> Except for the largest antisemitic group in history, the Nazis who were decidedly right wing.
The National Socialists were authoritarian more than anything. And there have been plenty of authoritarians of every political stripe. They both enacted socialist policies and backstabbed other socialist groups to get what they wanted. Trying to lump people you hate in with the Nazis is the oldest game on the internet.
The things that made Nazis uniquely terrible were the extermination campaign they waged in their death camps. So if you want to accuse someone of something, do it directly, rather than trying to smear people by association.
Even if that had happened, and it hasn't, it's unlikely that it would protect Google from abuse of anti-trust laws. They would only have freedom to choose who to do business with while complying with all the other laws.
By way of example, if you're on trial for assault, you can't justify yourself with a ruling saying that your actions don't qualify as attempted murder, you have to answer for the assault charge directly.
Fighting words must be "face-to-face insults likely to provoke a reasonable person to violent retaliation."
Online speech isn't face-to-face.
There's serious doubt about whether the exemption itself is still valid.
Here's a more complete explanation written by an actual first amendment lawyer:
Trope Seven: "Fighting words"
Example: "There are two exceptions from the constitutional right to free speech – defamation and the doctrine of “fighting words” or “incitement,” said John Szmer, an associate professor of political science and a constitutional law expert at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte." McClatchy.com, May 4, 2015.
No discussion of controversial speech is complete without some idiot suggesting that it may be "fighting words."
In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. If the "fighting words" doctrine survives — that's in serious doubt — it's limited to face-to-face insults likely to provoke a reasonable person to violent retaliation. The Supreme Court has rejected every opportunity to use the doctrine to support restrictions on speech. The "which by their very utterance inflict injury" language the Supreme Court dropped in passing finds no support whatsoever in modern law — the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence.
That's almost always irrelevant to the sort of speech at issue when the media invokes the trope.
Actually it's been stuck there for weeks now. No, I have no idea why Slashdot thinks it's related.
I've been noticing it for a long time now because I submitted that story. Granted, they didn't actually accept my submission, they instead wrote a new story out of my submission and credited me for some reason.
> Frankly, I've got the impression that most people don't really give a shit at all.
I have to agree with that. I've been disappointed by mass spying under all of the presidents (including Trump). I'm disappointed, but not at all surprised, that none of them have ended that.
That said, this is a pretty ordinary warrant. They can make a good case that it's not a fishing expedition and that it's to help bring conspiracy charges against people they've already arrested for rioting. That said, if they do go on a fishing expedition with this data, feel free to criticize them for that. Of course, that would most likely require additional warrants against the ISPs to unmask the subscriber(s) who own those IPs, so it shouldn't be impossible to tell if they're going after people they caught for felony rioting or organizing the violence or if they're just searching random IPs that weren't connected to anything.
> The intelligence on WMD was accurate, professional, and appropriately skeptical. It was GWB's team that rushed to judgment and pushed the narrative of WMD.
That's the trick, though. The ODNI report isn't so bad... it just doesn't actually say anything, nobody actually read it, and stories very rarely ever bother to link to it. It's the rest of the people all pushing stories about how 17 agencies say Russia hacked the election (something NOT in the damned report!).
FWIW, I don't seriously believe they "rushed to judgement" either. From what I can tell, they had an answer they wanted and they looked for any justification, however flimsy, to support that. This is the same thing you see with the Russia story today, where they push utter crap like the "Trump server secretly communicating with Russian bank!" story. Which, when you actually investigated, turned out to be a 3rd party marketing server associated with some Trump business making DNS queries due to Russian phishing scams against said bank. The real story there would be "who is spying on their DNS traffic?" but you won't find any stories in the media about that because few people ever read more than the headline of that story.
The media was actually against the GWB regime (for good reason, it turned out) so you heard more of the dissenting voices than you ever will vs. the Trump hysteria, but similar voices exist now and are going unheard. Heck, I can't even submit to Slashdot any more without getting bots marking me as "SPAM." If you go look at my submissions, you'll see this one got falsely marked as "SPAM" even though it's nothing of the sort. Slashdot published that exact story from someone else a day or so later.
I've never had ANY story flagged as spam before that and I have quite a lot of published Slashdot submissions.
Usually the question goes the other way: do you have a reason to *trust* them. Anyhow, there are a few things that make me question them, yes.
They've helped destabilize or backed coups in Iran, Guatemala, North Vietnam, Hungary, Laos, Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Zaire, Brazil, Indonesia, Greece, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Afghanistan, and probably other places. They've run operations like Operation Mockingbird, they helped with Watergate, etc.
The current operation is about like the lies over the WMD. Secret evidence, tons of stories with nothing in them but anonymous quotes.
And even the ODNI report you allude to is getting inflated. It merely said that hacking the election was something Russia might like to do, it didn't give any actual evidence if you read the damned thing. But what the heck does the Coast Guard know about this, anyhow? Oh, right, you probably didn't know who the members of that were. Or that the people who signed this report were just a couple of political appointees.
Same way you guys probably never read the Trend Micro report which everyone talked about and I think only Ars actually bothered to link to.
But sure, please feel free to show me the 'mountain of evidence' of CNN/WaPo stories that all cite each other, anonymous/secret sources, or the ODNI, Crowdstrike or Trend Micro reports that have jack all in them but an old copy of P.A.S. freeware and some Tor exit nodes. But hey, that Advanced Persistent Threat Fancy Bear is everywhere.
Actually, I thought they were building a military branch in charge of space? If they get any significant slice of the military budget they could actually do some cool stuff.
The sad thing is that when their plans to charge us for other people's sites were first made public, we were all united against that disgusting cash grab. Since then, thanks to lobbyists, we've all been divided up in our response to it and it turned into a political football when we all should have united against them.
I still wonder about the best approaches to ensure net neutrality. One thing that comes to mind is whether we can split up companies that offer internet access and to keep them from owning or making special deals with content providers. There's less reason to try to kill Netflix if you don't have special deals with Hulu or whatever.
But the problem is that they've figured out that it could be profitable and now we have to figure out how not to get exploited in their quest for profit, while they pay lobbyists to play us against each other.
> Which, in the case of this administration, would have lead to you dismissing a lot of accurate news reports. Anonymous sources should be treated with caution yes, but not immediate dismissal.
That's irrational. You should believe things because you have proof, rather than demanding proof before you'll stop believing. A horoscope might be right some of the time, too, but when it's right, it's for the wrong reasons. Otherwise, someone can just point out that anonymous rumors say that you're a creep who does unmentionable things in private. And we're all going to believe that now because you have no way to disprove it. Also, we can dismiss any evidence you do give us because you're a creep. See how that works? Believing things like this just makes people into tools: sad, pathetic, easily-manipulated losers.
> Which is why CNN only reported on the existence of the dossier, they didn't break it.
CNN reported that they had evidence they wouldn't show us. Buzzfeed actually showed us the dossier that CNN wouldn't, allowing people to understand just how unreliable the "evidence" CNN was working from was. Honestly, CNN was less ethical here, because they gave the viewers no opportunity to verify anything and they reported absurd rumors they were unable to verify instead of keeping their mouth shut.
CNN never should have reported on anything but the items they were able to verify from the dossier and never mentioned the rest. Instead they kept telling us how they had secret evidence they weren't going to show us. Then Buzzfeed showed everyone that it was a pile of garbage. It goes right up there with the story that hit Slashdot about the "secret communication with Russian banks" that turned out to be stray DNS queries from a 3rd party marketing server caused by Russian spam (also, who the hell was tapping their DNS...!?)
> Because there's nothing to retract, it hasn't been falsified.
The dossier puts one person in the wrong country because they confused him with someone who had the same name. It's true that some of the items are not falsifiable, because no evidence exists whatsoever, but again, it's not rational to believe things that cannot be falsified.
You might as well tell us that you saw all of this in your crystal ball, it's just as reliable. It's up to you to prove the claims you make. Trying to shift the proof onto others to disprove your claims is not rational. Hearsay is not evidence.
Again, they should not have reported anything they could not independently validate. Hearsay is not news. Any "journalist" who publishes such--about any person whatsoever--is a disgusting creep who deserves public scorn.
> CNN published one legitimately inaccurate story, and fired everyone involved.
CNN ended their association with Donna Brazille, but they never identified the person who actually leaked the questions, let alone did they fire them.
By all means, hold all of them to that standard. But demand documented proof of everything, on all sides. No, the person CNN blackmailed was not 15, at least according to their Reddit history. No, Trump's commission did not demand non-public voter roll data, you can read the damned letter on NPR. It's amazing how many lazy scumbag "journalists" couldn't be bothered to link the damned thing, including the article that Slashdot linked to.
It's damned pathetic that supposedly professional "journalists" are so lazy that they're not as good at providing sources as Slashdot comments.
> It uses the phrase "publicly available" then proceeds to list things that are generally not publicly available - varying by state of course.
It qualifies the entire list with "if publicly available in your state." That conditional would evaluate differently in each state, depending on local law.
Yes, some states do and some do not have those specific items. They wrote one letter for all 50 states and asked the state to supply whichever of that list of items is publicly available, figuring that the states would be smart enough to figure that out. It's written in such a way that it only requests an item if it is publicly available in that particular state.
So apparently a lot of Democratic states can't read simple English. Who knew?
> except... pretty much everything leaked from unofficial sources inside the white house has turned out to be completely true.... according to the other stories citing anonymous, unverifiable sources.
How did you get modded troll? The letter is here and it asks for "publicly-available voter roll data."
There are a few extra fields of data in some states that you missed, but they only asked for the public data, so the person you responded to is wrong to say otherwise.
Unless someone has silently edited either the Slashdot article or the Engaget article since you posted that, your statement is completely false. Nowhere on the version of the article that I read does it mention non-public data. At most, it talks about Louisiana refusing by saying they'll have to buy the publicly-available data.
But perhaps you've read the many other articles that did say that and you got confused, which is perfectly understandable. In that case, please try reading the actual letter instead of relying on lazy journalists who don't bother to cite their sources:
"I am requesting that you provide to the Comission the publicly available voter roll data" (emphasis added).
So no, neither the Slashdot summary nor the article linked here says that and it wouldn't be true even if they did say that. And any source saying that should give you a copy of the letter to verify it for yourself because if they do not, they are completely unreliable rumor mongers. If they bothered to cite reliable sources, they wouldn't have this sort of problem.
The voter rolls are public information that states may or may not make easy to get. They're normally available to anyone who follows the rules and pays the fee.
A single, instantly updated list of registered voters in California became reality on Monday, as two final counties plugged in to an electronic database mandated by a federal law enacted in the wake of the contentious 2000 presidential campaign.
> Twitter is somewhere between written and spoken in formality, so both slander and libel seem reasonable.
That's totally irrelevant. Unless you say it out loud with your mouth, it's not slander. If you're going to try to be pedantic, at least know what the word means.
> No, I don't need to use a legal dictionary since my post does not bring any legal arguments or intentions.
Slander and defamation are names of legal torts. To say we're not discussing law here is absurd and to miss your point you would need to have one to begin with, rather than an argument from ignorance using words you have failed to understand. The fact that you resort to "crayon-filled" insults shows that you are most likely just trolling, though, so I bid you good day.
To avoid repeating myself, I'll just link you back to this comment where I discuss the elements of a claim of defamation and how you need a specific, provable claim.
Basically, if a claim couldn't be proven or disproved, then it's not a factual claim and it's not defamation. Non-specific claims of "fraud" don't buy you a damned thing.
Slashdot Mirror
> Except for the largest antisemitic group in history, the Nazis who were decidedly right wing.
The National Socialists were authoritarian more than anything. And there have been plenty of authoritarians of every political stripe. They both enacted socialist policies and backstabbed other socialist groups to get what they wanted. Trying to lump people you hate in with the Nazis is the oldest game on the internet.
The things that made Nazis uniquely terrible were the extermination campaign they waged in their death camps. So if you want to accuse someone of something, do it directly, rather than trying to smear people by association.
Even if that had happened, and it hasn't, it's unlikely that it would protect Google from abuse of anti-trust laws. They would only have freedom to choose who to do business with while complying with all the other laws.
By way of example, if you're on trial for assault, you can't justify yourself with a ruling saying that your actions don't qualify as attempted murder, you have to answer for the assault charge directly.
Three points:
Here's a more complete explanation written by an actual first amendment lawyer:
Source: https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-censorship-tropes-in-the-medias-coverage-of-free-speech-controversies/
You're right, actually. I've just lost my sense of time. I can't believe it's almost been a full year now.
Actually it's been stuck there for weeks now. No, I have no idea why Slashdot thinks it's related.
I've been noticing it for a long time now because I submitted that story. Granted, they didn't actually accept my submission, they instead wrote a new story out of my submission and credited me for some reason.
> Frankly, I've got the impression that most people don't really give a shit at all.
I have to agree with that. I've been disappointed by mass spying under all of the presidents (including Trump). I'm disappointed, but not at all surprised, that none of them have ended that.
That said, this is a pretty ordinary warrant. They can make a good case that it's not a fishing expedition and that it's to help bring conspiracy charges against people they've already arrested for rioting. That said, if they do go on a fishing expedition with this data, feel free to criticize them for that. Of course, that would most likely require additional warrants against the ISPs to unmask the subscriber(s) who own those IPs, so it shouldn't be impossible to tell if they're going after people they caught for felony rioting or organizing the violence or if they're just searching random IPs that weren't connected to anything.
And here I was assuming they were counting the time spent *playing* VR games...
> The intelligence on WMD was accurate, professional, and appropriately skeptical. It was GWB's team that rushed to judgment and pushed the narrative of WMD.
That's the trick, though. The ODNI report isn't so bad... it just doesn't actually say anything, nobody actually read it, and stories very rarely ever bother to link to it. It's the rest of the people all pushing stories about how 17 agencies say Russia hacked the election (something NOT in the damned report!).
FWIW, I don't seriously believe they "rushed to judgement" either. From what I can tell, they had an answer they wanted and they looked for any justification, however flimsy, to support that. This is the same thing you see with the Russia story today, where they push utter crap like the "Trump server secretly communicating with Russian bank!" story. Which, when you actually investigated, turned out to be a 3rd party marketing server associated with some Trump business making DNS queries due to Russian phishing scams against said bank. The real story there would be "who is spying on their DNS traffic?" but you won't find any stories in the media about that because few people ever read more than the headline of that story.
The media was actually against the GWB regime (for good reason, it turned out) so you heard more of the dissenting voices than you ever will vs. the Trump hysteria, but similar voices exist now and are going unheard. Heck, I can't even submit to Slashdot any more without getting bots marking me as "SPAM." If you go look at my submissions, you'll see this one got falsely marked as "SPAM" even though it's nothing of the sort. Slashdot published that exact story from someone else a day or so later.
I've never had ANY story flagged as spam before that and I have quite a lot of published Slashdot submissions.
Usually the question goes the other way: do you have a reason to *trust* them. Anyhow, there are a few things that make me question them, yes.
They've helped destabilize or backed coups in Iran, Guatemala, North Vietnam, Hungary, Laos, Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Zaire, Brazil, Indonesia, Greece, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Afghanistan, and probably other places. They've run operations like Operation Mockingbird, they helped with Watergate, etc.
The current operation is about like the lies over the WMD. Secret evidence, tons of stories with nothing in them but anonymous quotes.
And even the ODNI report you allude to is getting inflated. It merely said that hacking the election was something Russia might like to do, it didn't give any actual evidence if you read the damned thing. But what the heck does the Coast Guard know about this, anyhow? Oh, right, you probably didn't know who the members of that were. Or that the people who signed this report were just a couple of political appointees.
Same way you guys probably never read the Trend Micro report which everyone talked about and I think only Ars actually bothered to link to.
But sure, please feel free to show me the 'mountain of evidence' of CNN/WaPo stories that all cite each other, anonymous/secret sources, or the ODNI, Crowdstrike or Trend Micro reports that have jack all in them but an old copy of P.A.S. freeware and some Tor exit nodes. But hey, that Advanced Persistent Threat Fancy Bear is everywhere.
Actually, I thought they were building a military branch in charge of space? If they get any significant slice of the military budget they could actually do some cool stuff.
The sad thing is that when their plans to charge us for other people's sites were first made public, we were all united against that disgusting cash grab. Since then, thanks to lobbyists, we've all been divided up in our response to it and it turned into a political football when we all should have united against them.
I still wonder about the best approaches to ensure net neutrality. One thing that comes to mind is whether we can split up companies that offer internet access and to keep them from owning or making special deals with content providers. There's less reason to try to kill Netflix if you don't have special deals with Hulu or whatever.
But the problem is that they've figured out that it could be profitable and now we have to figure out how not to get exploited in their quest for profit, while they pay lobbyists to play us against each other.
> Recently, I've been telling anyone saying "no proof!" that "There is proof, it's just above your security clearance".
Which is the same reason they still won't show us the aliens they captured in Area 51.
No worries, mate :)
You may have misunderstood, I was complaining that you got modded troll for providing factual information.
> Which, in the case of this administration, would have lead to you dismissing a lot of accurate news reports. Anonymous sources should be treated with caution yes, but not immediate dismissal.
That's irrational. You should believe things because you have proof, rather than demanding proof before you'll stop believing. A horoscope might be right some of the time, too, but when it's right, it's for the wrong reasons. Otherwise, someone can just point out that anonymous rumors say that you're a creep who does unmentionable things in private. And we're all going to believe that now because you have no way to disprove it. Also, we can dismiss any evidence you do give us because you're a creep. See how that works? Believing things like this just makes people into tools: sad, pathetic, easily-manipulated losers.
> Which is why CNN only reported on the existence of the dossier, they didn't break it.
CNN reported that they had evidence they wouldn't show us. Buzzfeed actually showed us the dossier that CNN wouldn't, allowing people to understand just how unreliable the "evidence" CNN was working from was. Honestly, CNN was less ethical here, because they gave the viewers no opportunity to verify anything and they reported absurd rumors they were unable to verify instead of keeping their mouth shut.
CNN never should have reported on anything but the items they were able to verify from the dossier and never mentioned the rest. Instead they kept telling us how they had secret evidence they weren't going to show us. Then Buzzfeed showed everyone that it was a pile of garbage. It goes right up there with the story that hit Slashdot about the "secret communication with Russian banks" that turned out to be stray DNS queries from a 3rd party marketing server caused by Russian spam (also, who the hell was tapping their DNS...!?)
> Because there's nothing to retract, it hasn't been falsified.
The dossier puts one person in the wrong country because they confused him with someone who had the same name. It's true that some of the items are not falsifiable, because no evidence exists whatsoever, but again, it's not rational to believe things that cannot be falsified.
You might as well tell us that you saw all of this in your crystal ball, it's just as reliable. It's up to you to prove the claims you make. Trying to shift the proof onto others to disprove your claims is not rational. Hearsay is not evidence.
Again, they should not have reported anything they could not independently validate. Hearsay is not news. Any "journalist" who publishes such--about any person whatsoever--is a disgusting creep who deserves public scorn.
> CNN published one legitimately inaccurate story, and fired everyone involved.
CNN's Chris Cuomo, a licensed attorney with an ethical obligation to know better and not to misinform us, falsely told us that Wikileaks was illegal. More credible lawyers quickly told us that was absolute BS.
CNN ended their association with Donna Brazille, but they never identified the person who actually leaked the questions, let alone did they fire them.
By all means, hold all of them to that standard. But demand documented proof of everything, on all sides. No, the person CNN blackmailed was not 15, at least according to their Reddit history. No, Trump's commission did not demand non-public voter roll data, you can read the damned letter on NPR. It's amazing how many lazy scumbag "journalists" couldn't be bothered to link the damned thing, including the article that Slashdot linked to.
It's damned pathetic that supposedly professional "journalists" are so lazy that they're not as good at providing sources as Slashdot comments.
> It uses the phrase "publicly available" then proceeds to list things that are generally not publicly available - varying by state of course.
It qualifies the entire list with "if publicly available in your state." That conditional would evaluate differently in each state, depending on local law.
Yes, some states do and some do not have those specific items. They wrote one letter for all 50 states and asked the state to supply whichever of that list of items is publicly available, figuring that the states would be smart enough to figure that out. It's written in such a way that it only requests an item if it is publicly available in that particular state.
So apparently a lot of Democratic states can't read simple English. Who knew?
They're "responding" to a request that wasn't made. We know this, because we can read the actual letter and see that they never asked for that.
What kind of idiot would fall for a childish trick like that?
> except... pretty much everything leaked from unofficial sources inside the white house has turned out to be completely true. ... according to the other stories citing anonymous, unverifiable sources.
How did you get modded troll? The letter is here and it asks for "publicly-available voter roll data."
There are a few extra fields of data in some states that you missed, but they only asked for the public data, so the person you responded to is wrong to say otherwise.
Did someone update the article silently? The article does not, in fact, claim that (though other articles have). Nor does the Slashdot summary.
You are, of course, correct that the actual letter requests "publicly available voter roll data" but nobody bothers to cite (or read) that.
Unless someone has silently edited either the Slashdot article or the Engaget article since you posted that, your statement is completely false. Nowhere on the version of the article that I read does it mention non-public data. At most, it talks about Louisiana refusing by saying they'll have to buy the publicly-available data.
But perhaps you've read the many other articles that did say that and you got confused, which is perfectly understandable. In that case, please try reading the actual letter instead of relying on lazy journalists who don't bother to cite their sources:
"I am requesting that you provide to the Comission the publicly available voter roll data" (emphasis added).
So no, neither the Slashdot summary nor the article linked here says that and it wouldn't be true even if they did say that. And any source saying that should give you a copy of the letter to verify it for yourself because if they do not, they are completely unreliable rumor mongers. If they bothered to cite reliable sources, they wouldn't have this sort of problem.
The voter rolls are public information that states may or may not make easy to get. They're normally available to anyone who follows the rules and pays the fee.
Or there's what California does.
> Twitter is somewhere between written and spoken in formality, so both slander and libel seem reasonable.
That's totally irrelevant. Unless you say it out loud with your mouth, it's not slander. If you're going to try to be pedantic, at least know what the word means.
> No, I don't need to use a legal dictionary since my post does not bring any legal arguments or intentions.
Slander and defamation are names of legal torts. To say we're not discussing law here is absurd and to miss your point you would need to have one to begin with, rather than an argument from ignorance using words you have failed to understand. The fact that you resort to "crayon-filled" insults shows that you are most likely just trolling, though, so I bid you good day.
Yes, definitely. The age doesn't make CNN's nasty behavior any better, I just want to blame them for real problems and not BS.
To avoid repeating myself, I'll just link you back to this comment where I discuss the elements of a claim of defamation and how you need a specific, provable claim.
Basically, if a claim couldn't be proven or disproved, then it's not a factual claim and it's not defamation. Non-specific claims of "fraud" don't buy you a damned thing.