thing?
I don't think the technology itself is bad, but I also believe anyone with a brain knows it's going to be misused, and that's probably what people are afraid of.
The questions with any tech are whether it's abuses outweigh the uses. On most technology there's a lot of consensus -- ie: the fact that you can hammer either a nail or your sister's head does not mean hammers should be banned -- but on some -- like nuclear anything -- it's a lot trickier.
In the long-term facial recognition will probably end up on the "hammer" side. Most people already carry a little doohickey that can pinpoint their location to within a few hundred feet, drive a vehicle that's registered in their name on public roads, are constantly on various surveillance cameras, etc.
The masses got worried about PRISM, etc. for about a month; but then they figured Obama had only been 97% truthful with his "If you like your plan, you can keep it," line. As long as Feinstein waves some bill that includes the word "warrant" under their noses they ain't gonna care that they're being facially recognized. What they're gonna care about is that their local cop says it will help him solve crimes.
For similar reasons as described in https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/criminal_intent.html it will not be usefull.
If they can get the false positive rate down, and they have all the other data they could get (ie: a surveillance camera network similar to London's, access to GPS networks, cell phone tower data); they could solve that problem by correlating data. They know where you live from your voter registration, they know your cell phone was at that home tower heading to this other tower, therefore they can probably figure out whether you're the guy in the brown coat or not.
The trouble with that is that they don't have any of that stuff set up into linked databases yet even in the UK. Stateside the Feds don't have access to any of it. They can get warrants for one guy's GPS, or his cell, and they can also use private security cameras to monitor said guy, but they don't have a national database putting all that shit together for everyone yet.
What this is most likely to be useful for is a lot less ambitious, and a lot less scary:
1) If we know the Secrets of Face Recognition then we'll have a pretty good idea of what the Chinese are doing when they implement their new national tracking/video/everything database in 2024. The disadvantage, of course, is that it's likely the Chinese will have stolen these secrets from us.
2) It will make investigating crimes with video evidence a lot easier. Even if the false-positive rate is too high for surveilling everyone cheaply, that doesn't mean it's too expensive to find known criminals. Let's say the tech allows you to dump 15 hours of surveillance tapes into a computer, and rule out 14 of those hours. Then your video analysts have a lot less work to do even if they have no clue whether the actual criminal is on the tape.
3) It will make locating other people easier. If you have a terrorist on your list, and your network gets 50-300 reports of him from your cameras in Detroit, and then it shoots to 500 a day for a, then you should probably have a video analyst or three analyze the Detroit video.
Note that while 2-3 will scare some people, most Americans aren't worried about the privacy of people the US government thinks are a) terrorists, or b) might be criminals.
The reason I accuse people of not reading or understanding my posts is because they don't. They have a script for how these debates go in their heads. Most of the time the script is accurate. But it's not for the posts I make, because I actually debate. That means I have changed my position when it is proven wrong, which means that you will have to actually think to prove my current position wrong.
As for your points, they didn't exist. Your argument was a paraphrase so far off that it was a lie, and supremely unfunny snark.
You expressed some distrust of the government, especially the high levels (like the Feds). That's not totally unjustified. It's certainly the main point of bad British sci-fi like 1984 and Clockwork Orange. However Slashdot is an American site. You should know that almost all actual oppression that America does to it's citizens is actually carried out by lower levels. In the most extreme cases it's actually individual assholes who do it. The government's involvement is restricted to carting away the corpses and telling the survivors, "that was stupid of you, you know we can't convince a Jury that giving a bunch of Indians blankets laced with smallpox is a crime, but you took the blankets anyway; clearly you are barbarians who did not deserve to live anyway."
So let's say you win this issue. Completely. 100%. Federal records can only be used in court cases after a ridiculously rigorous warrant process. Then let's say an asshole wins the White House. What happens?
He's got tons of asshole friends who don't have to prove anything to a Judge. They're dues-paying members of the Asshole Party, not public officials. They've got asshole allies in most state governments (even after a disastrous 2010 election Obama's Democrats controlled 13 states). The ridiculously complicated warrant process will be blamed by the Feds for their failure to catch any number of criminals. Which means our asshole President doesn't need any real powers top crush his opposition. He doesn't even need a super-secret, secure database of everything everyone does. He's got a political party. It has people in every City, suburb, small town, etc. It knows who the Asshole Party members are. It knows who isn't. It knows you aren't, and that you threatened to kill the Asshole Party volunteer who knocked on your door. The Party has a perfect excuse to start it's own militia (the Feds can't protect us due to that new warrant process), a bunch of willing asshole volunteers, states that will not prosecute, Feds who are under orders not to prosecute, etc.
And, unlike super-good database technology tracking everyone leading to Bad Things, this shit has actually happened. It was slightly different the Asshole Party of 1876 got the Anti-Assholes to agree to look the other way as they imposed Jim Crow on an unwilling South (at the time both South Carolina and Mississippi were majority black, and most other southern states were 40% black, so it's unlikely a fair referendum would have resulted in Jim Crow).
If I was talking about any individual case I would have linked directly to it. I'm talking about the principle under international law by which governments are not legally responsible in the same way everyone else is. They sovereigns so they are immune. This means that (by definition) their officials are immune. I'm sure that if you look at any tree in the forest you can prove it's not really a tree as defined by you, but that doesn't prove there ain't a forest.
Estonia convicted one of it's citizens of crimes against humanity committed while he was a KGB Agent. "Crimes Against Humanity" exist specifically because if they didn't nobody would have jurisdiction to prosecute them, which means the fact you're bringing one of them up proves that (in general) government officials can't be prosecuted for their actions as long as said actions follow the procedures set forth in their laws. Moreover the "citizen" thing is incredibly important here, because NSA and GHCQ snoops are citizens of the US and UK, not OPEC countries.
To actually win this argument you're gonna need an example of a mid-level (ie: felony, but not a Crime Against Humanity-level felony) crime, committed by a citizen of one country, working for his government, while acting under orders his lawful superiors said were lawful, that resulted in charges in another country. You've got a single example, which only counts if you assume that Extraordinary Rendition was "sporadic," rather then US government policy, because if it was US Government policy then it's a Crime Against Humanity and all this becomes irrelevant.
And again you didn't read anything I wrote.
You think the exact same criminal code applies to you and a government employee following policy. This is ridiculous BS, which you know because several examples of governmental employees committing crimes and not being charged with anything have been brought up. The Constitutional basis for this has been brought up. Your response has been to say jack-squat.
So here's my last shot. Undercover police commit crimes all the time. They sell drugs to establish credibility. They buy drugs so they can nail a dealer for dealing. They offer to sell sex.. They never get charged with those crimes unless they haven't done the paperwork properly, and gotten permission from their bosses. These NSA guys? Did the paperwork. Same for GHCQ.
This applies the world over, in every country, and to international law. The only exceptions are gross human rights violations (ie: actually killing people, all the NSA has been accused of so-far is compiling a database that would be really useful if it had a death squad division). Having your work computer hacked doesn't count.
You really not helping your case by ignoring all the actual facts I mentioned. I never said the government wouldn't have more computational ability or resources then a campaign. I didn't even imply that. I said I'd worked with this kind of data on camapigns, and I'd learned it's not the kind of data that is trivial to turn into computer algorithms.
As for the "bad guys," that's a phrase that kinda implies you aren't actually reading my case. I didn't say the guys opposing our Stasified-British Government were bad guys. If the British state turns into a Stasi nightmare then those opposing it would be (by definition) good guys. In this case the good guys don't have to be psychic. They just have to be cautious. Everybody starts out using burner phones. Eventually people get sloppy, and then you find out roughly the number of calls that need to be made on a burner phone before the StasiBritState figures you out. Why? Because you know Bill made lots of calls and he's dead, but Amy isn't and she only makes five. This is how every resistance movement, ever, in the history of mankind, has operated. If the Stasi are doing this shit on the cheap and not aggressively changing their algorithms they will be figured out within six months.
Hell, you're so inept you agreed with my point. I'm saying that just HAVING the data is not enough to create a Stasi nightmare. They must also spend lots of money/manhours/etc. analyzing said data. You brought up huge budgets. There are campaigns with multi-Billion budgets, mostly spent in the last few months, for $10 Billion+ on an annuallized basis. Since you contrast this with government budgets you just agreed that my $10 Billion or so extra funding in the UK budget for GHCQ would be the minimum they would need to make this work.
You might actually have to think in your next post, rather then snarking, or you'll accidentally agree with me again.
Read a bit more carefully/ I didn't say one guy had been convicted, I said one crime had resulted in a conviction. And this was in Italy, which doesn't have a great criminal justice system. These are the people who once convicted Guy Stair Sainty of libel for pointing out that a guy with no connection to Portugal at all could not be King or Portugal; apparently mostly because said guy's lawyers convinced the Judge to send all the correspondence to a very old address so Sainty didn;t even know he was on trial.
Hyperpower or not is irrelevant. Russia has never been a hyper-power, Russia's KGB has done things worse then our CIA, and nobody went back and convicted those guys. The French behave worse then us in Africa on a fairly routine basis, and nobody has convicted those guys. Even as a hyper-power, countries like Cuba and Venezuela have no real fear of offending us, are clearly the target of CIA operations, and never have criminal trials.
Sovereign immunity is a very real thing. It means nobody can ever oppose a government without permission of that government. For example, to sue the US Government for violation of your Constitutional rights in US Court you have to get the government's permission. The government's response to your lawsuit constitutes permission. If they simply refuse to respond to the lawsuit your suit dies, because as sovereigns "fuck you" is a perfectly valid response to any and all complaints.
If one country get pissed a government agent of another country they don't get to arrest the agent. They get to make a big diplomatic stink.
1) isn't a crime. Seriously, there's no statute that says a government employee who breaks the Constitution goes to jail. Plenty that say he gets fired, but none that say he gets tried in a Court of Law.
2) is the default mode of operation in any large organization.
Act of War is a fairly specific charge. It's very well-defined. To my knowledge hacking isn't on the list unless said hacking does major damage to physical things. So hacking to get info would be fine, but hacking to shut down the Iranian nuclear program would be sketchy.
That said, I never said Italy or France couldn't make a big diplomatic fuss about the NSA/GHCQ/etc. They are sovereign states and they have the right to make a diplomatic fuss about anything they want. Since war is generally the logical extension of diplomacy that includes interpreting hacking as an Act of War.
What that does not do, however, is make it possible for anyone to arrest and charge an NSA agent for hacking.
Default deny or default grant is irrelevant. I specifically mentioned their powers were restricted solely by what their constitutions and other procedures required. If the globe's Constitutions are default deny, then the statement is true. Which means that as long as the hackers file the proper paperwork with their superiors they aren't criminally liable.
Moreover you're simply wrong on the facts. Many states have no enumerated powers. Canada's Constitution, for example, gives the Federal government supreme powers with two exceptions. Certain powers (16 of them, IIRC) are granted the provinces, and the "Charter of Rights and Freedoms" denies the government certain powers. In other words it's a default grant state. Most British colonies, France, former French colonies, etc. are all in "Default Grant" mode. The US is the unusual country here.
Hell, the UK Parliament could declare Cameron dictator, sell all his political opponents on the white slave markets of Morocco, and depose the Queen with a single act supported by 50% of the lower House plus one guy. They'd have to pass the bill over Lords' objections, but 50% of the House of Commons and one guy can do that shit. They won't do that, and if the Queen maneuvered right (and got some legal breaks) she could probably get Cameron officially fired and new elections scheduled before she herself got fired, but in the UK freedom is basically what you have until you piss off Parliament.
Re-read my statement.
I said as long as the government follows it's procedures it is (by definition) not breaking the law. There's all kinds of paperwork required before the CIA can kill someone. As for the Fourth Amendment, it only governs the relationship between Americans and our government.
You can have your opinion all you want. But the simple fact is that Sovereign Immunity exists, and that in a career that has included enabling at least one instance of seven-figure mass murder, CIA agents have only been convicted of one crime. None of them will ever serve jail time for it.
The problem with using private contractors in this is that private contractors are fucking expensive. State-side they don't get government benefits, so they demand a higher salary then government drones. Their HR and other administrative stuff has to be paid for out of the money the government is spending on them.
So if you need 100k contractors to do data analysis on your Evil Spy Program you're gonna be spending $10-$20 Billion a year. You've also got 100k potential snitches.
If it's actually closer to the 300k number I mentioned, and they get paid Booz-Allen prices, we're talking a $50 Billion program.
I'm not saying we shouldn't stop the NSA, but I am saying that al this comparison to the Stasi is a bit overblown.
I'm not saying that the sides actually managed to agree, or that people weren't arguing the point. What I'm saying is that ordinary people really couldn't give two shits about it. The late 90s boom ended it, and it didn't really come to the fore until Boehnor won the Speakership in 2010. Deficits vs. taxes was one of those things pinheads in DC argue about, not something that directly affected their lives.
That's what happens in most of NATO to most issues. The Head of Government proposes something, it goes to the Legislature, there's a debate people pay attention to, and there's a vote in the Legislature. 99% of the time the government wins and everyone outside the capital goes back to ignoring the debate. 1% of the time the government loses, and the debate becomes a central issue in an election campaign that lasts a couple months.
If European parties had the exact same debate every day for four years they'd probably talk about their basic factual disagreements a lot more. At some point both sides run out of other arguments, so your choices are a) shut up and b) question the other guy's facts.
Have you ever actually dealt with that kind of data? I mean really dealt with it?
I have on political campaigns. Computers really cut down on the number of grunt-secretary-types you need, and if somebody's doing something predictable they can even do low-level analyst work. And you don't need to do that much analyses -- you're only really trying to figure out one thing, after all. And generally the data points (aka: people) you're talking aren't trying to thwart you. Either they love you in which case they want to make your database buetific, or they hate you and your database and just want you to go away. In the latter case they aree cooperating with you even if they tell "Fuck off, I believe in the Second Amendment and you are a fucking huge target," because the data the database needs on that dude is that he ain't voting Democratic.
But if I was a cop Out to Do Evil, and I was investigating people Out to Stop Me, it would be several orders of magnitude harder. The algorithm is predictable. The people I'm doing evil to aren't fucking morons. If they can confuse the prograkm's ties to video sensors siimply by changing hats between cameras they will start to do that shit. The only way I'll find out that is what they are, in fact, doing is by having an analyst go over all my video data. If I start taking down everyone whose made three calls to Yemen from the same phone number, people will start using burner phones for precisely two calls to Yemen, then exchanging them for a new number. If I don't have analysts going over the data from cell phone stares I won't know that.
And that assumes the technology actually works. Several of the databases I described would be too big for SQL. So you'd probably need a program that could a database in some fairly unique format, take the data from that and use it in a search query for a database of another format...
In theory it's all doable, but it's not trivial. The video-recognition database in particular doesn't seem to be possible with current computer technology, especially in fucking rainy Britain where it's always fucking raining, which means the face-recognition tech has to be able to tell like 5,000 different 120 lb Girls in yellow raincoats apart. From every angle, in every light condition, in the rain, etc. It would be pretty goddamn impressive if they created a product that could tell ethnicity by computer algorithm in all these weather conditions (ie: it can tell the Jamaican Londoner from the Pakistani from actual ethnic English people).
This is the kind of project that takes a big institution like the government 30,000 man-years. And even then there's only a 50-50 shot it works.
You do realize that the UK already has an obscene amount of data on it's people?
Londoners in particular, can be tracked individually by the police if they so choose. I don't think they even need a warrant. In theory they could decide they wanted to find out what some random hot chick does every day, and they'd be able to follow her everywhere she went for as long as she was in London.As long as she's in public she's on one of their cameras. For most people (ie: the ones who don't discuss their illegal activities by text message or email) that's a lot more threatening then anything that either GHCQ or the NSA could do on the internet. If you add in some stuff on their use of cell phone towers you get some things that are as threatening in theory, but in practice they won't become that big a deal. And it's not a big deal for pretty much the same reason the cameras aren't a big deal:
Analyzing that much data takes a lot of analysts. The Stasi employed one half of one percent of East Germany's population. To get that many analysts in the UK you'd need 300,000 of them. You only have 200k in your active duty military (altho with reserves that goes to 380k). With computers you could probably automate a some stuff, but as databases get more complex you a) need more database gurus to make sure the data/hardware/etc. all stays working, and b) need to have a lot of actual people looking at your results who are smart enough to notice garbage. You're still gonna need a literal British Army (~130k) of analysts. You only have 500k or so people employed in the Civil Service.
Yeah if you fuck up and break the law, you're truly fucked. They have everything. If you look like you broke the law the data could be great or (in rarer cases) it could really suck. There's a lot of it, so if you're innocent something probably shows you're innocent. Even if the cops hate you your barrister should get access to the data, and if he doesn't suck you will probably get off. If your barrister sucks, and the cops/prosecutors charge you anyway the data will make you look very guilty.
So?
If I decided to execute some dude I'd be in huge-ass trouble. Yet Texas does that shit all the damn time.
It's the government. The shit it does is legal by definition as long as the correct internal procedures are followed.
Sending malware counts as a crime, not legal surveillance.
If the victims knew the identities of the perpetrators they would be eligible for extradition under the standing treaties.
This has been repeated several times, but nobody has been able to name the treaty. In fact the last time I asked somebody brought up a non-governmental hacker.
This is a world of governments. What they do is legal, by definition, unless they have specific Constitutional or statutory bars on that particular behavior. Neither the US nor the UK has ever signed a treaty, or passed a law, that makes hacking in service of the government illegal.
Let me put it to you this way:
If US officials can't get extradited to Venezuela for participating in that minor coup attempt Venezuela had a decade pr so back, why could they be extradited for hacking?
It's not like a) the Venezuela coup worked so the new government loved the coupsters, or b) the Venezuelan government would have refrained from charging the CIA officers they were accusing if they thought anyone (literally anyone) would take it seriously.
You apparently totally missed my point. The OP was not about tax-financed jobs, he was talking about debt-financed jobs. And if you cut government debt by firing government employees you don't reduce anybody's current tax burden, the only immediate effects on the economy is that demand for employment goes down and the supply of unemployed people goes up. In other words everybody gets a pay cut.
Bonds don't get paid off for decades, so in the long-term you could be right. OTOH after several decades of full employment I'd expect economic growth to be quite robust. If it it's above the deficit you never have to actually raise taxes to pay off the debt. If you fire a bunch of people to try to balance the budget in the short-term you end up in the Greece situation of decades of pure misery. If you try a couple years of really intense deficit spending, OTOH, only putting on the breaks when inflation gets high, you might get what you actually want without having to pay the price by jacking up the tax rate.
As for the "overhead" snark, that really depends on the sector. No sanely-run state lets the defense sector take care of itself. States that have extreme control over healthcare tend to have much lower administrative costs, because instead of having dozens of doctors offices negotiate prices with dozens of insurance companies; which means all sides are paying out the ass for negotiators and again paying out the ass for a guy who knows that when Dr. Grbic does a hysterectomy he gets $100, but Dr. Jones crack negotiating team got $150. From both sides, because Dr. Grbic's office has to know to bill the insurers different amounts.
One asshole in the provincial capital who decrees "Every one of you motherfuckers gets precisely $94.27 per historectomy, you will address the bills to 1 Fuckyou Ct, Toronto, On-fucking-tario, and if you fuck with the paperwork I'm calling the goddamn provincial police" saves a lot of overhead. Especially since the Toronto asshole probably only makes low six-figures ($150k is very high in the public sector, the Ontario equivalent of a Governor barely breaks $200k), whereas private-sector negotiating teams tend to involve MBAs who think $200k is entry-level and insist they need at least one entry-level assistant. There's a reason both US Medicare and Canadian Medicare (that's what they call their healthcare system, and they actually named it first), have lower administrative costs then the private sector.
It gets even more efficient when you eliminate the individual Doctor's office as a business. Since there's no billing to be done, and the fuck-you guy can now tell Doctors they only get a base salary, which is in-line with other government base salaries; systems like the VA tend to have very low costs. The VA actually also has the top user satisfaction rating, despite the fact it cares for a fairly sick population.