Whatever, I could use a holiday. If chatting about buying a kitten or playing guitar hero can get me a free holiday, then by all means I will continue what I'm doing.
If you think extraordinary rendition is like being on holiday, I'd hate to see where you usually vacation.
Yeah? What exactly do I need to be kept "safe" from? Are they going to send thugs round to interrogate me for flirting on Facebook?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
No I would imagine not. Any given person likely has little to fear from increased surveillance; most people's lives are uninteresting. But if someone is looking at you with the intent of finding wrongdoing, they will find it. Especially if they have a history to look back on.
The other issue is that these surveillance powers are being used against anyone the US government doesn't like, for whatever reason. Do you agree with everything the US government does and says? I'd guess not. Do you support the actions of people who are organizing to push back against those policies you disagree with? I'd imagine so. Well these surveillance (and detention) powers are being used against those groups who are fighting for what you believe in, whether you participate or not. So your interests are being indirectly harmed by these powers.
Prove that we didn't elect them. Prove that the elections are all rigged. Then I would support, even join such a move.
Until then baring arms against elected officials would just be a subversion of democracy. Who would take their place? Those who fight against the people's will by removing their chosen leaders? That would lead to tyrany for sure.
Until then all there is to do is try to vote for the best lizards we can with lots of facepalms over who our felow citizens keep chosing.
It has been shown that the elections are rigged. http://blackboxvoting.org/ Not all of them, all the time of course. But the big boys can put their thumb on the scale when it matters most.
Senator Feinstein believes the program is legal, but wants to improve public confidence.
That made me chuckle. Sorry Senator, once you've been caught hiding things people are going to think you are still hiding things even if you're not. That's how the loss of trust works. You see, we don't trust you or the NSA anymore. As a wise man once said, fool me once shame on you, fool me can't get fooled again. So there will be no improvement of confidence amongst thinking people. The NSA spies on us and lied about it. It will take a long time of explicit good behavior for us to trust you or NSA again. And we all know that's not going to happen.
so fbi as an agency works like in gta V? screw justice if you can pin something on someone..
Law enforcement does that all the time. You can't prove the guy did what you think he did, so you get him on something else. It was never proven in court that Al Capone was a gangster, only that he was a tax cheat.
The right wing says when a company is making profit then they will hire more people and create additional jobs. Are you implying that more jobs is a bad thing? Obviously you are already employed or else you wouldnt think that way.
The right wing can say that, but it doesn't make it true. When a company makes a profit, they can do with it what they like, which often includes increasing salary and bonuses of management and the owners. That's fine in and of itself, but it doesn't necessarily lead to more jobs.
The right wing will defend all human life, even if the child isnt born yet. Even if you remove God from the equation it still seems like a noble cause to me. Only the left wing is arrogant enough to think they know exactly when a human becomes a human and stops being "just a bunch of cells".
Unless the person is a criminal or terrorist, right? I don't see many on the right opposing the death penalty. Does the right know when a person ceases to be a person?
As far as pot goes, i think that the narcotic is across the board for both left and right wing.
Pot is not a narcotic. Just saying.
The right wing says that "stifling regulations" cost a company a lot of money which cuts into profits which reduces jobs available. Its a diminished returns thing. Like salt on your food, regulation is a great thing in small amounts but too much of it will destroy an industry.
But Republican governments do things like exempt energy companies from the clean air and water acts. Is the energy industry in such a fragile state that it must be allowed to pollute our air and water in order to stay in business?
The whole "tax cuts for the rich" is the biggest illusion of them all. We consider the rich as having a "tax cut" when they are still paying a higher percentage than we are. Should wealthy people be punished for being rich? Or should we stop bellyaching and blaming everyone else and try to work hard so we can be rich someday?
The top 1% have something like 45% of the entire country's wealth. They should pay more than anyone else. Taxes are not a punishment; they are a way to pay for the government and infrastructure we all use, and that helps the wealthy become and remain wealthy. Working hard is no guarantee of becoming rich. Family influence and connections are a much better indicator. That is after all, a primary way that the rich maintain their status.
So, since you believe that your taxes should be higher, I assume that you do not take any deductions when you file your income tax (or only those that bring your taxes down to what you think they should be)? If such is not the case, you are a hypocrite...
Um, no.
...and what you really believe is you are willing to pay more as long as I am paying more.
That's more like it. Paying more taxes as an individual accomplishes nothing. It's like a one-man boycott of a store; it doesn't work. If everyone in a certain bracket is paying more, then something can be accomplished. And, for the record, I have voluntarily paid a higher tax rate (you can do that in Massachusetts).
Hate to break the bad news to you, but people who vote to have their own rights taken away in the name of "security" probably didn't deserve to be making their own choices in the first place.
Incidentally, if you actually, sincerely believe that the current ball of shit that is world politics is entirely due to Rupert Murdoch, you're either mentally ill or trolling. The man is a speck, a drop in the ocean compared to some of the money moving in defense contract circles. Murdoch is just a rich fuck who's making himself richer parroting what the people with REAL power are saying, ingratiating himself to the royalty. Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking. The politicians you elected are the ones doing that plotting. Even if he were, again, not important enough to make a difference. He's a media mogul, nothing more. I'm sure if the Democrats threw more money at him he'd dance just as well for the opposite side. The know nothings that Americans elect are the problem, not their media whores.
The one plotting to take away your freedom is your president, worry about that and forget Murdoch, you might actually accomplish something. Unless the extent of your activism involves schizophrenic rants about Rupert Murdoch being some sort of conservative Voodoo shaman?
While I agree that the state of world politics is not due solely to Rupert Murdoch, I disagree that he is merely a speck. He controls quite a bit of media around the world. I hope we can all understand by now that when you can control what news and viewpoints people hear you can control what and how they think. Of course there are other news outlets, but in the US those are owned and controlled by a handful of corporations (five, I think). The operators of these corporations share certain interests and so will not allow much talk about certain subjects or viewpoints.
Murdoch is more than a speck; he is a master propagandist that has a heavy hand in how many people see the world. It's hard to overstate that kind of power. He serves a valuable purpose as a member of the Elite.
The US has no equivalent of the UK's "Official Secrets Act". By definition, one cannot unlawfully disclose classified information unless one has been "indoctrinated" (i.e. granted a security clearance). A necessary part of that process is the signing of a non-disclosure agreement whereby one agrees to be held criminally liable for unauthorized disclosure. Absent such an NDA and security indocrination, the possession and/or dissemination of classified information is perfectly legal. Note how all legal scrutiny in the Snowden case (at least in the US) is directed against Snowden himself, and not at all against any of the news outlets that used him as a source. An interesting way to "civilly disobey" would be to have all employees refuse to accept the security clearance (that the NSA would require as part of their collaboration) when the NSA comes calling.
Thank you. I have had enough of this whole "It's illegal to disclose classified information" bullshit. It's only illegal if you have a clearance. Otherwise, you can disclose away!
Yeah those "college students, weed smoking liberal hippies, and unwashed OWS layabouts" have done a really good job. Remind me again which political groups that they've worked for that have been acted for/to american society? And of course those "NRA gun-toting loudmouths" were also the backbenchers behind the tea party which... gee...actually made a serious impact on the political landscape.
They made a serious impact after they were co-opted by members of the Establishment.
The Establishment is not monolithic; there are many powerful people promoting their disparate agendas. Still, it's hard to get anything done in America without at least some wealth and power behind you. So the issue of the wealthy and powerful having out sized influence and legal latitude never really gets addressed.
And that is the crux of the matter. Risk must be quantified in the units that business decisions are made - dollars. Beyond that, risk needs to accurately assessed to the point of what is the likelihood and not what is possible. Once we know the likelihood and the cost, decision makers will be able to make their decisions.
Ah, but here's the problem: It can't be done.
Explain to me how you will take risk and quantify it in dollars, when the attacks, the attackers and the vulnerabilities are changing over time. Explain to me how you will take the complexity of an environment with multiple critical paths...which will have changed by the time you're done mapping all of them, by the way...and map the vulnerabilities (all of them...you'll need to know this, obviously, and good luck with that) against those, in combination with a full on threat assessment of all the threat actors who may be interested in the organization as a target. Explain to me how you'll actually come up with a probability of compromise for every threat and vulnerability, and a cost for each possible kind of breach. Oh, and since capital planning will be determined using this, you need to predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, how all of this will change over the next 36 months (including guessing correctly about which capital budgets for other business functions will be approved).
This has been tried; it does not work. It costs an insane amount of money to do it, and this is why none of the security frameworks (CMMI, ITIL's security subset, COBIT, NIST SP800-53, etc.) try to do it. That's why you have to instead look at where you are weak overall, and work on improvement in general terms. There's no way to get to discrete numbers when it comes to this form of risk, because there are actual people on the other end of the equation, trying to change the numbers. It's not like most other forms of risk, where the outside cause is non-sentient and fairly quantifiable with actuarial means.
Just do like they did for the bank bailouts: pick a really big number.
So do you want the NSA to break Syria's encryption about their chemical weapons attacks?
Or do you prefer we not know that the Syrian government uses chemical weapons to kill civilian populations, affecting public policy?
Which social contract would you prefer government to break? the "Government shouldn't know private activities of foreign governments" or "Government shouldn't allow foreign governments to kill civilians"?
If your privacy is important, then you think that means your government shouldn't monitor foreign communications, correct? And that means you think it's ok for foreign governments to kill civilians as they please? And if you think foreign governments should be allowed to kill civilians, then I guess you don't donate to charity either? Why would you want to help other people, after all?
You can pick either charity or privacy, but you can't have both. Sorry. That's because bad guys have power, and you need more power to overcome those bad guys for the purposes of charity.
So charity or privacy? What's it going to be?
Won't somebody please think of the civilians!
All else aside, if you think the NSA breaks codes in order to prevent civilian casualties, or for "charity", you have another thing coming. They do it to provide intelligence to the US government to facilitate furthering its national interest, in whatever form that may take. And if you think civilian casualties or chemical weapons are the actual reason we are considering whether or not to attack Syria, you have yet another thing coming.
I know you didn't mean Lizardoids like that Reptillian crap right? I mean why say that?
Because if you believe the rich and powerful would conspire to maintain and expand their position through generations you must believe in shape-shifting alien lizards. Right? I mean, it just follows. One is as far fetched as the other.
Designed to create the belief:
1 - Intelligence intercepts and interrogations are effective at getting information that "protects" "us".
2 - Drones are an effective weapon against "our" "enemies" and not principally dangerous to villagers and local civic functions.
But WHY do you believe ANY public information from an agency that has DECEIT in its charter?
I thought about that when I read "Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, holds a mechanical-engineering degree". Khalid Sheik Mohammed was tortured into confessing to the 9/11 attacks. Not that it makes any difference in the reporting, but it seems to be an important detail to me.
So things would have been less dystopian without the bailouts? I can't really imagine that..
I'd have liked to have found out. Rewarding criminality only gets you more criminality. The banks could have been put into receivership and wound down and sold off in a controlled manner, preserving jobs and transitioning to new management. Shareholders and bondholders would have taken a haircut. But that would have meant the end of those banks as we knew them and their chief management would have been out of work and out of favor. Can't have that when you have powerful friends in government, eh?
Elliot Spitzer is a good example of someone who posed a direct threat to Wall Street and suddenly its discovered that he visited prostitutes and our establishment media uses it to destroy his career.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that and made that connection.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever, I could use a holiday. If chatting about buying a kitten or playing guitar hero can get me a free holiday, then by all means I will continue what I'm doing.
If you think extraordinary rendition is like being on holiday, I'd hate to see where you usually vacation.
Yeah? What exactly do I need to be kept "safe" from? Are they going to send thugs round to interrogate me for flirting on Facebook?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
No I would imagine not. Any given person likely has little to fear from increased surveillance; most people's lives are uninteresting. But if someone is looking at you with the intent of finding wrongdoing, they will find it. Especially if they have a history to look back on.
The other issue is that these surveillance powers are being used against anyone the US government doesn't like, for whatever reason. Do you agree with everything the US government does and says? I'd guess not. Do you support the actions of people who are organizing to push back against those policies you disagree with? I'd imagine so. Well these surveillance (and detention) powers are being used against those groups who are fighting for what you believe in, whether you participate or not. So your interests are being indirectly harmed by these powers.
Sorry Sideshow Bob. But it's his special birthday wish!
Prove that we didn't elect them. Prove that the elections are all rigged. Then I would support, even join such a move.
Until then baring arms against elected officials would just be a subversion of democracy. Who would take their place? Those who fight against the people's will by removing their chosen leaders? That would lead to tyrany for sure.
Until then all there is to do is try to vote for the best lizards we can with lots of facepalms over who our felow citizens keep chosing.
It has been shown that the elections are rigged. http://blackboxvoting.org/ Not all of them, all the time of course. But the big boys can put their thumb on the scale when it matters most.
Senator Feinstein believes the program is legal, but wants to improve public confidence.
That made me chuckle. Sorry Senator, once you've been caught hiding things people are going to think you are still hiding things even if you're not. That's how the loss of trust works. You see, we don't trust you or the NSA anymore. As a wise man once said, fool me once shame on you, fool me can't get fooled again. So there will be no improvement of confidence amongst thinking people. The NSA spies on us and lied about it. It will take a long time of explicit good behavior for us to trust you or NSA again. And we all know that's not going to happen.
Maybe he tried it while gluing pictures and other knick knacks to some poster board, you insensitive clod!
Nothing is said in public without a reason.
so fbi as an agency works like in gta V? screw justice if you can pin something on someone..
Law enforcement does that all the time. You can't prove the guy did what you think he did, so you get him on something else. It was never proven in court that Al Capone was a gangster, only that he was a tax cheat.
Well said. Thanks for saving me the time of responding to the AC above.
Okay, lets start from the top:
The right wing says when a company is making profit then they will hire more people and create additional jobs. Are you implying that more jobs is a bad thing? Obviously you are already employed or else you wouldnt think that way.
The right wing can say that, but it doesn't make it true. When a company makes a profit, they can do with it what they like, which often includes increasing salary and bonuses of management and the owners. That's fine in and of itself, but it doesn't necessarily lead to more jobs.
The right wing will defend all human life, even if the child isnt born yet. Even if you remove God from the equation it still seems like a noble cause to me. Only the left wing is arrogant enough to think they know exactly when a human becomes a human and stops being "just a bunch of cells".
Unless the person is a criminal or terrorist, right? I don't see many on the right opposing the death penalty. Does the right know when a person ceases to be a person?
As far as pot goes, i think that the narcotic is across the board for both left and right wing.
Pot is not a narcotic. Just saying.
The right wing says that "stifling regulations" cost a company a lot of money which cuts into profits which reduces jobs available. Its a diminished returns thing. Like salt on your food, regulation is a great thing in small amounts but too much of it will destroy an industry.
But Republican governments do things like exempt energy companies from the clean air and water acts. Is the energy industry in such a fragile state that it must be allowed to pollute our air and water in order to stay in business?
The whole "tax cuts for the rich" is the biggest illusion of them all. We consider the rich as having a "tax cut" when they are still paying a higher percentage than we are. Should wealthy people be punished for being rich? Or should we stop bellyaching and blaming everyone else and try to work hard so we can be rich someday?
The top 1% have something like 45% of the entire country's wealth. They should pay more than anyone else. Taxes are not a punishment; they are a way to pay for the government and infrastructure we all use, and that helps the wealthy become and remain wealthy. Working hard is no guarantee of becoming rich. Family influence and connections are a much better indicator. That is after all, a primary way that the rich maintain their status.
So, since you believe that your taxes should be higher, I assume that you do not take any deductions when you file your income tax (or only those that bring your taxes down to what you think they should be)? If such is not the case, you are a hypocrite...
Um, no.
...and what you really believe is you are willing to pay more as long as I am paying more.
That's more like it. Paying more taxes as an individual accomplishes nothing. It's like a one-man boycott of a store; it doesn't work. If everyone in a certain bracket is paying more, then something can be accomplished. And, for the record, I have voluntarily paid a higher tax rate (you can do that in Massachusetts).
Hate to break the bad news to you, but people who vote to have their own rights taken away in the name of "security" probably didn't deserve to be making their own choices in the first place.
Incidentally, if you actually, sincerely believe that the current ball of shit that is world politics is entirely due to Rupert Murdoch, you're either mentally ill or trolling. The man is a speck, a drop in the ocean compared to some of the money moving in defense contract circles. Murdoch is just a rich fuck who's making himself richer parroting what the people with REAL power are saying, ingratiating himself to the royalty. Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking. The politicians you elected are the ones doing that plotting. Even if he were, again, not important enough to make a difference. He's a media mogul, nothing more. I'm sure if the Democrats threw more money at him he'd dance just as well for the opposite side. The know nothings that Americans elect are the problem, not their media whores.
The one plotting to take away your freedom is your president, worry about that and forget Murdoch, you might actually accomplish something. Unless the extent of your activism involves schizophrenic rants about Rupert Murdoch being some sort of conservative Voodoo shaman?
While I agree that the state of world politics is not due solely to Rupert Murdoch, I disagree that he is merely a speck. He controls quite a bit of media around the world. I hope we can all understand by now that when you can control what news and viewpoints people hear you can control what and how they think. Of course there are other news outlets, but in the US those are owned and controlled by a handful of corporations (five, I think). The operators of these corporations share certain interests and so will not allow much talk about certain subjects or viewpoints.
Murdoch is more than a speck; he is a master propagandist that has a heavy hand in how many people see the world. It's hard to overstate that kind of power. He serves a valuable purpose as a member of the Elite.
The US has no equivalent of the UK's "Official Secrets Act". By definition, one cannot unlawfully disclose classified information unless one has been "indoctrinated" (i.e. granted a security clearance). A necessary part of that process is the signing of a non-disclosure agreement whereby one agrees to be held criminally liable for unauthorized disclosure. Absent such an NDA and security indocrination, the possession and/or dissemination of classified information is perfectly legal. Note how all legal scrutiny in the Snowden case (at least in the US) is directed against Snowden himself, and not at all against any of the news outlets that used him as a source. An interesting way to "civilly disobey" would be to have all employees refuse to accept the security clearance (that the NSA would require as part of their collaboration) when the NSA comes calling.
Thank you. I have had enough of this whole "It's illegal to disclose classified information" bullshit. It's only illegal if you have a clearance. Otherwise, you can disclose away!
Seems the answer is, "probably". http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-is-obscenely-profitable-2011-6
Does Twitter even make money?
Yeah those "college students, weed smoking liberal hippies, and unwashed OWS layabouts" have done a really good job. Remind me again which political groups that they've worked for that have been acted for/to american society? And of course those "NRA gun-toting loudmouths" were also the backbenchers behind the tea party which ... gee...actually made a serious impact on the political landscape.
They made a serious impact after they were co-opted by members of the Establishment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=0
The Establishment is not monolithic; there are many powerful people promoting their disparate agendas. Still, it's hard to get anything done in America without at least some wealth and power behind you. So the issue of the wealthy and powerful having out sized influence and legal latitude never really gets addressed.
Doesn't approximately half the population?
And that is the crux of the matter. Risk must be quantified in the units that business decisions are made - dollars. Beyond that, risk needs to accurately assessed to the point of what is the likelihood and not what is possible. Once we know the likelihood and the cost, decision makers will be able to make their decisions.
Ah, but here's the problem: It can't be done.
Explain to me how you will take risk and quantify it in dollars, when the attacks, the attackers and the vulnerabilities are changing over time. Explain to me how you will take the complexity of an environment with multiple critical paths...which will have changed by the time you're done mapping all of them, by the way...and map the vulnerabilities (all of them...you'll need to know this, obviously, and good luck with that) against those, in combination with a full on threat assessment of all the threat actors who may be interested in the organization as a target. Explain to me how you'll actually come up with a probability of compromise for every threat and vulnerability, and a cost for each possible kind of breach. Oh, and since capital planning will be determined using this, you need to predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, how all of this will change over the next 36 months (including guessing correctly about which capital budgets for other business functions will be approved).
This has been tried; it does not work. It costs an insane amount of money to do it, and this is why none of the security frameworks (CMMI, ITIL's security subset, COBIT, NIST SP800-53, etc.) try to do it. That's why you have to instead look at where you are weak overall, and work on improvement in general terms. There's no way to get to discrete numbers when it comes to this form of risk, because there are actual people on the other end of the equation, trying to change the numbers. It's not like most other forms of risk, where the outside cause is non-sentient and fairly quantifiable with actuarial means.
Just do like they did for the bank bailouts: pick a really big number.
Interesting! Thanks for the link. But because I am a child of the 80's, and because it rocks, I'm sticking with the Judas Priest interpretation.
So do you want the NSA to break Syria's encryption about their chemical weapons attacks?
Or do you prefer we not know that the Syrian government uses chemical weapons to kill civilian populations, affecting public policy?
Which social contract would you prefer government to break? the "Government shouldn't know private activities of foreign governments" or "Government shouldn't allow foreign governments to kill civilians"?
If your privacy is important, then you think that means your government shouldn't monitor foreign communications, correct? And that means you think it's ok for foreign governments to kill civilians as they please? And if you think foreign governments should be allowed to kill civilians, then I guess you don't donate to charity either? Why would you want to help other people, after all?
You can pick either charity or privacy, but you can't have both. Sorry. That's because bad guys have power, and you need more power to overcome those bad guys for the purposes of charity.
So charity or privacy? What's it going to be?
Won't somebody please think of the civilians!
All else aside, if you think the NSA breaks codes in order to prevent civilian casualties, or for "charity", you have another thing coming. They do it to provide intelligence to the US government to facilitate furthering its national interest, in whatever form that may take. And if you think civilian casualties or chemical weapons are the actual reason we are considering whether or not to attack Syria, you have yet another thing coming.
I know you didn't mean Lizardoids like that Reptillian crap right? I mean why say that?
Because if you believe the rich and powerful would conspire to maintain and expand their position through generations you must believe in shape-shifting alien lizards. Right? I mean, it just follows. One is as far fetched as the other.
Designed to create the belief: 1 - Intelligence intercepts and interrogations are effective at getting information that "protects" "us". 2 - Drones are an effective weapon against "our" "enemies" and not principally dangerous to villagers and local civic functions.
But WHY do you believe ANY public information from an agency that has DECEIT in its charter?
I thought about that when I read "Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, holds a mechanical-engineering degree". Khalid Sheik Mohammed was tortured into confessing to the 9/11 attacks. Not that it makes any difference in the reporting, but it seems to be an important detail to me.
So things would have been less dystopian without the bailouts? I can't really imagine that..
I'd have liked to have found out. Rewarding criminality only gets you more criminality. The banks could have been put into receivership and wound down and sold off in a controlled manner, preserving jobs and transitioning to new management. Shareholders and bondholders would have taken a haircut. But that would have meant the end of those banks as we knew them and their chief management would have been out of work and out of favor. Can't have that when you have powerful friends in government, eh?
Elliot Spitzer is a good example of someone who posed a direct threat to Wall Street and suddenly its discovered that he visited prostitutes and our establishment media uses it to destroy his career.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that and made that connection.
Look- I get we live in "unsafe" times, but this is just security theater.
Actually, we don't. Not any less safe than other times, anyway. It's those in power, with an agenda, that want us to think otherwise.