It isn't my definition, it's the definition of the people who actually did it to great positive effect.
There is nothing wrong with just ignoring stupid laws and there is nothing wrong with choosing exile over jail
I'm pretty sure that's what I said, he's gonna end up living in Ecuador or Moscow (or Leavenworth) eventually, that's the consequence.
The people in the wrong are the ones demanding a pardon -- it's easy for the government to pardon a leaker here, a leaker there, because they still retain the right to not do so in any other case. When one demands a pardon, one is confirming the legitimacy of the regime to grant one in the first place. It's impossible to defeat a law by demanding exceptions.
I'm pretty soft on Ellsberg's contribution to "end" of the Vietnam war -- the Papers only came out in mid-1971, at a time when Vietnamization had been in full swing for over two years, US troop involvement at the beginning of the year was less than a third off the 1969 peak and every office of the US government was frantically trying to extricate itself from the disaster. Ellsberg's leak became a football for different factions in the government to fix blame, while passing the buck for responsibility for the defeat (let alone the war) as such; doves in the Democratic party used it to discredit the hawks, and the legacy of Lyndon Johnson and Robert MacNamara in particular. It completed the damage begun by Chicago '68, and by 1972 the Democratic Party was a party in name only, utterly smashed into a liberal/leftist/pacifist wing, and a hawk/anticommunist/Scoop Jackson wing, which would eventually become a part of Reagan's base. If Nixon had released the papers himself he could not have done more damage to the political left.
Jail is something the government does to make you less effective. I'd rather be effective.
I'm sure that's what Carlos the Jackal told himself every morning. The Romantic Revolutionary Fugitive trope is the kryptonite of sustainable freedom movements; criminal gangs (and self-obsorbed Laptop Revolutionaries hiding in embassies) cannot bring about good government, no matter how pure their intentions. They simply feed into and legitimize the state's narrative of lawlessness as opposed to order.
All I'm saying is that if you're practicing civil disobedience and trying to stay out of jail, you're doing it wrong. Civil disobedience against an immoral law requires that you bear the penalty society and the government imposes. You let them shoot the fire hoses in your face, and let the world judge. You let them do it until everyone else hates them for doing it; you let them do it until they hate themselves for doing it. If you're serious about civil liberties in our country, I suspect that's what's required, people simply don't realize the evils done in their name.
Snowden did a good thing, but he did broke the law and he should be prepared to accept the consequences of that -- be they jail or unofficial exile. It's in the punishment that the immorality of laws are revealed, not the breach. That said, he's probably doing the right thing by not coming back, but we've yet to see if he's the sort of leader this movement needs, or if he's was even trying to do good, as opposed to simply trolling or committing vandalism.
If you had actually gone to jail over something, I might believe you.
You don't have to believe me, just read Gandhi and Thoreau:
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,– the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
I admit that while there are things in this world I don't like, I ain't willing to go to jail to change them, and this tells me that the things I don't like probably aren't such a big deal. This may be a pretty compromised worldview, but I'm not sure malcontents posting on Slashdot have any superior claim to ethics. Newsflash: You can't defeat a corrupt government with Retweets and Likes, or even by leaking a terabyte of diplomatic correspondence. Giving the Man a middle finger is a pointless exercise.
The Evil here is in the minds of millions of Americans who simply don't believe there is a problem. What it definitely is NOT is a conspiracy of a few powerful people to hide the truth from the Sheeple: you could tell the American people about every privacy violation that has occurred, and they'd mostly be okay with it, because they believe that it doesn't affect them. Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald can reveal all kinds of domestic surveillance, and can leak any number of internal documents, it just doesn't matter.
Gee, thanks for the link to the fucking Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. I'm sure that no one in Congress has ever heard of that:/
Who put nutcases like that in charge?!?
We did, and continue to do so; we have a lot of reasons:
Our governing institutions have profound status quo bias, and the present opposition party is happy to do nothing one way or the other and to let policy drift as long as they are out of power.
Activists in the US have succeded in portraying the government, as opposed to an elected political institution, into an adversary or "other" of the common people. This has fed into the broad popular belief that a vote "doesn't matter," and that only anti-democratic modalities effect real change -- bribery and influence, the courts, protests, fancy ideological applications of the Constitution to stymie democratic governance all fall under this.
Wether a politician is of the left or right, they cannot ignore that the defense establishment is easily the most popular and celebrated aspect of the Federal government, and any attempt to reign it in or approach its mission critically provokes popular rebuke. People love guys in black SWAT helmets more than they love their congressman.
Civil libertarians have, for the most part, been profoundly ineffective politically. They seem to fall into the same trap many public right-wingers in the US have, and they've discovered that they'd rather have the fame and glory of being a doctrinaire outsider than accepting gradual change by consensus (Julian Assange, I'm looking at you).
Most important point: Americans, in general, seem to be completely sold on the idea that "Americans" and "foreigners" have essentially different rights, and that the government can successfully abuse the rights of the latter while leaving unmolested the rights of the former.
The US has a whistleblower law that's ostensibly to protect them, yet this administration has attacked more whistleblowers than any other.
A "whistleblower" is someone who exposes illegal behavior or misconduct, and the "whistleblower law" is meant to protect him from reprisal. The problem here is that everything Snowden has exposed would appear to have the sanction of US law.
Obviously it's wrong, by most people's commonsense idea of what their rights are, and his act is a form of protest. To pardon him or exculpate him would, under normal rules, be a mistake, because going to jail for breaking an immoral law is an intrinsic aspect of civil disobedience -- Thoreau and MLK went to jail, their incarceration simply became a demonstration of the manifest immorality of the law.
A problem going forward is that the government doesn't seem satisfied to merely jail someone anymore, it has to hold them for months or years without indictment, as in the case of Bradley Manning. I can't tell yet if holding someone like Manning incognito, without charge for months or years, actually helps or hurts the protestor's case.
(I'd say on balance it seems to help, so far; if they'd simply arrested him, indicted him and convicted him in the old-fashioned way, nobody would be talking about him anymore.)
Microsoft also had the benefit of Java going first and making all the mistakes, and then Microsoft got lucky when Java lost its first-mover advantage chasing down several blind alleyways -- "Applets", Sun's mismanagement, a bureaucratic open source strategy.
The "towed to port" story was apocryphal, though it was a nasty crash according to all reports. In Microsoft's favor, the particular ship involved was a testbed where failures of all kinds of new systems are to be expected, even ones that result in the ship losing power and requiring a tug.
I have no doubt that if phones and the Internet had existed in 1789, they would have been covered by the 4th.
Had the Internet existed in 1789, it would have been federalized and made a part of the Post Office. As it is, such privacy rights would put private companies in the untenable position of handling your messages without "reading" them, which is quite a trick. This of course is even more ridiculous when applied to things like electronic shopping carts and web tracking data, which by their very nature are read and retained by the recipient vendor.
I'm gratified for this counterexample, though I'm bothered that it was a decision relating to fraud, as opposed to terrorism, which would likely have changed the outcome, for no good reason.
The flaw in your logic is the postal service. They are now maintaining images of the exterior of every piece of mail that they process. The exteriors of written correspondence are also part of my effects. This intrusion, useful as it has been, violates the 4th.
How are they supposed to deliver mail if the exterior is private?
Perhaps a convention could clarify our privacy rights - if Google, Verizon, Microsoft, et al. cannot guarantee privacy from all intrusions, then they cannot prevent any intrusions.
That would gut the usefulness of the Internet for business transactions, and would ruin Google's business model to boot -- they sorta need their datasets to be proprietary in order to make the secret sauce. Business is what the Internet is about, not free expression; this is a consequence of the fact that everything you do on the internet happens on someone else's property.
Unfortunately in this modern era, it's hard to recommend someone actually buy a car -- you should lease with a 100% of service covered (this is yet another one of the subtle ways people with poor credit are relegated to the Second Class).
If you must own a car, you should pay cash up front. If you want a new car with all the googaws, you should prepare to be slowly bled dry by service. The other option is to buy something from before the Computer Revolution and expect to get it serviced a lot, but for a lot cheaper!
Our right to be secure in our persons, papers, and effects will never be respected under the status quo.
Your rights in this regard are completely intact. You seem to think that emails, phone logs, and all manner of web data are "papers and effects", whereas no US court has ever held such a thing. And rightly so, this information is held on other people's computers, with no bailment or contract. As far as AT&T or Google is concerned, this sort of information is explicitly their property, not yours. Making this sort of information private would create a vast legal-bureaucratic framework -- the sort of regulation a hospital has to apply to HIPPA, with compliance officers, civil and criminal liability, all administered and verified by the federal government, except applying to every medium of every ISP, phone company, and website on the US Internet.
The last century of jurisprudence has generally held that, if electromagnetism is involved, the fourth amendment does not attach, because the consequences of such a ruling would utterly trample the rights of the comm network operators -- phone records, routing information, cookies, database rows, all of these things are their stuff, it is their privacy courts are most worried about, not yours; if you want privacy, keep your business off the Internet, where dozens of private corporations happily track your every move before the NSA even gets involved. You might as well demand privacy on the teacups at Disneyland.
The explicit exception to this is phone calls, and these are only protected on account of the quasi-state status of telephone networks as "Common Carriers."
I'm sorta dubious that he has anything to say that the Chinese or Russians don't already know, and anything they don't know, automatically becomes worthless the moment he discloses it in public.
I'm a sound designer, I mostly work on feature films; I use FLAC for my remote archives -- uploading to S3 goes a lot faster this way, particularly when the audio media is sparse. A 20 minute FX premix might be 10% the size of an equivalent WAV because of all the silence. The flac(1) tool also has a handy --keep-foreign-metadata option that generally gives byte-for-byte round trip accuracy, even for embedded metadata.
I also use Apple Lossless for my local library, mainly because it supports ID3 and Apple clients (like Pro Tools) support it more commonly than FLAC.
The pain is that for compliance reasons we have to row-replicate our "live" records to Santa and the Easter Bunny every month, sometimes more frequently around their rush periods. Fortunately, we did their original database transition in 1973* -- we just use some old JCL scripts someone put together at the time, they still seem to work.
*It's a little known fact that Our Dark and Imperious Prince of Lies actually operated a major consultancy in the 70s. SAP took over most of our clients in the early 80s when we transitioned into the consumer space (you've probably used our toner cartridges). Anyways that's why we did Leo Apotheker such a big favor.
It makes it impossible for delegated authorities to negotiate. Representatives are chosen to obtain results, perhaps by compromise, but to obtain results. When every last detail of a politician's position at every point in a negotiation is publicly verifiable, the incentives for "sticking to principle"* outweigh the incentives for obtaining a pareto optimal solution.
The delegated authorities may never enact a policy, they may never reform bad ones, nothing may happen at all -- but as long as they maintain a verifiable agenda that never gives an inch, they're guaranteed to keep their jobs.
* Read: slavishly adhering to constituent opinion and exercising minimal independent thought.
It's definitely not in the interests of science; I've seen more than few defense cuts characterized as a "War on the Troops."
The "War on..." rhetorical trope has a long and proud tradition, and I personally don't see a serious moral imbalance between paying for national defense and paying to measure sea levels, fisheries health, pollutants, seismic activity...
Of course it is, it's a completely falsifiable proposition.
A non-scientific statement would be, "It is right to reduce carbon emissions," or "It is not in our best interest to restrain global warming regardless of the cost."
None of the claims in the linked articles are in dispute, and the Brietbart article simply recaps a local Cincinnati Fox TV reporter, who's "Rogue IRS Agent" story is a strawman, which he does not attribute to any source -- he cannot, since nobody reputable has claimed this. It's dutiful, rather mild and uninformative reporting that has a provocative headline and unsubstantiated lede, for the purpose of headline trolling, which is about all most conservative news sites are good for.
Ed Rogers calls attention to his own unsubstantiated innuendoes thus:
I sat in a White House chief of staff’s office every day for more than two years. The only reason the legal counsel would tell the chief of staff about an impending report or disclosure would be so the chief of staff could tell the president.
He of course gained this valuable White House experience by doing damage control during the congressional investigations of Iran-Contra. If anyone could understand how a president simply isn't responsible for every bad act that happens under his authority, you'd think he would:)
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't my definition, it's the definition of the people who actually did it to great positive effect.
I'm pretty sure that's what I said, he's gonna end up living in Ecuador or Moscow (or Leavenworth) eventually, that's the consequence.
The people in the wrong are the ones demanding a pardon -- it's easy for the government to pardon a leaker here, a leaker there, because they still retain the right to not do so in any other case. When one demands a pardon, one is confirming the legitimacy of the regime to grant one in the first place. It's impossible to defeat a law by demanding exceptions.
I'm pretty soft on Ellsberg's contribution to "end" of the Vietnam war -- the Papers only came out in mid-1971, at a time when Vietnamization had been in full swing for over two years, US troop involvement at the beginning of the year was less than a third off the 1969 peak and every office of the US government was frantically trying to extricate itself from the disaster. Ellsberg's leak became a football for different factions in the government to fix blame, while passing the buck for responsibility for the defeat (let alone the war) as such; doves in the Democratic party used it to discredit the hawks, and the legacy of Lyndon Johnson and Robert MacNamara in particular. It completed the damage begun by Chicago '68, and by 1972 the Democratic Party was a party in name only, utterly smashed into a liberal/leftist/pacifist wing, and a hawk/anticommunist/Scoop Jackson wing, which would eventually become a part of Reagan's base. If Nixon had released the papers himself he could not have done more damage to the political left.
I'm sure that's what Carlos the Jackal told himself every morning. The Romantic Revolutionary Fugitive trope is the kryptonite of sustainable freedom movements; criminal gangs (and self-obsorbed Laptop Revolutionaries hiding in embassies) cannot bring about good government, no matter how pure their intentions. They simply feed into and legitimize the state's narrative of lawlessness as opposed to order.
All I'm saying is that if you're practicing civil disobedience and trying to stay out of jail, you're doing it wrong. Civil disobedience against an immoral law requires that you bear the penalty society and the government imposes. You let them shoot the fire hoses in your face, and let the world judge. You let them do it until everyone else hates them for doing it; you let them do it until they hate themselves for doing it. If you're serious about civil liberties in our country, I suspect that's what's required, people simply don't realize the evils done in their name.
Snowden did a good thing, but he did broke the law and he should be prepared to accept the consequences of that -- be they jail or unofficial exile. It's in the punishment that the immorality of laws are revealed, not the breach. That said, he's probably doing the right thing by not coming back, but we've yet to see if he's the sort of leader this movement needs, or if he's was even trying to do good, as opposed to simply trolling or committing vandalism.
You don't have to believe me, just read Gandhi and Thoreau:
I admit that while there are things in this world I don't like, I ain't willing to go to jail to change them, and this tells me that the things I don't like probably aren't such a big deal. This may be a pretty compromised worldview, but I'm not sure malcontents posting on Slashdot have any superior claim to ethics. Newsflash: You can't defeat a corrupt government with Retweets and Likes, or even by leaking a terabyte of diplomatic correspondence. Giving the Man a middle finger is a pointless exercise.
The Evil here is in the minds of millions of Americans who simply don't believe there is a problem. What it definitely is NOT is a conspiracy of a few powerful people to hide the truth from the Sheeple: you could tell the American people about every privacy violation that has occurred, and they'd mostly be okay with it, because they believe that it doesn't affect them. Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald can reveal all kinds of domestic surveillance, and can leak any number of internal documents, it just doesn't matter.
Gee, thanks for the link to the fucking Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. I'm sure that no one in Congress has ever heard of that :/
We did, and continue to do so; we have a lot of reasons:
A "whistleblower" is someone who exposes illegal behavior or misconduct, and the "whistleblower law" is meant to protect him from reprisal. The problem here is that everything Snowden has exposed would appear to have the sanction of US law.
Obviously it's wrong, by most people's commonsense idea of what their rights are, and his act is a form of protest. To pardon him or exculpate him would, under normal rules, be a mistake, because going to jail for breaking an immoral law is an intrinsic aspect of civil disobedience -- Thoreau and MLK went to jail, their incarceration simply became a demonstration of the manifest immorality of the law.
A problem going forward is that the government doesn't seem satisfied to merely jail someone anymore, it has to hold them for months or years without indictment, as in the case of Bradley Manning. I can't tell yet if holding someone like Manning incognito, without charge for months or years, actually helps or hurts the protestor's case.
(I'd say on balance it seems to help, so far; if they'd simply arrested him, indicted him and convicted him in the old-fashioned way, nobody would be talking about him anymore.)
Let none denigrate the usefulness of humble convention swag again.
Mr. Potato Head, backdoors are not secrets.
Microsoft also had the benefit of Java going first and making all the mistakes, and then Microsoft got lucky when Java lost its first-mover advantage chasing down several blind alleyways -- "Applets", Sun's mismanagement, a bureaucratic open source strategy.
2003 called, it wants its article back.
The "towed to port" story was apocryphal, though it was a nasty crash according to all reports. In Microsoft's favor, the particular ship involved was a testbed where failures of all kinds of new systems are to be expected, even ones that result in the ship losing power and requiring a tug.
Had the Internet existed in 1789, it would have been federalized and made a part of the Post Office. As it is, such privacy rights would put private companies in the untenable position of handling your messages without "reading" them, which is quite a trick. This of course is even more ridiculous when applied to things like electronic shopping carts and web tracking data, which by their very nature are read and retained by the recipient vendor.
Even if you buy it, the cost of proprietary service required means you're really only renting it.
I'm gratified for this counterexample, though I'm bothered that it was a decision relating to fraud, as opposed to terrorism, which would likely have changed the outcome, for no good reason.
How are they supposed to deliver mail if the exterior is private?
That would gut the usefulness of the Internet for business transactions, and would ruin Google's business model to boot -- they sorta need their datasets to be proprietary in order to make the secret sauce. Business is what the Internet is about, not free expression; this is a consequence of the fact that everything you do on the internet happens on someone else's property.
Unfortunately in this modern era, it's hard to recommend someone actually buy a car -- you should lease with a 100% of service covered (this is yet another one of the subtle ways people with poor credit are relegated to the Second Class).
If you must own a car, you should pay cash up front. If you want a new car with all the googaws, you should prepare to be slowly bled dry by service. The other option is to buy something from before the Computer Revolution and expect to get it serviced a lot, but for a lot cheaper!
Your rights in this regard are completely intact. You seem to think that emails, phone logs, and all manner of web data are "papers and effects", whereas no US court has ever held such a thing. And rightly so, this information is held on other people's computers, with no bailment or contract. As far as AT&T or Google is concerned, this sort of information is explicitly their property, not yours. Making this sort of information private would create a vast legal-bureaucratic framework -- the sort of regulation a hospital has to apply to HIPPA, with compliance officers, civil and criminal liability, all administered and verified by the federal government, except applying to every medium of every ISP, phone company, and website on the US Internet.
The last century of jurisprudence has generally held that, if electromagnetism is involved, the fourth amendment does not attach, because the consequences of such a ruling would utterly trample the rights of the comm network operators -- phone records, routing information, cookies, database rows, all of these things are their stuff, it is their privacy courts are most worried about, not yours; if you want privacy, keep your business off the Internet, where dozens of private corporations happily track your every move before the NSA even gets involved. You might as well demand privacy on the teacups at Disneyland.
The explicit exception to this is phone calls, and these are only protected on account of the quasi-state status of telephone networks as "Common Carriers."
I'm sorta dubious that he has anything to say that the Chinese or Russians don't already know, and anything they don't know, automatically becomes worthless the moment he discloses it in public.
I'm a sound designer, I mostly work on feature films; I use FLAC for my remote archives -- uploading to S3 goes a lot faster this way, particularly when the audio media is sparse. A 20 minute FX premix might be 10% the size of an equivalent WAV because of all the silence. The flac(1) tool also has a handy --keep-foreign-metadata option that generally gives byte-for-byte round trip accuracy, even for embedded metadata. I also use Apple Lossless for my local library, mainly because it supports ID3 and Apple clients (like Pro Tools) support it more commonly than FLAC.
The pain is that for compliance reasons we have to row-replicate our "live" records to Santa and the Easter Bunny every month, sometimes more frequently around their rush periods. Fortunately, we did their original database transition in 1973* -- we just use some old JCL scripts someone put together at the time, they still seem to work.
*It's a little known fact that Our Dark and Imperious Prince of Lies actually operated a major consultancy in the 70s. SAP took over most of our clients in the early 80s when we transitioned into the consumer space (you've probably used our toner cartridges). Anyways that's why we did Leo Apotheker such a big favor.
Don't, you'll go to hell, where you'll be forced to write a data warehousing backend for Satan's business affairs platform, which runs WebObjects.
It makes it impossible for delegated authorities to negotiate. Representatives are chosen to obtain results, perhaps by compromise, but to obtain results. When every last detail of a politician's position at every point in a negotiation is publicly verifiable, the incentives for "sticking to principle"* outweigh the incentives for obtaining a pareto optimal solution.
The delegated authorities may never enact a policy, they may never reform bad ones, nothing may happen at all -- but as long as they maintain a verifiable agenda that never gives an inch, they're guaranteed to keep their jobs.
* Read: slavishly adhering to constituent opinion and exercising minimal independent thought.
But Rails doesn't scale! :)
It's definitely not in the interests of science; I've seen more than few defense cuts characterized as a "War on the Troops."
The "War on..." rhetorical trope has a long and proud tradition, and I personally don't see a serious moral imbalance between paying for national defense and paying to measure sea levels, fisheries health, pollutants, seismic activity...
Of course it is, it's a completely falsifiable proposition.
A non-scientific statement would be, "It is right to reduce carbon emissions," or "It is not in our best interest to restrain global warming regardless of the cost."
None of the claims in the linked articles are in dispute, and the Brietbart article simply recaps a local Cincinnati Fox TV reporter, who's "Rogue IRS Agent" story is a strawman, which he does not attribute to any source -- he cannot, since nobody reputable has claimed this. It's dutiful, rather mild and uninformative reporting that has a provocative headline and unsubstantiated lede, for the purpose of headline trolling, which is about all most conservative news sites are good for.
Ed Rogers calls attention to his own unsubstantiated innuendoes thus:
He of course gained this valuable White House experience by doing damage control during the congressional investigations of Iran-Contra. If anyone could understand how a president simply isn't responsible for every bad act that happens under his authority, you'd think he would :)