> I take it you have never been to a real data center if you honestly believe someone can just sort of walk into a cloud data center.
I've done it, mostly by pretending interest in starting a contract there. "The cloud" does not necessarily mean data centers as robust, and expensive, as AWS.
I'm sorry to say this, but "so what"? Many vulnerabilities are due to tardy or inconsistently applied software updates, architecture, shared passwords, plaintext stored passwords, and unsanitized inputs. And many business, educational, and private environments say "we trust the people we work with" and apply _no_ security steps beyond their own border. The base OS images templates are reasonably good, reasonably well integrated, and their ability to handle "Virtual Private Clusters" gracefully encourages the use of genuine, maintainable "demilitarized zones" for exposed services. Coupled with the robust snapshot and system transfer capabilities, and genuine multi-zone hosting, and you're in far better shape.
There are some policies I'd change, but they're mostly human ones: The S3 storage is not a replacement for a secure, managed backup system, and the firewall configuration tools are fairly fragile. But they certainly beat most working environments I've encountered in decades of IT service.
The "cosmic pinball" of the larger planets ejecting other planets from the solar system is fascinating. If such ejections are common in different star systems, it might explain the startling number of planets and planetoids that are _not_ in orbits around stars being discovered as orbital telescopes improve. Most of these planets were too cool, and too small, to be detected until quite recently, The advent of infrared telescopes, and of extremely stable orbital telescopes to detect very small, non-luminescent interstellar objects have exposed thousands of such exoplanets.
I've suggested that if they're common, they might explain the "dark matter" problem of cosmology:namely, a reservoir of matter around galaxies that is impossible to detect by normal means, but doesn't require any exotic, unverified forms of matter to explain.
> Your letter is not quite what I meant. You're talking pardon. I'm talking amend the law so that what he did is no longer illegal.
This is the same Congress which has failed to defund Guantanamo Bay, and failed to defund the broad scale monitoring of American citizens in which the NSA still engages as a matter of course, which has failed to take the NSA to talk for lying outright to them, and which has failed to repeal the Patriot Act. There are _already_ legal protections for revealing classified information, cited by the Supreme Court concerning the New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers, but I don't see this Congress as willing to improve or clarify those protections. It's much too easy to be painted as "unAmerican" for attempting to do so, much as many conservatives have continued to paint Edward Snowden as a traitor.
> during the actual trial process no law is ever challenged on Constitutional grounds.
Only if you "squint real hard" as you describe it. Jury nullification is part of the "the trial process". Lawsuits against federal officials for unconstitutional laws, such as http://cnsnews.com/news/articl... are also constitutional challenges against the law itself. So are the constitutional challenges to 3 strikes laws, which admittedly have been more successfully challenged on appeal after sentencing. So are challenges to gun laws, filed by plaintiffs who've been charged with violating those laws. I'll accept that many of these challenges are not part of the conviction or acquittal phase of a trial, but they're certainly part of the overall court procedures leading to a conviction or acquittal on the grounds of a law, itself being illegal.
It's not common, but it's certainly part of the court proceedings. As you're pointing out, it may not be part of the trial proper, and it may not be technically correct to call the pre-trial proceedings part of the trial. But the Supreme Court docket always has _plenty_ of cases where the law, itself, is being challenged by a defendant and their legal team.
> As for going straight to Congress, how could that have been less safe then fleeing to Cuba via Russia
As distasteful as it may be, _Hong Kong_ and the Russians had strong motivation to protect him to embarrass the US, and were willing to work with his requests for Asylum. I don't see how the current Congress would do anything other than deny requests for immunity and turn him directly over to federal prosecutors, so he'd be facing immediate arrest, incarceration, or simple assassination. He'd certainly be denied any opportunity to testify publicly, and he'd lose most of his ability to control which documents to newly release to counter the blatant lies the NSA has told about its practices. I actively applaud his attempts to _control_ what he released, to not imperil active agents in the field, but he'd certainly lose that if he is ever held in the USA.
> Example: Highway speed limits are for all motor vehicles
But trucks used to be _much_ smaller than modern double wides or tanker-trucks for fuel and chemical delivery, so a whole new set of laws about the _construction_ of the highways and the weight capacity of the bridges was needed. And simple safety regulations about handling fuel for diesel, versus electric capacity, and about the quality of the fuel become critical pretty quickly to avoid fraudulent dilution of fuel. And mo9dern highways certainly didn't exist at the time of invention of the car, so what speeds _should_ be allowed on them? It also affects the safe radius for turns on the highway, and necessary ramping and markings to help drivers stay on the road.
> They couldn't continue to sell instruments and equipment to the Military at sky-high prices, the business they were doing in the 60's became comodified
They also sold to coporate customers, who discovered that instead of paying thousands for an oscilloscope, they could pay hundreds for a plug-in digital board with far less precision and frequency range, but they _did not care_. HP disdained to enter the low-end instrument market, and couldn't maintain the formerly very high revenue stream as modern A/D converters improved. They could have continued in a much more modest way: few modern technicians understand that _the oscilloscope probe _matters_ and needs to be taken into account very differently at different fruquency ranges in your measurements, and the old HP instruments took their tuning for accuracy _seriously_ to preserve precision. Now? Good luck finding that switching power supply harmonic creeping its way into your motherboard and causing errors because some cheap vendor discarded the small, extra ceramic capacitors to save price and board space on their latest design.
She also helped destroy the high quality instruments division before spinning it off as Agilent. That was the group whose technology quality helped keep HP's quality high, because the robust designs and high quality for HP instruments were a touchstone for quality in the the company's other departments. Since her advent, I've repeatedly shown partners and clients that they can buy more hardware, of better overall quality, for less money, than by insisting on HP. It does require some research, but when you're buying 100 servers you _do not care_ how many firewire ports it has, the graphical chipset, or how robust the decorative faceplate is. You care about CPU's, amount and quality of memory, and being able to afford dual power supplies _and_ dual UPS's and switches to plug them into.
To your last point: a call to a senator or representative is far, far less effectie than a letter, on paper. They're so rare today, and usually only for matters that require real attention, that they have a much stronger effect. And yes, I did write to my senator and representative, that he should be offerred prosecutorial immunity or a pardon in order to safely testify before Congress. And the letter to the president included a suggestion for a Medal of Honor.
> They don't challenge the legality of a law at trial.
It happens: not constantly, but still as a matter of course. The ability of judges, and in the longer term of juries, to modify the law itself is one of the critical checks and balances embedded in the constitution. Do look at the docket of the Supreme Court for many instances of just such cases. Also note that very few of these cases _started_ at the Supreme Court: most arose from much lower courts, going through a series of courts until landing on the docket of the Supreme Court for final decisions.
> In short, it simply does not apply to this case, or any other that uses the 1917 Espionage Act.
You've a point about the Whistleblower Protection Act, that one is more for wrongful termination than for criminal accusations of espionage. However, the very "Panama Papers" incidents that you referred to should also include the case against the New York Times, described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... It's fascinating material, and the Supreme Court decisions provided good grounds for defense against the Espionage Act.
Also, please note that Snowden did report misconduct "through proper channels". He was ignored by his own superiors as a matter of course and the criminal activity continued. There is little reason to believe the NSA's claims of "we can't find them", because they _have_ found at least one set of such emails, but only after saying no such email existed for many months. The NSA lies as a matter of course, to Congress and to FOIA requests. Their testimony in court cannot be trusted.
Please also note that the NSA policy of lying to Congress made Mr. Snowden going direclty to Congress likely ineffective and potentially quite unsafe. I admit to not dealing at this criminal level with security agencies, but have seen it regularly in bureaucracies and in handling security incidents. Whistleblowers are _destroyed_ as quickly as possible, partly to stop the leaks, partly to discredit their claims, and partly as a warning to others.
I can see it now, thank you for the pointer. It's still a basic editing error: that is a _terrible_ place to hide a link, literally under other clickable links.
If you're not dependent on the NFS shares for live daemons, do put them in autofs based automounts. That will let the rest of the boot procedure continue.
And yes, indeed, the full architecture of starting networks with systemd has become a large, complex, and fragile edifice, completely undesirable for stable servers. The strange new symlink replacing/etc/resolv.conf contributes to the confusion, described atat http://man7.org/linux/man-page...
It's not all the systtemd people. But the problem starts right with the technical leadership, Leonart Pottering. systemd is attempting to do _too many_ things. Daemon management, _and_ logging, _and_ network management, _and_ automounting, _and_ privilege management, _and_ Leonart has stated that the gola is a "stateless Linux" where no system specific configurations are stored in "/etc": they're all migrated to systemd configuration tools.
The result is not only much too large, it's not cross-platform, because systemd _cannot_ run anywhere but Linux due to the kernel changes required. It thus creates a Linux lock-in, breaking broad availability and usability of services oriiginally compiled for Linux.
> First of all, there's never any way you can prove you don't have a key. Period.
I agree with your reasoning. This is what steganography is for. One secure key can be used for secure data, the other for much less critical, "personal" data of much larger volume, such as personal correspondence and shopping lists.
> The only reliable way to protect your data from government thugs is to change the government such that there are no government thugs wanting your data.
Since all governments will want, and are likely to insist upon, access at will to private documents, I wouldn't expect this plan to work. The Russians tried replacing a horrible monarchy with "the people's government" and wound up with Lenin and Stalin and abuses the equivalent of anything the czars committed.
> any case touched by either corrupt techs should be presumed to be vacated.
That presumption is unlikely to be borne out: from what I see of the Jennie Doohan case in MA, few convictions were overturned. Many defendants in drug cases plea bargain to lesser offenses, and I'd expect _none_ of those cases to be revisited, even if the defendant pled out to avoid hash penalties they were likely to receive, especially with federally mandated sentencing guidelines. Some cases doubtless had other evidence or testimony, which may have been _corroborated_ by the tainted forensic analysis, but which prosecutors will have great reasons to claim are valid. And getting such cases re-heard and re-examined is an intense, expensive, and for prosecutors an embarrassing They have strong bureaucratic and professional reasons to avoid any revisiting of these cases.
Which is why Aaron Swartz, who was arrested for abusing PACER and trying to republish it entirely, followed up with attempting to download all of JSTOR. Replicating the indexed content could work well, in the short term, but, would eliminate the fees that make organizing and publishing the indexed information possible. He was eventually arrested for that, as well, partly because he kept breaking JSTOR and breaking MIT's access to JSTOR with his abuse.
I actually remember the Pentagon Papers, though not well from reading about them: it was roughly 50 years ago. But if you're referring to the charges filed against Ellsberg, please actually review the case, and then please try to claim that an accused whistleblower can get a fair trial as a matter of course. Even that one ruling by Judge Byrne that Ellsberg could not discuss his _intent_ for revealing the documents was grounds for appeal, and as best I could tell from the time part of a campaign to publicly discredit Ellsberg as a criminal. That ruling was, as best I could tell, not based on law or any publicly admitted US judicial standard. Fortunately for Danial Ellsberg, and unfortunately for the judge who clearly favored the prosecution, prosecutorial and other federal agency misconduct became to outrageous that even Judge Burne had to declare a mistrial. And from the time, the mistrial was to avoid an acquittal or an appeal, which would have been even _more_ embarrassing for the prosecution.
Since the Pentagon Papers, there have been specific laws to _protect_ whistleblowers, especially the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. So please: do not cite a horrible ruling from a case declared a mistrial as establishing some sort of legal precedent, I would cite that ruling of exactly what Mr. Snowden could and should be frightened of: a horrible, hostile court and prosecutors willing to bend or even break the law to punish a whistleblower.
The idea that "the point of the trial is always to determine whether the defendant actually did the crime, not whether the crime should be illegal" is fundamentally incorrect. "The crime" usually includes intent as part of the definition of a criminal act. And there is a constitutionally protected court behavior called "jury nullification", in which the law itself is judged to be illegal. And last, there are _constantly_ cases involving the constitutionality of specific laws, filed by defendants trying to get the law itself overturned as unconstituional. Judging the laws, themselves, is a critical power of the judiciary.
> Anyone convicted on the basis of a test she could have conducted should be pardoned.
I agree with your sentiment. I see enormous practical difficulties. Sorting out which convictions were "on the basis of a test" is a nightmare, especially when the victims of poor testing plea bargained to a lower sentence. And what of people convicted of violence while in prison, violence that might not have occurred if they'd been free?
> because it is literally illegal for them to mention to the Jury that Snowden thought the leak was in the public interest
No, it's not "literally illegal". to mention that. The judge may give explicit directions against it, but intent is a critical and normal part of a legal defense, especially if Mr. Snowden cited the protections of the various "whistleblower" laws. There's also a great tendency of judges to shut down any attempt by a defense attorney to invoke "jury nullification", which is always available to a jury even when the judge explicitly says "you must only convict or acquit on *this* basis".
> There's no need for secrecy, special assassination teams, or anything special.
There's also "no need" for the excessive and abusive monitoring that Mr. Snowden disclosed. Except that, there is a _compelling_ need for people involved in such criminal, illegal behavior to punish whistleblowers, and for the people who've invested their professional lives in such abuse to vindicate themselves in anger, and especially for thise still involved in it to prevent any further disclosures or credible disclosures. What does Edward Snowden have left that he refused to leak before now to protect real intelligence assets? What might he feel free to reveal in a US court that might be leaked by the jury or the judge, and recorded in the court record?
Thee's also "no need" for a prosecutor to fail to present witnesses or for witnesses from the intelligence community, called by the defense, to lie under oath about illegal activity documented by Edward Snowden. But it's extremely likely to happen.
> What makes you think he'd not get a fair trial in the US?
Given the extraordinary nature and extent of the documents, the trial would not possibly be open, Judge and jury (if there was one) and defense attorneys would operate under extraordinary limitations of access to witnesses and documents that would establish justification for his whistle blowing, and various intelligence agencies would likely operate extra-legally to insure his conviction or even his early murder.
> Because I haven't heard any mainstream conservative groups try to restrict free speech;
Oh, my. Have you really not paid attention to the censorship of Planned Parenthood from discussing abortion with women? Or of discussing birth control in high schools? Or of teaching evolution in science classes? Or did you ignore the attempts by the US government to censoe the Pentagon Papers, or to censor Analog science magazine from printing details of the basic physical design of a simple atom bomb? Or of ongoing restrictions on publishing cryptography or security vulnerabilities, evidenced by speeches being censored at DefCon? Or the "Comic Book Code", applied to American comc books for decades?
> Firing bird shot into the air is not a serious hazard. I don't know how you think hunters get birds, hint they don't wait for them to land
They don't normally hunt within city limits, where firing guns was illegal in this case. In the USA, most bird hunters hunt on private property outside city limits, where the property owner has given permission. There's some hunting on public land, but this usually requires a permit to prevent poaching and depopulating the hunted species. Similar, more stringent restrictions are applied to deer hunting with both guns and bows, primarily for safety reasons. A 30-06 bullet missing a deer that is above the hunter, and traveling unimpeded as it arcs through the air, can still have lethal velocity over 1000 yards away: that's why a well trained hunter checks what is beyond his target, in case the round misses or penetrates and continues through the target.
There are many species that have been hunted to extinction: most hunters don't want to see that happen, and some of them are the best supporters of their local ecologies that you could imagine, investing in parks and preservation and invaluable conservation movements. The political tension between hunters and vegetarian or vegan ecology promoters create very strange political bedfellows.
There are tradeoffs. Next to roads, there are often telephone poles and power lines. But even with high quality GPS or wifi based location tools on the drone, mapping locations like Google maps are often off by a street or two, so confirming the address is still needed. Picking safety over precision is going to be fascinating work.
Slashdot Mirror
> I take it you have never been to a real data center if you honestly believe someone can just sort of walk into a cloud data center.
I've done it, mostly by pretending interest in starting a contract there. "The cloud" does not necessarily mean data centers as robust, and expensive, as AWS.
> With my stuff in my rack I can use open source
I'm sorry to say this, but "so what"? Many vulnerabilities are due to tardy or inconsistently applied software updates, architecture, shared passwords, plaintext stored passwords, and unsanitized inputs. And many business, educational, and private environments say "we trust the people we work with" and apply _no_ security steps beyond their own border. The base OS images templates are reasonably good, reasonably well integrated, and their ability to handle "Virtual Private Clusters" gracefully encourages the use of genuine, maintainable "demilitarized zones" for exposed services. Coupled with the robust snapshot and system transfer capabilities, and genuine multi-zone hosting, and you're in far better shape.
There are some policies I'd change, but they're mostly human ones: The S3 storage is not a replacement for a secure, managed backup system, and the firewall configuration tools are fairly fragile. But they certainly beat most working environments I've encountered in decades of IT service.
The "cosmic pinball" of the larger planets ejecting other planets from the solar system is fascinating. If such ejections are common in different star systems, it might explain the startling number of planets and planetoids that are _not_ in orbits around stars being discovered as orbital telescopes improve. Most of these planets were too cool, and too small, to be detected until quite recently, The advent of infrared telescopes, and of extremely stable orbital telescopes to detect very small, non-luminescent interstellar objects have exposed thousands of such exoplanets.
I've suggested that if they're common, they might explain the "dark matter" problem of cosmology:namely, a reservoir of matter around galaxies that is impossible to detect by normal means, but doesn't require any exotic, unverified forms of matter to explain.
> Your letter is not quite what I meant. You're talking pardon. I'm talking amend the law so that what he did is no longer illegal.
This is the same Congress which has failed to defund Guantanamo Bay, and failed to defund the broad scale monitoring of American citizens in which the NSA still engages as a matter of course, which has failed to take the NSA to talk for lying outright to them, and which has failed to repeal the Patriot Act. There are _already_ legal protections for revealing classified information, cited by the Supreme Court concerning the New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers, but I don't see this Congress as willing to improve or clarify those protections. It's much too easy to be painted as "unAmerican" for attempting to do so, much as many conservatives have continued to paint Edward Snowden as a traitor.
> during the actual trial process no law is ever challenged on Constitutional grounds.
Only if you "squint real hard" as you describe it. Jury nullification is part of the "the trial process". Lawsuits against federal officials for unconstitutional laws, such as http://cnsnews.com/news/articl... are also constitutional challenges against the law itself. So are the constitutional challenges to 3 strikes laws, which admittedly have been more successfully challenged on appeal after sentencing. So are challenges to gun laws, filed by plaintiffs who've been charged with violating those laws. I'll accept that many of these challenges are not part of the conviction or acquittal phase of a trial, but they're certainly part of the overall court procedures leading to a conviction or acquittal on the grounds of a law, itself being illegal.
It's not common, but it's certainly part of the court proceedings. As you're pointing out, it may not be part of the trial proper, and it may not be technically correct to call the pre-trial proceedings part of the trial. But the Supreme Court docket always has _plenty_ of cases where the law, itself, is being challenged by a defendant and their legal team.
> As for going straight to Congress, how could that have been less safe then fleeing to Cuba via Russia
As distasteful as it may be, _Hong Kong_ and the Russians had strong motivation to protect him to embarrass the US, and were willing to work with his requests for Asylum. I don't see how the current Congress would do anything other than deny requests for immunity and turn him directly over to federal prosecutors, so he'd be facing immediate arrest, incarceration, or simple assassination. He'd certainly be denied any opportunity to testify publicly, and he'd lose most of his ability to control which documents to newly release to counter the blatant lies the NSA has told about its practices. I actively applaud his attempts to _control_ what he released, to not imperil active agents in the field, but he'd certainly lose that if he is ever held in the USA.
> Example: Highway speed limits are for all motor vehicles
But trucks used to be _much_ smaller than modern double wides or tanker-trucks for fuel and chemical delivery, so a whole new set of laws about the _construction_ of the highways and the weight capacity of the bridges was needed. And simple safety regulations about handling fuel for diesel, versus electric capacity, and about the quality of the fuel become critical pretty quickly to avoid fraudulent dilution of fuel. And mo9dern highways certainly didn't exist at the time of invention of the car, so what speeds _should_ be allowed on them? It also affects the safe radius for turns on the highway, and necessary ramping and markings to help drivers stay on the road.
> They couldn't continue to sell instruments and equipment to the Military at sky-high prices, the business they were doing in the 60's became comodified
They also sold to coporate customers, who discovered that instead of paying thousands for an oscilloscope, they could pay hundreds for a plug-in digital board with far less precision and frequency range, but they _did not care_. HP disdained to enter the low-end instrument market, and couldn't maintain the formerly very high revenue stream as modern A/D converters improved. They could have continued in a much more modest way: few modern technicians understand that _the oscilloscope probe _matters_ and needs to be taken into account very differently at different fruquency ranges in your measurements, and the old HP instruments took their tuning for accuracy _seriously_ to preserve precision. Now? Good luck finding that switching power supply harmonic creeping its way into your motherboard and causing errors because some cheap vendor discarded the small, extra ceramic capacitors to save price and board space on their latest design.
She also helped destroy the high quality instruments division before spinning it off as Agilent. That was the group whose technology quality helped keep HP's quality high, because the robust designs and high quality for HP instruments were a touchstone for quality in the the company's other departments. Since her advent, I've repeatedly shown partners and clients that they can buy more hardware, of better overall quality, for less money, than by insisting on HP. It does require some research, but when you're buying 100 servers you _do not care_ how many firewire ports it has, the graphical chipset, or how robust the decorative faceplate is. You care about CPU's, amount and quality of memory, and being able to afford dual power supplies _and_ dual UPS's and switches to plug them into.
To your last point: a call to a senator or representative is far, far less effectie than a letter, on paper. They're so rare today, and usually only for matters that require real attention, that they have a much stronger effect. And yes, I did write to my senator and representative, that he should be offerred prosecutorial immunity or a pardon in order to safely testify before Congress. And the letter to the president included a suggestion for a Medal of Honor.
> They don't challenge the legality of a law at trial.
It happens: not constantly, but still as a matter of course. The ability of judges, and in the longer term of juries, to modify the law itself is one of the critical checks and balances embedded in the constitution. Do look at the docket of the Supreme Court for many instances of just such cases. Also note that very few of these cases _started_ at the Supreme Court: most arose from much lower courts, going through a series of courts until landing on the docket of the Supreme Court for final decisions.
> In short, it simply does not apply to this case, or any other that uses the 1917 Espionage Act.
You've a point about the Whistleblower Protection Act, that one is more for wrongful termination than for criminal accusations of espionage. However, the very "Panama Papers" incidents that you referred to should also include the case against the New York Times, described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... It's fascinating material, and the Supreme Court decisions provided good grounds for defense against the Espionage Act.
Also, please note that Snowden did report misconduct "through proper channels". He was ignored by his own superiors as a matter of course and the criminal activity continued. There is little reason to believe the NSA's claims of "we can't find them", because they _have_ found at least one set of such emails, but only after saying no such email existed for many months. The NSA lies as a matter of course, to Congress and to FOIA requests. Their testimony in court cannot be trusted.
Please also note that the NSA policy of lying to Congress made Mr. Snowden going direclty to Congress likely ineffective and potentially quite unsafe. I admit to not dealing at this criminal level with security agencies, but have seen it regularly in bureaucracies and in handling security incidents. Whistleblowers are _destroyed_ as quickly as possible, partly to stop the leaks, partly to discredit their claims, and partly as a warning to others.
I can see it now, thank you for the pointer. It's still a basic editing error: that is a _terrible_ place to hide a link, literally under other clickable links.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
With a few seconds editing, this could have been in the summary.
> as soon as something pukes in the binary file it may be completely unreadable
And it _will_ puke, because that's when you need to debug the code.
> t waiting forever to mount the NFS shares.
If you're not dependent on the NFS shares for live daemons, do put them in autofs based automounts. That will let the rest of the boot procedure continue.
And yes, indeed, the full architecture of starting networks with systemd has become a large, complex, and fragile edifice, completely undesirable for stable servers. The strange new symlink replacing /etc/resolv.conf contributes to the confusion, described atat http://man7.org/linux/man-page...
> Both.
It's not all the systtemd people. But the problem starts right with the technical leadership, Leonart Pottering. systemd is attempting to do _too many_ things. Daemon management, _and_ logging, _and_ network management, _and_ automounting, _and_ privilege management, _and_ Leonart has stated that the gola is a "stateless Linux" where no system specific configurations are stored in "/etc": they're all migrated to systemd configuration tools.
The result is not only much too large, it's not cross-platform, because systemd _cannot_ run anywhere but Linux due to the kernel changes required. It thus creates a Linux lock-in, breaking broad availability and usability of services oriiginally compiled for Linux.
> First of all, there's never any way you can prove you don't have a key. Period.
I agree with your reasoning. This is what steganography is for. One secure key can be used for secure data, the other for much less critical, "personal" data of much larger volume, such as personal correspondence and shopping lists.
> The only reliable way to protect your data from government thugs is to change the government such that there are no government thugs wanting your data.
Since all governments will want, and are likely to insist upon, access at will to private documents, I wouldn't expect this plan to work. The Russians tried replacing a horrible monarchy with "the people's government" and wound up with Lenin and Stalin and abuses the equivalent of anything the czars committed.
> any case touched by either corrupt techs should be presumed to be vacated.
That presumption is unlikely to be borne out: from what I see of the Jennie Doohan case in MA, few convictions were overturned. Many defendants in drug cases plea bargain to lesser offenses, and I'd expect _none_ of those cases to be revisited, even if the defendant pled out to avoid hash penalties they were likely to receive, especially with federally mandated sentencing guidelines. Some cases doubtless had other evidence or testimony, which may have been _corroborated_ by the tainted forensic analysis, but which prosecutors will have great reasons to claim are valid. And getting such cases re-heard and re-examined is an intense, expensive, and for prosecutors an embarrassing They have strong bureaucratic and professional reasons to avoid any revisiting of these cases.
Which is why Aaron Swartz, who was arrested for abusing PACER and trying to republish it entirely, followed up with attempting to download all of JSTOR. Replicating the indexed content could work well, in the short term, but, would eliminate the fees that make organizing and publishing the indexed information possible. He was eventually arrested for that, as well, partly because he kept breaking JSTOR and breaking MIT's access to JSTOR with his abuse.
I actually remember the Pentagon Papers, though not well from reading about them: it was roughly 50 years ago. But if you're referring to the charges filed against Ellsberg, please actually review the case, and then please try to claim that an accused whistleblower can get a fair trial as a matter of course. Even that one ruling by Judge Byrne that Ellsberg could not discuss his _intent_ for revealing the documents was grounds for appeal, and as best I could tell from the time part of a campaign to publicly discredit Ellsberg as a criminal. That ruling was, as best I could tell, not based on law or any publicly admitted US judicial standard. Fortunately for Danial Ellsberg, and unfortunately for the judge who clearly favored the prosecution, prosecutorial and other federal agency misconduct became to outrageous that even Judge Burne had to declare a mistrial. And from the time, the mistrial was to avoid an acquittal or an appeal, which would have been even _more_ embarrassing for the prosecution.
Since the Pentagon Papers, there have been specific laws to _protect_ whistleblowers, especially the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. So please: do not cite a horrible ruling from a case declared a mistrial as establishing some sort of legal precedent, I would cite that ruling of exactly what Mr. Snowden could and should be frightened of: a horrible, hostile court and prosecutors willing to bend or even break the law to punish a whistleblower.
The idea that "the point of the trial is always to determine whether the defendant actually did the crime, not whether the crime should be illegal" is fundamentally incorrect. "The crime" usually includes intent as part of the definition of a criminal act. And there is a constitutionally protected court behavior called "jury nullification", in which the law itself is judged to be illegal. And last, there are _constantly_ cases involving the constitutionality of specific laws, filed by defendants trying to get the law itself overturned as unconstituional. Judging the laws, themselves, is a critical power of the judiciary.
> Anyone convicted on the basis of a test she could have conducted should be pardoned.
I agree with your sentiment. I see enormous practical difficulties. Sorting out which convictions were "on the basis of a test" is a nightmare, especially when the victims of poor testing plea bargained to a lower sentence. And what of people convicted of violence while in prison, violence that might not have occurred if they'd been free?
> because it is literally illegal for them to mention to the Jury that Snowden thought the leak was in the public interest
No, it's not "literally illegal". to mention that. The judge may give explicit directions against it, but intent is a critical and normal part of a legal defense, especially if Mr. Snowden cited the protections of the various "whistleblower" laws. There's also a great tendency of judges to shut down any attempt by a defense attorney to invoke "jury nullification", which is always available to a jury even when the judge explicitly says "you must only convict or acquit on *this* basis".
> There's no need for secrecy, special assassination teams, or anything special.
There's also "no need" for the excessive and abusive monitoring that Mr. Snowden disclosed. Except that, there is a _compelling_ need for people involved in such criminal, illegal behavior to punish whistleblowers, and for the people who've invested their professional lives in such abuse to vindicate themselves in anger, and especially for thise still involved in it to prevent any further disclosures or credible disclosures. What does Edward Snowden have left that he refused to leak before now to protect real intelligence assets? What might he feel free to reveal in a US court that might be leaked by the jury or the judge, and recorded in the court record?
Thee's also "no need" for a prosecutor to fail to present witnesses or for witnesses from the intelligence community, called by the defense, to lie under oath about illegal activity documented by Edward Snowden. But it's extremely likely to happen.
> What makes you think he'd not get a fair trial in the US?
Given the extraordinary nature and extent of the documents, the trial would not possibly be open, Judge and jury (if there was one) and defense attorneys would operate under extraordinary limitations of access to witnesses and documents that would establish justification for his whistle blowing, and various intelligence agencies would likely operate extra-legally to insure his conviction or even his early murder.
Or don't loan books. Always consider them gifts.
> Because I haven't heard any mainstream conservative groups try to restrict free speech;
Oh, my. Have you really not paid attention to the censorship of Planned Parenthood from discussing abortion with women? Or of discussing birth control in high schools? Or of teaching evolution in science classes? Or did you ignore the attempts by the US government to censoe the Pentagon Papers, or to censor Analog science magazine from printing details of the basic physical design of a simple atom bomb? Or of ongoing restrictions on publishing cryptography or security vulnerabilities, evidenced by speeches being censored at DefCon? Or the "Comic Book Code", applied to American comc books for decades?
> Firing bird shot into the air is not a serious hazard. I don't know how you think hunters get birds, hint they don't wait for them to land
They don't normally hunt within city limits, where firing guns was illegal in this case. In the USA, most bird hunters hunt on private property outside city limits, where the property owner has given permission. There's some hunting on public land, but this usually requires a permit to prevent poaching and depopulating the hunted species. Similar, more stringent restrictions are applied to deer hunting with both guns and bows, primarily for safety reasons. A 30-06 bullet missing a deer that is above the hunter, and traveling unimpeded as it arcs through the air, can still have lethal velocity over 1000 yards away: that's why a well trained hunter checks what is beyond his target, in case the round misses or penetrates and continues through the target.
There are many species that have been hunted to extinction: most hunters don't want to see that happen, and some of them are the best supporters of their local ecologies that you could imagine, investing in parks and preservation and invaluable conservation movements. The political tension between hunters and vegetarian or vegan ecology promoters create very strange political bedfellows.
There are tradeoffs. Next to roads, there are often telephone poles and power lines. But even with high quality GPS or wifi based location tools on the drone, mapping locations like Google maps are often off by a street or two, so confirming the address is still needed. Picking safety over precision is going to be fascinating work.