Yes, I was sloppy on slighting BSD for credit and inappropriately using "Linux" as a stand-in for "Free and open-source UNIX-derived operating systems and associated server infrastructure." One should note that Microsoft internal projects enjoy the benefits of IIS as a free and open-source product, with unlimited expert support to make the system work; a situation that exists for nobody else outside Microsoft.
Nonetheless, the point raised in the original post still stands: are students being educated about programming, or indoctrinated to be worker drones tied into a proprietary ecosystem? Will they learn the benefits and social ramifications of Free software systems, or will that module be swapped out for RIAA-approved lectures on the eeeeevils of piracy? Will they be taught to think about protecting the privacy and security of end-users of systems they are programming for, or only about priorities of protecting employer profits?
No, Code.org does not need centralized tracking of each individual student's activities over many years. Tracking student achievement; determining who has passed classes and qualified for credits; is the responsibility of the local school district and educators in the classroom. For improving quality of the educational materials, all Code.org needs is aggregate summary data, at the classroom level at the very finest-grained, and to encourage evaluation and feedback from classroom educators on how well each portion of the material engages/baffles/bores/frustrates/enlightens students.
"Some kind of feedback" means collecting aggregate data reports from teachers and local school districts on how the program is working. "Some kind of feedback" does not require centrally tracking every assignment grade from each individual student. That level of intrusive tracking serves different ends from improving the educational quality of the material --- for which the companies involved have a proven track record of being heinously evil.
Anyone who wants a functioning website runs the backend on Linux. Microsoft ran Microsoft Hotmail on Linux backends for a long time during Billy G's ruthless tenure. I note you don't respond to the actual question of whether students are being brainwashed into narrow use of proprietary products, instead of learning about the world of superior tools outside profitable product lines. Sure, Microsoft cronies know how to efficiently run their own operations with Linux on the back end (not as if they'd make money from selling themselves Microsoft products), but you can bet they want everyone else to be using IIS/Exchange/Windows.
how is disliking technology for technology's sake, which is something I think that all nerds do, nerdy?
Being knowledgeable and passionate about a subject usually leads to developing a critical evaluative stance specifically towards the objects of your interest. If you're a food nerd, you're likely a more picky eater than someone who crams any piece of food into their mouth. If you're a typography nerd, you may be thrown into a spitting rage by the vast majority of texts printed. If you're a technology nerd, you might not be inclined to mindlessly gush about every silly bauble with a computer in it. You might set a rather high standard for the technology that you do admire --- expecting a remarkable level of elegance, functionality, or clever hacking found only in rare instances.
I use spatially optimized bathroom layouts, so that critical information inputs are within direct reach of sensory arrays from the command center. I do not need to embark on a long journey away from the command throne to confirm the proper function of peripheral systems. Why some people insist on inefficient megabathrooms, with a thousand square foot courtyard separating the primary functional units, is beyond me.
I prefer to use one of the thousands of directly neurally integrated advance biotech thermal sensors that I carry around at all times. I stick the tip of my finger in the water.
No, I still think that, if the methods are insufficiently described (do not sufficiently capture the nuances of the physical experiment) to permit reliable replication of results, then this makes an experiment un-reproducible by definition.
Indeed, allowances must be made for the study of ephemeral phenomena --- people's perceptions in some particular time and place; a comet passing by once --- that preclude actual recreation of the experiment. So, I think there is a "methodological description" requirement for reproducibility which is itself an abstract concept rather than (necessarily) physically enactable. Which is: the methods should be sufficiently well described that another experimenter, with access to the same resources as described in the method, could repeat the results (with allowance for stated statistical fluctuations). This covers the case where the "resources" include "students at Random U. in the year 2009," which may be impossible to acquire again without a time machine. But, the "methods" description ought to be thorough enough to cover all factors that would significantly change the outcome: if you would get a different answer by selecting participants from a different pool, then precise description of how the selection was accomplished is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, the result is useless unreproducible garbage.
So, I agree with your point that actual ability to repeat an experiment performed is not a requirement for reproducibility. I disagree that differences between described method and lab reality "excuse" any experiment from being reproducible: an experiment is "reproducible" only to the extent that any such differences are too small to alter the result (at the level of confidence stated). This may be only an "abstract, in theory" requirement for ephemeral phenomena --- but the methods and result claims need to fully reflect that, not claiming results about "The Psychology of Humans" when all that has been demonstrated is "the psychology of caucasian females in Western Pennsylvania in 1992, self-selected by response to flyers on coffee shop bulletin boards."
Sorry, I have no idea how Slashdot managed to completely mangle my post, cutting out a big chunk in the middle, after previewing and submitting. I don't have the patience to re-write it, so just ignore the garbled mess left after Slashdot's unexpected redaction of a whole middle paragraph.
Isn't the ability to reproduce results based on the "idea" in the methods section central to the concept of scientific "reproducibility"? If I claim I applied one set of methods and got a certain result --- but those methods are different from the physical reality of my setup that reasonable adherence to the stated methods will produce a vastly different result --- then I have failed at publishing a "reproducible" experiment.
Example: "By the method of releasing lead spheres at rest into the air, I have observed that lead spheres have a tendency to rise upward (padhering to methods as written, which need to be sufficiently precise to capture all relevant "lab-specific" conditions which would significantly effect the result?
I think if differences between abstract ideal and physical implementation are sufficient to preclude replication of results, then this renders an experiment "not reproducible," rather than "explaining away" the inability of following experimentalists to produce consistent answers.
This mass-media announcement of "unnamed public official says vague thing" seems designed for a broad audience rather than prompting an "insider" to get jumpy. There's nothing in this announcement that would change what Snowden and his insiders know --- Snowden knows what files he's got, and knows the NSA knows approximately what kind of files he might have (though likely not exactly which ones). This is part of the propaganda cycle for people outside the inner circles --- the general public and less-well-connected third-party organizations. Whatever the NSA goons are doing to infiltrate Snowden's closer connections probably won't be making Slashdot's front page.
Criminal occupations, according to all actual economic studies, are generally not high paying. Sure, there are a few rich guys on top (like every industry); though, even they are hardly rich compared to the "legit" oligarchy. Despite Hollywood portrayals that every criminal swaggers about in a life of luxury and fast cars and diamond-studded-gold-bling-everything, crime actually pays a lot less than minimum wage for the overwhelming majority of participants.
Providing jobs stops crime. High crime levels pop up in areas with extreme unemployment, and is a symptom of the rot of America's Capitalist system. If the money spent on prisons and police for hunting down druggies were put into hiring people to patch potholes and clean up parks and re-paint schools, there'd be pretty much no one heading into criminal trades. But, paying money to poor people to work isn't nearly as profitable to the rich as getting paid to lock them up (while benefitting from propaganda against the "naturally criminal" poor to slash other social welfare programs).
If Snowden was remotely smart (and, there are reasonable indications he is), then Greenwald and friends already have a list of checksums for unreleased documents. Whatever Snowden sends them, if it doesn't match a checksum, then they'll know it's been modified after the initial transfer. And the KGB would be told about this little arrangement too, so they wouldn't waste their time trying.
Unfortunately, that type of useful info probably wouldn't be on the wider "track your ex-wife" computer network for casual mass privacy invasion that Snowden had access to. If the NSA has some serious "break GPG" level cracks, those are probably deeply buried in some vault for which Snowden would not be able to find the name of the person who knows the person who knows the person with the access code.
The NSA was certainly sloppy with security on the info available on Snowden's network; however, remember this was the network for random military-industrial contractors, likely designed by random military-industrial contractors, who are rarely competent at anything besides hoovering cash from taxpayers. The parts of the NSA with enough brains to infiltrate "seriously secure" systems are probably also a bit smarter than your average random contractor about keeping the really important stuff safe.
JFK's motorcade had more than one car in it, right? I assume the first couple black limos passing by would be a good indicator to get that itchy trigger finger ready. No need to lean out and see the cars coming from far away. Also, recall there was a gigantic crowd lining the road? I suspect I could tell when the motorcade was coming while blindfolded, from the approaching wave of shouting and clapping. I can't conclusively say this would have worked; I wasn't in the room when it happened (... or was I?... No, I was not, on account of not nearly having been born yet... or was I?).
I can pretty much guarantee you that, if there were a brand-new piece of information on the JFK assassination not already available in the reams of public documents until now, it would receive a heck of a lot of media attention than yet-another-rehash-of-the-same-old-stuff.
Foreign governments interacting with the US aren't the issue here. They know we're full of shit (just like they know they'd do the same wherever possible). This is all a matter of public perception. Journalists who harp on multi-year-old news are easy to dismiss as quacks with an agenda (even if that "agenda" is manifestly in the public interest) --- there's plenty of decades-old history, fully available in the public record, that the US public would be greatly enlightened by being made more aware of; but it's "old news" now. Any reporter who reminds the viewers about the big lies of years past won't keep their jobs (consider how many folks who blatantly lied to push the Iraq invasion are still treated as respectable foreign policy commentators today, because history past last year has been tossed down the memory hole). But, a "brand new" revelation still has a chance of breaking through, and keeping the American public cognizant of what their "national security" overlords are up to.
I agree it's ridiculous. I suspect it's the residue of so many people being indoctrinated into Capitalist ideals: the very phrase "free rider" encapsulates all the negative connotations drilled into people's heads from birth about the horrors of letting fellow humans benefit without paying. Healthcare and education are obviously too expensive, and too beneficial, for individuals to be charged the full cost up front --- they highlight how ridiculous a pure Capitalist system would be; and, how great benefits for society can be generated through common action and investment in the public good. Transit fare is still inexpensive enough that it's not blatantly ridiculous to think about asking a lower-income person to cough up a couple bucks to pay; even though it would be far more efficient and sensible to forget about payment altogether. The only moderately ridiculous status of enforcing public transit fares is not enough to overcome the high ideological barriers of Capitalism.
If it's such a disadvantage, then why would Snowden et al. be doing it? They're currently the ones in control of the data; so, if releasing everything at once (or at least most but a smaller "security" file) makes it more credible and relevant, then they could just do so. Since they aren't --- and, I think it's clear how this provides the leakers quite a bit of leverage --- changing to the opposite situation would likely benefit the NSA spooks. Not as much as having Snowden and all his files vanish completely; but there's little chance of that happening (Snowden's had plenty of time to set up the mother of all paranoid multiple-failsafes backup plans).
Being able to selectively leak the files out one at a time means that for the next couple of years gives Snowden a lot of leverage for optimizing impact on public perceptions --- which is all any of this is about. The only threat to the NSA is the American public; nothing in any of these documents will have much if any impact on actual operations aside from PR fiascos. Ability to time information to remind the American public at opportune moments which of their politicians has been lying to their face about surveillance, and how much they should value voting anyone into office who promises to cut back on NSA programs, is a significant advantage.
Why would the US government intentionally indicate that they believe such a thing? What this accomplishes is to encourage anyone who wants to hurt the US to kill Snowden (forcing the release of the supposed super-damaging materials). If that's the message the US propaganda spooks want everyone to hear, then you should be looking for ulterior motives. I'd guess there isn't anything so terribly damaging (that can't be whitewashed away as well as the rest of the stuff has been) that would really be "doomsday" for the US.
Rather than having everything eventually trickle out over several years, well-times to keep the media pressure against the US surveillance state, I suspect it would be preferable to the NSA and friends if Snowden were forced to dump everything all at once (perhaps by being killed). Everything's going to come out eventually --- by having it all in one heap, the total impact on public perceptions (what really matters here) is reduced: one quick spike in media attention and outrage, then it's all "old news" and there's no time for serious public analysis of the implications of each individual revelation.
Snowden and friends of democracy and freedom have an advantage by controlling the gradual release of information --- otherwise, they'd have dumped it all already. Forcing everything out at once (by encouraging every dumber enemy of the US to try assassinating Snowden) would help the PR effort to quickly wash this whole mess away from public attention. It would sure make it easier for the US officials to keep their lies straight, if everything they were lying to refute was already available.
Why stop at one mode of tracking when multiple systems allow far more reliable results? Any one tracking mode will deal with a lot of noise, including intentional obfuscation. You can swap around transit cards; wear a hoodie; leave your cellphone at home/work; etc. However, combine multiple systems and you get something far more robust --- match up a person's cell phone, transit card, and facial features, and you've got a far more reliable tool. You can even identify groups of people trying to subvert one system, and tag them as super-suspicious. Regularly trade transit passes with your friend, and the system can spot that from alternate tracking data, and put you both on "the list" of potential terrorist conspirators (hey, probable cause for full wiretaps on all your other communications, too!).
By making up for boutique price in volume, the same way Walgreens and every other big corporation selling loads of cheap stuff makes money. It's a different business model, but one that works fine --- big alcohol and tobacco megacorporations aren't having trouble keeping the profits rolling in. Now, perhaps the current generation of illegal criminal druglords won't be the ones to profit off a change --- probably the much larger and more vicious cartels of Big Pharma and Big Tobacco legal criminals would find a way to cut in on most of the new business, if they can't prevent it with anti-drug efforts.
Again: dumb, no. Irresponsibly participating in a sick system without questioning the structure of authority? Yes. Fucking coward pussies? Perhaps --- but no more so than every other upper-middle-class participant in the Capitalist system, turning a blind eye to the perpetuation of large-scale injustice in order to provide a comfortable life for themselves. They are certainly not brave as those who challenge and oppose the system are --- especially those standing up against oppression from positions of weakness and poverty. But, they are not dumb; that is an incorrect criticism of the system, leading to useless solutions. That is, we don't need "smarter" scientists to make the world a better place; we need radicalized critics of the existing structures of oppression to stand up throughout the system, and tear it down to make room for better alternatives to grow.
That one point being that Libertarians are wildly self-inconsistent, and you can only "follow" their arguments if you're already a True Believer to start with?
"Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works."
"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!"
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I was sloppy on slighting BSD for credit and inappropriately using "Linux" as a stand-in for "Free and open-source UNIX-derived operating systems and associated server infrastructure." One should note that Microsoft internal projects enjoy the benefits of IIS as a free and open-source product, with unlimited expert support to make the system work; a situation that exists for nobody else outside Microsoft.
Nonetheless, the point raised in the original post still stands: are students being educated about programming, or indoctrinated to be worker drones tied into a proprietary ecosystem? Will they learn the benefits and social ramifications of Free software systems, or will that module be swapped out for RIAA-approved lectures on the eeeeevils of piracy? Will they be taught to think about protecting the privacy and security of end-users of systems they are programming for, or only about priorities of protecting employer profits?
No, Code.org does not need centralized tracking of each individual student's activities over many years. Tracking student achievement; determining who has passed classes and qualified for credits; is the responsibility of the local school district and educators in the classroom. For improving quality of the educational materials, all Code.org needs is aggregate summary data, at the classroom level at the very finest-grained, and to encourage evaluation and feedback from classroom educators on how well each portion of the material engages/baffles/bores/frustrates/enlightens students.
"Some kind of feedback" means collecting aggregate data reports from teachers and local school districts on how the program is working. "Some kind of feedback" does not require centrally tracking every assignment grade from each individual student. That level of intrusive tracking serves different ends from improving the educational quality of the material --- for which the companies involved have a proven track record of being heinously evil.
Anyone who wants a functioning website runs the backend on Linux. Microsoft ran Microsoft Hotmail on Linux backends for a long time during Billy G's ruthless tenure. I note you don't respond to the actual question of whether students are being brainwashed into narrow use of proprietary products, instead of learning about the world of superior tools outside profitable product lines. Sure, Microsoft cronies know how to efficiently run their own operations with Linux on the back end (not as if they'd make money from selling themselves Microsoft products), but you can bet they want everyone else to be using IIS/Exchange/Windows.
how is disliking technology for technology's sake, which is something I think that all nerds do, nerdy?
Being knowledgeable and passionate about a subject usually leads to developing a critical evaluative stance specifically towards the objects of your interest. If you're a food nerd, you're likely a more picky eater than someone who crams any piece of food into their mouth. If you're a typography nerd, you may be thrown into a spitting rage by the vast majority of texts printed. If you're a technology nerd, you might not be inclined to mindlessly gush about every silly bauble with a computer in it. You might set a rather high standard for the technology that you do admire --- expecting a remarkable level of elegance, functionality, or clever hacking found only in rare instances.
I use spatially optimized bathroom layouts, so that critical information inputs are within direct reach of sensory arrays from the command center. I do not need to embark on a long journey away from the command throne to confirm the proper function of peripheral systems. Why some people insist on inefficient megabathrooms, with a thousand square foot courtyard separating the primary functional units, is beyond me.
I prefer to use one of the thousands of directly neurally integrated advance biotech thermal sensors that I carry around at all times. I stick the tip of my finger in the water.
No, I still think that, if the methods are insufficiently described (do not sufficiently capture the nuances of the physical experiment) to permit reliable replication of results, then this makes an experiment un-reproducible by definition.
Indeed, allowances must be made for the study of ephemeral phenomena --- people's perceptions in some particular time and place; a comet passing by once --- that preclude actual recreation of the experiment. So, I think there is a "methodological description" requirement for reproducibility which is itself an abstract concept rather than (necessarily) physically enactable. Which is: the methods should be sufficiently well described that another experimenter, with access to the same resources as described in the method, could repeat the results (with allowance for stated statistical fluctuations). This covers the case where the "resources" include "students at Random U. in the year 2009," which may be impossible to acquire again without a time machine. But, the "methods" description ought to be thorough enough to cover all factors that would significantly change the outcome: if you would get a different answer by selecting participants from a different pool, then precise description of how the selection was accomplished is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, the result is useless unreproducible garbage.
So, I agree with your point that actual ability to repeat an experiment performed is not a requirement for reproducibility. I disagree that differences between described method and lab reality "excuse" any experiment from being reproducible: an experiment is "reproducible" only to the extent that any such differences are too small to alter the result (at the level of confidence stated). This may be only an "abstract, in theory" requirement for ephemeral phenomena --- but the methods and result claims need to fully reflect that, not claiming results about "The Psychology of Humans" when all that has been demonstrated is "the psychology of caucasian females in Western Pennsylvania in 1992, self-selected by response to flyers on coffee shop bulletin boards."
Sorry, I have no idea how Slashdot managed to completely mangle my post, cutting out a big chunk in the middle, after previewing and submitting. I don't have the patience to re-write it, so just ignore the garbled mess left after Slashdot's unexpected redaction of a whole middle paragraph.
Isn't the ability to reproduce results based on the "idea" in the methods section central to the concept of scientific "reproducibility"? If I claim I applied one set of methods and got a certain result --- but those methods are different from the physical reality of my setup that reasonable adherence to the stated methods will produce a vastly different result --- then I have failed at publishing a "reproducible" experiment.
Example:
"By the method of releasing lead spheres at rest into the air, I have observed that lead spheres have a tendency to rise upward (padhering to methods as written, which need to be sufficiently precise to capture all relevant "lab-specific" conditions which would significantly effect the result?
I think if differences between abstract ideal and physical implementation are sufficient to preclude replication of results, then this renders an experiment "not reproducible," rather than "explaining away" the inability of following experimentalists to produce consistent answers.
This mass-media announcement of "unnamed public official says vague thing" seems designed for a broad audience rather than prompting an "insider" to get jumpy. There's nothing in this announcement that would change what Snowden and his insiders know --- Snowden knows what files he's got, and knows the NSA knows approximately what kind of files he might have (though likely not exactly which ones). This is part of the propaganda cycle for people outside the inner circles --- the general public and less-well-connected third-party organizations. Whatever the NSA goons are doing to infiltrate Snowden's closer connections probably won't be making Slashdot's front page.
Criminal occupations, according to all actual economic studies, are generally not high paying. Sure, there are a few rich guys on top (like every industry); though, even they are hardly rich compared to the "legit" oligarchy. Despite Hollywood portrayals that every criminal swaggers about in a life of luxury and fast cars and diamond-studded-gold-bling-everything, crime actually pays a lot less than minimum wage for the overwhelming majority of participants.
Providing jobs stops crime. High crime levels pop up in areas with extreme unemployment, and is a symptom of the rot of America's Capitalist system. If the money spent on prisons and police for hunting down druggies were put into hiring people to patch potholes and clean up parks and re-paint schools, there'd be pretty much no one heading into criminal trades. But, paying money to poor people to work isn't nearly as profitable to the rich as getting paid to lock them up (while benefitting from propaganda against the "naturally criminal" poor to slash other social welfare programs).
If Snowden was remotely smart (and, there are reasonable indications he is), then Greenwald and friends already have a list of checksums for unreleased documents. Whatever Snowden sends them, if it doesn't match a checksum, then they'll know it's been modified after the initial transfer. And the KGB would be told about this little arrangement too, so they wouldn't waste their time trying.
Unfortunately, that type of useful info probably wouldn't be on the wider "track your ex-wife" computer network for casual mass privacy invasion that Snowden had access to. If the NSA has some serious "break GPG" level cracks, those are probably deeply buried in some vault for which Snowden would not be able to find the name of the person who knows the person who knows the person with the access code.
The NSA was certainly sloppy with security on the info available on Snowden's network; however, remember this was the network for random military-industrial contractors, likely designed by random military-industrial contractors, who are rarely competent at anything besides hoovering cash from taxpayers. The parts of the NSA with enough brains to infiltrate "seriously secure" systems are probably also a bit smarter than your average random contractor about keeping the really important stuff safe.
JFK's motorcade had more than one car in it, right? I assume the first couple black limos passing by would be a good indicator to get that itchy trigger finger ready. No need to lean out and see the cars coming from far away. Also, recall there was a gigantic crowd lining the road? I suspect I could tell when the motorcade was coming while blindfolded, from the approaching wave of shouting and clapping. I can't conclusively say this would have worked; I wasn't in the room when it happened (... or was I? ... No, I was not, on account of not nearly having been born yet ... or was I?).
I can pretty much guarantee you that, if there were a brand-new piece of information on the JFK assassination not already available in the reams of public documents until now, it would receive a heck of a lot of media attention than yet-another-rehash-of-the-same-old-stuff.
Foreign governments interacting with the US aren't the issue here. They know we're full of shit (just like they know they'd do the same wherever possible). This is all a matter of public perception. Journalists who harp on multi-year-old news are easy to dismiss as quacks with an agenda (even if that "agenda" is manifestly in the public interest) --- there's plenty of decades-old history, fully available in the public record, that the US public would be greatly enlightened by being made more aware of; but it's "old news" now. Any reporter who reminds the viewers about the big lies of years past won't keep their jobs (consider how many folks who blatantly lied to push the Iraq invasion are still treated as respectable foreign policy commentators today, because history past last year has been tossed down the memory hole). But, a "brand new" revelation still has a chance of breaking through, and keeping the American public cognizant of what their "national security" overlords are up to.
I agree it's ridiculous. I suspect it's the residue of so many people being indoctrinated into Capitalist ideals: the very phrase "free rider" encapsulates all the negative connotations drilled into people's heads from birth about the horrors of letting fellow humans benefit without paying. Healthcare and education are obviously too expensive, and too beneficial, for individuals to be charged the full cost up front --- they highlight how ridiculous a pure Capitalist system would be; and, how great benefits for society can be generated through common action and investment in the public good. Transit fare is still inexpensive enough that it's not blatantly ridiculous to think about asking a lower-income person to cough up a couple bucks to pay; even though it would be far more efficient and sensible to forget about payment altogether. The only moderately ridiculous status of enforcing public transit fares is not enough to overcome the high ideological barriers of Capitalism.
If it's such a disadvantage, then why would Snowden et al. be doing it? They're currently the ones in control of the data; so, if releasing everything at once (or at least most but a smaller "security" file) makes it more credible and relevant, then they could just do so. Since they aren't --- and, I think it's clear how this provides the leakers quite a bit of leverage --- changing to the opposite situation would likely benefit the NSA spooks. Not as much as having Snowden and all his files vanish completely; but there's little chance of that happening (Snowden's had plenty of time to set up the mother of all paranoid multiple-failsafes backup plans).
Being able to selectively leak the files out one at a time means that for the next couple of years gives Snowden a lot of leverage for optimizing impact on public perceptions --- which is all any of this is about. The only threat to the NSA is the American public; nothing in any of these documents will have much if any impact on actual operations aside from PR fiascos. Ability to time information to remind the American public at opportune moments which of their politicians has been lying to their face about surveillance, and how much they should value voting anyone into office who promises to cut back on NSA programs, is a significant advantage.
Why would the US government intentionally indicate that they believe such a thing? What this accomplishes is to encourage anyone who wants to hurt the US to kill Snowden (forcing the release of the supposed super-damaging materials). If that's the message the US propaganda spooks want everyone to hear, then you should be looking for ulterior motives. I'd guess there isn't anything so terribly damaging (that can't be whitewashed away as well as the rest of the stuff has been) that would really be "doomsday" for the US.
Rather than having everything eventually trickle out over several years, well-times to keep the media pressure against the US surveillance state, I suspect it would be preferable to the NSA and friends if Snowden were forced to dump everything all at once (perhaps by being killed). Everything's going to come out eventually --- by having it all in one heap, the total impact on public perceptions (what really matters here) is reduced: one quick spike in media attention and outrage, then it's all "old news" and there's no time for serious public analysis of the implications of each individual revelation.
Snowden and friends of democracy and freedom have an advantage by controlling the gradual release of information --- otherwise, they'd have dumped it all already. Forcing everything out at once (by encouraging every dumber enemy of the US to try assassinating Snowden) would help the PR effort to quickly wash this whole mess away from public attention. It would sure make it easier for the US officials to keep their lies straight, if everything they were lying to refute was already available.
Why stop at one mode of tracking when multiple systems allow far more reliable results? Any one tracking mode will deal with a lot of noise, including intentional obfuscation. You can swap around transit cards; wear a hoodie; leave your cellphone at home/work; etc. However, combine multiple systems and you get something far more robust --- match up a person's cell phone, transit card, and facial features, and you've got a far more reliable tool. You can even identify groups of people trying to subvert one system, and tag them as super-suspicious. Regularly trade transit passes with your friend, and the system can spot that from alternate tracking data, and put you both on "the list" of potential terrorist conspirators (hey, probable cause for full wiretaps on all your other communications, too!).
By making up for boutique price in volume, the same way Walgreens and every other big corporation selling loads of cheap stuff makes money. It's a different business model, but one that works fine --- big alcohol and tobacco megacorporations aren't having trouble keeping the profits rolling in. Now, perhaps the current generation of illegal criminal druglords won't be the ones to profit off a change --- probably the much larger and more vicious cartels of Big Pharma and Big Tobacco legal criminals would find a way to cut in on most of the new business, if they can't prevent it with anti-drug efforts.
Again: dumb, no. Irresponsibly participating in a sick system without questioning the structure of authority? Yes. Fucking coward pussies? Perhaps --- but no more so than every other upper-middle-class participant in the Capitalist system, turning a blind eye to the perpetuation of large-scale injustice in order to provide a comfortable life for themselves. They are certainly not brave as those who challenge and oppose the system are --- especially those standing up against oppression from positions of weakness and poverty. But, they are not dumb; that is an incorrect criticism of the system, leading to useless solutions. That is, we don't need "smarter" scientists to make the world a better place; we need radicalized critics of the existing structures of oppression to stand up throughout the system, and tear it down to make room for better alternatives to grow.
That one point being that Libertarians are wildly self-inconsistent, and you can only "follow" their arguments if you're already a True Believer to start with?
Oh, I know how Libertarians argue their positions. Very poorly, by spouting dogmatic quips that never address the core deficiencies of their religion.
"Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works."
"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!"