Well I only just started checking out RT.com during the Snowden situation. They seemed to have better, more neutral coverage than US news sources. Although that may not be saying much since the US news sources seem like they are getting their articles written for them by the US administration.
Perhaps RT is usually more biased and made an exception for the Snowden story because you couldn't make up better stuff than that. I'm only talking about the written web site coverage. I haven't viewed any videos or watched their satellite channel.
The most balanced foreign news seems to come from DW and Al Jazeera.
I did find Al Jazeera's coverage unbiased as well. And The Guardian coverage seemed pretty good. I hadn't heard of DW before. I just took a look at their site and it looks pretty good. Is that Germany's version of Voice of America and BBC World Service?
How do you know all of this? Have you lived there? Also what does Syria have to do with anything? Does the fighting in Syria affect day to day life in Russia?
The US is just as bad or worse when it comes to unnecessary foreign wars as entertainment. As far as murder, ask Yemeni and Pakistani children who've lost friends and siblings to US missiles about murder. They may not agree with you that Russia is worse in that respect.
You might try looking at the networks' coverage of Snowden to see how wrong this is. "Liberal" MSNBC and NPR (can't speak for the others) have actually been mostly neutral, sometimes supportive, toward him; Fox is the one insisting he's a traitor or bringing on Washington talking heads who do.
I haven't noticed this neutrality you speak of in any US news outlet and I searched hard for an exception. It was depressing to think that every choice was anti-Snowden, pro surveillance state propaganda. To get neutrality you have to go to foreign news outlets. Pretty much any foreign news source actually seems to get you out of the everything-the-US-government-does-is-wonderful reality distortion field.
The Snowden story is actually the first time I've realized that the US media has gotten quite this bad. To the point of yellow journalism and outright obvious propaganda. I had thought that objectivity and neutrality was something that US news agencies at least aspired to. Now they don't even feel the need to pretend. I have to wonder at what other pro-government news stories I've been misled and manipulated by.
Clearly there are conservative-military people in the US who want to restart the cold war. Russia is not our enemy anymore. All of this hate toward our Russian friends makes me sad. The smear campaign against Snowden has now extended to Russia. It really is embarrassing to be an American these days. We must look like such angry, violent idiots to the rest of the world. The dumb bully of the planet.
I like Russia. I like its culture. I like its language. It isn't the USSR anymore. I think I'd actually prefer living there to living here in the US. I think Snowden is going to be pleasantly surprised with much about that country. It may even be freer in some ways than the US. For instance apparently the Russians don't have to worry about gag orders when they refuse to comply with government surveillance agencies.
How is this so called "blatant propaganda" different from the blatant propaganda from every corporate or government news source in the US? Among Americans at least 50% think Snowden is one of the good guys and not a traitor and shouldn't be punished, but every major US news outlet consistently paints Snowden in the worst possible light doing their best to help the government out as much as possible with its blatant character assassinations and smears.
I actually think US news sources are more like Pravda. Every single one is nothing more than an arm of the US government. The only way to get any news that is even remotely objective and not wildly pro-government biased is to seek foreign news sources like Al Jazeera, RT, or the BBC. So it's a Pot meet Kettle kind of situation. I actually think RT.com, at least the American section, is quite a bit less biased than any US source of news.
Also the fact that you are spreading lies and calling Snowden a traitor probably means that you get your paycheck from the US government. I think you are a bit too obvious though. Haven't you guys ever heard of subtlety? If you want to serve your masters well it would be better to town down some of the more obvious defector/traitor verbiage. You can't be an effective cyber warrior if it is obvious to everyone that that is what you are.
Three, I thought we hated the big bad corporations. Now we want them to fight our battles with the government we generally side with against them?
Are you actually trying to argue that our government is an enemy of corporate power? Half the time politicians end up with a cushy overpaid job with one of them when they leave public office. They aren't enemies. The corporations couldn't even exist in their current form without the government to protect them from liability, from individual responsibility. Corporations and the government are the best of friends.
If the government belongs to these companies then why should they bother to cooperate? They could just tell them to fuck off and collect their own data.
My understanding was that they get paid well for their cooperation and for their time. They aren't losing money on the surveillance directly. Quite the opposite.
Simply eliminating it means you go back to the president using the intelligence services as his own personal army to spy on his political opponents.
And you think the FISA courts are preventing that? The president can do that anyway. And the NSA can do whatever it wants with or without FISA courts. When everything they do is hidden and anyone who squacks about it ends up like Manning or Snowden they truly have nothing to fear. They don't need anyone's permission to do whatever they want as long as everything they do is a secret. It's not like they don't routinely lie to congress and FISA anyway. Hell they probably lie even to the president.
Freedom is never useless. It's the principle that this country was founded upon. Giving it up just means more human misery no matter how much crime there is. And we are not facing routine daily terrorist attacks.
Even with daily terrorist attacks I still don't see that turning our government into the one that George Orwell dreamed up is going to help anyway. It might stop some of the attacks, but not all of them and then we still have to live in a privacy-less dystopia.
Well it's not as simple as that. If the government were simply not allowed to do anything not specifically explicitly listed in the Constitution, then there wouldn't be a need to list things that they couldn't do.
The need to list those things was debated precisely because they were afraid that their inclusion would imply that human beings had no other rights and the government was allowed to do anything it wanted that did not interfere with those enumerated rights. They hoped that including the 9th amendment would make their position clear, but instead it was simply ignored.
"Here are the 10 ways that the government is limited, but the government is permitted to do anything else."
That is exactly how our government interprets it. In fact SCOTUS doesn't even consider them "rights". It calls them "privileges".
There's plenty of reason to think that the authors of the Constitution expected us to use our heads and figure out where to draw some of the lines between what the government can or can't do. It's actually pretty absurd to think otherwise. Why else would you have 3 different branches all play a role in creating, interpreting, and executing laws *in addition* to the Constitution?
The constitution enumerates the broad strokes of what the government is allowed to do. How law makers choose to make use of those powers is up to them. They are allowed to make any law which does not exceed the limited powers granted to the government in the constitution. If a law exceeds the authority granted to the government in the constitution it is unconstitutional and automatically invalid and is supposed to be struck down by the SCOTUS. Laws are specific implementations of powers granted in the constitution.
Why have an ability to amend the Constitution?
The ability to amend the constitution was intended to be difficult since it can lead to tyranny of the majority against any minority. The constitution, by limiting what the government is allowed to do, was intended to protect minorities and individuals from the tyranny of mob rule that is the downside to democracy. The democratic process was never really intended to override their fundamental rules of what a just government may properly do.
Obviously they expected some level of fluidity and contextual judgment, though we could debate what they expected that level to be.
They did expect society to make some changes, but they hoped that it would not be necessary and they didn't want it to be easy and they certainly didn't intend it to mean that the constitution was a mere subset of everything the government was allowed to do and that the only thing protecting citizens from its wrath was those few amendments thrown in as an afterthought just in case.
Before you argue that that is not "protected" speech let me remind you of the point I was making about being allowed unrestricted freedom of speech in your own home joking around with your friends. The NSA is making nearly all forms of communication fullly public to be put under the microscope by law enforcement agencies looking for something to bust you on.
Okay Mr. Shill. I'll bite. It used to be that you only had to worry about getting arrested for saying the wrong thing if you spoke in public. If you post on your facebook page that you want to murder children and then say, "just kidding" nowadays you go to prison for a long time. It is pretty much understood that if you are at home joking around with your friends you can say literally anything without worrying about going to prison for it. Due to the NSA any form of communication that is not in meatspace is the equivalent of making a statement to the police. So it's a kind of chilling effect and that is just one of the problems with this sort of universal surveillance.
It isn't difficult to think of more. Like the fact that there is a 100% chance that that NSA info has already been abused. We just don't know about it. If I had access to that data I would abuse it too. It's just human nature.
Why would the DEA reveal the original source of the tips anyway? Once they have the tip they can gather their own data independently or even claim the voice recording or whatever as their own. No need to drop the charges if it goes to trial.
In order to prevent a new oppressive government from using those tools, the authors of the Bill of Rights made them illegal.
Actually the Bill of Rights was just supposed to be a reminder of what the government was not allowed to do. Anything not specifically allowed in the constitution was supposed to be forbidden to the government. The constitution was supposed to be a way of telling the government, "You can do these things and only these things. In order to do anything else you must actually amend the constitution." Enumerating the nearly infinite set of all things that the government was not allowed to do seemed a lot harder than enumerating the small list of their powers.
Downloading copyrighted material is also illegal in many countries, but that hasn't stopped millions of people from doing it. It would be difficult to enforce a crackdown on the use of P2P communication software if millions of people used it right from the start. It is difficult to defeat the protection of the herd with sufficiently large numbers in the herd. Off course if the US decides to go for broke and just arrest or execute everyone in giant concentration camps then all bets are off.
And I look at negative ratings first because a vendor or retailer won't pad a product with negative reviews.
Right. Because retailers are too stupid to think of the idea of paying shills to leave negative reviews of their competitors. There are also fake negative reviews.
This doesn't work with the non-obvious shills on sites like Amazon. There is no way for you to know whether a detailed story that sounds convincing is true or not. As has already been pointed out humans nearly always overestimate their ablity to detect a lie. Not all shills are obvious about it.
Bad reviews can also be fake, but yes by skipping the 5 star reviews you will skip over the highest percentage of shill reviews. That still leaves a lot of shill reviews however, some highly skilled and subtle and others more obvious. The shills that were clever enough not to go for a full 5 stars are probably also clever enough to write a realistic sounding review that mentions one or two mildly bad aspects of a product along with the good ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I only just started checking out RT.com during the Snowden situation. They seemed to have better, more neutral coverage than US news sources. Although that may not be saying much since the US news sources seem like they are getting their articles written for them by the US administration.
Perhaps RT is usually more biased and made an exception for the Snowden story because you couldn't make up better stuff than that. I'm only talking about the written web site coverage. I haven't viewed any videos or watched their satellite channel.
The most balanced foreign news seems to come from DW and Al Jazeera.
I did find Al Jazeera's coverage unbiased as well. And The Guardian coverage seemed pretty good. I hadn't heard of DW before. I just took a look at their site and it looks pretty good. Is that Germany's version of Voice of America and BBC World Service?
I skim RT daily. But you know what? An *awful* lot of their content is blatant and clumsy propaganda.
You skim it daily even though you think it is blatant propaganda? Why?
How do you know all of this? Have you lived there? Also what does Syria have to do with anything? Does the fighting in Syria affect day to day life in Russia?
The US is just as bad or worse when it comes to unnecessary foreign wars as entertainment. As far as murder, ask Yemeni and Pakistani children who've lost friends and siblings to US missiles about murder. They may not agree with you that Russia is worse in that respect.
You might try looking at the networks' coverage of Snowden to see how wrong this is. "Liberal" MSNBC and NPR (can't speak for the others) have actually been mostly neutral, sometimes supportive, toward him; Fox is the one insisting he's a traitor or bringing on Washington talking heads who do.
I haven't noticed this neutrality you speak of in any US news outlet and I searched hard for an exception. It was depressing to think that every choice was anti-Snowden, pro surveillance state propaganda. To get neutrality you have to go to foreign news outlets. Pretty much any foreign news source actually seems to get you out of the everything-the-US-government-does-is-wonderful reality distortion field.
The Snowden story is actually the first time I've realized that the US media has gotten quite this bad. To the point of yellow journalism and outright obvious propaganda. I had thought that objectivity and neutrality was something that US news agencies at least aspired to. Now they don't even feel the need to pretend. I have to wonder at what other pro-government news stories I've been misled and manipulated by.
Clearly there are conservative-military people in the US who want to restart the cold war. Russia is not our enemy anymore. All of this hate toward our Russian friends makes me sad. The smear campaign against Snowden has now extended to Russia. It really is embarrassing to be an American these days. We must look like such angry, violent idiots to the rest of the world. The dumb bully of the planet.
I like Russia. I like its culture. I like its language. It isn't the USSR anymore. I think I'd actually prefer living there to living here in the US. I think Snowden is going to be pleasantly surprised with much about that country. It may even be freer in some ways than the US. For instance apparently the Russians don't have to worry about gag orders when they refuse to comply with government surveillance agencies.
How is this so called "blatant propaganda" different from the blatant propaganda from every corporate or government news source in the US? Among Americans at least 50% think Snowden is one of the good guys and not a traitor and shouldn't be punished, but every major US news outlet consistently paints Snowden in the worst possible light doing their best to help the government out as much as possible with its blatant character assassinations and smears.
I actually think US news sources are more like Pravda. Every single one is nothing more than an arm of the US government. The only way to get any news that is even remotely objective and not wildly pro-government biased is to seek foreign news sources like Al Jazeera, RT, or the BBC. So it's a Pot meet Kettle kind of situation. I actually think RT.com, at least the American section, is quite a bit less biased than any US source of news.
Also the fact that you are spreading lies and calling Snowden a traitor probably means that you get your paycheck from the US government. I think you are a bit too obvious though. Haven't you guys ever heard of subtlety? If you want to serve your masters well it would be better to town down some of the more obvious defector/traitor verbiage. You can't be an effective cyber warrior if it is obvious to everyone that that is what you are.
Three, I thought we hated the big bad corporations. Now we want them to fight our battles with the government we generally side with against them?
Are you actually trying to argue that our government is an enemy of corporate power? Half the time politicians end up with a cushy overpaid job with one of them when they leave public office. They aren't enemies. The corporations couldn't even exist in their current form without the government to protect them from liability, from individual responsibility. Corporations and the government are the best of friends.
If the government belongs to these companies then why should they bother to cooperate? They could just tell them to fuck off and collect their own data.
My understanding was that they get paid well for their cooperation and for their time. They aren't losing money on the surveillance directly. Quite the opposite.
I don't have a problem with the NSA collecting information about me. My problem is what they could be intending to do with it.
Well good for you, but what about the rest of us? Do you base all of your political positions on "To hell with everyone else! What's in it for me?"
Simply eliminating it means you go back to the president using the intelligence services as his own personal army to spy on his political opponents.
And you think the FISA courts are preventing that? The president can do that anyway. And the NSA can do whatever it wants with or without FISA courts. When everything they do is hidden and anyone who squacks about it ends up like Manning or Snowden they truly have nothing to fear. They don't need anyone's permission to do whatever they want as long as everything they do is a secret. It's not like they don't routinely lie to congress and FISA anyway. Hell they probably lie even to the president.
Freedom is never useless. It's the principle that this country was founded upon. Giving it up just means more human misery no matter how much crime there is. And we are not facing routine daily terrorist attacks.
Even with daily terrorist attacks I still don't see that turning our government into the one that George Orwell dreamed up is going to help anyway. It might stop some of the attacks, but not all of them and then we still have to live in a privacy-less dystopia.
and is subject to far fewer restrictions.
Restrictions? What are these "restrictions" you speak of?
It is the NKVD or GPU that we should really be worried about.
Well it's not as simple as that. If the government were simply not allowed to do anything not specifically explicitly listed in the Constitution, then there wouldn't be a need to list things that they couldn't do.
The need to list those things was debated precisely because they were afraid that their inclusion would imply that human beings had no other rights and the government was allowed to do anything it wanted that did not interfere with those enumerated rights. They hoped that including the 9th amendment would make their position clear, but instead it was simply ignored.
"Here are the 10 ways that the government is limited, but the government is permitted to do anything else."
That is exactly how our government interprets it. In fact SCOTUS doesn't even consider them "rights". It calls them "privileges".
There's plenty of reason to think that the authors of the Constitution expected us to use our heads and figure out where to draw some of the lines between what the government can or can't do. It's actually pretty absurd to think otherwise. Why else would you have 3 different branches all play a role in creating, interpreting, and executing laws *in addition* to the Constitution?
The constitution enumerates the broad strokes of what the government is allowed to do. How law makers choose to make use of those powers is up to them. They are allowed to make any law which does not exceed the limited powers granted to the government in the constitution. If a law exceeds the authority granted to the government in the constitution it is unconstitutional and automatically invalid and is supposed to be struck down by the SCOTUS. Laws are specific implementations of powers granted in the constitution.
Why have an ability to amend the Constitution?
The ability to amend the constitution was intended to be difficult since it can lead to tyranny of the majority against any minority. The constitution, by limiting what the government is allowed to do, was intended to protect minorities and individuals from the tyranny of mob rule that is the downside to democracy. The democratic process was never really intended to override their fundamental rules of what a just government may properly do.
Obviously they expected some level of fluidity and contextual judgment, though we could debate what they expected that level to be.
They did expect society to make some changes, but they hoped that it would not be necessary and they didn't want it to be easy and they certainly didn't intend it to mean that the constitution was a mere subset of everything the government was allowed to do and that the only thing protecting citizens from its wrath was those few amendments thrown in as an afterthought just in case.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/07/11/day-six-facebook-teen-jail.html
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130502/18364622931/ma-teen-arrested-held-without-bail-posting-supposed-terrorist-threat-facebook.shtml
Before you argue that that is not "protected" speech let me remind you of the point I was making about being allowed unrestricted freedom of speech in your own home joking around with your friends. The NSA is making nearly all forms of communication fullly public to be put under the microscope by law enforcement agencies looking for something to bust you on.
Okay Mr. Shill. I'll bite. It used to be that you only had to worry about getting arrested for saying the wrong thing if you spoke in public. If you post on your facebook page that you want to murder children and then say, "just kidding" nowadays you go to prison for a long time. It is pretty much understood that if you are at home joking around with your friends you can say literally anything without worrying about going to prison for it. Due to the NSA any form of communication that is not in meatspace is the equivalent of making a statement to the police. So it's a kind of chilling effect and that is just one of the problems with this sort of universal surveillance.
It isn't difficult to think of more. Like the fact that there is a 100% chance that that NSA info has already been abused. We just don't know about it. If I had access to that data I would abuse it too. It's just human nature.
Why would the DEA reveal the original source of the tips anyway? Once they have the tip they can gather their own data independently or even claim the voice recording or whatever as their own. No need to drop the charges if it goes to trial.
In order to prevent a new oppressive government from using those tools, the authors of the Bill of Rights made them illegal.
Actually the Bill of Rights was just supposed to be a reminder of what the government was not allowed to do. Anything not specifically allowed in the constitution was supposed to be forbidden to the government. The constitution was supposed to be a way of telling the government, "You can do these things and only these things. In order to do anything else you must actually amend the constitution." Enumerating the nearly infinite set of all things that the government was not allowed to do seemed a lot harder than enumerating the small list of their powers.
Strong encryption is - as far as we know from Mr. Snowden who knows a bit more of their abilities than the average person - not compromised.
Has he actually released information about NSA decryption capabilities? I missed that. Do you have a link?
Downloading copyrighted material is also illegal in many countries, but that hasn't stopped millions of people from doing it. It would be difficult to enforce a crackdown on the use of P2P communication software if millions of people used it right from the start. It is difficult to defeat the protection of the herd with sufficiently large numbers in the herd. Off course if the US decides to go for broke and just arrest or execute everyone in giant concentration camps then all bets are off.
And I look at negative ratings first because a vendor or retailer won't pad a product with negative reviews.
Right. Because retailers are too stupid to think of the idea of paying shills to leave negative reviews of their competitors. There are also fake negative reviews.
This doesn't work with the non-obvious shills on sites like Amazon. There is no way for you to know whether a detailed story that sounds convincing is true or not. As has already been pointed out humans nearly always overestimate their ablity to detect a lie. Not all shills are obvious about it.
Bad reviews can also be fake, but yes by skipping the 5 star reviews you will skip over the highest percentage of shill reviews. That still leaves a lot of shill reviews however, some highly skilled and subtle and others more obvious. The shills that were clever enough not to go for a full 5 stars are probably also clever enough to write a realistic sounding review that mentions one or two mildly bad aspects of a product along with the good ones.