cyanoacrylate wrote: > You obviously didn't read the summary
I read the entire document. You have a interesting point, let's not get personal.
> The whole point was that a repressive government > was vulnerable to a netwar if and only if it is: > > 1. In a state of political flux > 2. In the process of opening up political freedom > 3. Requiring greater world participation in its economy
Although you don't say it, you seem to imply that even if the foreign government is repressive, it is OK for our government to aid them in repression. It is supposedly justifiable because if foreign government is assisted in destroying the militant social activists then they'll become less repressive sooner. And militant social activists are exactly the people most discussed in the RAND study ( see ch2 pg20 for example ).
This is naive, IMO. Repressive governments become less oppressive when it becomes clear they can't sustain their society without healing internal divisions. See, for example, the history of South Africa. Governments try to open up 'just enough' to spur economic growth, but not enough for people to have real control over the elites who oppress them. However, as events in Eastern Europe, South Africa, etc.. show, once given some freedom, people will try to get more freedom and push past the false limits set by the ruling elites. This pushing does not 'set the country back 10 year', it propels it forward.
The question is, should the United States use its spying expertise to assist repressive governments in destroying networks of militant social activists. I think according to law and ethics the answer is no.
-Merlin
p.s. there are a lot of papers written by various folks about what 'netwar' is and is not. Stick to the '.mil' analysis, for example as it by and large avoids the hype. Netwar, to the extent that it is different from psychological-warfare, is about connections between people, institutions, etc... Intelligence helps repressive governments pick exactly who/what will 'disrupt the network' if eliminated, discredited, threatened, etc....
This thread seems to say "the NSA are technocrats".
Our tax dollars hire them to spy on everyone outside the united states and find the connections between all sorts of people, their bank accounts, their friends, political and commercial organizations. They may or may not be spying on Americans as well--they have stone-walled the U.S. Senate on the issue of Echelon.
> I've heard some say they are the biggest > collection of brains in the US. I think that's > probably true, except for maybe RAND.
The RAND Corporation's Netwar report, prepared for the U.S. government, recommends that the govt assists repressive governments in defending themselves in struggles over their reputations, and that repressive governments can do this with a variety of dirty tricks and covert operations.
If these recommendations are being carried out, and I have seen some evidence to suggest that they are, I suspect information from Echelon is being used to destroy human-rights networks.
I personally believe NSA intelligence filters from the NSA => the U.S. Army => to the Columbian army => rightwing paramilitary
If the NSA's powerful data collection capabilities have been used in this pursuit, American money is [indirectly] responsible for the the blood of, for example, Columbian and Mexican peasants killed by pro-military paramilitaries.
>Almost no languages have been designed [as a beginner's language]
LOGO stands out as the best learning language, IMO. Read papers on educational design or download the software (freeware or commercial) from The Logo Foundation.
The Logo programming environments have been developed over the past 28 years.
Some say "oh, its a baby language." I disagree. I've taught programming to scores of children in several countries. Kids can understand programming right away by seeing the LOGO turtle respond to
TELL TURTLE 0 RIGHT 90
But they also can grow with the language and learn debugging, recursion, AI, arrays, stacks, sorting functions, etc...
I've learned over a dozen computer languages, (LOGO was my fourth). But I really started to enjoy programming one summer when I created my own shoot-em-up game in Logo and helped a 12 year program a Chess game in that 'baby language'.
python's interactive prompt will be helpful to beginners. It's object and package system is easy to understand. It is less complex than perl. I think its a decent choice and with a good teacher kids can learn in any language. But python is designed to be a clear, object-oriented scripting language, while LOGO has 28 years of depth in education.
Good luck to this project! TMTOWTE (E is for Educate)
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cyanoacrylate wrote:
> You obviously didn't read the summary
I read the entire document. You have a interesting point, let's not get personal.
> The whole point was that a repressive government > was vulnerable to a netwar if and only if it is:
>
> 1. In a state of political flux
> 2. In the process of opening up political freedom
> 3. Requiring greater world participation in its
economy
Although you don't say it, you seem to imply that even if the foreign government is repressive, it is OK for our government to aid them in repression. It is supposedly justifiable because if foreign government is assisted in destroying the militant social activists then they'll become less repressive sooner. And militant social activists are exactly the people most discussed in the RAND study ( see ch2 pg20 for example ).
This is naive, IMO. Repressive governments become less oppressive when it becomes clear they can't sustain their society without healing internal divisions. See, for example, the history of South Africa. Governments try to open up 'just enough' to spur economic growth, but not enough for people to have real control over the elites who oppress them. However, as events in Eastern Europe, South Africa, etc.. show, once given some freedom, people will try to get more freedom and push past the false limits set by the ruling elites. This pushing does not 'set the country back 10 year', it propels it forward.
The question is, should the United States use its spying expertise to assist repressive governments in destroying networks of militant social activists. I think according to law and ethics the answer is no.
-Merlin
p.s. there are a lot of papers written by various
folks about what 'netwar' is and is not. Stick to the '.mil' analysis, for example as it by and large avoids the hype. Netwar, to the extent that it is different from psychological-warfare, is about connections between people, institutions, etc... Intelligence helps repressive governments pick exactly who/what will 'disrupt the network' if eliminated, discredited, threatened, etc....
This thread seems to say "the NSA are technocrats".
Our tax dollars hire them to spy on everyone outside the united states and find the connections between all sorts of people, their bank accounts, their friends, political and commercial organizations. They may or may not be spying on Americans as well--they have stone-walled the U.S. Senate on the issue of Echelon.
> I've heard some say they are the biggest
> collection of brains in the US. I think that's
> probably true, except for maybe RAND.
The RAND Corporation's Netwar report, prepared for the U.S.
government, recommends that the govt assists repressive governments in
defending themselves in struggles over their reputations, and that
repressive governments can do this with a variety of dirty tricks and
covert operations.
If these recommendations are being carried out, and I have seen some
evidence to suggest that they are, I suspect information from Echelon is
being used to destroy human-rights networks.
I personally believe NSA intelligence filters from
the NSA => the U.S. Army =>
to the Columbian army => rightwing paramilitary
If the NSA's powerful data collection capabilities have been used in this pursuit, American money is [indirectly] responsible for the the blood of, for example, Columbian and Mexican peasants killed by pro-military paramilitaries.
Merlin
>Almost no languages have been designed [as a beginner's language]
LOGO stands out as the best learning language, IMO. Read papers on educational design or download the software (freeware or commercial) from The Logo Foundation.
The Logo programming environments have been developed over the past 28 years.
Some say "oh, its a baby language."
I disagree. I've taught programming to scores of children in several countries. Kids can understand programming right away by seeing the LOGO turtle respond to
But they also can grow with the language and
learn debugging, recursion, AI, arrays, stacks, sorting functions, etc...
I've learned over a dozen computer languages, (LOGO was my fourth). But I really started to enjoy programming one summer when I created my own shoot-em-up game in Logo and helped a 12 year program a Chess game in that 'baby language'.
python's interactive prompt will be helpful to beginners. It's object and package system is easy to understand. It is less complex than perl. I think its a decent choice and with a good teacher kids can learn in any language. But python is designed to be a clear, object-oriented scripting language, while LOGO has 28 years of depth in education.
Good luck to this project! TMTOWTE (E is for Educate)