Current NASA boss is Michael Griffin is a Bush 2005 appointee.
As for what govt employees can do, they first must follow the law. That does include some protection for whistleblowers, but it's not unlimited. Otherwise, they must follow their superior's direction. NASA ain't that far removed from the military. If they have an ethical problem, there may be ethic/compliance complaint channels to follow. Or they could resign. Blabbing to congress outside the legally-described Congressional oversight process is gross insubordination.
Oversimplified: He's working for "We The People" who have decided that he & other govt employees will take direction from the US President and his appointees. His wishes and desires do not outweigh the 51% who voted from the Prez.
'scuse me, but Why does he think he can talk? He's a GOVERNMENT employee, and they are paid to keep military, financial and diplomatic secrets. I'm very sure he signed a secrecy agreement.
His employer, the US govt, pays him to work and find out things for it. Not for anyone else. Work for hire.
If he had wanted to preserve his free speech, he ought to have chosen a different employment. Acedemic work would be obvious.
The limit on growth of a bureaucracy is the competence of it's denizens. Money is no limit -- it is raised by taxes and squabbled over. The least competant (by internal stds) lose. Popularity is no limit.
The EU, and to a decreasing extent, the UK,.au and.ca have larger bureaucracies than the US because government employment has higher social status so it attracts more talented individuals.
Do you really want a more competant government? You will just get more of it, until it expands to it's limit of competence.
I think I can see a bit of both sides here: 1) The US constitution does not authorize fishing trips; 2) evidence is needed about filter effectivness to make a decision on-the-merits.
The usual solution to this is redacted data: the party gets just what it needs, but no more. In this case, the judge could order Google to randomize source IP addresses (or at least the low order 8 bits) and instruct the US govt that it may not use the data for any individual prosecutions (fruit of the poisoned vine). Under such orders, the govt might withdraw it's request.
Privacy is all well and good, but is it a tool that should be allowed to hide wrongdoing? No. The US Constitution is very clear on the matter. "Warrents shall issue..."
In a civil trial, subpoenae are available for all information in anyone's possession. Deleted or archived too, so long as someone still has it. No penalty if not. It's all potentially evidence. If it's fishing, then object to the judge. S/he'll decide on the merits. Do you want courts to work without evidence?
As usual, attempts to ban something mostly just serve as publicity.
It would have been better to request that the material clearly be labelled "parody" or "fiction", because some wankers might be confused and think Howie is a nice guy.
Comments like "I want those people on my carpet" are just foolish. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
People do things for reasons. Hammering them for things that turn out badly just produces CYA, fear and paralysis. Red in tooth-and-claw management always devours itself.
Prosecutors need the HD caches, etc. to discover and prove the identity of the perpetrators. Sure, the victim machine logs will show the IP of the attacker, but how do they turn that into a person to arrest?
Look at game theory: betrayal and greed only work in the very short term. Co-operation works much better long term. Different people have different time horizons (discount rates), but the system has long memories. Getting longer with electronics.
Anyplace that uses surveillance is expected to _use_ it, and have hard evidence for allegations. No "might have". Either they got the tape, or they don't.
AFAIK, SOx is all about increasing "transparency",
mostly records retention and statement quality. OSS can only help these, not hurt, unless the corp is incurring liability by violating licences.
Please understand: People who go into the armed services of any nation are giving up rights that civilians enjoy. This is one of the things that makes conscription so reprehensible.
Military commanders are worried about troop morale, and will intervene to keep whatever they consider disruptive away. They can and will punish spreading of dissent or other insubordination. Sometimes very severely.
The military also censors what it's members can say. This is necessary to avoid inadvertantly informing an enemy, but like everything else, it can be abused. Also part of service life. It ain't pretty.
The BBC poseur appears to accept the bobbies boast: tame the internet, and crime will stop. That is too laughable for comment.
Law enforcement _never_ has been able to stop crime, and at best has been able to catch stupid crooks. This give the illusion of enforcement and really does provide an effective deterrant.
More specifically, there's lots of legit crypto traffic out ther: HTTPS you might want to use with your bank is probably the biggest. Streaming video is mostly MPEG2 or MPEG4 and is indistinguishable from crypto -- a pseudorandom stream that is incredibly difficult to analyse by machine. Crypto or no, a sniffer can't tell "Desparate Houswifes" from OBL issuing a fatwa. Let alone stego.
This horse gone. Trawling won't work. So the cops have to go back to targetted surveillance. Boo hoo! It's expensive, and so will need at least internal justification. If not external via warrents.
"wrong" has several meanings. The newspaper probably did nothing illegal. Unless Denmark has some sort of "promoting hatred" laws. But the newspaper may have been very morally wrong in blaspheming an important world religion. Of course, that depends on your sense of morals.
I'm deeply concerned about the Arab/Islamic reactions to the Danish cartoons depicting The Prophet Mohammed.
I accept the cartoons are blasphemy and deeply offensive. Yet I hear no acknowledgment that freedom-of-expression is religiously venerated in the West. Worse, official (pandering?) reaction (sanctions) holds large unrelated groups responsible rather than the tiny right-wing newspaper that did the wrong. The many must pay for the misdeeds of the few. This implies responsibility for their own extremists!
I know media everywhere is seriously distorted. In the West, fear sells ink, photons and electrons. I wanted to understand the feeling on the ground. What are the people feeling?
Do you have a reference saying ISPs will be required to capture new [metadata] that they are already not capturing? TFA said that incompleted cellphone calls might not be captured if the equipment wasn't capable.
Running a full capture (minus content) will not be possible on most current equipment. Crisco will be selling a lot of new routers. There are very few 100baseTX hubs out there (most are switches) so sniffing traffic will take new [router] hardware as well as the new beefy logging machine. And I don't have any idea how intra-ISP traffic can be captured.
Those of you hot under the collar [and impatient] POP QUIZ: What does you ISP log now, and how long does s/he retain it? Have you asked?
I read TFA & elsewhere the word "retention". No-where does it mandate that information not being captured will suddenly have to be.
I do not expect ISPs will have to log all TCP/IP traffic (ala tcpdump). They'd need massive new firewall logging servers. Insteady, they will just have to keep their sendmail and login files for two years. And phone billing info likewise. Many probably already are. AFAIK, US telecoms have been required from pre-PC days to keep this info for at least one year.
In all sincerity, I thought no one could escape. AOL crutches crippled a newbie for life. Using the term "screenname" [twice-ugh] marked the OP as an [ex?]AOLer. TFA said "profile", and I think most of us would say "userid" or UID for the oldtimers.
But the content indicated s/he wasn't entirely clueless. Congratulations!
Slashdot Mirror
As for what govt employees can do, they first must follow the law. That does include some protection for whistleblowers, but it's not unlimited. Otherwise, they must follow their superior's direction. NASA ain't that far removed from the military. If they have an ethical problem, there may be ethic/compliance complaint channels to follow. Or they could resign. Blabbing to congress outside the legally-described Congressional oversight process is gross insubordination.
His employer, the US govt, pays him to work and find out things for it. Not for anyone else. Work for hire.
If he had wanted to preserve his free speech, he ought to have chosen a different employment. Acedemic work would be obvious.
The EU, and to a decreasing extent, the UK, .au and .ca have larger bureaucracies than the US because government employment has higher social status so it attracts more talented individuals.
Do you really want a more competant government? You will just get more of it, until it expands to it's limit of competence.
The usual solution to this is redacted data: the party gets just what it needs, but no more. In this case, the judge could order Google to randomize source IP addresses (or at least the low order 8 bits) and instruct the US govt that it may not use the data for any individual prosecutions (fruit of the poisoned vine). Under such orders, the govt might withdraw it's request.
In a civil trial, subpoenae are available for all information in anyone's possession. Deleted or archived too, so long as someone still has it. No penalty if not. It's all potentially evidence. If it's fishing, then object to the judge. S/he'll decide on the merits. Do you want courts to work without evidence?
It would have been better to request that the material clearly be labelled "parody" or "fiction", because some wankers might be confused and think Howie is a nice guy.
People do things for reasons. Hammering them for things that turn out badly just produces CYA, fear and paralysis. Red in tooth-and-claw management always devours itself.
Not even having `root` hurts only rarely, but then you get to blame those who _do_ have root.
Anyplace that uses surveillance is expected to _use_ it, and have hard evidence for allegations. No "might have". Either they got the tape, or they don't.
Military commanders are worried about troop morale, and will intervene to keep whatever they consider disruptive away. They can and will punish spreading of dissent or other insubordination. Sometimes very severely.
The military also censors what it's members can say. This is necessary to avoid inadvertantly informing an enemy, but like everything else, it can be abused. Also part of service life. It ain't pretty.
Law enforcement _never_ has been able to stop crime, and at best has been able to catch stupid crooks. This give the illusion of enforcement and really does provide an effective deterrant.
More specifically, there's lots of legit crypto traffic out ther: HTTPS you might want to use with your bank is probably the biggest. Streaming video is mostly MPEG2 or MPEG4 and is indistinguishable from crypto -- a pseudorandom stream that is incredibly difficult to analyse by machine. Crypto or no, a sniffer can't tell "Desparate Houswifes" from OBL issuing a fatwa. Let alone stego.
This horse gone. Trawling won't work. So the cops have to go back to targetted surveillance. Boo hoo! It's expensive, and so will need at least internal justification. If not external via warrents.
Thanks for the correction.
I accept the cartoons are blasphemy and deeply offensive. Yet I hear no acknowledgment that freedom-of-expression is religiously venerated in the West. Worse, official (pandering?) reaction (sanctions) holds large unrelated groups responsible rather than the tiny right-wing newspaper that did the wrong. The many must pay for the misdeeds of the few. This implies responsibility for their own extremists!
I know media everywhere is seriously distorted. In the West, fear sells ink, photons and electrons. I wanted to understand the feeling on the ground. What are the people feeling?
Running a full capture (minus content) will not be possible on most current equipment. Crisco will be selling a lot of new routers. There are very few 100baseTX hubs out there (most are switches) so sniffing traffic will take new [router] hardware as well as the new beefy logging machine. And I don't have any idea how intra-ISP traffic can be captured.
I read TFA & elsewhere the word "retention". No-where does it mandate that information not being captured will suddenly have to be.
I do not expect ISPs will have to log all TCP/IP traffic (ala tcpdump). They'd need massive new firewall logging servers. Insteady, they will just have to keep their sendmail and login files for two years. And phone billing info likewise. Many probably already are. AFAIK, US telecoms have been required from pre-PC days to keep this info for at least one year.
I think I've already seen a set of Python DVDs by artist. How will this be different? Erudite commentary?
But the content indicated s/he wasn't entirely clueless. Congratulations!