As I understand it, it is not illegal to intercept foreign communications without a warrant, so it's OK for the NSA to wiretap Somali terrorists. And while they can't (in theory) wiretap a conversation between two US citizens without a warrant, if they are listening to a foreign terrorist in a foreign country, and it turns out he's talking to a US citizen, well, apparently the 4th Amendment doesn't apply.
No, because the Congo Wars were a localized conflict. They did not involve a worldwide Islamic conspiracy, supported by millions of people, to impose a religious dictatorship on the entire world. It's like the difference between a few murders committed by a street gang over the right to sell drugs in a few blocks of one city, versus a few murders by an organization of political revolutionaries hoping to overthrow the government. Taking the latter more seriously is not sanctimonious or hypocritical.
Slaughtering scores of men, women, and children at a mall, including torturing and dismembering them, is more than "a mall shooting." It's not sanctimony to be upset about it, especially when the atrocity was committed by a group whose goal is to impose a worldwide religious dictatorship.
He's claiming not that the evidence is wrong, he's claiming that it was collected illegally.
If this guy's calls were to friends in Minnesota and were swept up in one of those "all Verizon records for this three-month period" warrants, I'd say it was illegal. But it seems to have been multiple calls with a terrorist leader in Somalia, so the collection looks legal to me. The 4th Amendment doesn't cover foreigners engaging in war against the US or our allies, and the NSA is supposed to be looking for things like this.
Mencken notwithstanding, it is not defending freedom to claim that phone conversations with foreign terrorists are free speech, or deserve privacy.
At trial, the jury listened to dozens of the defendants’ intercepted telephone conversations, including many conversations between defendant Moalin and Aden Hashi Ayrow, one of al Shabaab’s most prominent leaders who was subsequently killed in a missile strike on May 1, 2008. In those calls, Ayrow implored Moalin to send money to al Shabaab, telling Moalin that it was “time to finance the Jihad.” Ayrow told Moalin, “You are running late with the stuff. Send some and something will happen.” In the calls played for the jury, Ayrow repeatedly asked Moalin to reach out to defendant Mohamud—the imam—to obtain funds for al Shabaab.
The United States also presented a recorded telephone conversation in which defendant Moalin gave the terrorists in Somalia permission to use his house in Mogadishu, Somalia, telling Ayrow that “after you bury your stuff deep in the ground, you would, then, plant the trees on top.” Prosecutors argued at trial that Moalin was offering a place to hide weapons.
When Moalin cautioned, however, that the house could be easily identified from afar, Ayrow replied, “No one would know. How could anyone know, if the house is used only during the nights?”
If money is speech as is precedent in the U.S, why is his donation to a terrorist group not protected under the first amendment?
Because some forms of speech, even in the form of money, are illegal. I can't buy heroin. I can't claim I own a stolen car, sell it to you, and then use free speech as a defense after the police tow it away, give it back to the rightful owner, and arrest me. I can't solicit someone to murder you and use free speech as a defense.
Look, I'm not cheerleading for the NSA, or defending their dragnet surveillance, which I consider a "general warrant" and thus a violation of the 4th Amendment. I'm just saying that in this case, it looks like they got someone who did a bit more than donate a little money to a questionable organization. When the head of a major terrorist organization calls somebody in San Diego on the phone, that's a pretty big red flag. Noticing that a foreign terrorist leader is calling someone in the USA is exactly what the NSA is supposed to be doing. Did the government do something underhanded to convict Mr. Moalin? It's unclear. It's very possible that this is another Al Capone situation: they couldn't get Capone for the major crimes they knew he had committed, so they got him for tax evasion. (Capone's official story was that he made his money in the second-hand furniture business.) In the Moalin case, it does look like they convicted someone who deserved it.
A little more background, courtesy of the Daily Mail. The Slashdot summary is a bit vague, referring to "donating a small sum of money to an organization that the federal government considered terrorist in nature." Apparently Mr. Moalin once missed a telephone call from "Aden Hashi Ayrow, the senior al Shabaab leader," which makes it likely that a little more was going on than merely the donation of "a small sum of money." You may recall al Shabaab as the group behind the recent slaughter at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. So to say "an organization that the federal government considered terrorist in nature" is to omit some rather important background. By any rational definition, al Shabaab is certainly a terror group.
This goes far beyond the third party doctrine, effectively prosecuting someone and depriving them of the ability to defend themselves by declaring that they have no standing to refute the evidence used against them.
IANAL, but this statement seems overheated and inaccurate. Of course the defendant can "defend themselves" and "refute the evidence used against them": they can claim they didn't make those phone calls, for instance. What this case seems to say is that they can't simply have the evidence thrown out. That seems like a critical distinction.
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
Because government employee programmers, who probably belong to a union and cannot be fired for anything less than murdering the boss, would have done better?
Hmmm, interesting. But what is laughing at a joke? It isn't necessarily nervous, or joyful. It's sort of a relief, in that the tension of the buildup is released in the punch line, but that doesn't seem to be the same as "laughter of relief." Humor, or laughter, just seems to me to be as core of an emotion as fear or anger, but maybe psychologists and data miners don't see it that way.
But they really need to factor in context, multiple meanings, and especially other factors that might lead to high frequencies of their chosen "emotional" words, like proper names or other plot points that may not actually be representative of the vocabulary and emotions of the story overall.
You are correct. Obviously this sort of text analyzer is still in its infancy. It would be interesting to throw some oddball stories at it and see the results. E.g., here's a story filled with unpaired words. I wonder what it would say its "emotional temperature" was? And of course the program would totally miss the humor. (Note that the New Yorker blew the formatting when they put this online, and that the actual story starts with the third sentence: "It had been a rough day....")
Analysing the emotional content of text is also becoming easier. In recent years, researchers have built up significant databases of the emotions that a given word evokes. This is part of the new field of sentiment analysis in which common words are categorised as positive, negative or neutral and associated with one of the eight fundamental emotions—joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, surprise and anticipation.
I don't know about anyone else, but I found that bit as fascinating as the text analyzer itself. But where does laughter fit? Shouldn't it count as a fundamental emotion? Or is it considered just a sub-category of "surprise" or "joy"?
In any case, I wonder if someone could combine all that with the 36 dramatic situations and a few other components, and create a program that writes stories....
Are you and I looking at the same graph? I see a huge dip in the revenue side after Reagan takes over and then mild growth which is completely attributable to economic growth and somewhat below trend compared to all administrations.
The dip in revenue after Reagan took over was the end of Carter-era inflation. The tax cuts then took a few years to have an effect on the economy, and then revenue went up.
The gap between spending and revenues in the Clinton years looks good from the get go.
Yes, he inherited a pretty healthy economy.
The GOP took over Congress only in his last term.
Nope, it was in 1994, two years into his first term.
The only time the deficit has gone down (in fact completely eliminated) was during the high tax years of Clinton. The economy did great and unemployment went to a record low.
Don't forget that those were also the years when the GOP took over Congress and restrained spending, a little bit, for a little while.
The other shoe is about to drop in the form of "Why didn't you save my little girl from that pedophile?"
Interesting, but I have theory about a different other shoe, and I'll risk some karma to lay it out here. Despite many feeble protestations to the contrary, we know for sure that the IRS disproportionately persecuted Tea Party and other conservative groups, Obama critics, and GOP donors. In at least one case the FBI, OHSA, and ATF also seem to have been sicced on a group seen as a political enemy of the Obama administration. So how long will it be before we learn that the NSA was also used for partisan political purposes?
You are correct that listed prices on Amazon aren't definitive. Some people pull a number out of their butt, then subsequent listers think that's the market price. But there really are valuable old computer books.
The APPLE II BASIC programming manual by Jef Raskin currently goes for $52 and up on Amazon. A few years ago I found a late-'90s book on embedded systems programming that turned out to be in demand and later sold for about $100 on Amazon. So look up anything unusual, specific, or that might have nostalgia value there or on Bookfinder.com before you recycle them or sell them for a buck or two.
Right wing politicians have classified pot as a narcotic and make all sorts of claims about how dangerous and addictive it is without any evidence whatsoever other than their fervent belief in that.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand it, it is not illegal to intercept foreign communications without a warrant, so it's OK for the NSA to wiretap Somali terrorists. And while they can't (in theory) wiretap a conversation between two US citizens without a warrant, if they are listening to a foreign terrorist in a foreign country, and it turns out he's talking to a US citizen, well, apparently the 4th Amendment doesn't apply.
No, because the Congo Wars were a localized conflict. They did not involve a worldwide Islamic conspiracy, supported by millions of people, to impose a religious dictatorship on the entire world. It's like the difference between a few murders committed by a street gang over the right to sell drugs in a few blocks of one city, versus a few murders by an organization of political revolutionaries hoping to overthrow the government. Taking the latter more seriously is not sanctimonious or hypocritical.
Slaughtering scores of men, women, and children at a mall, including torturing and dismembering them, is more than "a mall shooting." It's not sanctimony to be upset about it, especially when the atrocity was committed by a group whose goal is to impose a worldwide religious dictatorship.
He's claiming not that the evidence is wrong, he's claiming that it was collected illegally.
If this guy's calls were to friends in Minnesota and were swept up in one of those "all Verizon records for this three-month period" warrants, I'd say it was illegal. But it seems to have been multiple calls with a terrorist leader in Somalia, so the collection looks legal to me. The 4th Amendment doesn't cover foreigners engaging in war against the US or our allies, and the NSA is supposed to be looking for things like this.
Mencken notwithstanding, it is not defending freedom to claim that phone conversations with foreign terrorists are free speech, or deserve privacy.
Was it really A.H.A. who called? Was he really calling the defendant? Or did he misdial the number?
From the FBI press release:
At trial, the jury listened to dozens of the defendants’ intercepted telephone conversations, including many conversations between defendant Moalin and Aden Hashi Ayrow, one of al Shabaab’s most prominent leaders who was subsequently killed in a missile strike on May 1, 2008. In those calls, Ayrow implored Moalin to send money to al Shabaab, telling Moalin that it was “time to finance the Jihad.” Ayrow told Moalin, “You are running late with the stuff. Send some and something will happen.” In the calls played for the jury, Ayrow repeatedly asked Moalin to reach out to defendant Mohamud—the imam—to obtain funds for al Shabaab.
The United States also presented a recorded telephone conversation in which defendant Moalin gave the terrorists in Somalia permission to use his house in Mogadishu, Somalia, telling Ayrow that “after you bury your stuff deep in the ground, you would, then, plant the trees on top.” Prosecutors argued at trial that Moalin was offering a place to hide weapons.
When Moalin cautioned, however, that the house could be easily identified from afar, Ayrow replied, “No one would know. How could anyone know, if the house is used only during the nights?”
If money is speech as is precedent in the U.S, why is his donation to a terrorist group not protected under the first amendment?
Because some forms of speech, even in the form of money, are illegal. I can't buy heroin. I can't claim I own a stolen car, sell it to you, and then use free speech as a defense after the police tow it away, give it back to the rightful owner, and arrest me. I can't solicit someone to murder you and use free speech as a defense.
Look, I'm not cheerleading for the NSA, or defending their dragnet surveillance, which I consider a "general warrant" and thus a violation of the 4th Amendment. I'm just saying that in this case, it looks like they got someone who did a bit more than donate a little money to a questionable organization. When the head of a major terrorist organization calls somebody in San Diego on the phone, that's a pretty big red flag. Noticing that a foreign terrorist leader is calling someone in the USA is exactly what the NSA is supposed to be doing. Did the government do something underhanded to convict Mr. Moalin? It's unclear. It's very possible that this is another Al Capone situation: they couldn't get Capone for the major crimes they knew he had committed, so they got him for tax evasion. (Capone's official story was that he made his money in the second-hand furniture business.) In the Moalin case, it does look like they convicted someone who deserved it.
A little more background, courtesy of the Daily Mail. The Slashdot summary is a bit vague, referring to "donating a small sum of money to an organization that the federal government considered terrorist in nature." Apparently Mr. Moalin once missed a telephone call from "Aden Hashi Ayrow, the senior al Shabaab leader," which makes it likely that a little more was going on than merely the donation of "a small sum of money." You may recall al Shabaab as the group behind the recent slaughter at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. So to say "an organization that the federal government considered terrorist in nature" is to omit some rather important background. By any rational definition, al Shabaab is certainly a terror group.
IANAL, but this statement seems overheated and inaccurate. Of course the defendant can "defend themselves" and "refute the evidence used against them": they can claim they didn't make those phone calls, for instance. What this case seems to say is that they can't simply have the evidence thrown out. That seems like a critical distinction.
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
Because government employee programmers, who probably belong to a union and cannot be fired for anything less than murdering the boss, would have done better?
What possible reason is there for this?
Samsung's consumer electronics strategy seems to be: "Let's try every damn thing we can think of, and see what sells!"
Hmmm, interesting. But what is laughing at a joke? It isn't necessarily nervous, or joyful. It's sort of a relief, in that the tension of the buildup is released in the punch line, but that doesn't seem to be the same as "laughter of relief." Humor, or laughter, just seems to me to be as core of an emotion as fear or anger, but maybe psychologists and data miners don't see it that way.
But they really need to factor in context, multiple meanings, and especially other factors that might lead to high frequencies of their chosen "emotional" words, like proper names or other plot points that may not actually be representative of the vocabulary and emotions of the story overall.
You are correct. Obviously this sort of text analyzer is still in its infancy. It would be interesting to throw some oddball stories at it and see the results. E.g., here's a story filled with unpaired words. I wonder what it would say its "emotional temperature" was? And of course the program would totally miss the humor. (Note that the New Yorker blew the formatting when they put this online, and that the actual story starts with the third sentence: "It had been a rough day....")
I could see classifying "satisfaction" as a type of "joy."
From TFA:
Analysing the emotional content of text is also becoming easier. In recent years, researchers have built up significant databases of the emotions that a given word evokes. This is part of the new field of sentiment analysis in which common words are categorised as positive, negative or neutral and associated with one of the eight fundamental emotions—joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, surprise and anticipation.
I don't know about anyone else, but I found that bit as fascinating as the text analyzer itself. But where does laughter fit? Shouldn't it count as a fundamental emotion? Or is it considered just a sub-category of "surprise" or "joy"?
In any case, I wonder if someone could combine all that with the 36 dramatic situations and a few other components, and create a program that writes stories....
Are you and I looking at the same graph? I see a huge dip in the revenue side after Reagan takes over and then mild growth which is completely attributable to economic growth and somewhat below trend compared to all administrations.
The dip in revenue after Reagan took over was the end of Carter-era inflation. The tax cuts then took a few years to have an effect on the economy, and then revenue went up.
The gap between spending and revenues in the Clinton years looks good from the get go.
Yes, he inherited a pretty healthy economy.
The GOP took over Congress only in his last term.
Nope, it was in 1994, two years into his first term.
Reagan and Bush both proved that taxes are already too high. They both lowered taxes and the result was an increase in funding to the government.
Only in your imagination.
No, the original comment was correct. Federal revenue did go up... but spending went up even more.
The only time the deficit has gone down (in fact completely eliminated) was during the high tax years of Clinton. The economy did great and unemployment went to a record low.
Don't forget that those were also the years when the GOP took over Congress and restrained spending, a little bit, for a little while.
Not a single person will lose insurance due to this law. Blatant fearmongering.
You are blatantly incorrect. Scores of thousands have already lost their insurance due to this law:
Ten states where Obamacare wipes out existing health care plans
Trader Joe's Invites Part-Timers Losing Company Coverage To Seek Additional Obamacare Subsidy
Despite Obama Promise, Many Coloradans Losing Their Health Insurance Plans
The other shoe is about to drop in the form of "Why didn't you save my little girl from that pedophile?"
Interesting, but I have theory about a different other shoe, and I'll risk some karma to lay it out here. Despite many feeble protestations to the contrary, we know for sure that the IRS disproportionately persecuted Tea Party and other conservative groups, Obama critics, and GOP donors. In at least one case the FBI, OHSA, and ATF also seem to have been sicced on a group seen as a political enemy of the Obama administration. So how long will it be before we learn that the NSA was also used for partisan political purposes?
You are correct that listed prices on Amazon aren't definitive. Some people pull a number out of their butt, then subsequent listers think that's the market price. But there really are valuable old computer books.
The APPLE II BASIC programming manual by Jef Raskin currently goes for $52 and up on Amazon. A few years ago I found a late-'90s book on embedded systems programming that turned out to be in demand and later sold for about $100 on Amazon. So look up anything unusual, specific, or that might have nostalgia value there or on Bookfinder.com before you recycle them or sell them for a buck or two.
"He who has the gold, makes the rules."
And try to laugh more.
Good idea. Note that greenhouses often buy CO2 generators to increase plant growth.
And the increase in ambient CO2 levels is already making the Earth greener.
Isn't single-payer supposed to be more "efficient"? I keep hearing that about health care.
Right wing politicians have classified pot as a narcotic and make all sorts of claims about how dangerous and addictive it is without any evidence whatsoever other than their fervent belief in that.
Damn that right-winger, Franklin Delano Roosevelt!