The discussion you want to have is can the US use international domain names to bully small countries.
The discussion the Indians want to have is what the.org people are gonna do about jihadwatch.org, which riled up Islamic Indians to the point where they rioted and 15 people died, because some Indian Islamic pol realized that a) India could do something about Jihadwatch now, and b) the Indian Islamic pol who forced them to do so would probably have enough clout to get a lucrative cabinet job.
The discussion the Chinese want to have is why the well-known terrorist the Dalai Lahma has a website.
The discussion the Russians want to have is how can Spamhaus be stopped from slandering good Russian businessman.
Look, I agree the US is a bully. Where I disagree is the assertion that there is literally any other system the world could adopt that would result in less bullying.
Why do americans get so paranoid that letting the world itself control the worlds telecommunications network, instead of the spooky us government is a somehow a threat to freedom.
Look, I trust the US Government more then I trust most governments. It's better then France by an order of magnitude because it doesn't turn hypocrisy into an art form. It's much better then pretty much any Latin American government, because Latin American governments have a tendency to get together, decide things among themselves, and then conclude it's a global conspiracy (generally led by the US) when the entire rest of the world don't immediately amend their Constitutions to go along with Latin America.
African and Asian governments are a very mixed bag. Many of them have only been free countries for 15-20 years, so it's hard to know whether they're France. Most of the rest have extremely anti-freedom laws, generally banning divisive speech, because the country itself is so young and fragile it would descend into bloody Civil War if Ethno-Religious Group A actually had to listen to what Ethno-Religious Group B thought about it. This is not necessarily bad policy for them, but it does mean that I strongly suspect an internet run by (for example) India would ban a lot of domains simply because their use would piss off some semi-literate minority with AK-47s and nothing to do.
In short I don't trust the US much, but the number of countries I trust more then the US is miniscule, and I can't think of any way to keep everyone else off the internet-running committee. Particularly if it's run through the UN, where Security Council Members France, Chine, and Russia have dibs on any Committee seat that's available.
I'm sorry but as a non american, reading about PRISM doesn't fill me with confidence that letting a foreign power control my communications is "freedom".
It SHOULD be controlled by a democracy of the world, not Obama and the NSA.
There are 1.3 Billion Chinese people, and their idea of a free internet is much different then America's idea of a free internet.
Don't get me wrong, I sincerely doubt a free election in China wouldn't result in a lot of easing up by the Communist party, but if you think most Chinese want Tibetan Nationalists from Poughkeepsie to communicate with anyone in Tibet itself you're fucking insane.
Add a billion Indians who know think that insulting religion should be illegal (because if it isn't everyone will be killed in a brutal and pointless Civil War), Pakistanis who banned blasphemy, etc.
A Democracy of the world running the internet would be terrifying.
Actually, by joining the UN you generally agree to follow a lot of US-Style rules.
The UN is actually a continuation of the Western Allies who won WW2. At the time Stalin swore up and down the Soviet way was pro-freedom-of-speech, pro-freedom-of-religion, etc. So numerous UN documents strongly imply that members are required to enforce Western standards of freedom.
That doesn't really have any legal standing in most countries, who frequently issue strong "buts" exempting themselves from various bits when they sign on, but that doesn't mean they refused to sign on the dotted line.
Regardless you're taking the argument a bit further then the OP was. He's saying that all these countries claim they want to take ICANN from the US to protect freedom of speech/right to privacy/etc., but that in fact they are unlikely to do so through the UN.
So let me get this straight - it's better to have all of your actions monitored and recorded online by one of the most warmongering and paranoid countries on the planet, than to have the Internet controlled by an international organization which "might" abuse the privilege? Makes sense...
God you're clueless about how the UN works.
Security Council states get whatever they want at the UN. Period. France, for example, got the UN to approve a mission to protect it's tiny little ally Rwanda. The Rwandans were having the slight problem that their policy of hacking 10%-20% of the country to death on international TV provoked a rebellion against the government. Since they couldn't win a battle, the UN-mandated cease-fire was basically a cover for mass-murder. See the rebels mostly spoke English, which is apparently a worse crime in France then hacking 20% of your country death with a cheap Chinese machete.
They did pull out, after the rebels shot at them, and the PR got really bad. But the PR must not have been too bad, because the Prime Minister Chirac got promoted to President a few years later.
Which means the US loses no actual power over the internet when UN Control happens. We're on the Security Council, therefore fuck you. What does change is that the French get the same power the US currently has, as do those great enemies of censorship the Chinese and Russians. And they get to use that power to protect their pro-freedom allies in Syria, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.
Not to mention the Brits. But badmouthing the Brits isn't in style, even tho they probably deserve it a as much as the US, so I won't bother.
That would have been a sensible argument before Obama took office.
Since he's taken office he's pulled back on a lot of Bush's excesses. He hasn't done as much as he said he would, but he's definitely stopped waterboarding, sending people to GitMo, he's ended warrantless wire-tapping, etc.
BTW, Warrentless Wire-Taps are actually legal in almost every country but the US, so FISA is more protection then you get in almost every country.
How many days was it between the French freaking out about PRISM, and us finding out they ran their own version of it?
I'd trust a handful of countries to act more honorably then the US. Trouble is they're pretty much all white and European (the non-white ones are too new as Democracies for us to know whether they're trustworthy), and from a non-Western point-of-view an all-white-European internet governing body is not much of gain over a US internet governing body.
I'm not worried that the UN would be hideously inefficient with overseeing the Internet, I'm worried that they would be hideously evil overseeing the internet.
The problem with the UN is that it is very nice to all it's member states.
For example, back in the mid-90s one of those states had a problem with rebels. The problem was the rebels were winning. So that state began hacking hundreds of thousands of people to death. By the time the UN declared a cease-fire all the potential victims were dead, and the cease-fire only served to protect their murderers because those murderers were losing every damn battle.
In a lot of ways I suspect Wikileaks actually wants this kind of governance to happen to the internet, because Wikileaks acts a lot more like knee-jerk anti-Americans then people who want everyone to be free.
Pretty much. Americans we're terrified that Big Brother was reading their email, but their attitude towards everyone else is FU Foreign bastard. And technically they're right. The Constitution gives rights to Americans.
If you think this is annoying try being non-white in NYC. Stop and frisk is almost certainly unconstitutional because white people don't get stopped or frisked, but because white people don;t get stopped or frisked nobody with power to fix it actually gives a rat's ass.
You don't seem to understand why everyone is worried about UN Control.
It's not that we're worried the formal documents would allow bad shit to happen. The thing that makes a dictatorship a dictatorship is that the formal documents are ignored. What we're worried about is that increased UN Control means Russia gets a lot more information on things like who owns a domain name. They could easily get their guy in a position to acquire all information a domain registrar or domain host has on a specific domain name. Which means that an extra-legal death squad could easily get the address of any Russian Opposition Activist. More likely the Russian Tax Police would simply BS up some charges.
I'm not saying the US is a wonderful, saintly, completely benign influence. I'm just saying that it's a lot less evil then the alternatives. To paraphrase a cantankerous old bastard: "US Control is the worst option except for all the others."
Ever heard of France? Nice place, official motto "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?" Actual motto "Liberty for white Catholic Frenchman, Equality for white Catholic Frenchmen, Fraternity is BS but it sounds nice?" Actual French behavior during the Rwandan genocide: veto all potential actions that stop the genocide, as soon as the murderers ran out of targets insist on sending hundreds of troops to protect the murderers from justice. The rebels spoke English, and potential Anglophiles are a greater threat to the French state then mass-murderers.
Most of the South American nations Wikileaks et al. love are run by guys who restrict freedom of speech because freedom of speech might allow people to say nice things about America. They then get on the same stage as psuedo-democratic Iran because it bitches about America. African states have a distressing tendency to create good-old-boy networks where nobody ever gets in trouble for being evil because punishing a former head of state for being evil would insult the sovereignty of that state.
I'm not saying these countries don't have rational reasons for their attitudes. I am saying that turning your freedom of speech over to a guy who loves Iran because loving Iran pisses off America is a really dumb way to protect freedom of speech. The US will read your damn email six days a week and twice on Sunday, but it has yet to torture anyone for agreeing with the 45% of the country that lost the last election.
He who funds it controls it. Which nations do you trust to control it?
France is obviously out, because nobody who pays any attention to them at all was surprised that their reaction to the NSA Story was extreme outrage, and that two goddamn days later it was all over the internet that they were just as bad. The German government may be trustworthy, but nobody actually trusts them. Same with the Japanese. I trust southern democracies (like Brazil) to an extent, but they've all got major bones to pick with various former colonial, countries, which a) tends to blind them to the fact that Iran is fucking evil, and b) Makes them very reluctant to tell another country "you can't censor that". More importantly it's very difficult to know which South American or African nations are Machiavellian lying sons-of-bitches (ie: France), and which ones are actually ethical democracies, because their track record is only a few decades long.
I'd trust a handful of Nordic nations. They're the only ones with long histories of running their foreign policy almost entirely on moral principles. The trouble is if you set up an internet-funding body run entirely by white European countries the non-white, non-European countries are not gonna be any happier then if the US ran the damn thing.
This is true in Kenya, which has very little money to pay for things like a Western-style Justice System focused on protecting the Rights of the Accused, but does have a bunch of donors demanding that Kenya magic up such a system.
It's even more true in Iraq, where the guys manning any given checkpoint are there mostly to harass Sunnis, not prevent Shi'a terrorism against said Sunnis.
I sincerely doubt either country would prefer a bomb detector that worked to one that allows them to engage in racial profiling, support ethnic militias, etc. with plausible deniability.
$38 million for 10 years of detectors is $3.8 million a year.
Iraq has 33 million people and needs checkpoints pretty much everywhere. Kenya needs fewer checkpoints, but it has 40 million plus to protect. There are very few pieces of bomb detection kit that would do all that for $3.8 mil a year.
No US Government Agency has ever used this things. All US Government agencies are convinced they're BS, ridiculous, and Kenya/Iraq's security forces are basically witch doctors for using the damn things. Bribes may be part of it, but I suspect that other manufacturers of bomb-detection equipment would be more then willing to pay bribes.
What I suspect this detector has that the others don't is that a) it's incredibly cheap, and b) it doesn't actually work. It goes off when the cop is suspicious, regardless of any other circumstances. So it's a perfect legal/moral justification for being really hard on any ethnic group the cops think of as likely to be terrorists. In Iraq it's also a great justification for letting the terrorists you like through your checkpoint...
The ridiculous witch-doctor level BS our cops believe is lie detectors.
You're not giving the third-worlders enough credit. They aren't stupid.
You also don't understand the problems they have with security. A major one is that our recent standards for democratic law enforcement are incredibly expensive, they have no cash, and their governments depend on aid from us. There's a reason that in the 19th century hangings generally happened within 6 months of the crime, whereas today they take a decade, and that reason is basically we added a whole bunch of expensive levels of lawyers/appeals/standards for evidence/etc. I'm not saying those are bad things, I'm just saying they ain't cheap, and Kenya ain't got Billion$ lying around to pay for them.
This little toy is cheap. $3.8 mill a year to supply both Iraq (population 20-30 million) and Kenya (population 40 million) is damn near free. Since it looks like it works it looks like it satisfies Western democratic law enforcement standards, which means they ain't gonna get cut off from aid.
Meanwhile their cops get to do all the nasty things we can afford to stop doing. Extreme racial profiling, searching cars just because some asshole feels like being an asshole, etc. can all be justified by pointing to this wonderful device the Americans have provided.
It's all about scale. HSBC money laundered trillions of dollars and had to pay a few billion bucks in a fine with no criminal charges. Liberty Reserve laundered a few billion and the guys running it got arrested. If this guy had charged more so it was 380 million then perhaps he'd be better off? Wasn't there just a story about the pentagon paying 1 billion for rewriting a payroll system that they didn't use? I doubt anyone went to jail for that one (Yes, different country, but scale is important)
Scale also depends on country. In the US a $1 Billion fraud is about $3 per capita, with our high incomes it's a rounding error's rounding error in the budget.
I'd assume what happened in this case is that the Pentagon didn't need what it thought it needed when it wrote the original contract, didn't realize this until the contract had been signed (and they couldn't get out of it), and thus the software company was actually delivering exactly what it had been asked to deliver.
I suspect this product is still loved by the Kenyans because it wasn't expected to deliver a working bomb detector. Kenya is incredibly poor, so they can't afford $Billion contracts. That doesn't mean they don't have potentially expensive security needs, and a bunch of Western donors who insist the Kenyans have a moral spend whatever it takes to fulfill western standards of democracy.
With these detectors their bomb-squads have a perfectly valid legal reason to go after anyone they think is suspicious. The bomb detector chirps whenever it's operator is suspicious, and if it's operator is racist against Somali-Kenyans then oh well.
Remember the bomb detector goes off when the user thinks it should go off.
Which means if your insurgent group looks like the kind of people who are insurgents the damn detector will always "go off," you'll always be delayed by the side of the road for a visual inspection, and your bomb will probably be detected. If it's grandmas in expensive cars your bomb get through until the Army figures out your new MO.
The practical point of these detectors is probably a cover for racial and ethnic profiling, not anything the actual detectors actually do.
Everybody knows that certain tribes (currently Somalis) are the ones bombing things, everyone knows that Kenyans have the same right to not be blown up as white boys, what most people do not realize is that this does not mean the Kenyan government magically has the same ability to buy bomb detection equipment as the US Government. Which means that if you do law enforcement on the cheap (aka: tribal profiling) all the Right groups will complain about it.
So you hand this thing to a grizzled old sergeant who can basically smell a bomb, he stops most of them (but not all, because the detector doesn't actually work). He is using a combination on intuition, experience, and racism; but he will stop a not insignificant number of attacks. And if Amnesty International complains about every Somali being stopped the government can blame the bomb detectors.
Remember Kenya's GDP is only $1,800 at PPP. A reasonable amount for a country to spend on it's security is 5% of GDP. That's $90. And that's PPP, not actual. Actual defense/security spending should be in the $30-$50 range. Which is divided among the Navy, Air Force, Army, etc. That doesn't leave a lot of cash for bomb detectors that work.
OTOH, cheap-ass detectors that allow you to be racist unofficially are in the budget.
This story is probably the actual reason Kenya buys this shit. GDP is listed as $1,800, but that's adjusted for purchasing power. If you take Kenya's actual per capita GDP and buy shit in Nairobi you'll have $1,800 worth of stuff. But there's very little cash in Kenya, so actual GDP is about $880. You can't buy good bomb-detectors in Nairobi, so the actual GDP is more relevant. Even that numbers high, because most of Kenya's GDP is subsistence agriculture, not cash; and it's really hard to turn produce from that kind of agriculture into government equipment. Unless you think the Soviet strategy of taking food from people, using it to buy Ford Tractors, and then ensuring only the politically unreliable starve is a good idea.
Which means Kenya doesn't have the money to buy an expensive bomb kit and equip the entire Army with it. It does have the money to buy a fake detector, give to a 20-year NCO who knows all the signs of a car transporting bombs, and then use the fake-kit as the justification for his blatant tribal profiling.
Keep in mind that in much of Africa you need something to do that or everyone gets raped. Literally.
Weapons that work are incredibly expensive, your economy is tiny and produces virtually no cash, and "patriotism" basically consists of bitching about the people who drew your country's borders in the 1880s.
This means 50 High School buddies are a National Security Threat if they are actually willing to take casualties on their way to storming the Presidential Palace. And by "National Security Threat," I don't mean Edward Snowden, bitching about secrets from an airport, I mean Samuel Doe shooting the President personally, and then distributing videos of the "execution" in multiple countries because he wanted everyone to know he was badass.
Most of the US's per capita income advantage is eaten by our much higher health spending. Our government actually spends more, per capita, on healthcare then the British government despite the fact that it only provides health services to vets, government employees, the very poor (in Ohio you can't get on Medicaid if you are above 100% poverty. ie: can afford to eat), and seniors. Including private spending, you guys spend 9.3% of GDP on health care, whereas the US spends 17.9%. We get some convenience for the very rich with that kind of spending, but many people (such as myself) will never even get on a waiting list to see a Doctor because we don't have insurance, we don't have money, and the insurance system in the US is set up so it's very difficult for US doctors to give discounts to people because they're poor. The downsides of the British system do not show up in any measure of general health, and for specific diseases there are methodological issues.
In other words we could cut taxes, and not experience any reduction in lifespan or other measures of health-care, if we implemented the NHS in the US. But it will never happen because political power in the US so diffuse that nobody could simply order all Doctors to change their private practices into government offices.
Government profitability really depends on the industry.
In Detroit, for example, the currently out-of-money City actually runs the Water Department for most of the region. It almost always turns a profit. Government-run utilities generally either break even or turn a profit.
In the late Clinton years the Feds were turning a profit (or, as it's known in government circles, "running a surplus"), the problem was that we chose to elect a Republican Congress and weren't terribly emphatic in our choice of Al Gore, so knee-jerk anti-tax Crusaders from the Right took over everything and cut taxes.
Ahh the fun part about being anti-government: If the government isn't perfect at all times this means you can imply the government sucks at everything.
Never mind the fact that no non-governmental entity has even gotten close to getting a spacecraft to Mars, or even further then the space station, that it was a private entity that made the mistake, or that several dozen other missions to Mars have gone off without as hitch. You get to bitch about the government, which means Republicans get to advocate for lowering taxes by firing people, and nobody will ever go to Mars again because there's no money in it.
Except the Chinese. Real smart strategy there, giving the Chinese the whole damn Solar System.
There's a degree of selection bias in that last sentence.
Obama, for example, goes on and on about "waste, fraud, and abuse," which is apparently exactly prevalent enough for him to hit his currently desired budget numbers. OTOH, his opponents frequently imply it's all waste because it's the government that does it.
Anti-vaxers can't say anything without being called out. I mean literally anything. RFK Jr. and Jenny McCarthy couldn't bitch about the NRA without snarky comments implying they're doing it to legitimize their anti-vaxer agenda from almost all of the people who hate the NRA. Anti-GM Activists aren't as universally despised, but they aren't taken very seriously because they tend to suck at science.
All those FDA approved food additives are are fine.
This one is probably technically untrue, because "all" is a lot. The FDA is pretty good, but they're not perfect.
The scanners the TSA uses are safe and effective.
Probably half-true. TSA is not gonna open itself up to major legal liability by using scanners that hurt scannees.
"Effective," is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Putting millions on subsidized healthcare and ensuring even more of the incidental costs are hidden from consumers will reduce healthcare spending.
Intuitively this makes no sense, but we do have several hundred examples of health systems to compare ourselves to, i9ncluding several dozen high-income countries with economies similar to our own, and what's really fucking weird is that the more hidden costs are the lower they are.
The UK and Canada, for example, never charges anyone for anything. The Brits spend very little on health care per person. The Canadians spend more, but are still like 50% cheaper then we are, and their costs would have to be higher then typical because Canadian Doctors could easily move to Florida and get paid American salaries.
Countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland spend between us and the Brits; but they also actually charge people co-pays and insist everyone have a private insurance policy.
There was no coup in Egypt...
This one is BS, but it's politically important BS because if there was a coup in Egypt then we have to stop paying the Egyptians to be nice to the Israelis, which would mean they'd technically go to a state of war with Israel (the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is part of a three-way deal with us), poor Bibi Netanyahu would not be able to cut his conventional army to pay for social services, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The discussion you want to have is can the US use international domain names to bully small countries.
The discussion the Indians want to have is what the .org people are gonna do about jihadwatch.org, which riled up Islamic Indians to the point where they rioted and 15 people died, because some Indian Islamic pol realized that a) India could do something about Jihadwatch now, and b) the Indian Islamic pol who forced them to do so would probably have enough clout to get a lucrative cabinet job.
The discussion the Chinese want to have is why the well-known terrorist the Dalai Lahma has a website.
The discussion the Russians want to have is how can Spamhaus be stopped from slandering good Russian businessman.
Look, I agree the US is a bully. Where I disagree is the assertion that there is literally any other system the world could adopt that would result in less bullying.
Why do americans get so paranoid that letting the world itself control the worlds telecommunications network, instead of the spooky us government is a somehow a threat to freedom.
Look, I trust the US Government more then I trust most governments. It's better then France by an order of magnitude because it doesn't turn hypocrisy into an art form. It's much better then pretty much any Latin American government, because Latin American governments have a tendency to get together, decide things among themselves, and then conclude it's a global conspiracy (generally led by the US) when the entire rest of the world don't immediately amend their Constitutions to go along with Latin America.
African and Asian governments are a very mixed bag. Many of them have only been free countries for 15-20 years, so it's hard to know whether they're France. Most of the rest have extremely anti-freedom laws, generally banning divisive speech, because the country itself is so young and fragile it would descend into bloody Civil War if Ethno-Religious Group A actually had to listen to what Ethno-Religious Group B thought about it. This is not necessarily bad policy for them, but it does mean that I strongly suspect an internet run by (for example) India would ban a lot of domains simply because their use would piss off some semi-literate minority with AK-47s and nothing to do.
In short I don't trust the US much, but the number of countries I trust more then the US is miniscule, and I can't think of any way to keep everyone else off the internet-running committee. Particularly if it's run through the UN, where Security Council Members France, Chine, and Russia have dibs on any Committee seat that's available.
I'm sorry but as a non american, reading about PRISM doesn't fill me with confidence that letting a foreign power control my communications is "freedom".
It SHOULD be controlled by a democracy of the world, not Obama and the NSA.
There are 1.3 Billion Chinese people, and their idea of a free internet is much different then America's idea of a free internet.
Don't get me wrong, I sincerely doubt a free election in China wouldn't result in a lot of easing up by the Communist party, but if you think most Chinese want Tibetan Nationalists from Poughkeepsie to communicate with anyone in Tibet itself you're fucking insane.
Add a billion Indians who know think that insulting religion should be illegal (because if it isn't everyone will be killed in a brutal and pointless Civil War), Pakistanis who banned blasphemy, etc.
A Democracy of the world running the internet would be terrifying.
Actually, by joining the UN you generally agree to follow a lot of US-Style rules.
The UN is actually a continuation of the Western Allies who won WW2. At the time Stalin swore up and down the Soviet way was pro-freedom-of-speech, pro-freedom-of-religion, etc. So numerous UN documents strongly imply that members are required to enforce Western standards of freedom.
That doesn't really have any legal standing in most countries, who frequently issue strong "buts" exempting themselves from various bits when they sign on, but that doesn't mean they refused to sign on the dotted line.
Regardless you're taking the argument a bit further then the OP was. He's saying that all these countries claim they want to take ICANN from the US to protect freedom of speech/right to privacy/etc., but that in fact they are unlikely to do so through the UN.
So let me get this straight - it's better to have all of your actions monitored and recorded online by one of the most warmongering and paranoid countries on the planet, than to have the Internet controlled by an international organization which "might" abuse the privilege? Makes sense...
God you're clueless about how the UN works.
Security Council states get whatever they want at the UN. Period. France, for example, got the UN to approve a mission to protect it's tiny little ally Rwanda. The Rwandans were having the slight problem that their policy of hacking 10%-20% of the country to death on international TV provoked a rebellion against the government. Since they couldn't win a battle, the UN-mandated cease-fire was basically a cover for mass-murder. See the rebels mostly spoke English, which is apparently a worse crime in France then hacking 20% of your country death with a cheap Chinese machete.
They did pull out, after the rebels shot at them, and the PR got really bad. But the PR must not have been too bad, because the Prime Minister Chirac got promoted to President a few years later.
Which means the US loses no actual power over the internet when UN Control happens. We're on the Security Council, therefore fuck you. What does change is that the French get the same power the US currently has, as do those great enemies of censorship the Chinese and Russians. And they get to use that power to protect their pro-freedom allies in Syria, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.
Not to mention the Brits. But badmouthing the Brits isn't in style, even tho they probably deserve it a as much as the US, so I won't bother.
That would have been a sensible argument before Obama took office.
Since he's taken office he's pulled back on a lot of Bush's excesses. He hasn't done as much as he said he would, but he's definitely stopped waterboarding, sending people to GitMo, he's ended warrantless wire-tapping, etc.
BTW, Warrentless Wire-Taps are actually legal in almost every country but the US, so FISA is more protection then you get in almost every country.
How many days was it between the French freaking out about PRISM, and us finding out they ran their own version of it?
I'd trust a handful of countries to act more honorably then the US. Trouble is they're pretty much all white and European (the non-white ones are too new as Democracies for us to know whether they're trustworthy), and from a non-Western point-of-view an all-white-European internet governing body is not much of gain over a US internet governing body.
I'm not worried that the UN would be hideously inefficient with overseeing the Internet, I'm worried that they would be hideously evil overseeing the internet.
The problem with the UN is that it is very nice to all it's member states.
For example, back in the mid-90s one of those states had a problem with rebels. The problem was the rebels were winning. So that state began hacking hundreds of thousands of people to death. By the time the UN declared a cease-fire all the potential victims were dead, and the cease-fire only served to protect their murderers because those murderers were losing every damn battle.
In a lot of ways I suspect Wikileaks actually wants this kind of governance to happen to the internet, because Wikileaks acts a lot more like knee-jerk anti-Americans then people who want everyone to be free.
Pretty much. Americans we're terrified that Big Brother was reading their email, but their attitude towards everyone else is FU Foreign bastard. And technically they're right. The Constitution gives rights to Americans.
If you think this is annoying try being non-white in NYC. Stop and frisk is almost certainly unconstitutional because white people don't get stopped or frisked, but because white people don;t get stopped or frisked nobody with power to fix it actually gives a rat's ass.
You don't seem to understand why everyone is worried about UN Control.
It's not that we're worried the formal documents would allow bad shit to happen. The thing that makes a dictatorship a dictatorship is that the formal documents are ignored. What we're worried about is that increased UN Control means Russia gets a lot more information on things like who owns a domain name. They could easily get their guy in a position to acquire all information a domain registrar or domain host has on a specific domain name. Which means that an extra-legal death squad could easily get the address of any Russian Opposition Activist. More likely the Russian Tax Police would simply BS up some charges.
I'm not saying the US is a wonderful, saintly, completely benign influence. I'm just saying that it's a lot less evil then the alternatives. To paraphrase a cantankerous old bastard:
"US Control is the worst option except for all the others."
Ever heard of France? Nice place, official motto "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?" Actual motto "Liberty for white Catholic Frenchman, Equality for white Catholic Frenchmen, Fraternity is BS but it sounds nice?" Actual French behavior during the Rwandan genocide: veto all potential actions that stop the genocide, as soon as the murderers ran out of targets insist on sending hundreds of troops to protect the murderers from justice. The rebels spoke English, and potential Anglophiles are a greater threat to the French state then mass-murderers.
Most of the South American nations Wikileaks et al. love are run by guys who restrict freedom of speech because freedom of speech might allow people to say nice things about America. They then get on the same stage as psuedo-democratic Iran because it bitches about America. African states have a distressing tendency to create good-old-boy networks where nobody ever gets in trouble for being evil because punishing a former head of state for being evil would insult the sovereignty of that state.
I'm not saying these countries don't have rational reasons for their attitudes. I am saying that turning your freedom of speech over to a guy who loves Iran because loving Iran pisses off America is a really dumb way to protect freedom of speech. The US will read your damn email six days a week and twice on Sunday, but it has yet to torture anyone for agreeing with the 45% of the country that lost the last election.
He who funds it controls it. Which nations do you trust to control it?
France is obviously out, because nobody who pays any attention to them at all was surprised that their reaction to the NSA Story was extreme outrage, and that two goddamn days later it was all over the internet that they were just as bad. The German government may be trustworthy, but nobody actually trusts them. Same with the Japanese. I trust southern democracies (like Brazil) to an extent, but they've all got major bones to pick with various former colonial, countries, which a) tends to blind them to the fact that Iran is fucking evil, and b) Makes them very reluctant to tell another country "you can't censor that". More importantly it's very difficult to know which South American or African nations are Machiavellian lying sons-of-bitches (ie: France), and which ones are actually ethical democracies, because their track record is only a few decades long.
I'd trust a handful of Nordic nations. They're the only ones with long histories of running their foreign policy almost entirely on moral principles. The trouble is if you set up an internet-funding body run entirely by white European countries the non-white, non-European countries are not gonna be any happier then if the US ran the damn thing.
Mod parent up.
This is true in Kenya, which has very little money to pay for things like a Western-style Justice System focused on protecting the Rights of the Accused, but does have a bunch of donors demanding that Kenya magic up such a system.
It's even more true in Iraq, where the guys manning any given checkpoint are there mostly to harass Sunnis, not prevent Shi'a terrorism against said Sunnis.
I sincerely doubt either country would prefer a bomb detector that worked to one that allows them to engage in racial profiling, support ethnic militias, etc. with plausible deniability.
BS.
$38 million for 10 years of detectors is $3.8 million a year.
Iraq has 33 million people and needs checkpoints pretty much everywhere. Kenya needs fewer checkpoints, but it has 40 million plus to protect. There are very few pieces of bomb detection kit that would do all that for $3.8 mil a year.
I think you're misreading the story.
No US Government Agency has ever used this things. All US Government agencies are convinced they're BS, ridiculous, and Kenya/Iraq's security forces are basically witch doctors for using the damn things. Bribes may be part of it, but I suspect that other manufacturers of bomb-detection equipment would be more then willing to pay bribes.
What I suspect this detector has that the others don't is that a) it's incredibly cheap, and b) it doesn't actually work. It goes off when the cop is suspicious, regardless of any other circumstances. So it's a perfect legal/moral justification for being really hard on any ethnic group the cops think of as likely to be terrorists. In Iraq it's also a great justification for letting the terrorists you like through your checkpoint...
The ridiculous witch-doctor level BS our cops believe is lie detectors.
You're not giving the third-worlders enough credit. They aren't stupid.
You also don't understand the problems they have with security. A major one is that our recent standards for democratic law enforcement are incredibly expensive, they have no cash, and their governments depend on aid from us. There's a reason that in the 19th century hangings generally happened within 6 months of the crime, whereas today they take a decade, and that reason is basically we added a whole bunch of expensive levels of lawyers/appeals/standards for evidence/etc. I'm not saying those are bad things, I'm just saying they ain't cheap, and Kenya ain't got Billion$ lying around to pay for them.
This little toy is cheap. $3.8 mill a year to supply both Iraq (population 20-30 million) and Kenya (population 40 million) is damn near free. Since it looks like it works it looks like it satisfies Western democratic law enforcement standards, which means they ain't gonna get cut off from aid.
Meanwhile their cops get to do all the nasty things we can afford to stop doing. Extreme racial profiling, searching cars just because some asshole feels like being an asshole, etc. can all be justified by pointing to this wonderful device the Americans have provided.
It's all about scale. HSBC money laundered trillions of dollars and had to pay a few billion bucks in a fine with no criminal charges. Liberty Reserve laundered a few billion and the guys running it got arrested. If this guy had charged more so it was 380 million then perhaps he'd be better off? Wasn't there just a story about the pentagon paying 1 billion for rewriting a payroll system that they didn't use? I doubt anyone went to jail for that one (Yes, different country, but scale is important)
Scale also depends on country. In the US a $1 Billion fraud is about $3 per capita, with our high incomes it's a rounding error's rounding error in the budget.
I'd assume what happened in this case is that the Pentagon didn't need what it thought it needed when it wrote the original contract, didn't realize this until the contract had been signed (and they couldn't get out of it), and thus the software company was actually delivering exactly what it had been asked to deliver.
I suspect this product is still loved by the Kenyans because it wasn't expected to deliver a working bomb detector. Kenya is incredibly poor, so they can't afford $Billion contracts. That doesn't mean they don't have potentially expensive security needs, and a bunch of Western donors who insist the Kenyans have a moral spend whatever it takes to fulfill western standards of democracy.
With these detectors their bomb-squads have a perfectly valid legal reason to go after anyone they think is suspicious. The bomb detector chirps whenever it's operator is suspicious, and if it's operator is racist against Somali-Kenyans then oh well.
Remember the bomb detector goes off when the user thinks it should go off.
Which means if your insurgent group looks like the kind of people who are insurgents the damn detector will always "go off," you'll always be delayed by the side of the road for a visual inspection, and your bomb will probably be detected. If it's grandmas in expensive cars your bomb get through until the Army figures out your new MO.
The practical point of these detectors is probably a cover for racial and ethnic profiling, not anything the actual detectors actually do.
For Kenya that's actually the point.
Everybody knows that certain tribes (currently Somalis) are the ones bombing things, everyone knows that Kenyans have the same right to not be blown up as white boys, what most people do not realize is that this does not mean the Kenyan government magically has the same ability to buy bomb detection equipment as the US Government. Which means that if you do law enforcement on the cheap (aka: tribal profiling) all the Right groups will complain about it.
So you hand this thing to a grizzled old sergeant who can basically smell a bomb, he stops most of them (but not all, because the detector doesn't actually work). He is using a combination on intuition, experience, and racism; but he will stop a not insignificant number of attacks. And if Amnesty International complains about every Somali being stopped the government can blame the bomb detectors.
Remember Kenya's GDP is only $1,800 at PPP. A reasonable amount for a country to spend on it's security is 5% of GDP. That's $90. And that's PPP, not actual. Actual defense/security spending should be in the $30-$50 range. Which is divided among the Navy, Air Force, Army, etc. That doesn't leave a lot of cash for bomb detectors that work.
OTOH, cheap-ass detectors that allow you to be racist unofficially are in the budget.
This story is probably the actual reason Kenya buys this shit. GDP is listed as $1,800, but that's adjusted for purchasing power. If you take Kenya's actual per capita GDP and buy shit in Nairobi you'll have $1,800 worth of stuff. But there's very little cash in Kenya, so actual GDP is about $880. You can't buy good bomb-detectors in Nairobi, so the actual GDP is more relevant. Even that numbers high, because most of Kenya's GDP is subsistence agriculture, not cash; and it's really hard to turn produce from that kind of agriculture into government equipment. Unless you think the Soviet strategy of taking food from people, using it to buy Ford Tractors, and then ensuring only the politically unreliable starve is a good idea.
Which means Kenya doesn't have the money to buy an expensive bomb kit and equip the entire Army with it. It does have the money to buy a fake detector, give to a 20-year NCO who knows all the signs of a car transporting bombs, and then use the fake-kit as the justification for his blatant tribal profiling.
Keep in mind that in much of Africa you need something to do that or everyone gets raped. Literally.
Weapons that work are incredibly expensive, your economy is tiny and produces virtually no cash, and "patriotism" basically consists of bitching about the people who drew your country's borders in the 1880s.
This means 50 High School buddies are a National Security Threat if they are actually willing to take casualties on their way to storming the Presidential Palace. And by "National Security Threat," I don't mean Edward Snowden, bitching about secrets from an airport, I mean Samuel Doe shooting the President personally, and then distributing videos of the "execution" in multiple countries because he wanted everyone to know he was badass.
A major upside is cost.
Most of the US's per capita income advantage is eaten by our much higher health spending. Our government actually spends more, per capita, on healthcare then the British government despite the fact that it only provides health services to vets, government employees, the very poor (in Ohio you can't get on Medicaid if you are above 100% poverty. ie: can afford to eat), and seniors. Including private spending, you guys spend 9.3% of GDP on health care, whereas the US spends 17.9%. We get some convenience for the very rich with that kind of spending, but many people (such as myself) will never even get on a waiting list to see a Doctor because we don't have insurance, we don't have money, and the insurance system in the US is set up so it's very difficult for US doctors to give discounts to people because they're poor. The downsides of the British system do not show up in any measure of general health, and for specific diseases there are methodological issues.
In other words we could cut taxes, and not experience any reduction in lifespan or other measures of health-care, if we implemented the NHS in the US. But it will never happen because political power in the US so diffuse that nobody could simply order all Doctors to change their private practices into government offices.
Government profitability really depends on the industry.
In Detroit, for example, the currently out-of-money City actually runs the Water Department for most of the region. It almost always turns a profit. Government-run utilities generally either break even or turn a profit.
In the late Clinton years the Feds were turning a profit (or, as it's known in government circles, "running a surplus"), the problem was that we chose to elect a Republican Congress and weren't terribly emphatic in our choice of Al Gore, so knee-jerk anti-tax Crusaders from the Right took over everything and cut taxes.
Ahh the fun part about being anti-government:
If the government isn't perfect at all times this means you can imply the government sucks at everything.
Never mind the fact that no non-governmental entity has even gotten close to getting a spacecraft to Mars, or even further then the space station, that it was a private entity that made the mistake, or that several dozen other missions to Mars have gone off without as hitch. You get to bitch about the government, which means Republicans get to advocate for lowering taxes by firing people, and nobody will ever go to Mars again because there's no money in it.
Except the Chinese. Real smart strategy there, giving the Chinese the whole damn Solar System.
There's a degree of selection bias in that last sentence.
Obama, for example, goes on and on about "waste, fraud, and abuse," which is apparently exactly prevalent enough for him to hit his currently desired budget numbers. OTOH, his opponents frequently imply it's all waste because it's the government that does it.
Anti-vaxers can't say anything without being called out. I mean literally anything. RFK Jr. and Jenny McCarthy couldn't bitch about the NRA without snarky comments implying they're doing it to legitimize their anti-vaxer agenda from almost all of the people who hate the NRA. Anti-GM Activists aren't as universally despised, but they aren't taken very seriously because they tend to suck at science.
All those FDA approved food additives are are fine.
This one is probably technically untrue, because "all" is a lot. The FDA is pretty good, but they're not perfect.
The scanners the TSA uses are safe and effective.
Probably half-true. TSA is not gonna open itself up to major legal liability by using scanners that hurt scannees.
"Effective," is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Putting millions on subsidized healthcare and ensuring even more of the incidental costs are hidden from consumers will reduce healthcare spending.
Intuitively this makes no sense, but we do have several hundred examples of health systems to compare ourselves to, i9ncluding several dozen high-income countries with economies similar to our own, and what's really fucking weird is that the more hidden costs are the lower they are.
The UK and Canada, for example, never charges anyone for anything. The Brits spend very little on health care per person. The Canadians spend more, but are still like 50% cheaper then we are, and their costs would have to be higher then typical because Canadian Doctors could easily move to Florida and get paid American salaries.
Countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland spend between us and the Brits; but they also actually charge people co-pays and insist everyone have a private insurance policy.
There was no coup in Egypt ...
This one is BS, but it's politically important BS because if there was a coup in Egypt then we have to stop paying the Egyptians to be nice to the Israelis, which would mean they'd technically go to a state of war with Israel (the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is part of a three-way deal with us), poor Bibi Netanyahu would not be able to cut his conventional army to pay for social services, etc.