I don't think you realise the severity of the risk. Major ISP will monitor all communications, which means buried in the back office, they will monitor insider information of other corporations to gain investor advantage. They will monitor all communications to enable the theft of patentable ideas that companies are working on. The will monitor all communications to gain business intelligence and competitive advantage. They will be able to selective slow and delete communications at critical junctures like tender time and during contractual negotiations. They will monitor all communications to gather knowledge and use that knowledge to extort compliance. Those are real threats and don't think for a second that modern psychopathic corporate executives wont exploit them and that's what your companies management risk by not taking action. Keep in mind it will cost you company nothing beyond what they are already spending on politicians in order for them to protect themselves and their business as well as saving a lot of money in the future. So why wouldn't they act, it is not who supplies the most campaign dollars individually but who supplies the most campaign dollars collectively and who is the greatest political threat. You have already seen a major upset in the primaries because an idiot politician thought he only had to listen to a few major campaign donors and could ignore everyone else, big mistake and something your management needs to remind their pet politicians of. For by far the majority of businesses (something like 9,999 out of 10,000 businesses) net neutrality is not only a good thing but realistically a vital thing.
Just a reminder, you do not steal stuff online unless you attempt to purposefully defraud someone. You download content from the internet based upon the claim by the website providing the content that they are entitled to do so. You participate in marketing exercises provided by that web site just as you do with free to air television. You are not the police, you are not the courts, it is not up to you to legally confirm who is and is not entitled to make that content available to you, that is the purview of the civil courts during the trial process. The only assumption you can ever make is who ever makes that content available to download is legally entitled to do so until such time as it is proven in court that they were are not entitled to do so.
Is that reasonable, well, let's put it this was, the internet provides billions, yes billions of bits of copyrighted content available, from web sites, to stories, to images, to music and of course video content, literally billions of specifically copyrightable works, from hundreds of millions of sources. What individual is going to be capable of validating the correct legally valid source for that content, what sound just court can claim that as fair and reasonable.
Not to forget there is a world of difference between uploading content and downloading it. Technically you can steal content online but that implies denying the copyright holders access to it and not downloading a copy of it, this has been down numerous times, most specifically by false DMCA claims, which are currently not prosecuted under law as they should be.
Meh, in this case who cares. Comcast et al are wildly outnumbered. Every company that benefits by the internet and those costs savings and profits best served by net neutrality are in a position to lobby politicians to ensure they get net neutrality. We are talking less than ten corporations attempting to take on tens of thousands of corporations.
It is all rather easy. All those CIOs and tech support types need to do is remind management what comes under risk with loss of net neutrality. Now broadband business opportunities gone, secure private communications gone, stable fast communications gone and endless price rises and communications extortion guaranteed. With tens of thousands of corporations and businesses reliant upon cheap, stable and secure broadband, calling politicians and lobbyists, who do you think will win, fewer than ten companies or a hundred thousand odd companies.
So type out the memo, run up that spreadsheet, pass the warning on to management about what they risk and let them drop a line to their pet politician, it'll cost them nothing and it will save the heaps and ensure new opportunities. In the end a bunch of politicians will take Comcast et al money but stab them in the back because there will be far too many other business to risk ignoring.
It is arbitrary where the company is based as long as tax is based at point of revenue. With regard to justification of costs, either they are taxed upon full revenue or they accurately substantiated costs whether local or foreign and exclude profit margins from those costs, failure to fully substantiate costs result in full taxes on revenue. All profit shifting to tax havens or tax discounting countries must stop, those countries that specifically set out to steal the social services of other countries should suffer full economic retribution in the form of trade blockade, blocking of all currency transactions and full tax upon revenue for those companies based in those locations.
Actually I prefer the full detail of the link, for me being more security concious that is the proper link. So learn that people have their own personal preference.
Then I would suggest you use this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-..., I do and I can assure my up to date version of FireFox looks nothing what so ever like Chrome, bit of a mix of vista (thanks to classic shell http://www.classicshell.net/) and of course regular old FireFox thanks to the afore mentioned addon . Keep in mind it is Mozzila FireFox and it is very configurable, hell, given the desire and the skill or money and you can rebrand it after yourself and do all sorts of GUI minded things to it.
Apparently this is what you should really do http://forums.comcast.com/t5/B.... Stop paying the rental fee for a modem and put in a proper modem router firewall and ensure remote management has been disabled and use a good password.
However for the adjustment to be accepted for computer integrated eye wear, society needs to make a greater moral adjustment. That being all about who people really are versus who they pretend to be and how they adjust that for various social interactions. So greater acceptance of what is normal behaviour but is publicly denied as being so.
Note the biggest fight in this will be with psychopaths and narcissists, who routinely present themselves as something they are not in order to gain social advantage and to manipulate people. They will resist this violently as had already been demonstrated as it will expose them for who they are.
So if you can see it, you can record it in order to validate your memory, requires a broader social adjustment, that we become far more honest with each other and that all bull shit manipulators will lose social advantage from being skilled liars. So computer integrated eye wear is both invasive and protective and there is a real balance in there that needs to be properly and openly discussed.
Always read the fine print, in this case pay attention to way he says. Slight delay, now what does that really mean. Like email, is the slight delay a reference to postal services, or the electronic transfer of data, so milli seconds or minutes to complete.
I pay for bandwidth, I expect that bandwidth to be usable, what I do with that bandwidth as long as it is within the law is up to me not the providers choice. I do not accept the ISP monitoring, controlling and censoring my. I do not accept the ISP crippling my choices of content suppliers in preference for their own. I do not accept my ISP to purposefully crippling the services of companies who do not contract with them in preference for those that do.
It is obvious laws are required to protect the provision of services to ensure anti-competitive monopolistic tactics can not be used to artificially inflate profit margins.
It seems like all the POS compromises were inside jobs of one description or another. Pay minimum wage, chop and change employees, means you system will get compromised, it is just a matter of time. Looks like all instore purchase will require cameras at the checkout to to photograph every person making a credit card purchase. All deliveries based upon online credit card purchases will require an identified and photographed individual to accept them (skype could become popular for online purchase, no video confirmation and record, no sale). This to set up a trail to track for fraudulent activity to find the gang and the insiders.
You missed bits and pieces like. Whose fault is the student teacher ratio, the students, the teachers or the administration. Interactive learning experiences that help engage students in learning and put lessons skills into practice, how often are they provided, student's fault, teacher's fault or administration's fault. How about teachers skills, science teachers teaching science, maths teachers teaching math, computer teachers teaching computers, so inappropriate teacher assignment, student's fault, teacher's fault or administration's fault. Quality of teaching environment, student's fault, teacher's fault or administration's fault. Hmm, you know what, politicians purposeful running public schools into the ground by reducing funding, screwing around with student teacher ratios, cutting back on learning experiences and providing a poor quality learning environment and then blaming it all on teachers are real douche bags.
What is the impact of chopping and changing teachers mid-school. Tenure must be earned and can readily be denied by the simple act of letting the teacher go prior to earning tenure and tenure also binds the teacher to the school to take another position means giving up tenure.
So some politically motivated judge makes a pretty crap ruling based upon ideology and not law. As no teacher is bound to the students, they are bound to the school and only after having substantiated their worth over an extended period and basically can only be fired for failing to perform their duties properly and not because of random short term cut backs, politics, beliefs or any other biased reason. This to create a stable and properly structured learning environment for the students, sound teacher retention practices are really required. Of course for knee jerk right wing idiots with little knowledge or understanding of anything outside of their own personal greed, how well schools run, meh who gives a crap, as long as you can blame the failure on someone else whilst cashing in.
I seems they are too stupid to realise they are no longer teaching French, they are now teaching censorship, correct speech and by inference correct thought. All who disobey will be singled out and reminded they are monitored at all times within the school and not even the slightest deviance from the defined norm will be tolerated. Really dangerous stuff, if the parents approved it, they are really rather foolish.
Lets not forget in performance based law enforcement the definition of violent crime was changed some years back in order to make the numbers look better "In the FBIâ(TM)s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault" http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cj..., in most countries and earlier in the US all assaults and threats were violent crimes. Also people are becoming more afraid of reporting crime in the US as a result to violent interactions with law enforcement.
As for guns, you only look at crimes committed with firearms not all violent crimes. Reality here is out of the mouth of the Sheriff himself, their primary role is protecting and serving law enforcement and the public are part of the war zone, the enemy. I can't believe that idiot said it out loud, you Americans really are screwed, not that you don't deserve it. You taught them all in Iraq and the Iraqis suffered for it and then you hired them as law enforcement and now you lot are suffering for it, Nelson Muntz laugh is most appropriate here https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... Shootings by law enforcement have of course risen out of control. Armoured cars and machine guns, shaven heads and testosterone supplements, hiring for lower IQ's, arrest based performance measures, yep, that's going turn out well, uh huh, it's a fucking war zone alright and the public is not the enemy, at least in the US.
Here is a neat little story that explains it all and why individuals buying bit coin lottery machines are just plain nuts http://guardianlv.com/2014/04/... . Crazy thinking along the lines of "Bitcoin enthusiasts believe Bitcoin will become the worldâ(TM)s reserve currency, replacing the dollar as the international medium of exchange, making them Bitcoin millionaires." often is promoted to hide the typical pyramid scam, which of course is the reality of bitcoin, early comers win and the later comers pay for it.
Air gap espionage I thought that was the pet project of the CIA, with MK Ultra suspected as still running as an off balance sheet semi-privatised but fully politicised entity, undoubtedly doing some very strange things, with some very strange people. Not so much cooperating with the NSA but in competition with them. One wanders if the NSA will start shifting some research efforts into that whole mind control area, as that is one remaining area that have as yet failed to tap.
It is illegal to obey an illegal order and that includes orders to break the constitution, regardless of whether or not it is illegally written into law. It is already a matter of record that the ways of doing it properly were completely and utterly broken, especially when the NSA representatives including the head of the NSA publicly lied under oath. For which they have as yet failed to be charged for the crime committed on public record!!! Also note not, not one single individual has as yet to be charged for the huge level of criminal activity within the NSA. So pointing to laws in this case is to point to empty twaddle, completely and utterly meaningless where the administration, the agencies they command, and private for profit contractors all routinely broke laws and have all have been failed to be held accountable. Which of course also means the US Department of in-Justice is also now just as culpable.
Did a Russian agent trick Snowden, well based upon repeated demands the Snowden be murdered out of hand with out trial by many US politicians, not really, Snowden was destined to go there or remain in China or possibly South America. Would a Russia agent claim extra credit for Snowden, depends upon whether it is promotion time or not, if a promotion is in the offing you can pretty much guarantee it, just like any other spy vs spy type any where in the world (publicly bragging about it is rather questionable unless it was an act of misinformation). As for getting a copy of the data, if Snowden didn't have it, then Russia would simply buy a loose copy direct off one of the many private contractors, who has access to it. Don't forget that copy nabbed at the airport in the UK.
Problem is, good police officers are not getting railroaded out of office by the general public, they are getting railroaded out of office by corrupt law enforcement seeking to protect themselves from exposure by the those good police officers. I think it is very important that you keep that in mind and the public filming them, ensures good police officers have proof of their qualities and evidence to back them up against corrupt law enforcement.
I always separate out policing from law enforcement because law enforces falsely believe they are judge, jury and executioner (only the courts enforce the law) where as police support the public in upholding the law and keeping the peace, as well as providing first response emergency rescue services. You do not measure a police officer by the number of arrests they make but by the quality of their interactions with the public both social and civil.
Well to put a positive spin on it. Think of it as a friendly reminder as to why you should leave your regular phone behind when you cross international boundaries and buy a new one on location. You might consider it a bit awkward but remember many countries border police have the right to steal you phone, maybe return it or give you rather nasty hidden free software which is very difficult to remove if it is returned. Don't forget on your return journey to grab the data off that travel phone store in on a usb drive and stick that drive in your luggage in a suitably random spot. Clear that temporary phone of all that personal data and if they take it from you and return it, toss it into the bin or sell it, never to use it again. You should never ever cross international boundaries with your personal digital history stuck in you bloody pocket it is really pretty silly, in our current perverse horribly privacy invasive global society. Don't ever roam, buy local, you can get a pretty decent phone for far less than the roaming charges and its a whole damn lot safer. Do some research before you travel and find a suitable place close to the airport or your initial accommodation to buy that phone. Once you have your travel phone enable call forwarding.
In this case, I'll bet, there would also be a bit of "Just how badly did those morons abuse the system" in this and the Feds are worried how bad it will make the look. So get it first, check how badly it was abused and then try to figure out what to do next, besides going crap, crap, crap, crap what did those idiots think they were doing, don't they know the system keeps records. The more the system was abused the more likely it will be shut down all together. Now was it abused? Oh yeah, otherwise they wouldn't bother gathering those records because otherwise those records would prove how the system works properly.
I will add a minor correction for you, It is always important to recognise the reality of what is going on. Simply blaming the government of the US, is not really accurate, that aligns too much of the fault to the bulk of the citizens of US (although they are most definitely partially to blame). You need to call it the Corporate States of America. Basically the US government and it's Agencies corruptly taken over to further the interests of psychopathic US corporate executives not just US corporations but Multi-National Corporations (so not even just Americans).
Your war is not really with the US government at all, just with the Corporations that run it and those psychopathic corporate executives and the major investors who run those corporations. So cut of the head of the snake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... and the problem will go away. Don't blame or fight the puppet, the US government and it's agencies, get rid of the puppet masters examples like the Koch(head) Boys, and the problem will go away as the bulk of US citizens regain control of their own government. Help them, save you, from themselves.
I think you are confusing creating a military defence force with a vassal state making a tributary payment.
For those various vassal states like Canada and Australia, that money would be far better spent on turning infantry and armoured units into mechanised combat engineers with full infrastructure building skills. Basically as a part of the extended training doing full trades apprenticeships. Of course you shouldn't let that training go to waste. So when the Federal government sponsors infrastructure spending they send in the combat engineers to do the labour, as they are already paid for and it applies their training honing it in a most useful fashion. Then all the government then has to pay for is materials creating huge savings on infrastructure spending. Of course the military are then useful beyond the service employment and easily go into construction careers. Even that ever demanding corporate US military industrial state should consider making that switch in order to repair it's deteriorating infrastructure.
Seriously, the reality, you want to defend you country, just look at North Korea vs Iraq. Just a handful of nukes is all you need. So forget tributary payments to the US in the form of buying tanks and planes just make your own long range stealth cruise missiles and arm the with nukes. No matter how big that invasion force one or two nukes and they are gone, just like they were never there. Never there being the normal outcome of the threat of tactical nukes.
That is not the problem of a secret trial. The real problem of a secret trial is the presumption of guilt and the defendants must prove their innocence. That presumption of guilt is basically being "LOUDLY" and "PUBLICLY" declared tainting all possible juries. The trial has to be secret because they are guilty and 'er' 'um' because they are guilty. The judge in upholding the secrecy has publicly declared their guilt. So the trial is not longer a trial of guilt or innocence simply a secret declaration of an pre-agreed punishment to be handed out. The whole point of public trials to to force government to publicly prove it's claim because we don't fucking believe them until they do so and every time government fails to prove it's case it is because it is lying.
History has proven that privatisation universally results in increase of charges to the individual and major reductions in the provisions of services. It is logical, governments attempts to provide the maximum possible service for the least possible charge. Private industry attempts to provide the least possible service for the maximum possible charge, for fuck sake they publicly brag about, it's called profit (except when privatisation is being discussed then they pay PR=B$ types to run around spreading the delusion that corporations love you, the really, really do).
No the logical rule is that purposefully destroying is the crime, neither proving nor disproving the crime related to that evidence and the originating accusation. However, the penalty applied for the destruction of evidence is the crux of the matter, in destroying the evidence of a crime the penalty should be more severe or treated as if it was the maximum possible infringement of the accused crime. The is to motivate people to preserve the evidence so that everyone knows what is going on and government and society can react to the breach on order to take step to repeat it's repetition. In destroying evidence of a crime, you are destroying the ability of society to take corrective measures and thus it affects the whole of society, well beyond those directly affected in the actual breach of law. It will also make it a pretty stupid act to destroy evidence of a lessor crime than the one you were accused of.
The whole principle of a public trial is so that everyone can know what is going on. That any claims are proven, that actions of government are substantiated, when it does the accusing and when it is the accused. It is not about simply mindlessly punishing people. It is all about what happened, why it happened, what can be done to remediate it and how it can be prevented in future.
Take for example the worst most heinous possible criminal. Simply executing them based upon a confession is completely and utterly pointless. Knowing exactly what they done, how they done, proof of this to ensure no guilty party goes free whether as a result of a false confession or those associated with the crime. This helps to gain knowledge to reduce the chances of repetition of the crime. Just like keeping the perpetrator alive as a subject of medical research, genetics, psychological and future pharmacological research associated with prevention of that crime, so not just about being able to release them if they are latter proven innocent. Those who commit the worst crimes are the most valuable research tools in order to prevent those crimes that they committed.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you realise the severity of the risk. Major ISP will monitor all communications, which means buried in the back office, they will monitor insider information of other corporations to gain investor advantage. They will monitor all communications to enable the theft of patentable ideas that companies are working on. The will monitor all communications to gain business intelligence and competitive advantage. They will be able to selective slow and delete communications at critical junctures like tender time and during contractual negotiations. They will monitor all communications to gather knowledge and use that knowledge to extort compliance. Those are real threats and don't think for a second that modern psychopathic corporate executives wont exploit them and that's what your companies management risk by not taking action. Keep in mind it will cost you company nothing beyond what they are already spending on politicians in order for them to protect themselves and their business as well as saving a lot of money in the future. So why wouldn't they act, it is not who supplies the most campaign dollars individually but who supplies the most campaign dollars collectively and who is the greatest political threat. You have already seen a major upset in the primaries because an idiot politician thought he only had to listen to a few major campaign donors and could ignore everyone else, big mistake and something your management needs to remind their pet politicians of. For by far the majority of businesses (something like 9,999 out of 10,000 businesses) net neutrality is not only a good thing but realistically a vital thing.
Just a reminder, you do not steal stuff online unless you attempt to purposefully defraud someone. You download content from the internet based upon the claim by the website providing the content that they are entitled to do so. You participate in marketing exercises provided by that web site just as you do with free to air television. You are not the police, you are not the courts, it is not up to you to legally confirm who is and is not entitled to make that content available to you, that is the purview of the civil courts during the trial process. The only assumption you can ever make is who ever makes that content available to download is legally entitled to do so until such time as it is proven in court that they were are not entitled to do so.
Is that reasonable, well, let's put it this was, the internet provides billions, yes billions of bits of copyrighted content available, from web sites, to stories, to images, to music and of course video content, literally billions of specifically copyrightable works, from hundreds of millions of sources. What individual is going to be capable of validating the correct legally valid source for that content, what sound just court can claim that as fair and reasonable.
Not to forget there is a world of difference between uploading content and downloading it. Technically you can steal content online but that implies denying the copyright holders access to it and not downloading a copy of it, this has been down numerous times, most specifically by false DMCA claims, which are currently not prosecuted under law as they should be.
Meh, in this case who cares. Comcast et al are wildly outnumbered. Every company that benefits by the internet and those costs savings and profits best served by net neutrality are in a position to lobby politicians to ensure they get net neutrality. We are talking less than ten corporations attempting to take on tens of thousands of corporations.
It is all rather easy. All those CIOs and tech support types need to do is remind management what comes under risk with loss of net neutrality. Now broadband business opportunities gone, secure private communications gone, stable fast communications gone and endless price rises and communications extortion guaranteed. With tens of thousands of corporations and businesses reliant upon cheap, stable and secure broadband, calling politicians and lobbyists, who do you think will win, fewer than ten companies or a hundred thousand odd companies.
So type out the memo, run up that spreadsheet, pass the warning on to management about what they risk and let them drop a line to their pet politician, it'll cost them nothing and it will save the heaps and ensure new opportunities. In the end a bunch of politicians will take Comcast et al money but stab them in the back because there will be far too many other business to risk ignoring.
It is arbitrary where the company is based as long as tax is based at point of revenue. With regard to justification of costs, either they are taxed upon full revenue or they accurately substantiated costs whether local or foreign and exclude profit margins from those costs, failure to fully substantiate costs result in full taxes on revenue. All profit shifting to tax havens or tax discounting countries must stop, those countries that specifically set out to steal the social services of other countries should suffer full economic retribution in the form of trade blockade, blocking of all currency transactions and full tax upon revenue for those companies based in those locations.
Actually I prefer the full detail of the link, for me being more security concious that is the proper link. So learn that people have their own personal preference.
Then I would suggest you use this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-..., I do and I can assure my up to date version of FireFox looks nothing what so ever like Chrome, bit of a mix of vista (thanks to classic shell http://www.classicshell.net/) and of course regular old FireFox thanks to the afore mentioned addon . Keep in mind it is Mozzila FireFox and it is very configurable, hell, given the desire and the skill or money and you can rebrand it after yourself and do all sorts of GUI minded things to it.
Apparently this is what you should really do http://forums.comcast.com/t5/B.... Stop paying the rental fee for a modem and put in a proper modem router firewall and ensure remote management has been disabled and use a good password.
However for the adjustment to be accepted for computer integrated eye wear, society needs to make a greater moral adjustment. That being all about who people really are versus who they pretend to be and how they adjust that for various social interactions. So greater acceptance of what is normal behaviour but is publicly denied as being so.
Note the biggest fight in this will be with psychopaths and narcissists, who routinely present themselves as something they are not in order to gain social advantage and to manipulate people. They will resist this violently as had already been demonstrated as it will expose them for who they are.
So if you can see it, you can record it in order to validate your memory, requires a broader social adjustment, that we become far more honest with each other and that all bull shit manipulators will lose social advantage from being skilled liars. So computer integrated eye wear is both invasive and protective and there is a real balance in there that needs to be properly and openly discussed.
Always read the fine print, in this case pay attention to way he says. Slight delay, now what does that really mean. Like email, is the slight delay a reference to postal services, or the electronic transfer of data, so milli seconds or minutes to complete.
I pay for bandwidth, I expect that bandwidth to be usable, what I do with that bandwidth as long as it is within the law is up to me not the providers choice. I do not accept the ISP monitoring, controlling and censoring my. I do not accept the ISP crippling my choices of content suppliers in preference for their own. I do not accept my ISP to purposefully crippling the services of companies who do not contract with them in preference for those that do.
It is obvious laws are required to protect the provision of services to ensure anti-competitive monopolistic tactics can not be used to artificially inflate profit margins.
It seems like all the POS compromises were inside jobs of one description or another. Pay minimum wage, chop and change employees, means you system will get compromised, it is just a matter of time. Looks like all instore purchase will require cameras at the checkout to to photograph every person making a credit card purchase. All deliveries based upon online credit card purchases will require an identified and photographed individual to accept them (skype could become popular for online purchase, no video confirmation and record, no sale). This to set up a trail to track for fraudulent activity to find the gang and the insiders.
You missed bits and pieces like. Whose fault is the student teacher ratio, the students, the teachers or the administration. Interactive learning experiences that help engage students in learning and put lessons skills into practice, how often are they provided, student's fault, teacher's fault or administration's fault. How about teachers skills, science teachers teaching science, maths teachers teaching math, computer teachers teaching computers, so inappropriate teacher assignment, student's fault, teacher's fault or administration's fault. Quality of teaching environment, student's fault, teacher's fault or administration's fault. Hmm, you know what, politicians purposeful running public schools into the ground by reducing funding, screwing around with student teacher ratios, cutting back on learning experiences and providing a poor quality learning environment and then blaming it all on teachers are real douche bags.
What is the impact of chopping and changing teachers mid-school. Tenure must be earned and can readily be denied by the simple act of letting the teacher go prior to earning tenure and tenure also binds the teacher to the school to take another position means giving up tenure.
So some politically motivated judge makes a pretty crap ruling based upon ideology and not law. As no teacher is bound to the students, they are bound to the school and only after having substantiated their worth over an extended period and basically can only be fired for failing to perform their duties properly and not because of random short term cut backs, politics, beliefs or any other biased reason. This to create a stable and properly structured learning environment for the students, sound teacher retention practices are really required. Of course for knee jerk right wing idiots with little knowledge or understanding of anything outside of their own personal greed, how well schools run, meh who gives a crap, as long as you can blame the failure on someone else whilst cashing in.
I seems they are too stupid to realise they are no longer teaching French, they are now teaching censorship, correct speech and by inference correct thought. All who disobey will be singled out and reminded they are monitored at all times within the school and not even the slightest deviance from the defined norm will be tolerated. Really dangerous stuff, if the parents approved it, they are really rather foolish.
Lets not forget in performance based law enforcement the definition of violent crime was changed some years back in order to make the numbers look better "In the FBIâ(TM)s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault" http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cj..., in most countries and earlier in the US all assaults and threats were violent crimes. Also people are becoming more afraid of reporting crime in the US as a result to violent interactions with law enforcement.
As for guns, you only look at crimes committed with firearms not all violent crimes. Reality here is out of the mouth of the Sheriff himself, their primary role is protecting and serving law enforcement and the public are part of the war zone, the enemy. I can't believe that idiot said it out loud, you Americans really are screwed, not that you don't deserve it. You taught them all in Iraq and the Iraqis suffered for it and then you hired them as law enforcement and now you lot are suffering for it, Nelson Muntz laugh is most appropriate here https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... Shootings by law enforcement have of course risen out of control. Armoured cars and machine guns, shaven heads and testosterone supplements, hiring for lower IQ's, arrest based performance measures, yep, that's going turn out well, uh huh, it's a fucking war zone alright and the public is not the enemy, at least in the US.
Here is a neat little story that explains it all and why individuals buying bit coin lottery machines are just plain nuts http://guardianlv.com/2014/04/... . Crazy thinking along the lines of "Bitcoin enthusiasts believe Bitcoin will become the worldâ(TM)s reserve currency, replacing the dollar as the international medium of exchange, making them Bitcoin millionaires." often is promoted to hide the typical pyramid scam, which of course is the reality of bitcoin, early comers win and the later comers pay for it.
Air gap espionage I thought that was the pet project of the CIA, with MK Ultra suspected as still running as an off balance sheet semi-privatised but fully politicised entity, undoubtedly doing some very strange things, with some very strange people. Not so much cooperating with the NSA but in competition with them. One wanders if the NSA will start shifting some research efforts into that whole mind control area, as that is one remaining area that have as yet failed to tap.
It is illegal to obey an illegal order and that includes orders to break the constitution, regardless of whether or not it is illegally written into law. It is already a matter of record that the ways of doing it properly were completely and utterly broken, especially when the NSA representatives including the head of the NSA publicly lied under oath. For which they have as yet failed to be charged for the crime committed on public record!!! Also note not, not one single individual has as yet to be charged for the huge level of criminal activity within the NSA. So pointing to laws in this case is to point to empty twaddle, completely and utterly meaningless where the administration, the agencies they command, and private for profit contractors all routinely broke laws and have all have been failed to be held accountable. Which of course also means the US Department of in-Justice is also now just as culpable.
Did a Russian agent trick Snowden, well based upon repeated demands the Snowden be murdered out of hand with out trial by many US politicians, not really, Snowden was destined to go there or remain in China or possibly South America. Would a Russia agent claim extra credit for Snowden, depends upon whether it is promotion time or not, if a promotion is in the offing you can pretty much guarantee it, just like any other spy vs spy type any where in the world (publicly bragging about it is rather questionable unless it was an act of misinformation). As for getting a copy of the data, if Snowden didn't have it, then Russia would simply buy a loose copy direct off one of the many private contractors, who has access to it. Don't forget that copy nabbed at the airport in the UK.
Problem is, good police officers are not getting railroaded out of office by the general public, they are getting railroaded out of office by corrupt law enforcement seeking to protect themselves from exposure by the those good police officers. I think it is very important that you keep that in mind and the public filming them, ensures good police officers have proof of their qualities and evidence to back them up against corrupt law enforcement.
I always separate out policing from law enforcement because law enforces falsely believe they are judge, jury and executioner (only the courts enforce the law) where as police support the public in upholding the law and keeping the peace, as well as providing first response emergency rescue services. You do not measure a police officer by the number of arrests they make but by the quality of their interactions with the public both social and civil.
You don't happen to work for some douche telecom incumbent that charges outrageous roaming charges do you?
Well to put a positive spin on it. Think of it as a friendly reminder as to why you should leave your regular phone behind when you cross international boundaries and buy a new one on location. You might consider it a bit awkward but remember many countries border police have the right to steal you phone, maybe return it or give you rather nasty hidden free software which is very difficult to remove if it is returned. Don't forget on your return journey to grab the data off that travel phone store in on a usb drive and stick that drive in your luggage in a suitably random spot. Clear that temporary phone of all that personal data and if they take it from you and return it, toss it into the bin or sell it, never to use it again. You should never ever cross international boundaries with your personal digital history stuck in you bloody pocket it is really pretty silly, in our current perverse horribly privacy invasive global society. Don't ever roam, buy local, you can get a pretty decent phone for far less than the roaming charges and its a whole damn lot safer. Do some research before you travel and find a suitable place close to the airport or your initial accommodation to buy that phone. Once you have your travel phone enable call forwarding.
In this case, I'll bet, there would also be a bit of "Just how badly did those morons abuse the system" in this and the Feds are worried how bad it will make the look. So get it first, check how badly it was abused and then try to figure out what to do next, besides going crap, crap, crap, crap what did those idiots think they were doing, don't they know the system keeps records. The more the system was abused the more likely it will be shut down all together. Now was it abused? Oh yeah, otherwise they wouldn't bother gathering those records because otherwise those records would prove how the system works properly.
I will add a minor correction for you, It is always important to recognise the reality of what is going on. Simply blaming the government of the US, is not really accurate, that aligns too much of the fault to the bulk of the citizens of US (although they are most definitely partially to blame). You need to call it the Corporate States of America. Basically the US government and it's Agencies corruptly taken over to further the interests of psychopathic US corporate executives not just US corporations but Multi-National Corporations (so not even just Americans).
Your war is not really with the US government at all, just with the Corporations that run it and those psychopathic corporate executives and the major investors who run those corporations. So cut of the head of the snake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... and the problem will go away. Don't blame or fight the puppet, the US government and it's agencies, get rid of the puppet masters examples like the Koch(head) Boys, and the problem will go away as the bulk of US citizens regain control of their own government. Help them, save you, from themselves.
I think you are confusing creating a military defence force with a vassal state making a tributary payment.
For those various vassal states like Canada and Australia, that money would be far better spent on turning infantry and armoured units into mechanised combat engineers with full infrastructure building skills. Basically as a part of the extended training doing full trades apprenticeships. Of course you shouldn't let that training go to waste. So when the Federal government sponsors infrastructure spending they send in the combat engineers to do the labour, as they are already paid for and it applies their training honing it in a most useful fashion. Then all the government then has to pay for is materials creating huge savings on infrastructure spending. Of course the military are then useful beyond the service employment and easily go into construction careers. Even that ever demanding corporate US military industrial state should consider making that switch in order to repair it's deteriorating infrastructure.
Seriously, the reality, you want to defend you country, just look at North Korea vs Iraq. Just a handful of nukes is all you need. So forget tributary payments to the US in the form of buying tanks and planes just make your own long range stealth cruise missiles and arm the with nukes. No matter how big that invasion force one or two nukes and they are gone, just like they were never there. Never there being the normal outcome of the threat of tactical nukes.
That is not the problem of a secret trial. The real problem of a secret trial is the presumption of guilt and the defendants must prove their innocence. That presumption of guilt is basically being "LOUDLY" and "PUBLICLY" declared tainting all possible juries. The trial has to be secret because they are guilty and 'er' 'um' because they are guilty. The judge in upholding the secrecy has publicly declared their guilt. So the trial is not longer a trial of guilt or innocence simply a secret declaration of an pre-agreed punishment to be handed out. The whole point of public trials to to force government to publicly prove it's claim because we don't fucking believe them until they do so and every time government fails to prove it's case it is because it is lying.
History has proven that privatisation universally results in increase of charges to the individual and major reductions in the provisions of services. It is logical, governments attempts to provide the maximum possible service for the least possible charge. Private industry attempts to provide the least possible service for the maximum possible charge, for fuck sake they publicly brag about, it's called profit (except when privatisation is being discussed then they pay PR=B$ types to run around spreading the delusion that corporations love you, the really, really do).
No the logical rule is that purposefully destroying is the crime, neither proving nor disproving the crime related to that evidence and the originating accusation. However, the penalty applied for the destruction of evidence is the crux of the matter, in destroying the evidence of a crime the penalty should be more severe or treated as if it was the maximum possible infringement of the accused crime. The is to motivate people to preserve the evidence so that everyone knows what is going on and government and society can react to the breach on order to take step to repeat it's repetition. In destroying evidence of a crime, you are destroying the ability of society to take corrective measures and thus it affects the whole of society, well beyond those directly affected in the actual breach of law. It will also make it a pretty stupid act to destroy evidence of a lessor crime than the one you were accused of.
The whole principle of a public trial is so that everyone can know what is going on. That any claims are proven, that actions of government are substantiated, when it does the accusing and when it is the accused. It is not about simply mindlessly punishing people. It is all about what happened, why it happened, what can be done to remediate it and how it can be prevented in future.
Take for example the worst most heinous possible criminal. Simply executing them based upon a confession is completely and utterly pointless. Knowing exactly what they done, how they done, proof of this to ensure no guilty party goes free whether as a result of a false confession or those associated with the crime. This helps to gain knowledge to reduce the chances of repetition of the crime. Just like keeping the perpetrator alive as a subject of medical research, genetics, psychological and future pharmacological research associated with prevention of that crime, so not just about being able to release them if they are latter proven innocent. Those who commit the worst crimes are the most valuable research tools in order to prevent those crimes that they committed.