Worse, LOVEINT is a bit disturbing, but not the kind of abuse that's serious on a governmental level.
Suppose the next election is Hillary vs. Christie. Would you be happy with people listening in on Christie's phone calls and those of his circle and supporters? Or Hillary's?
Imagine how that could be abused to swing elections. Counter strategies. Embarrass or blackmail donors.
All because the technology is in place with weak protections that a determined agent (or cabal) could easily bypass.
Just the "metadata", knowing who these people talk to, can be seriously abused.
And how naive do people have to be to think that all of that and more is not already going on in a secret organization? Not you specifically, I'm talking people in general.
Seriously, how can an educated person go to work each day, knowing they are violating civil rights of everyone in the country (not to mention the world) and still feel good about their job? They job demands bunch of deluded true believers or people simple without ethics.
This has been my experience. Most of the people I know who hold a clearance believe all or most of the bullshit they learned in school. The US are the Good Guys fighting against those evil terrorists. Sure there are problems, but any lawbreaking was done for the best of intentions. That's who gets cleared. If you color outside the lines, you don't get cleared. My clearance was denied, go figure.
This gets to an interesting dynamic; that people can disagree, or have differing viewpoints and not have one be "wrong". This comes up quite a bit on the topic of religion or the existence of God. Religion is certainly a situation in which people have been told what to think. All of these Christians or Jews or Muslims or Hindus or whatever did not come to their beliefs independently. I very much agree with your point that it is a control structure; they all are. They are more about regimenting behavior and beliefs than anything truly spiritual.
As to the existence of God, we don't know either way. A god or gods may exist or he/they may not. I personally believe that there exists an entity who created the universe. But I have absolutely no issue with Atheists. My belief is personal, held for personal reasons. I cannot prove the existence of this higher consciousness that I believe in, so why would I expect anyone else to share my belief? It's not about right and wrong, it's about what works for a person in their life. I have become more comfortable with the concepts of "maybe" and "I don't know".
Here is a good philosophical exercise that everyone can do. Think about your values and opinions on various things. Ponder which ones of them are just you repeating what you have been told to think about the particular topic.
That'd be most of them. Most of people's ideas, attitudes and opinions are not their own. They have either been told what to think, or have selected a position from a menu presented to them by some teacher, parent, P.R. firm, news channel, religion, etc. Careful though, most people are likewise unreceptive to that idea. I include myself in this estimation, though I do try to examine my beliefs. It is unavoidable, in a way. It's not easy to transfer knowledge, information or something like values without some form of indoctrination.
But people come to see the established order, or consensus as iron-clad. They are threatened by the idea that the truth can be fluid, and facts they have known their whole lives could turn out to be wrong. It is unsettling, so they avoid such realizations. We see this dynamic in studies that show how people will retain a belief even in the face of contradicting evidence. They will explain away or discount the new evidence so that they may continue with their belief. It is interesting and sometimes maddening to me. But as I said earlier, I know what I think and why I think it. So when most people disagree with me on some subject, I am not bothered as much.
IIRC, he had about 3 or 4 of them built from old microwave scraps and some hand-machined parts. I wouldn't be surprised if he got a "stop or you'll get v&" letter from Flowers By Irene or their friends. It's the kind of thing feds get all itchy about.
We live in a free country; don't let anyone tell you different.
Being 6'4", I have to drive with my head stabilized against the roof, when I'm not ducking to see the stop light. If I sit further back, either I can't steer properly, or my head bounces off the top of the windshield when braking and occasionally the top of door when turning right.
Honestly given the number of drunk idiots on the road, combined with the number of people who can't even drive properly when they are sober let alone inebriated (anyone who claims they aren't impaired at 0.08 is kidding themselves), I'm surprised people don't support this measure more.
I'd guess it's because they think the ends don't justify the means.
Also, people will admit the craziest things. "Do you know why I've stopped you?" "Yes, officer, you stopped me because of the the dead body in my trunk! Oh no, don't tell me you stopped me because of the bag of drugs under my seat..."
I love that question. The answer is obviously "no". He hasn't yet told me why he stopped me, so how could I possibly know?
Except that in the US there must be probable cause in order to detain people and search them.
"Probable cause" is whatever the cops want to invent. I got pulled over once while driving home from grocery shopping one night, with the cop wanting to know if I'd had anything to drink, where was I going, etc. The reason they pulled me over is because they "saw me swerving". I was doing nothing of the sort.
And yet the policeman's word is considered a "fact" in court. They are assumed to always be telling the truth. Show me someone who claims to always tell the truth and I'll show you a liar.
Does growing drugs present a direct and immediate threat to others?
Driving impaired does even if you are not obviously weaving all over the road.
Ok, what's your point? If you are not exhibiting any signs of being impaired, there should be no reason to pull you over even if you are actually drunk. Or do you not understand what probable cause means?
Yes, I know, that is the point. Cops shouldn't be able to just say, "oh, he said sure, go ahead and look".
The burden of proof is on the police, not on the citizen. If they have PC, they should be able to back it up.
The idea is that in a free country, we are not subject to inspection or investigation by our government unless we have actually taken actions that draw such attention to ourselves.
Combine that with the fact that most people do not know their rights when confronted by police. Most people are too ignorant or intimidated to exercise and defend their rights when faced with authority. I don't blame them, as police are trained to be intimidating.
It's a problem though, because people end up unwittingly surrendering their rights. I would think that a real education system would teach people stuff like that; their rights vis-a-vis the state and its representatives. But they don't because our education system is designed to prepare people for the workforce, not educate them as competent, independent citizens.
You're expecting that quaint old concept of "Innocent until Proven Guilty". We got rid of that years ago. Back in the 1980s when every employment applicant became a suspected drug addict and illegal alien.
Yeah, I remember those days. Good times...
But that's part of what worries me about our new paradigm. It's this notion that we should be stopping people before they commit crimes. It sounds like a great idea, but it's really easy to slip into a thought-crime perspective where just an interest in the world around you starts looking suspect. A book about beating a polygraph sounds really interesting to me. I have no reason to think I'll be faced with a polygraph test. But the idea of beating one sounds intriguing. So I might read this book just out of curiosity. Or a book on picking locks. I have no interest in breaking into anyone's home or business. But I think it would be cool to know how to pick a lock; it might be useful too. We should not be making curiosity out to be sinister. It is how we learn and grow.
Nothing much did happen, other than a minor government holiday, Obamacare launched to a mess...
oh yea...
Snowden told us all something that we already knew, so nothing changed there.
Those of us who care, already knew. Those who didn't know, didn't care, or didn't want to know, or are too busy watching American Idol or Honey Boo Boo or whatever.
When I used to suggest that we were all being spied on, I was called paranoid or a conspiracy theorist. Nowadays I'm not. So that's changed, and frankly I appreciate it.
You think it's "rather funny" that they might think you have an interest in beating polygraph examinations if you bought a book on beating polygraph examinations?
What, I can't read something for my own edification anymore? If I read a book by Ann Coulter, does that mean I'm a liberal-hating conservative? Or if I read the Communist Manifest that I'm a Marxist? If I read a book on RFID, does that make me a hacker? What about a book on alarm systems? Am I now a burglar? I like to learn about things that interest me. I like to know how things work. I'm interested in diverse ideas. I guess that makes me suspicious.
When I saw the movie all those years ago, it clearly seemed to be a parody of jingoism/militarism. I mean, with the cheesy propaganda news feeds and the reflexive eagerness for warfare, it was quite obviously a parody. I question the premise of this article.
By a similar token the need for the NSA is an ugly reality. Not every group or society on the planet is willing to live in peace within their own borders. Seventy years ago it was Germany, Italy, and Japan. Not long after that was settled, North Korea decided it would invade South Korea. After WW2 the Soviet Union and its allies used or threatened to use military force on many occasions including in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Berlin, Cuba. North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. The list goes on and on. Saddam's Iraq invaded Kuwait and annexed it until the UN authorized the US and allied forces to remove Iraq's army from Kuwait. Chinese state controlled media just published maps showing targets for Chinese nuclear weapons in the US and also publicized the existence of their extensive submarine force. Russia has started probing US and European air defenses again, and has made mock nuclear attacks. Even ignoring terrorism the NSA has plenty to watch for, and will for the foreseeable future.
There are may things limiting human potential. One of the biggest is human nature.
I only wish you would include the United States in your estimation. The US is the largest arms dealer in the world, and has its armies in more countries than any other. Their black ops agencies have overthrown governments and trained terrorists in every corner of the globe.
The world can indeed be a dangerous place. The United States is a major player on that world stage, and not some innocent bystander that needs to protect itself from all those other bad countries. The US needs to protect itself in the same way an organized crime family needs to protect itself. The NSA is not like Captain America, fighting for Truth and Justice. It's more like Luka Brasi.
Or you can not use any Google products. Gmail, google maps, search etc are free so that they can advertise to you and collect data on you.
Funny story. In the early 90s a new network started being used regularily by hundreds of colleges, science labs, and educational facilities. It had been built up for military purposes as an experiment, but after building a new one, the military turned it over to the academic community. It was a global network, massively redundant, and was initially used to exchange files and e-mail. Researchers quickly developed some simple protocols to allow anyone on the network to exchange information freely with anyone else on the network. A need arose to catalog and organize the rapidly increasing number of nodes on this network, and the information just started pouring in. That network... was called the internet.
It's original inventors hoped that this free and equal peer-based network they had built would be used to share human knowledge across cultures around the world, bringing together millions, and now billions, of people together. They never asked for money. They didn't believe in advertising revenue to support it... the people who built and maintained the network did so not out of greed, or desire for wealth, but because they genuinely believed in one of the foundational principles of science:
Knowledge should be free.
I know today it's just a historical footnote, that greed and the desire for wealth has created not one, but seven of the largest companies on the planet, whose sole business plans are to exploit the free exchange of information by putting up artificial barriers and charging for access to things, while spying on us and abusing the data flow... and that today, we just accept this.
But those of us that built the network remember there are other motivations than greed... some of us still build things for others, because we want them to be free. Because we want them to have knowledge, and information -- because we understood, instinctively, that the biggest advances of the 21st century wasn't going to be in science or technology, but in an expanding concept of what it means to be human. We couldn't put it into those words, not then, but we knew it would be important that this resource remain free and open to all -- that the fastest route to human growth, worldwide, everyone, everywhere, would mean making sure knowledge was equally available. Because knowledge is power... and we knew, from tens of thousands of years of human history, that when you try to hold onto knowledge, to power, it corrupts you. It destroys you. It sucks your soul right out and pours in a neverending need for more... more what? More everything.
And so those of us who were around back then recognize Google, and the NSA, and all these other organizations and governments for what they are: An unnatural restriction on the potential of the human race. They're strangling us with their greed. They're creating the next Dark Age... because the power imbalance between the information-rich and the information-poor is growing, exponentially. And Google is one of the central players.
First you have to prove I'm wrong. You've signally failed to do so.
But I shouldn't be surprised, you're terminally clueless.
Come on, Derek. Your member number is low enough that you should be old enough to remember the Internet in 1990. It was more or less as Girlintraining describes.
If I had anything to do that I really wanted to keep secret from the government, I sure wouldn't use any electronic form of payment.
But the funny thing is, I doubt that cash will remain the way it is now for very long. Give it 20 years, we'll probably have government traceable credit chips to replace cash.
It will be in the name of preventing drug dealers and criminals and money laundering and all that, but it will also make it very hard to do anything financial that the government can't detect.
Given your spending pattern, if you used cash for a purchase it would be a red flag. Any large cash transaction is out of character and therefore suspect. I use cash whenever possible, even for larger purchases. It establishes a pattern and denies data points to the collectors.
You may be right about the future of cash. The authorities don't like anonymous transactions these days. But the more people use cash, the harder that will be to do. Use cash, people!
Slashdot Mirror
And how many incidents go undetected?
Worse, LOVEINT is a bit disturbing, but not the kind of abuse that's serious on a governmental level.
Suppose the next election is Hillary vs. Christie. Would you be happy with people listening in on Christie's phone calls and those of his circle and supporters? Or Hillary's?
Imagine how that could be abused to swing elections. Counter strategies. Embarrass or blackmail donors.
All because the technology is in place with weak protections that a determined agent (or cabal) could easily bypass.
Just the "metadata", knowing who these people talk to, can be seriously abused.
And how naive do people have to be to think that all of that and more is not already going on in a secret organization? Not you specifically, I'm talking people in general.
Seriously, how can an educated person go to work each day, knowing they are violating civil rights of everyone in the country (not to mention the world) and still feel good about their job? They job demands bunch of deluded true believers or people simple without ethics.
This has been my experience. Most of the people I know who hold a clearance believe all or most of the bullshit they learned in school. The US are the Good Guys fighting against those evil terrorists. Sure there are problems, but any lawbreaking was done for the best of intentions. That's who gets cleared. If you color outside the lines, you don't get cleared. My clearance was denied, go figure.
...after all, the status quo came about for a reason and your idea has to be pretty clever to beat it in all, or even most, metrics.
Yeah, but no one can agree on what that reason is.
I think education should be a top priority, after that everything else will sort itself out within a generation.
But what will you teach them, and what if they disagree?
This gets to an interesting dynamic; that people can disagree, or have differing viewpoints and not have one be "wrong". This comes up quite a bit on the topic of religion or the existence of God. Religion is certainly a situation in which people have been told what to think. All of these Christians or Jews or Muslims or Hindus or whatever did not come to their beliefs independently. I very much agree with your point that it is a control structure; they all are. They are more about regimenting behavior and beliefs than anything truly spiritual.
As to the existence of God, we don't know either way. A god or gods may exist or he/they may not. I personally believe that there exists an entity who created the universe. But I have absolutely no issue with Atheists. My belief is personal, held for personal reasons. I cannot prove the existence of this higher consciousness that I believe in, so why would I expect anyone else to share my belief? It's not about right and wrong, it's about what works for a person in their life. I have become more comfortable with the concepts of "maybe" and "I don't know".
Also, the hive mind.
Here is a good philosophical exercise that everyone can do. Think about your values and opinions on various things. Ponder which ones of them are just you repeating what you have been told to think about the particular topic.
That'd be most of them. Most of people's ideas, attitudes and opinions are not their own. They have either been told what to think, or have selected a position from a menu presented to them by some teacher, parent, P.R. firm, news channel, religion, etc. Careful though, most people are likewise unreceptive to that idea. I include myself in this estimation, though I do try to examine my beliefs. It is unavoidable, in a way. It's not easy to transfer knowledge, information or something like values without some form of indoctrination.
But people come to see the established order, or consensus as iron-clad. They are threatened by the idea that the truth can be fluid, and facts they have known their whole lives could turn out to be wrong. It is unsettling, so they avoid such realizations. We see this dynamic in studies that show how people will retain a belief even in the face of contradicting evidence. They will explain away or discount the new evidence so that they may continue with their belief. It is interesting and sometimes maddening to me. But as I said earlier, I know what I think and why I think it. So when most people disagree with me on some subject, I am not bothered as much.
IIRC, he had about 3 or 4 of them built from old microwave scraps and some hand-machined parts. I wouldn't be surprised if he got a "stop or you'll get v&" letter from Flowers By Irene or their friends. It's the kind of thing feds get all itchy about.
We live in a free country; don't let anyone tell you different.
Thanks AC! It's good to know some still remember really old Simpsons references.
Unfortunately, that's a given these days.
Being 6'4", I have to drive with my head stabilized against the roof, when I'm not ducking to see the stop light. If I sit further back, either I can't steer properly, or my head bounces off the top of the windshield when braking and occasionally the top of door when turning right.
Was this the largest automobile you could afford?
Honestly given the number of drunk idiots on the road, combined with the number of people who can't even drive properly when they are sober let alone inebriated (anyone who claims they aren't impaired at 0.08 is kidding themselves), I'm surprised people don't support this measure more.
I'd guess it's because they think the ends don't justify the means.
Also, people will admit the craziest things. "Do you know why I've stopped you?" "Yes, officer, you stopped me because of the the dead body in my trunk! Oh no, don't tell me you stopped me because of the bag of drugs under my seat ..."
I love that question. The answer is obviously "no". He hasn't yet told me why he stopped me, so how could I possibly know?
Except that in the US there must be probable cause in order to detain people and search them.
"Probable cause" is whatever the cops want to invent. I got pulled over once while driving home from grocery shopping one night, with the cop wanting to know if I'd had anything to drink, where was I going, etc. The reason they pulled me over is because they "saw me swerving". I was doing nothing of the sort.
And yet the policeman's word is considered a "fact" in court. They are assumed to always be telling the truth. Show me someone who claims to always tell the truth and I'll show you a liar.
Does growing drugs present a direct and immediate threat to others?
Driving impaired does even if you are not obviously weaving all over the road.
Ok, what's your point? If you are not exhibiting any signs of being impaired, there should be no reason to pull you over even if you are actually drunk. Or do you not understand what probable cause means?
That is all true, but it does not give the government the right to stop and search me without probable cause.
If some percentage of people on the road are drunk at any given time, there's a probability that it's you.
They're within the bounds of 'probable' so long as they don't search your trunk and glovebox.
What? It's Probable Cause, not Probability Cause.
Yes, I know, that is the point. Cops shouldn't be able to just say, "oh, he said sure, go ahead and look".
The burden of proof is on the police, not on the citizen. If they have PC, they should be able to back it up.
The idea is that in a free country, we are not subject to inspection or investigation by our government unless we have actually taken actions that draw such attention to ourselves.
Combine that with the fact that most people do not know their rights when confronted by police. Most people are too ignorant or intimidated to exercise and defend their rights when faced with authority. I don't blame them, as police are trained to be intimidating.
It's a problem though, because people end up unwittingly surrendering their rights. I would think that a real education system would teach people stuff like that; their rights vis-a-vis the state and its representatives. But they don't because our education system is designed to prepare people for the workforce, not educate them as competent, independent citizens.
You're expecting that quaint old concept of "Innocent until Proven Guilty". We got rid of that years ago. Back in the 1980s when every employment applicant became a suspected drug addict and illegal alien.
Yeah, I remember those days. Good times...
But that's part of what worries me about our new paradigm. It's this notion that we should be stopping people before they commit crimes. It sounds like a great idea, but it's really easy to slip into a thought-crime perspective where just an interest in the world around you starts looking suspect. A book about beating a polygraph sounds really interesting to me. I have no reason to think I'll be faced with a polygraph test. But the idea of beating one sounds intriguing. So I might read this book just out of curiosity. Or a book on picking locks. I have no interest in breaking into anyone's home or business. But I think it would be cool to know how to pick a lock; it might be useful too. We should not be making curiosity out to be sinister. It is how we learn and grow.
Nothing much did happen, other than a minor government holiday, Obamacare launched to a mess...
oh yea...
Snowden told us all something that we already knew, so nothing changed there.
Those of us who care, already knew. Those who didn't know, didn't care, or didn't want to know, or are too busy watching American Idol or Honey Boo Boo or whatever.
When I used to suggest that we were all being spied on, I was called paranoid or a conspiracy theorist. Nowadays I'm not. So that's changed, and frankly I appreciate it.
You think it's "rather funny" that they might think you have an interest in beating polygraph examinations if you bought a book on beating polygraph examinations?
What, I can't read something for my own edification anymore? If I read a book by Ann Coulter, does that mean I'm a liberal-hating conservative? Or if I read the Communist Manifest that I'm a Marxist? If I read a book on RFID, does that make me a hacker? What about a book on alarm systems? Am I now a burglar? I like to learn about things that interest me. I like to know how things work. I'm interested in diverse ideas. I guess that makes me suspicious.
It's fine as long as they have stormtrooper accuracy.
Hey! They're more precise than sand people!
When I saw the movie all those years ago, it clearly seemed to be a parody of jingoism/militarism. I mean, with the cheesy propaganda news feeds and the reflexive eagerness for warfare, it was quite obviously a parody. I question the premise of this article.
By a similar token the need for the NSA is an ugly reality. Not every group or society on the planet is willing to live in peace within their own borders. Seventy years ago it was Germany, Italy, and Japan. Not long after that was settled, North Korea decided it would invade South Korea. After WW2 the Soviet Union and its allies used or threatened to use military force on many occasions including in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Berlin, Cuba. North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. The list goes on and on. Saddam's Iraq invaded Kuwait and annexed it until the UN authorized the US and allied forces to remove Iraq's army from Kuwait. Chinese state controlled media just published maps showing targets for Chinese nuclear weapons in the US and also publicized the existence of their extensive submarine force. Russia has started probing US and European air defenses again, and has made mock nuclear attacks. Even ignoring terrorism the NSA has plenty to watch for, and will for the foreseeable future.
There are may things limiting human potential. One of the biggest is human nature.
I only wish you would include the United States in your estimation. The US is the largest arms dealer in the world, and has its armies in more countries than any other. Their black ops agencies have overthrown governments and trained terrorists in every corner of the globe.
The world can indeed be a dangerous place. The United States is a major player on that world stage, and not some innocent bystander that needs to protect itself from all those other bad countries. The US needs to protect itself in the same way an organized crime family needs to protect itself. The NSA is not like Captain America, fighting for Truth and Justice. It's more like Luka Brasi.
Or you can not use any Google products. Gmail, google maps, search etc are free so that they can advertise to you and collect data on you.
Funny story. In the early 90s a new network started being used regularily by hundreds of colleges, science labs, and educational facilities. It had been built up for military purposes as an experiment, but after building a new one, the military turned it over to the academic community. It was a global network, massively redundant, and was initially used to exchange files and e-mail. Researchers quickly developed some simple protocols to allow anyone on the network to exchange information freely with anyone else on the network. A need arose to catalog and organize the rapidly increasing number of nodes on this network, and the information just started pouring in. That network... was called the internet.
It's original inventors hoped that this free and equal peer-based network they had built would be used to share human knowledge across cultures around the world, bringing together millions, and now billions, of people together. They never asked for money. They didn't believe in advertising revenue to support it... the people who built and maintained the network did so not out of greed, or desire for wealth, but because they genuinely believed in one of the foundational principles of science:
Knowledge should be free.
I know today it's just a historical footnote, that greed and the desire for wealth has created not one, but seven of the largest companies on the planet, whose sole business plans are to exploit the free exchange of information by putting up artificial barriers and charging for access to things, while spying on us and abusing the data flow... and that today, we just accept this.
But those of us that built the network remember there are other motivations than greed... some of us still build things for others, because we want them to be free. Because we want them to have knowledge, and information -- because we understood, instinctively, that the biggest advances of the 21st century wasn't going to be in science or technology, but in an expanding concept of what it means to be human. We couldn't put it into those words, not then, but we knew it would be important that this resource remain free and open to all -- that the fastest route to human growth, worldwide, everyone, everywhere, would mean making sure knowledge was equally available. Because knowledge is power... and we knew, from tens of thousands of years of human history, that when you try to hold onto knowledge, to power, it corrupts you. It destroys you. It sucks your soul right out and pours in a neverending need for more... more what? More everything.
And so those of us who were around back then recognize Google, and the NSA, and all these other organizations and governments for what they are: An unnatural restriction on the potential of the human race. They're strangling us with their greed. They're creating the next Dark Age... because the power imbalance between the information-rich and the information-poor is growing, exponentially. And Google is one of the central players.
Google... is evil.
I think I love you.
First you have to prove I'm wrong. You've signally failed to do so.
But I shouldn't be surprised, you're terminally clueless.
Come on, Derek. Your member number is low enough that you should be old enough to remember the Internet in 1990. It was more or less as Girlintraining describes.
If I had anything to do that I really wanted to keep secret from the government, I sure wouldn't use any electronic form of payment.
But the funny thing is, I doubt that cash will remain the way it is now for very long. Give it 20 years, we'll probably have government traceable credit chips to replace cash.
It will be in the name of preventing drug dealers and criminals and money laundering and all that, but it will also make it very hard to do anything financial that the government can't detect.
Given your spending pattern, if you used cash for a purchase it would be a red flag. Any large cash transaction is out of character and therefore suspect. I use cash whenever possible, even for larger purchases. It establishes a pattern and denies data points to the collectors.
You may be right about the future of cash. The authorities don't like anonymous transactions these days. But the more people use cash, the harder that will be to do. Use cash, people!