More importantly this is not inventing the Apollo Program. California's Exchange is serving 10% of the country's population fine. Build six of those and Obama's golden.
I doubt it can actually be done in 5 weeks, but in theory they should have the hardware to do it (that $600 million went somewhere), so installing the right software could do the trick.
$600 million is not a lot in the world of government contracting. There are several models of Jet in the Air Force that cost that much. Moreover this was a really big job. They need enough servers to complete 15 million orders, they need to talk to the IRS (mostly for income data), several other agencies, fairly sophisticated GIS systems (many plans aren't available in all counties), and insurance company computer systems.
Your little exchange probably had to handle talking to the insurer's computers, but it didn't care what percent of poverty you were, it may not have cared which County you lived in, and it probably didn't care as much about security. It's a small target, at least compared to a Federal Exchange. Hack it and you screw a few thousand. OTOH if you hack the Federal Exchange you could theoretically steal 15 million people's everything. SSN, name, address, IRS info, every fucking thing.
What I personally don't get is why they didn't just steal a bunch of servers from MA. I get maybe they wouldn't have scaled up, but the MA system worked at a scale of 5 million residents so you just set up 20 or 30 of those, and put up a splash page that tells people which one of those to go to, and you're golden.
Don't know about the industry, but it is unusual for Exchanges. Massachusetts has run fine for years. Cali and New York State went live on Oct. 1 with relatively few problems.
In Obama's defense he was not actually supposed to make any Exchanges. The people who were supposed to do that were the states, but a bunch of states bailed and the backup plan became the plan. Which meant a $1 Billion budget line that was basically an Oh Fuck option became the Exchange for something like a third of the country, and Obama had less time to plan then the states did.
He was confirmed as Chief Performance Officer back in 2009. All Obama has to do to give him this gig is re-write the job description.
And he doesn't have to re-write much because the CPO is supposed look at government operations (ie: this clusterfuck) and figure out how to make work better. Fixing specific projects probably wasn't what the Senate had in mind when it confirmed him, but they probably won't complain. The GOP will figure he won't do it, and they'll want Obama to have some more rope to hang himself, the Dems will think he will pull it off and will save them all.
Purists who do complain don't understand the point of the system of confirmation. The point isn't that everyone always gets a vote. the point is that the Executive can't ignore the will Congress. In this case that will will be expressed by Congress not complaining.
The thing you have to keep in mind about the US Health System is that it's a series of kludges. Active Federal employees on the civilian side use a version of the Dutch system. There's a bunch of Federally owned hospitals (aka: the British system) for military retirees. To insure retirees in the 60s we stole Canada's system, even keeping the name "Medicare," and simply added the words "over 65" to the bill. Which means we have three entire countries worth of health regulations simply for retirees and Federal employees. Most people are insured by their employers , which is a fourth country worth of regulations. Roughly 10% of the country buys on the individual market, which is regulated at the state-level by 50 different regulators, for a fifth country. Medicaid for the poor is a federal/state mixture, which makes it sixth. The uninsured pay their bills a variety of ways, from charity care to sticker price. So we don't really have a health system, we have seven health payment systems.
If we were Canada or the UK, and we didn't have significant Checks and Balances in the policy-making arms of the government, we could do what any smart engineer would do in this situation and start a massive project to replace these seven systems with one system. But we aren't that country. Every American is convinced that his health insurance is great, therefore he will simply not believe your new system will be better for him, therefore he will bitch at his Senator if you try to (for example) let poor people formerly on Medicaid visit his VA Hospital. And getting 51 Senators (or 50 and the VP), and 218 House members to agree to do anything like that has proven to be damn near impossible. You can get them to agree to pour money into one section of the system or another, but they don't change people's health care very often.
So what Obama did was take the least popular one of those systems (the uninsured), and send half of them to Medicaid and half to the Individual Market in a manner reminiscent of the Dutch. He changed the individual market so it is more affordable. In other words the Affordable Care Act had to have the same amount of regulations in it as the entirety of Dutch law relating to Dutch health insurance. Since it kept five of the other six system it also had to include a lot of language/code to insure compatibility with those systems. For example a student whose dad (with custody) is on Medicare, Step-mom is eligible for insurance through her job and the VA, and Mom-mom (no custody) has a policy on the Exchange. Is the kid eligible for the Exchange policy, the VA policy, or does stepmom have to switch over to her job's insurance?
It possible that in China the technocrats who run the Communist party could all have learned a proposal this complicated in a year or so's debate without majorly neglecting their other duties. But we aren't China. We aren't led by nameless suits whose entire role is to exude policy confidence. We are led by us. And it turns out we aren't smart enough to learn a half-dozen slightly different versions of the Dutch system in eight months. Frankly I don't blame us.
What we are smart enough to do is learn the outlines of the ideas, to a surprisingly high level of detail in many areas; and then muddle through the rest the best we can. This is what happens in a democracy with Checks and Balances, entrenched interests (ie: people calling their Congressman in panic when their insurance changes), and an independent legislature whenever anyone tries to fix any major problem.
It would be really nice if you'd actually read what I said. I didn't say Portuguese was a dialect of Spanish. I said that if I wanted to provoke you off I'd say it was. Like every other argument I've made on this thread, you promptly proved that one right.
It seems like you don't want to debate, you want to be provoked, and if that's the case just say so. I have some really good insults left over from when I was 8. Nine-year-olds are too mature to tell yo-mamma jokes.
Let's repeat the statement that started this for the record: "If you think it's unusual for a small country to follow it's large neighbors closely you clearly haven't spent much time in Europe. Scandinavia and the Finns pay an inordinate amount of attention to Germany and Russia. Portugal pays a lot of attention to Spain, and Portugal isn't that much smaller then Spain..."
Read that closely. It says that due to Portugal's proximity to Spain Portugal will have stronger ties to Spain then it would otherwise. Are you seriously arguing that if Portugal was located in the South Pacific it would have as tight a relationship with Spain as it does?
If you think that was an attempt at provocation then you might want to learn that lesson on speaking without information yourself. If I wanted to provoke you'd I'd probably be referring to Portuguese as a dialect of Spanish you silly person you.
And, for the record, France is slightly bigger then the UK. It's also closer.
Which means that you're still proving my case: nations that are near each-other physically have closer relationships then their respective sizes would imply.
You miss the point. When they are working for an overseas government, they are a criminal end of story. Compared to what Gary Mckinnon was doing the US government was involved in global organised crime and if those involved were caught and prosecuted as justice would demand, would result in several millennia of prison sentences. Criminals are criminals, save the 'but we are special' and allowed to break every other countries laws, as an excuse for all the people to US has killed globally to feed corporate greed.
You can argue that it's not fair McKinnon got arrested and almost deported for things governments do all the time, but you can't argue that it's illegal for them to arrest him and not arrest their own hackers. The people who write the laws are the governments of the world, and they are very careful to include numerous outs for themselves.
Yes you would need Danish permits. Even going to another country to do it might get you into trouble in Denmark. As their citizen you are their responsibility, and if you make everyone look like idiots by putting the entire world on Defcon 3 with a do-it-yourself launch they probably won't respond by appointing you Greve af Stjernerne. It won't matter if you do it from Mozambique or Copenhagen.
As an American with an iffy grasp of American law I'm not a great authority on Danish space law. So if you think there's a possibility you will actually get enough fuel to get of the ground you should start talking to a lawyer today. If you don't have a plan to get that fuel then you should probably be focused on the fuel, not the permit.
I'm not arguing you're all wanabe Spaniards, crying yourselves to sleep because Juan Carlos I only speaks Spanish on your radios. I'm arguing that you pay way more attention to Spain then similarly-sized countries because it's within a two-hour drive of the entirety of continental Portugal. A lot Portuguese people probably work on the other side of the border. A lot of Spanish people probably work in Portugal. If you're Portuguese and Lisbon is too damn small you're a lot more likely to choose Madrid then Detroit or Toronto even tho they are all the same size. Given that both countries are trying to deal with a collapse in their finance markets AND austerity at the same time you guys would be foolish not to pay very close attention to what the Spanish are doing, because if one of your countries can magic it's way out of this the other one can too.
Objectively speaking Spain is roughly as important as Canada or Poland. The UK is twice it's population, much richer, has a much more potent military, has a veto on the Security Council, etc. That's not a knock on any of there countries, it's simply a fact that the UK is a lot more important then Spain. But according to you Portuguese people pay the same amount of attention to both.
You're missing the point. McKinnon was not working for his government, therefore he was just a hacker. You'll note that a) several countries we have never been formally at war with have spied on us (Israel and Russia come to mind), b) all of these people had handlers in their official governments, c) many of those handlers were actually within the US when they handled their spies, but nonetheless d) nobody who was openly employed by any of their governments in any capacity was arrested.
Extraordinary rendition has sometimes resulted in charges against CIA spooks. But simple spying never has.
I'll agree that it's possible Brazil et al. will try it. But nobody outside of Brazil et al. will give a shit.
Analytical, anti-hypocritical types do tend to hate hypocrites.
A reason I get really annoyed at the anti-NSA stuff is that I think it's hypocritical for people to go on a fourth Amendment kick to protect their internet toys, while their Mayor engages in stop-and-frisk. And instead of/. and the EFF giving equal time to stop-and-frisk, they give it no time and then downvote you when you bring it up in the middle of a debate on the NSA.
I put up with official US hypocrisy because it's the least hypocritical government that actually tries to help people all over the world. The others are either pure Realpolitik (France, Russia, China, etc.), or decree that both sides are evil so all civilized nations should stay out. Yes sometimes we fuck up, but it tries; and (unlike most countries) when it succeeds great things happen. For example, prior to our involvement in Korea that country was poorer then any country in Africa.
Keep in mind that they have plenty of euphemisms they use to describe oppression. The Russians, for example, probably won't cop to being spying human rights-violating bastards. But Russia's Russianness from evil illegal immigrants? Perhaps having "strong leadership,?" Or preventing hooliganism? They will also fail to condemn private lynch mobs against enemies of Putin.
The Chinese have a rich tradition of Communist euphemisms to borrow from.
The entire point of the NSA is to spy on foreign leaders. That is their job. Generally when they talk about in press releases they emphasize Colonels from countries like Korea, but they are also supposed to intercept and decode signals from the higher ups in every country. It's not like they would have refused to decode transmissions from relatively Democratic Axis states like Finland or Romania during WW2 just because they thought those transmissions were directly from the Head of State.
As for spying on CEOs, Greenwald has released lots of documents from NSA sources saying they do it, but none on actual operations. That could mean they did it once in 1993, or it could mean they never did it but they like to remind Congress they could if asked, it could mean he's waiting for a big reveal, or it could mean Snowden was in the wrong spot to get docs. You have no evidence.
Moreover you have no evidence that any "powerful individual" not in the NSA's chain of command has ever directed surveillance at anyone in particular. Fuck, the entire problem seems to be that the NSA gets official authorization to do stuff it shouldn't be able to get authorization for, and that it does this to everyone.
If you think it's unusual for a small country to follow it's large neighbors closely you clearly haven't spent much time in Europe. Scandinavia and the Finns pay an inordinate amount of attention to Germany and Russia. Portugal pays a lot of attention to Spain, and Portugal isn't that much smaller then Spain. The Irish are renowned for their ability to denigrate anything English, while being more English then the goddamned English.
You're missing key points of the French timeline. While Snowden was still in HK they played the part of the wronged party. Then, on July 4th, Le Monde pointed out they were as bad as the US. The Morales incident didn't happen until the 5th.
As for Rousseff, I'm not knocking for encrypting her email. I'm knocking her for acting surprised that she needed to. Brazil is not some little country everyone ignores anymore. It's a real country, which actually tries to have influence in the world, which means that the people it's trying to influence have a damn good reason to spy on it.
As for spying on governments, it doesn't matter whether you think the US should have this info. It doesn't matter whether you think the Russian/Chinese/French/etc. should have this info. We will all hack your computers to get it. Your responses should be a) implement good security at all times, not just because somebody's having a spy-scandal, b) have spys/hacks of your own so you have some idea of what's compromised, and c) have a couple convincing-sounding offended speeches ready for when somebody gets caught spying on your ass because the hoi polloi don't understand spying is the default. You can bring morality into this conversation if you want, all you'll do is convince everyone that you are a) lying to cover up your extensive spy networks, or b) are an idiot. There is no c) nice Mexican boy goes to UN and abolishes spying.
As for the other NSA stuff, keep in mind that the entire point of the NSA is to spy on non-Americans. That is why it exists. I'd agree it would be very nice if they were more discriminating in their targets, but their job is not to be fair to Brazilians. That's what Brazilians have a government for. The NSA's job is to protect Americans. You can disagree with that purpose all you want, until your current country becomes a state nobody who can stop it will care.
As for bases in Latin countries, there are two. GitMo and a recent one in Brazil. If the Brazilians throw us out that won't be a tragedy for us, because we still have the Brits and the Brits own Ascension and the Falklands. If it's a choice between giving up SigInt on people who want to kill us and moving troops to the Falklands we will make that choice seven days a week and twice on Sunday. Technically this would anger one of our two allies in Latin America (Argentina would be pissed, Columbia wouldn't), but we only allied with Argentina to ensure they wouldn't attack the Falklands again, and they'd be suicidal to attack a US Base, so that wouldn't matter either.
That's actually the problem with electing anti-American Presidents who ally with the Cubans and Venezuelans. Since we'll never get cooperation from them anyway, there's no reason not to be mean to their people.
Nope. Because you have read without understanding. The point of that clause is to say that state laws can't trump any source of Federal law, including treaties. If this clause said what you think it said it would put treaties on equal footing with the Constitution, which would mean a Jew-banning treaty would be just as valid as the First Amendment. In actual practice treaties have virtually no standing in Courts unless Congress has also passed statutes backing them up, in which case the judges ignore the treaty-text and only read the statute/Executive Orders/etc. Thus the numerous and sundry cases where anti-Death penalty Western European states loudly protest against American executions and the courts respond with a merry "Fuck you." The most blatant example actually involved a Mexican national. His treaty-guaranteed right to help from his embassy was ignored by Texas, everyone (including Obama) said Texas should not have done that, but Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. was still executed back in '11.
Moreover, even assuming that you are technically right, you didn't answer the question. If it's a treaty that protects Mexico from spying by the US then which treaty? There's probably a bunch that have vapid tawdry declarations of mutual friendship, and others in legal langtuage that say we'll recognize each-other's laws. But no treaty that said, flat-out "we shall never spy on Mexico," would ever be signed by the P{resident or ratified by the Senate.
[sarcasm] Somebody hasn't been watching Foxnews enough.
A few thousand US Troops, a few hundred thousand Iraqi and Afghani civilians, a massive deficit caused by unpaid-for tax cuts, and a minor economic collapse were a small price to pay for killing the Kyoto Treaty. [/sarcasm]
For one thing I'm very surprised that a slashdot post criticizing anti-NSA activists got down-modded for being redundant. Flamebait, or troll I would have understood. I would have disagreed with it, but I could have seen the logic. But it's not like there're a lot of other slashdotters criticizing the EFF.
For another, you don't seem to understand how flexible the NRA is ideologically. When people who scare society are using guns in ways that normal gun-owners don't they will be at the forefront of the lynchmob. For example, when the Black Panthers threatened cops by following them around with guns the NRA and Ronald Reagen demanded that be made illegal. What the NRA objects to very consistently are any restrictions on firearms that would inconvenience their membership.
In other words if the EFF was as tactically flexible as the NRA they would not be trying to get Basaaly Moalin off on privacy grounds. They aren't arguing that sending money to sex-slaving terrorists is legitimate (and therefore he shouldn't be in jail), they aren't arguing that he didn't try to send the money (and therefore someone else should be in jail), they are arguing the government doesn't have the right to know he gave money to sex-slaving terrorists. That's the problem privacy activists have had historically. They have all this soaring rhetoric about how important privacy is to freedom, then some guy commits a terrible crime (almost getting away with it), and they respond by proving he actually did get away with it.
I'm convinced there should be more oversight of the NSA, and that they probably shouldn't be the long-term stewards of the data they gather. That should probably be some agency that's major job is to protect privacy. It should only be accessible with a warrant. But I am not convinced that freedom died the minute the government got copies of everyone's cell-phone metadata and their email.
As I said, I suspect one of Putin's conditions is that he stop saying anything. Putin's got a weird little love-hate relationship with Obama going on. It involves lots of posturing, but very few actually hostile actions. For example he could have really screwed Obama simply by secretly shipping Russian air defense units to the Russian military base in Syria, and blowing a few fighters out of the sky. Instead he negotiated a compromise that solved the Syria question. And if Ed Snowden is on Russian soil tweeting about how evil Obama is at the wrong minute Putin's careful choreography just won't work. The deal Putin offered him was probably one of those offers that are too good to refuse, and it probably involved a lot of Ed Snowden being very very quiet.
I suspect Greenwald won't print any stuff that implicates any government not in the Anglosphere. Partly that's because he doesn't think of it as news to say the Chinese are unfree, partly that's because he doesn't want to endanger Snowden so he doesn't want to piss off un-free Russia, but mostly I suspect it's that he has no reason to. If he's anti-British and anti-American he's gonna assume anything that implicated non-British and non-American countries is BS propaganda. If he's not he probably doesn't want to cripple our operations against those countries by revealing exactly which hacks we use to break the Great Firewall.
What's going to happen is what always happens when these programs come to light: everyone will bitch, somebody may try something really dramatic like expelling Ambassadors; and then six months from now nobody will care. Everyone the NSA has spied on so far has acted this way. Brazil's response is actually strongest. They are starting a program encrypting their internal government emails, which begs the question: why the fuck they weren't doing that already. In other words it's you're being arrogant and naive. Everybody who thought about this for 10 seconds, including the entire population of Mexico, probably assumed both the US and the Chinese have hacked Mexican government computers extensively. Brazil is slightly more isolated from the rest of the world, so they were probably arrogant and naive enough to assume that they weren't being hacked.
As for the arrogance and naivety of other NSA programs, keep in mind that from the NSA's point of view they have a warrant for everything they get. You may not like the warrants, but it is both arrogant and naive to assume that simply because you think a warrant is over-broad everyone else in the entire world will agree with you and the warrant will be destroyed just as soon as you issue a press release saying so.
it's still illegal and technically usa has contracts in place that say that they would help catch such persons and would send them to mexico for trial.
What US law prevents us from spying on Mexico? I am genuinely curious about this. Note that a treaty is irrelevant. It is a law in the sense that it is legal, but crimes are based on statutes passed by Congress, so you'll need to cite the statute. Moreover legally speaking our relationship with Mexico is less close then our relationship to Argentina or Pakistan, both of which are Major Non-NATO Allies.
US government attorneys argue that the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to take the case, filed in July by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
Extradition only works for things that are crimes in both countries, and the extraditing country generally gets a veto on the death sentence.
Since spying on foreign countries is a core function of the US Government several Constitutional provisions make arresting a US Government employee for spying he did in the course of his job illegal. Which means all Mexican charges will do is stop some NSA spooks from vacationing on Mexican beaches, or in Latin American countries likely to extradite them to Mexico.
By his story he doesn't need the documents to out the Chinese. He trained people in the NSA on defeating the Chinese. He could write "Ed's guide to fucking with the Great Firewall" without any documentation at all.
I suspect the Russians would not like that, so he can;t really do it.
I suspect even if that's on Greenwald's pile Greenwald won't mention it. In the Anglophone Left-Wing tradition there's a long history of ignoring the great crimes of foreign leaders if your current leaders do anything wrong. That's why there was a US Communist party after Stalin. There's a reason Wikileaks has not had any leaks out China or Russia, despite the fact that both countries are hundreds of times worse then the US.
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More importantly this is not inventing the Apollo Program. California's Exchange is serving 10% of the country's population fine. Build six of those and Obama's golden.
I doubt it can actually be done in 5 weeks, but in theory they should have the hardware to do it (that $600 million went somewhere), so installing the right software could do the trick.
$600 million is not a lot in the world of government contracting. There are several models of Jet in the Air Force that cost that much. Moreover this was a really big job. They need enough servers to complete 15 million orders, they need to talk to the IRS (mostly for income data), several other agencies, fairly sophisticated GIS systems (many plans aren't available in all counties), and insurance company computer systems.
Your little exchange probably had to handle talking to the insurer's computers, but it didn't care what percent of poverty you were, it may not have cared which County you lived in, and it probably didn't care as much about security. It's a small target, at least compared to a Federal Exchange. Hack it and you screw a few thousand. OTOH if you hack the Federal Exchange you could theoretically steal 15 million people's everything. SSN, name, address, IRS info, every fucking thing.
What I personally don't get is why they didn't just steal a bunch of servers from MA. I get maybe they wouldn't have scaled up, but the MA system worked at a scale of 5 million residents so you just set up 20 or 30 of those, and put up a splash page that tells people which one of those to go to, and you're golden.
You do realize that California and Massachusetts have Exchanges that work?
Which means that an awful lot of this code can be brought in from those states.
Don't know about the industry, but it is unusual for Exchanges. Massachusetts has run fine for years. Cali and New York State went live on Oct. 1 with relatively few problems.
In Obama's defense he was not actually supposed to make any Exchanges. The people who were supposed to do that were the states, but a bunch of states bailed and the backup plan became the plan. Which meant a $1 Billion budget line that was basically an Oh Fuck option became the Exchange for something like a third of the country, and Obama had less time to plan then the states did.
He was confirmed as Chief Performance Officer back in 2009. All Obama has to do to give him this gig is re-write the job description.
And he doesn't have to re-write much because the CPO is supposed look at government operations (ie: this clusterfuck) and figure out how to make work better. Fixing specific projects probably wasn't what the Senate had in mind when it confirmed him, but they probably won't complain. The GOP will figure he won't do it, and they'll want Obama to have some more rope to hang himself, the Dems will think he will pull it off and will save them all.
Purists who do complain don't understand the point of the system of confirmation. The point isn't that everyone always gets a vote. the point is that the Executive can't ignore the will Congress. In this case that will will be expressed by Congress not complaining.
The thing you have to keep in mind about the US Health System is that it's a series of kludges. Active Federal employees on the civilian side use a version of the Dutch system. There's a bunch of Federally owned hospitals (aka: the British system) for military retirees. To insure retirees in the 60s we stole Canada's system, even keeping the name "Medicare," and simply added the words "over 65" to the bill. Which means we have three entire countries worth of health regulations simply for retirees and Federal employees. Most people are insured by their employers , which is a fourth country worth of regulations. Roughly 10% of the country buys on the individual market, which is regulated at the state-level by 50 different regulators, for a fifth country. Medicaid for the poor is a federal/state mixture, which makes it sixth. The uninsured pay their bills a variety of ways, from charity care to sticker price. So we don't really have a health system, we have seven health payment systems.
If we were Canada or the UK, and we didn't have significant Checks and Balances in the policy-making arms of the government, we could do what any smart engineer would do in this situation and start a massive project to replace these seven systems with one system. But we aren't that country. Every American is convinced that his health insurance is great, therefore he will simply not believe your new system will be better for him, therefore he will bitch at his Senator if you try to (for example) let poor people formerly on Medicaid visit his VA Hospital. And getting 51 Senators (or 50 and the VP), and 218 House members to agree to do anything like that has proven to be damn near impossible. You can get them to agree to pour money into one section of the system or another, but they don't change people's health care very often.
So what Obama did was take the least popular one of those systems (the uninsured), and send half of them to Medicaid and half to the Individual Market in a manner reminiscent of the Dutch. He changed the individual market so it is more affordable. In other words the Affordable Care Act had to have the same amount of regulations in it as the entirety of Dutch law relating to Dutch health insurance. Since it kept five of the other six system it also had to include a lot of language/code to insure compatibility with those systems. For example a student whose dad (with custody) is on Medicare, Step-mom is eligible for insurance through her job and the VA, and Mom-mom (no custody) has a policy on the Exchange. Is the kid eligible for the Exchange policy, the VA policy, or does stepmom have to switch over to her job's insurance?
It possible that in China the technocrats who run the Communist party could all have learned a proposal this complicated in a year or so's debate without majorly neglecting their other duties. But we aren't China. We aren't led by nameless suits whose entire role is to exude policy confidence. We are led by us. And it turns out we aren't smart enough to learn a half-dozen slightly different versions of the Dutch system in eight months. Frankly I don't blame us.
What we are smart enough to do is learn the outlines of the ideas, to a surprisingly high level of detail in many areas; and then muddle through the rest the best we can. This is what happens in a democracy with Checks and Balances, entrenched interests (ie: people calling their Congressman in panic when their insurance changes), and an independent legislature whenever anyone tries to fix any major problem.
It would be really nice if you'd actually read what I said. I didn't say Portuguese was a dialect of Spanish. I said that if I wanted to provoke you off I'd say it was. Like every other argument I've made on this thread, you promptly proved that one right.
It seems like you don't want to debate, you want to be provoked, and if that's the case just say so. I have some really good insults left over from when I was 8. Nine-year-olds are too mature to tell yo-mamma jokes.
Let's repeat the statement that started this for the record:
"If you think it's unusual for a small country to follow it's large neighbors closely you clearly haven't spent much time in Europe. Scandinavia and the Finns pay an inordinate amount of attention to Germany and Russia. Portugal pays a lot of attention to Spain, and Portugal isn't that much smaller then Spain..."
Read that closely. It says that due to Portugal's proximity to Spain Portugal will have stronger ties to Spain then it would otherwise. Are you seriously arguing that if Portugal was located in the South Pacific it would have as tight a relationship with Spain as it does?
If you think that was an attempt at provocation then you might want to learn that lesson on speaking without information yourself. If I wanted to provoke you'd I'd probably be referring to Portuguese as a dialect of Spanish you silly person you.
And, for the record, France is slightly bigger then the UK. It's also closer.
Which means that you're still proving my case: nations that are near each-other physically have closer relationships then their respective sizes would imply.
You miss the point. When they are working for an overseas government, they are a criminal end of story. Compared to what Gary Mckinnon was doing the US government was involved in global organised crime and if those involved were caught and prosecuted as justice would demand, would result in several millennia of prison sentences. Criminals are criminals, save the 'but we are special' and allowed to break every other countries laws, as an excuse for all the people to US has killed globally to feed corporate greed.
You can argue that it's not fair McKinnon got arrested and almost deported for things governments do all the time, but you can't argue that it's illegal for them to arrest him and not arrest their own hackers. The people who write the laws are the governments of the world, and they are very careful to include numerous outs for themselves.
Yes you would need Danish permits. Even going to another country to do it might get you into trouble in Denmark. As their citizen you are their responsibility, and if you make everyone look like idiots by putting the entire world on Defcon 3 with a do-it-yourself launch they probably won't respond by appointing you Greve af Stjernerne. It won't matter if you do it from Mozambique or Copenhagen.
As an American with an iffy grasp of American law I'm not a great authority on Danish space law. So if you think there's a possibility you will actually get enough fuel to get of the ground you should start talking to a lawyer today. If you don't have a plan to get that fuel then you should probably be focused on the fuel, not the permit.
I'm not arguing you're all wanabe Spaniards, crying yourselves to sleep because Juan Carlos I only speaks Spanish on your radios. I'm arguing that you pay way more attention to Spain then similarly-sized countries because it's within a two-hour drive of the entirety of continental Portugal. A lot Portuguese people probably work on the other side of the border. A lot of Spanish people probably work in Portugal. If you're Portuguese and Lisbon is too damn small you're a lot more likely to choose Madrid then Detroit or Toronto even tho they are all the same size. Given that both countries are trying to deal with a collapse in their finance markets AND austerity at the same time you guys would be foolish not to pay very close attention to what the Spanish are doing, because if one of your countries can magic it's way out of this the other one can too.
Objectively speaking Spain is roughly as important as Canada or Poland. The UK is twice it's population, much richer, has a much more potent military, has a veto on the Security Council, etc. That's not a knock on any of there countries, it's simply a fact that the UK is a lot more important then Spain. But according to you Portuguese people pay the same amount of attention to both.
You're missing the point. McKinnon was not working for his government, therefore he was just a hacker. You'll note that a) several countries we have never been formally at war with have spied on us (Israel and Russia come to mind), b) all of these people had handlers in their official governments, c) many of those handlers were actually within the US when they handled their spies, but nonetheless d) nobody who was openly employed by any of their governments in any capacity was arrested.
Extraordinary rendition has sometimes resulted in charges against CIA spooks. But simple spying never has.
I'll agree that it's possible Brazil et al. will try it. But nobody outside of Brazil et al. will give a shit.
Analytical, anti-hypocritical types do tend to hate hypocrites.
A reason I get really annoyed at the anti-NSA stuff is that I think it's hypocritical for people to go on a fourth Amendment kick to protect their internet toys, while their Mayor engages in stop-and-frisk. And instead of /. and the EFF giving equal time to stop-and-frisk, they give it no time and then downvote you when you bring it up in the middle of a debate on the NSA.
I put up with official US hypocrisy because it's the least hypocritical government that actually tries to help people all over the world. The others are either pure Realpolitik (France, Russia, China, etc.), or decree that both sides are evil so all civilized nations should stay out. Yes sometimes we fuck up, but it tries; and (unlike most countries) when it succeeds great things happen. For example, prior to our involvement in Korea that country was poorer then any country in Africa.
Keep in mind that they have plenty of euphemisms they use to describe oppression. The Russians, for example, probably won't cop to being spying human rights-violating bastards. But Russia's Russianness from evil illegal immigrants? Perhaps having "strong leadership,?" Or preventing hooliganism? They will also fail to condemn private lynch mobs against enemies of Putin.
The Chinese have a rich tradition of Communist euphemisms to borrow from.
The entire point of the NSA is to spy on foreign leaders. That is their job. Generally when they talk about in press releases they emphasize Colonels from countries like Korea, but they are also supposed to intercept and decode signals from the higher ups in every country. It's not like they would have refused to decode transmissions from relatively Democratic Axis states like Finland or Romania during WW2 just because they thought those transmissions were directly from the Head of State.
As for spying on CEOs, Greenwald has released lots of documents from NSA sources saying they do it, but none on actual operations. That could mean they did it once in 1993, or it could mean they never did it but they like to remind Congress they could if asked, it could mean he's waiting for a big reveal, or it could mean Snowden was in the wrong spot to get docs. You have no evidence.
Moreover you have no evidence that any "powerful individual" not in the NSA's chain of command has ever directed surveillance at anyone in particular. Fuck, the entire problem seems to be that the NSA gets official authorization to do stuff it shouldn't be able to get authorization for, and that it does this to everyone.
Computer hacking is illegal for private citizens. So I couldn't hack the President of Mexico's email.
But that does not apply to government employees, working under legal government orders.
If you think it's unusual for a small country to follow it's large neighbors closely you clearly haven't spent much time in Europe. Scandinavia and the Finns pay an inordinate amount of attention to Germany and Russia. Portugal pays a lot of attention to Spain, and Portugal isn't that much smaller then Spain. The Irish are renowned for their ability to denigrate anything English, while being more English then the goddamned English.
You're missing key points of the French timeline. While Snowden was still in HK they played the part of the wronged party. Then, on July 4th, Le Monde pointed out they were as bad as the US. The Morales incident didn't happen until the 5th.
As for Rousseff, I'm not knocking for encrypting her email. I'm knocking her for acting surprised that she needed to. Brazil is not some little country everyone ignores anymore. It's a real country, which actually tries to have influence in the world, which means that the people it's trying to influence have a damn good reason to spy on it.
As for spying on governments, it doesn't matter whether you think the US should have this info. It doesn't matter whether you think the Russian/Chinese/French/etc. should have this info. We will all hack your computers to get it. Your responses should be a) implement good security at all times, not just because somebody's having a spy-scandal, b) have spys/hacks of your own so you have some idea of what's compromised, and c) have a couple convincing-sounding offended speeches ready for when somebody gets caught spying on your ass because the hoi polloi don't understand spying is the default. You can bring morality into this conversation if you want, all you'll do is convince everyone that you are a) lying to cover up your extensive spy networks, or b) are an idiot. There is no c) nice Mexican boy goes to UN and abolishes spying.
As for the other NSA stuff, keep in mind that the entire point of the NSA is to spy on non-Americans. That is why it exists. I'd agree it would be very nice if they were more discriminating in their targets, but their job is not to be fair to Brazilians. That's what Brazilians have a government for. The NSA's job is to protect Americans. You can disagree with that purpose all you want, until your current country becomes a state nobody who can stop it will care.
As for bases in Latin countries, there are two. GitMo and a recent one in Brazil. If the Brazilians throw us out that won't be a tragedy for us, because we still have the Brits and the Brits own Ascension and the Falklands. If it's a choice between giving up SigInt on people who want to kill us and moving troops to the Falklands we will make that choice seven days a week and twice on Sunday. Technically this would anger one of our two allies in Latin America (Argentina would be pissed, Columbia wouldn't), but we only allied with Argentina to ensure they wouldn't attack the Falklands again, and they'd be suicidal to attack a US Base, so that wouldn't matter either.
That's actually the problem with electing anti-American Presidents who ally with the Cubans and Venezuelans. Since we'll never get cooperation from them anyway, there's no reason not to be mean to their people.
Nope. Because you have read without understanding. The point of that clause is to say that state laws can't trump any source of Federal law, including treaties. If this clause said what you think it said it would put treaties on equal footing with the Constitution, which would mean a Jew-banning treaty would be just as valid as the First Amendment. In actual practice treaties have virtually no standing in Courts unless Congress has also passed statutes backing them up, in which case the judges ignore the treaty-text and only read the statute/Executive Orders/etc. Thus the numerous and sundry cases where anti-Death penalty Western European states loudly protest against American executions and the courts respond with a merry "Fuck you." The most blatant example actually involved a Mexican national. His treaty-guaranteed right to help from his embassy was ignored by Texas, everyone (including Obama) said Texas should not have done that, but Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. was still executed back in '11.
Moreover, even assuming that you are technically right, you didn't answer the question. If it's a treaty that protects Mexico from spying by the US then which treaty? There's probably a bunch that have vapid tawdry declarations of mutual friendship, and others in legal langtuage that say we'll recognize each-other's laws. But no treaty that said, flat-out "we shall never spy on Mexico," would ever be signed by the P{resident or ratified by the Senate.
[sarcasm]
Somebody hasn't been watching Foxnews enough.
A few thousand US Troops, a few hundred thousand Iraqi and Afghani civilians, a massive deficit caused by unpaid-for tax cuts, and a minor economic collapse were a small price to pay for killing the Kyoto Treaty.
[/sarcasm]
For one thing I'm very surprised that a slashdot post criticizing anti-NSA activists got down-modded for being redundant. Flamebait, or troll I would have understood. I would have disagreed with it, but I could have seen the logic. But it's not like there're a lot of other slashdotters criticizing the EFF.
For another, you don't seem to understand how flexible the NRA is ideologically. When people who scare society are using guns in ways that normal gun-owners don't they will be at the forefront of the lynchmob. For example, when the Black Panthers threatened cops by following them around with guns the NRA and Ronald Reagen demanded that be made illegal. What the NRA objects to very consistently are any restrictions on firearms that would inconvenience their membership.
In other words if the EFF was as tactically flexible as the NRA they would not be trying to get Basaaly Moalin off on privacy grounds. They aren't arguing that sending money to sex-slaving terrorists is legitimate (and therefore he shouldn't be in jail), they aren't arguing that he didn't try to send the money (and therefore someone else should be in jail), they are arguing the government doesn't have the right to know he gave money to sex-slaving terrorists. That's the problem privacy activists have had historically. They have all this soaring rhetoric about how important privacy is to freedom, then some guy commits a terrible crime (almost getting away with it), and they respond by proving he actually did get away with it.
I'm convinced there should be more oversight of the NSA, and that they probably shouldn't be the long-term stewards of the data they gather. That should probably be some agency that's major job is to protect privacy. It should only be accessible with a warrant. But I am not convinced that freedom died the minute the government got copies of everyone's cell-phone metadata and their email.
As I said, I suspect one of Putin's conditions is that he stop saying anything. Putin's got a weird little love-hate relationship with Obama going on. It involves lots of posturing, but very few actually hostile actions. For example he could have really screwed Obama simply by secretly shipping Russian air defense units to the Russian military base in Syria, and blowing a few fighters out of the sky. Instead he negotiated a compromise that solved the Syria question. And if Ed Snowden is on Russian soil tweeting about how evil Obama is at the wrong minute Putin's careful choreography just won't work. The deal Putin offered him was probably one of those offers that are too good to refuse, and it probably involved a lot of Ed Snowden being very very quiet.
I suspect Greenwald won't print any stuff that implicates any government not in the Anglosphere. Partly that's because he doesn't think of it as news to say the Chinese are unfree, partly that's because he doesn't want to endanger Snowden so he doesn't want to piss off un-free Russia, but mostly I suspect it's that he has no reason to. If he's anti-British and anti-American he's gonna assume anything that implicated non-British and non-American countries is BS propaganda. If he's not he probably doesn't want to cripple our operations against those countries by revealing exactly which hacks we use to break the Great Firewall.
What's going to happen is what always happens when these programs come to light: everyone will bitch, somebody may try something really dramatic like expelling Ambassadors; and then six months from now nobody will care. Everyone the NSA has spied on so far has acted this way. Brazil's response is actually strongest. They are starting a program encrypting their internal government emails, which begs the question: why the fuck they weren't doing that already. In other words it's you're being arrogant and naive. Everybody who thought about this for 10 seconds, including the entire population of Mexico, probably assumed both the US and the Chinese have hacked Mexican government computers extensively. Brazil is slightly more isolated from the rest of the world, so they were probably arrogant and naive enough to assume that they weren't being hacked.
As for the arrogance and naivety of other NSA programs, keep in mind that from the NSA's point of view they have a warrant for everything they get. You may not like the warrants, but it is both arrogant and naive to assume that simply because you think a warrant is over-broad everyone else in the entire world will agree with you and the warrant will be destroyed just as soon as you issue a press release saying so.
it's still illegal and technically usa has contracts in place that say that they would help catch such persons and would send them to mexico for trial.
What US law prevents us from spying on Mexico? I am genuinely curious about this. Note that a treaty is irrelevant. It is a law in the sense that it is legal, but crimes are based on statutes passed by Congress, so you'll need to cite the statute. Moreover legally speaking our relationship with Mexico is less close then our relationship to Argentina or Pakistan, both of which are Major Non-NATO Allies.
US government attorneys argue that the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to take the case, filed in July by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
i would love to see their response when mexico demands extradition. yes, mexico can extradite people from the US.
i'm pretty sure espionage is a capital crime.
Extradition only works for things that are crimes in both countries, and the extraditing country generally gets a veto on the death sentence.
Since spying on foreign countries is a core function of the US Government several Constitutional provisions make arresting a US Government employee for spying he did in the course of his job illegal. Which means all Mexican charges will do is stop some NSA spooks from vacationing on Mexican beaches, or in Latin American countries likely to extradite them to Mexico.
By his story he doesn't need the documents to out the Chinese. He trained people in the NSA on defeating the Chinese. He could write "Ed's guide to fucking with the Great Firewall" without any documentation at all.
I suspect the Russians would not like that, so he can;t really do it.
I suspect even if that's on Greenwald's pile Greenwald won't mention it. In the Anglophone Left-Wing tradition there's a long history of ignoring the great crimes of foreign leaders if your current leaders do anything wrong. That's why there was a US Communist party after Stalin. There's a reason Wikileaks has not had any leaks out China or Russia, despite the fact that both countries are hundreds of times worse then the US.