The posting of this article to Slashdot is FUD, pure and simple, as is most anti-nuclear propaganda. Radioactive material, like all other toxins, requires a certain concentration to be lethal.
You seem to be among the growing sub-group of the population who think nothing is dangereous. Sort of the antithesis of the tin-foil hat crowd.
First, your post misleads by defining the end result of exposure to radioactivity or chemical toxins to be only lethality. Just because someone does not receive a lethal dose of any toxin does NOT mean they weren't mighty sick or their lives were not ruined by the exposure.
Secondly, your post misleads by stating that the radioactive material from the satellite's core will be evenly spread out over the planet. Such a hypothesis is not reasonable given the heavy shielding of the reactor core, which will arrive at the surface at least partly intact.
Third, your post misleads by equating the exposure from the low energy, x-ray emitting radioactive source in a dental x-ray machine to the disintegrating plutonium core of an falling satellite. One involves exposure to x-ray radiation from a well contained, relatively benign radiation source while the other involves exposure to solids of a highly radioactive full-spectrum emitter, plutonium.
If the core is exposed during re-entry portions of it will be released as highly radioactive plutonium particles (probably in the form of smoke). A single particle of plutonium lodged in the lungs of an individual will produce cancer. The plutonium not released to the atmosphere will impact the Earth and be distributed in a concentrated area with a potentially lethal effects. Probably in sizable chunks spread along a swath several hundred miles long.
In the absolute worst-case scenario, what if the core fell into New York City, London or Paris or Mecca? Aren't we spending billions of dollars to prevent dirty bombs?
There is a big difference from being exposed to the radiation from a dental x-ray and being exposed to the core plutinium from a reactor. To say that the risk from a falling plutonium reactor is the same as a dental x-ray is absurd.
there might be a few applications out there, but none that I can think of off the top of my head.
Sheesh. Get an imagination. As I write this I can see:
A roving auctioneer taking his LAN with him so agents on the bidding floor can access information about the items.
A biologist in the field using it so his students can log data as they collect samples, thereby allowing the focus of the research to change in real time.
Teachers who have to change classrooms taking their LAN with them so students can access info in the classroom.
A buyer who needs access to a lot of product information can take the backpack to a location and then access the info, compare prices, fill out order forms etc. through a handheld without having to lug a laptop around the warehouse.
Speakers at conferences can provide background information to audience members no matter where they give the talk.
It took me about five minutes to come up with these ideas.
Why does this get moderated as flamebait? It expresses a valid and sensical opinion. It is no more flamebait that the "murder is cool" post, and contains a lot more insight.
Re:Absurd level of moral relativism.
on
Microdrone Spy Planes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And the US was morally superior, you say? In WWII the US used flamethrowers to incinerate 50 teenage student nurses in a cave on Iwo Jima when they refused to come out. In Vietnam Wiliam Calley ordered the execution of 350 women, children and elderly at My Lai. More than 20% of the victims were under the age of 5. The US killed more civilians in the fire-bombing of Dresden (an open city) than the Japanese killed in Nanking by an order of magnitude. Did this make the US and all its soldiers amoral? No. Neither did Nanking make the Kamikaze amoral.
My point, and I think that of the original poster, is the morality of killing innocents does not hinge on the mode of delivery.
Too highbrow indeed. It wasn't a pop-culture Borg reference but a play on words involving the helicopter's control stick (a "collective"), which is quite witty.
I am always amazed by the reaction from most people whenever this topic comes up on slashdot. The great worry seems to be commercialization and the ability of merchants to use targeted marketing. These are the least of my worries. RFID technology is the great wet-dream of the police state.
In your post you recognized the potential abuse of RFID by government agencies, but you didn't go far enough. Your scenario started the tracking by police with an illegal act, when in fact the government will be able to track everyone all the time. They will be able to identify where we go, when we go, and who we go with. Agencies in the US and Great Britain already monitor practically every telephone and email message ON THE PLANET via Echelon, so getting enough computing power to monitor everyone's activities in the US won't be a big problem for them.
By placing scanners on the street the government can easily track everyone by their clothing. They will also be able to identify who you associate with by identifying all the tags near yours, easily collecting "known associate" data on every single citizen.
An undercover agent walking through a political rally against [your cause here] will be able to identify everyone at that rally.
One of my worries is that this internal spying is being made possible by businesses who want to place RFID tags in everything we buy. Congress has not yet allowed a national ID card (although the current administration supports one) but an ID card will be unnecesssary when everyone carries around 5 - 10 RFID tags. Homeland Security will just piggyback on the commercial system.
Hmm, actually it is called an anaolgy. I didn't extend your point at all - I merely pointed out how a similar action involving a physical object is plainly seen as wrong.
As for Amazon, Epinions, etc, a large number of sites link to these places for information on products they discuss.
You can rationalize your postion all you want, but Google hits to Epinions, kelkoo and amazon pages that don't even exist result from clear manipulation of Google. Please tell me how legitimate links from legitimate pages could possibly take me to dynamically created pages on Amazon, Kelkoo and Epinions that have nothing to do with my search terms other than to say "No Reviews of X. Be the first to post a Review of X.". Are you really saying that there are lots of legitimate links out there pointing to those pages? Get real.
You can't seriously be telling me that you see no moral, logical, or functional difference between posting a link with a certain title to associate an innocuous phrase with a public figures name and the violent hijacking of an aircraft, usualy involving the execution of one or more passengers.
Sheesh! Talk about extending the point! Of course there are moral and functional differences between hijacking aircraft and hijacking google links - one involves aircraft and people and the other doesn't. Where you are correct is that I don't see a logical difference in the two (logical similarity is the point of an analogy after all). Don't make up statements by me and then try to discredit them - it only makes you look, well, dumb. Neither does making some absurd statements about passenger executions enhance your position.
My analogy is actually quite good - taking a google search to a location entirely unexpected to the user but which is only of benefit to the hijacker is remarkably similar to commandeering an aircraft to take people to an unexpected physical location that is of benefit to the hijacker.
Actually, the *most* irritating thing about slashdot are the people who know absolutely nothing about what they are talking about and STILL insist in inflicting the rest of us with their brain dumps.
Case in point - your moronic post. It costs absolutely nothing to view any Salon article.
The original article says that the problem is that the "page rank" takes things out of context. I assume they mean the little snippets of the page that are displayed.
You may be right, but that isn't what I interpreted the complaint to be. My interpretation is that the damaging page came to the top and was displayed more prominantly than all the other pages that did NOT say damaging things about him. He thinks this is unfair and the pages that say good things about him should not go to the bottom of the list. Of course the damaging page turned out to be from the State of California listing CPAs under investigation, so of course it has more links to it than other, positive, pages.
If Google used a pagerank systm that preferred pages with words such as "criminal" or "investigation" over words like "honest" or "upstanding" he would have a case, but Google's technique of using the number of links to a page is pretty much independent of that kind of bias.
that's what makes PageRank valuable... by using the terms used by people to link to a particular page, they reflect real phrases used by real people to refer to a particular page
By your logic aircraft hijackers have just as much right to take the plane to Cuba as the others on the plane have to get to the destination printed on the ticket - after all, the hijackers are passengers too, and have their own destination preferences. Why should the other passengers complain that the plane didn't go to the destination they expected?
Additionally, your statement that these are real people using real phrases is not always true. When I am searching for a particlar term I far too often get links to pages with "Reviews of X" or "Best prices for X" and when I go to that page there is absolutely nothing there about it. Even when I type in a complex search term I still get hijacked links to common words in the phrase. Clearly the companies are manipulating Google results using PageRank to get you to their site at any cost. Epinions, Kelkoo and Amazon are among the largest abusers of the PageRank system in this way. I assume they have thousands of bogus pages posted somewhere with tens of thousands of links from common words to their site but with no real information.
RTFA - this IS about paper and pen ballots, and a machine's inability to properly record it. This has NOTHING to do with people voting on computers.
But that doen't mean what he said isn't valid. Besides, what you just said is wrong. The votes were tallied on computers. Having no human oversight resulted in errors that would not have been made if the voted had been hand-counted.
Receipts don't (and won't) go to the voter, they go to the election officials who can use it to conduct a recount. The voter may get to hold the receipt for a while to verify that it accurately reflects his vote, but then it is used to either officially place his vote or to provide a trackable record of all votes. NO polling place currently gives out receipts for voters to carry out of the poll, nor are they likely to in the future. This is by design, not by accident. It would be too easy to influence people who have not voted by using the information; and yes, by scoundrels requiring proof that the voter voted for the "proper" candidate.
Are the white vote cards one-time use cards and are they saved by the election officials? If so, this sounds like a pretty good system that allows recounts. Ballot stuffing would be difficult since the poll should have the same number of cards at the end of the day that they had at the beginning of the day. There would be a fairly high cost to buy the cards in the first place, but if they are blanked and re-used in the next election it would be a very economical in the long run.
It was thoughtful of the officials to put that big black arrow on the card to make voting easy for all the inebriated partyers.
It's all about trust, and right now someone else is making the decision about who we can trust.
It isn't about trust, it's about verification. No voting process should rely on trust at any point. It should be checked and verified at every step, no matter who runs or designs it.
It is very worrying that Sequoia did not think of that. It seems like a very basic QC check to me. It raises the question of what other obvious flaws the systems have. The common denominaor of all the electronic voting systems seems to be that they have hired idiots as project managers. Their programming is sloppy, their error-trapping techniques are sloppy, and their documentation is sloppy or non-existent. They seem to be using the same level of care that you or I would be using to develop a shopping list program in Excel. Ending up with the wrong elected officials is just a bit more important than forgetting to pick up extra milk.
Let's not lose track of the fact that it isn't individual vtes themselves that should be held sacred, it is the ability of the population to select the country's leaders. That is a subtle but important difference. After all, the citizens of soviet russia got to vote, too.
The sanctity of an individual's vote is there to support the higher goal of expressing the people's will. The previous poster's point that confidence levels should be checked to whatever level necessary to insure that the election expressed the will of the people is correct. In theory, in an election of 100 million voters where 50,000,001 votes were cast for one candidate and 49,999,999 votes were cast for the other candidate, all the votes would have to be recounted. In an election with a 90 million/10 million split you would hardly have to re-count any votes at all. It is not important to establish that every single one of those 100 million voters had their votes counted exactly right - the will of the people can be determined without having to do so.
His major point was, correctly, that since we do not know in advance how close any election will be it is crucial to insure that re-counts to any level of confidence must be possible - hence we need paper trails for every vote.
OK, Speilburg CAN make good movies, but he generally doesn't. His scifi movies are particularly bad and are more specialized demonstration pieces for Hollywood special effects insiders than for an audience. If he has a special effect he likes he shows it to you, he then shows it to you again in case you missed how wonderful it was, and then he shows it to you AGAIN in case you missed it the first two times.
I live on an eighth floor apartment, so I hope the next one of the 2 or 3 per year that "should" burn up in the atmosphere do so well before there are only 80 feet of atmosphere left.
And I suppose you want me to use 11 pt. Letter Gothic type as well.
I'm not about to wade through the USA Patriot Act just to satisfy your requirements. Any reasonable person would accept the multiple independent summaries of the USAPA that are available. The lost restraints on wiretaps and the newly acquired ability of the government to tap any citizen's phone without their name ever having to appear on a request to a judge for a Court Order are common issues in these reports. When I was Googling I ran across at least 10 professionally prepared legal summaries of the USAPA, including one in a report to Congress, that pointed out the same issues as the EFF summary.
If anyone other than you was saying that the act did not give the government the right to tap individual phones without a specific court order that named the person(s) involved, or what criminal acts they were suspected of commiting, I might be tempted to read it for myself, but you are the only one.
Again, I ask to show me where in the patriot act it grants police the power to wire tap without a warrent.
Here's the information you requestd...
From the EFF (emphasis mine):
FBI and CIA can now go from phone to phone, computer to computer
without demonstrating that each is being used by a suspect or target of an order, or even specifically identifying the person targeted. The government may now serve a single Title III wiretap, FISA wiretap or pen/trap order on any person or entity nationwide, regardless of whether that person or entity is named in the order. The government need not make any showing to a court that the particular information or communication to be acquired is relevant to a criminal investigation.
Note that the "orders" as used above means a police wiretap order, NOT a court order authorizing a wiretap.
I'm too lazy to embed the link to the entire analysis, but here it is...
But, you know...seriously...while no huge fan of Pres. Bush....from what I hear from Kerry...and the more I learn of him and his views. I don't really see him making ANY kind of difference over issues like this (privacy)...or most the others. I think both parties are so owned by big money obligations to corporate interests...that nothing will change.
I disagree. It used to be that the two parties were primarily centrist, but the Republicans have become such right-wing extremists that the moderate Democrats are now liberal by comparison. I think the policies of the Bush administration have awakened a lot of Democrats and shown them why they are Democrats. We will never have a party that is totally good, so we just have to pick the one that best serves our wishes. Over time, if we pick candidates who think as we do the reforms will come.
So when we get a bunch of civil-liberties cancelling, Constitution-ammending, privacy-invading, police-state minded neoconservative fat cats in office we just have to vote the bastards out and remember to never make that mistake again.
Here's another point: Which candidate should you vote for - one that you THINK may lie to you in the future or one that you KNOW is lying to you? Seems a no-brainer to me.
Slashdot Mirror
The posting of this article to Slashdot is FUD, pure and simple, as is most anti-nuclear propaganda. Radioactive material, like all other toxins, requires a certain concentration to be lethal.
You seem to be among the growing sub-group of the population who think nothing is dangereous. Sort of the antithesis of the tin-foil hat crowd.
First, your post misleads by defining the end result of exposure to radioactivity or chemical toxins to be only lethality. Just because someone does not receive a lethal dose of any toxin does NOT mean they weren't mighty sick or their lives were not ruined by the exposure.
Secondly, your post misleads by stating that the radioactive material from the satellite's core will be evenly spread out over the planet. Such a hypothesis is not reasonable given the heavy shielding of the reactor core, which will arrive at the surface at least partly intact.
Third, your post misleads by equating the exposure from the low energy, x-ray emitting radioactive source in a dental x-ray machine to the disintegrating plutonium core of an falling satellite. One involves exposure to x-ray radiation from a well contained, relatively benign radiation source while the other involves exposure to solids of a highly radioactive full-spectrum emitter, plutonium.
If the core is exposed during re-entry portions of it will be released as highly radioactive plutonium particles (probably in the form of smoke). A single particle of plutonium lodged in the lungs of an individual will produce cancer. The plutonium not released to the atmosphere will impact the Earth and be distributed in a concentrated area with a potentially lethal effects. Probably in sizable chunks spread along a swath several hundred miles long.
In the absolute worst-case scenario, what if the core fell into New York City, London or Paris or Mecca? Aren't we spending billions of dollars to prevent dirty bombs?
There is a big difference from being exposed to the radiation from a dental x-ray and being exposed to the core plutinium from a reactor. To say that the risk from a falling plutonium reactor is the same as a dental x-ray is absurd.
there might be a few applications out there, but none that I can think of off the top of my head.
Sheesh. Get an imagination. As I write this I can see:
A roving auctioneer taking his LAN with him so agents on the bidding floor can access information about the items.
A biologist in the field using it so his students can log data as they collect samples, thereby allowing the focus of the research to change in real time.
Teachers who have to change classrooms taking their LAN with them so students can access info in the classroom.
A buyer who needs access to a lot of product information can take the backpack to a location and then access the info, compare prices, fill out order forms etc. through a handheld without having to lug a laptop around the warehouse.
Speakers at conferences can provide background information to audience members no matter where they give the talk.
It took me about five minutes to come up with these ideas.
Why does this get moderated as flamebait? It expresses a valid and sensical opinion. It is no more flamebait that the "murder is cool" post, and contains a lot more insight.
And the US was morally superior, you say? In WWII the US used flamethrowers to incinerate 50 teenage student nurses in a cave on Iwo Jima when they refused to come out. In Vietnam Wiliam Calley ordered the execution of 350 women, children and elderly at My Lai. More than 20% of the victims were under the age of 5. The US killed more civilians in the fire-bombing of Dresden (an open city) than the Japanese killed in Nanking by an order of magnitude. Did this make the US and all its soldiers amoral? No. Neither did Nanking make the Kamikaze amoral.
My point, and I think that of the original poster, is the morality of killing innocents does not hinge on the mode of delivery.
Too highbrow indeed. It wasn't a pop-culture Borg reference but a play on words involving the helicopter's control stick (a "collective"), which is quite witty.
I am always amazed by the reaction from most people whenever this topic comes up on slashdot. The great worry seems to be commercialization and the ability of merchants to use targeted marketing. These are the least of my worries. RFID technology is the great wet-dream of the police state.
In your post you recognized the potential abuse of RFID by government agencies, but you didn't go far enough. Your scenario started the tracking by police with an illegal act, when in fact the government will be able to track everyone all the time. They will be able to identify where we go, when we go, and who we go with. Agencies in the US and Great Britain already monitor practically every telephone and email message ON THE PLANET via Echelon, so getting enough computing power to monitor everyone's activities in the US won't be a big problem for them.
By placing scanners on the street the government can easily track everyone by their clothing. They will also be able to identify who you associate with by identifying all the tags near yours, easily collecting "known associate" data on every single citizen.
An undercover agent walking through a political rally against [your cause here] will be able to identify everyone at that rally.
One of my worries is that this internal spying is being made possible by businesses who want to place RFID tags in everything we buy. Congress has not yet allowed a national ID card (although the current administration supports one) but an ID card will be unnecesssary when everyone carries around 5 - 10 RFID tags. Homeland Security will just piggyback on the commercial system.
Your psuedo-logic is too bloody weird for me to respond.
Just to let you know, I, instarx, did NOT write that reply to your post. Someone has managed to hijack my user name it seems.
Hmm, actually it is called an anaolgy. I didn't extend your point at all - I merely pointed out how a similar action involving a physical object is plainly seen as wrong.
As for Amazon, Epinions, etc, a large number of sites link to these places for information on products they discuss.
You can rationalize your postion all you want, but Google hits to Epinions, kelkoo and amazon pages that don't even exist result from clear manipulation of Google. Please tell me how legitimate links from legitimate pages could possibly take me to dynamically created pages on Amazon, Kelkoo and Epinions that have nothing to do with my search terms other than to say "No Reviews of X. Be the first to post a Review of X.". Are you really saying that there are lots of legitimate links out there pointing to those pages? Get real.
You can't seriously be telling me that you see no moral, logical, or functional difference between posting a link with a certain title to associate an innocuous phrase with a public figures name and the violent hijacking of an aircraft, usualy involving the execution of one or more passengers.
Sheesh! Talk about extending the point! Of course there are moral and functional differences between hijacking aircraft and hijacking google links - one involves aircraft and people and the other doesn't. Where you are correct is that I don't see a logical difference in the two (logical similarity is the point of an analogy after all). Don't make up statements by me and then try to discredit them - it only makes you look, well, dumb. Neither does making some absurd statements about passenger executions enhance your position.
My analogy is actually quite good - taking a google search to a location entirely unexpected to the user but which is only of benefit to the hijacker is remarkably similar to commandeering an aircraft to take people to an unexpected physical location that is of benefit to the hijacker.
Actually, the *most* irritating thing about slashdot are the people who know absolutely nothing about what they are talking about and STILL insist in inflicting the rest of us with their brain dumps.
Case in point - your moronic post. It costs absolutely nothing to view any Salon article.
The original article says that the problem is that the "page rank" takes things out of context. I assume they mean the little snippets of the page that are displayed.
You may be right, but that isn't what I interpreted the complaint to be. My interpretation is that the damaging page came to the top and was displayed more prominantly than all the other pages that did NOT say damaging things about him. He thinks this is unfair and the pages that say good things about him should not go to the bottom of the list. Of course the damaging page turned out to be from the State of California listing CPAs under investigation, so of course it has more links to it than other, positive, pages.
If Google used a pagerank systm that preferred pages with words such as "criminal" or "investigation" over words like "honest" or "upstanding" he would have a case, but Google's technique of using the number of links to a page is pretty much independent of that kind of bias.
that's what makes PageRank valuable... by using the terms used by people to link to a particular page, they reflect real phrases used by real people to refer to a particular page
By your logic aircraft hijackers have just as much right to take the plane to Cuba as the others on the plane have to get to the destination printed on the ticket - after all, the hijackers are passengers too, and have their own destination preferences. Why should the other passengers complain that the plane didn't go to the destination they expected?
Additionally, your statement that these are real people using real phrases is not always true. When I am searching for a particlar term I far too often get links to pages with "Reviews of X" or "Best prices for X" and when I go to that page there is absolutely nothing there about it. Even when I type in a complex search term I still get hijacked links to common words in the phrase. Clearly the companies are manipulating Google results using PageRank to get you to their site at any cost. Epinions, Kelkoo and Amazon are among the largest abusers of the PageRank system in this way. I assume they have thousands of bogus pages posted somewhere with tens of thousands of links from common words to their site but with no real information.
RTFA - this IS about paper and pen ballots, and a machine's inability to properly record it. This has NOTHING to do with people voting on computers.
But that doen't mean what he said isn't valid. Besides, what you just said is wrong. The votes were tallied on computers. Having no human oversight resulted in errors that would not have been made if the voted had been hand-counted.
Receipts don't (and won't) go to the voter, they go to the election officials who can use it to conduct a recount. The voter may get to hold the receipt for a while to verify that it accurately reflects his vote, but then it is used to either officially place his vote or to provide a trackable record of all votes. NO polling place currently gives out receipts for voters to carry out of the poll, nor are they likely to in the future. This is by design, not by accident. It would be too easy to influence people who have not voted by using the information; and yes, by scoundrels requiring proof that the voter voted for the "proper" candidate.
Are the white vote cards one-time use cards and are they saved by the election officials? If so, this sounds like a pretty good system that allows recounts. Ballot stuffing would be difficult since the poll should have the same number of cards at the end of the day that they had at the beginning of the day. There would be a fairly high cost to buy the cards in the first place, but if they are blanked and re-used in the next election it would be a very economical in the long run.
It was thoughtful of the officials to put that big black arrow on the card to make voting easy for all the inebriated partyers.
It's all about trust, and right now someone else is making the decision about who we can trust.
It isn't about trust, it's about verification. No voting process should rely on trust at any point. It should be checked and verified at every step, no matter who runs or designs it.
It is very worrying that Sequoia did not think of that. It seems like a very basic QC check to me. It raises the question of what other obvious flaws the systems have. The common denominaor of all the electronic voting systems seems to be that they have hired idiots as project managers. Their programming is sloppy, their error-trapping techniques are sloppy, and their documentation is sloppy or non-existent. They seem to be using the same level of care that you or I would be using to develop a shopping list program in Excel. Ending up with the wrong elected officials is just a bit more important than forgetting to pick up extra milk.
'Scuse me, but did you perchance sleep throught the 2000 Presidential election?
Let's not lose track of the fact that it isn't individual vtes themselves that should be held sacred, it is the ability of the population to select the country's leaders. That is a subtle but important difference. After all, the citizens of soviet russia got to vote, too.
The sanctity of an individual's vote is there to support the higher goal of expressing the people's will. The previous poster's point that confidence levels should be checked to whatever level necessary to insure that the election expressed the will of the people is correct. In theory, in an election of 100 million voters where 50,000,001 votes were cast for one candidate and 49,999,999 votes were cast for the other candidate, all the votes would have to be recounted. In an election with a 90 million/10 million split you would hardly have to re-count any votes at all. It is not important to establish that every single one of those 100 million voters had their votes counted exactly right - the will of the people can be determined without having to do so.
His major point was, correctly, that since we do not know in advance how close any election will be it is crucial to insure that re-counts to any level of confidence must be possible - hence we need paper trails for every vote.
OK, Speilburg CAN make good movies, but he generally doesn't. His scifi movies are particularly bad and are more specialized demonstration pieces for Hollywood special effects insiders than for an audience. If he has a special effect he likes he shows it to you, he then shows it to you again in case you missed how wonderful it was, and then he shows it to you AGAIN in case you missed it the first two times.
The whole sequence will last 15 minutes.
And since Speilburg is the director we will see it three times in case we missed noticing how cool it was the first two times.
I live on an eighth floor apartment, so I hope the next one of the 2 or 3 per year that "should" burn up in the atmosphere do so well before there are only 80 feet of atmosphere left.
And I suppose you want me to use 11 pt. Letter Gothic type as well.
I'm not about to wade through the USA Patriot Act just to satisfy your requirements. Any reasonable person would accept the multiple independent summaries of the USAPA that are available. The lost restraints on wiretaps and the newly acquired ability of the government to tap any citizen's phone without their name ever having to appear on a request to a judge for a Court Order are common issues in these reports. When I was Googling I ran across at least 10 professionally prepared legal summaries of the USAPA, including one in a report to Congress, that pointed out the same issues as the EFF summary.
If anyone other than you was saying that the act did not give the government the right to tap individual phones without a specific court order that named the person(s) involved, or what criminal acts they were suspected of commiting, I might be tempted to read it for myself, but you are the only one.
Here's the information you requestd...
From the EFF (emphasis mine):
Note that the "orders" as used above means a police wiretap order, NOT a court order authorizing a wiretap.
I'm too lazy to embed the link to the entire analysis, but here it is...
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrori
But, you know...seriously...while no huge fan of Pres. Bush....from what I hear from Kerry...and the more I learn of him and his views. I don't really see him making ANY kind of difference over issues like this (privacy)...or most the others. I think both parties are so owned by big money obligations to corporate interests...that nothing will change.
I disagree. It used to be that the two parties were primarily centrist, but the Republicans have become such right-wing extremists that the moderate Democrats are now liberal by comparison. I think the policies of the Bush administration have awakened a lot of Democrats and shown them why they are Democrats. We will never have a party that is totally good, so we just have to pick the one that best serves our wishes. Over time, if we pick candidates who think as we do the reforms will come.
So when we get a bunch of civil-liberties cancelling, Constitution-ammending, privacy-invading,
police-state minded neoconservative fat cats in office we just have to vote the bastards out and remember to never make that mistake again.
Here's another point: Which candidate should you vote for - one that you THINK may lie to you in the future or one that you KNOW is lying to you? Seems a no-brainer to me.