Amazingly, it is legal to carry and use a firearm in many places where some of my examples above would be illegal for the common person to use. I really wonder how the "right to bear arms" became the "right to carry a gun" -- it's not really that guns should be outlawed, but that they're just so inappropriate for so many situations, but people (on both sides of the fence) have come to place inappropriate expectations on what they can accomplish.
Sounds like you pretty much agree with me, but didn't read my entire post before hit hit reply:)
As for your last sentence... that is truly the best advice, where possible.
I'd just rather live in a world where an attacker wouldn't be thinking "does she/doesn't she have a gun" but instead has to wonder "is she/isn't she armed?" or even better, doesn't even wonder, because the attacker considers attacking too risky/inappropriate by default.
Many different jobs in the computer security world have this issue -- the answer for most of them is that if you're found out using these for personal gain/fun, you've just ended your career. Nobody (not even organized crime) wants someone on board who would screw them over by haphazardly leaking this sort of information.
Plus, having the wide set of unpatched exploits is only part of the issue; the guys who are finding the new ones can just as easily do this on their own time too. But why do it? They're being paid by the government (and protected by the government) to do something that would carry hefty penalties if they did it themselves.
For that matter, many jobs in all walks of life have this issue -- but you're not overly worried about the guy who works for the City Water Department, are you?
Solve your censorship problem and you will solve a lot of your other problems. Just be prepared to see high turnover in your leadership -- something that has been needed for a very long time in China.
Interesting point here... I think a lot of people aren't up to speed on current politics in China; leadership used to be for life, but is now for a set period with mandatory retirement. The result is that this generation has seen significantly more movement in the meritocracy than ever before, and a notable decrease in cronyism and general corruption. Still a long way to go, but it's a start -- and surprisingly, improving censorship has been more of a slow-forming result than a cause.
Application-level multiplexing avoids repeating TCP slow start when the user agent starts downloading additional resources in parallel, such as style sheet, script, and images, or when the user agent stops a download before it has finished.
Maybe we need a Stylesheet Transfer Protocol and an Activescript Transfer Protocol. Then we can tie them all together using the Super Omni Awesome Protocol.
It's probably a good thing that IETF is codifying a standard for all this, but it's not like there aren't already standards out there in use that would be just as efficient for solving these problems. SPDY is just one of them.
But why destroy the peripherals? Why not donate everything to technology poor places like Somalia or Kandahar or Arkansas? Are they afraid people are going to extract sensitive government data from a recycled CRT? Or do we need a five million dollar initiative in order to give the all clear to give away old stuff for free?
Actually, this is a good idea in more than one way: send all the peripherals etc (everything but the HD) to some third world country. Then when the hidden keyloggers start phoning home, the spooks will have a moment of getting REALLY confused as they read through all the requests to help get their sick mother's wealth out of the country....
...That means you get accidental deaths. And that also means that when we fail at the people end of things the damage is that much more catastrophic.
And this is less true of an SUV than it is of a gun? I don't think your distinction between items you categorize as "causes death only" and ones you categorize as "not built primarily for killing" is the most important one here.
The person you replied to made a valid, logical point about the person operating the killing device being the deciding factor in whether it causes a death. That's just as true for a driver running over her estranged lover repeatedly or plowing through a crowd at a mall in her SUV as it is for a shooter trying to see how many first graders he can kill.
That doesn't mean it's *only* the people at fault, just that they are a bigger factor than their chosen implement of destruction. Claiming "false dichotomy" is convenient and could be viewed as correct for a certain interpretation of the statements you replied to, but misses the point.
To paraphrase a fictional character from a popular movie, "A *person* is reasonable. *People* are dumb, stupid, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.", the weapon used, whether purpose-built or not, is a distant second to the wielder, in terms of what constitutes a danger.
Well, we've already got an SUV registry... Just sayin'.
"Who the hell are you to decide when an action is grounds for the death penalty?"
Just to be crystal clear, are you saying that self-defense with a weapon is never appropriate? If so, you may wish to hold forth as to why the police should be armed, or exactly what posture someone being beaten to death should take to be most noble in your eyes. Is that the fetal position, or some sort of supplication toward the east?
He's saying that shoot to kill is not the only self-defense with a weapon, and should not be the first line of defense. Personally, I'd rather go for dislocating someone's arm (for minor agression), momentarily blinding or deafening the person or paralyzing them from the waist down or rendering them comatose (for extreme cases) to killing them outright.
Now, Guns aren't just for killing; they're also for maiming. But they're notoriously inaccurate for both unless used by a well-trained person -- plus, you don't know what the victim's response to the maiming will be. Do something to dislocate their right arm, and you know they can't use their right arm very well. Blind them with a flashbang and you know they can't see. Hit them hard in the knees with anything, and they aren't going to be ambulatory any time soon.
Amazingly, it is legal to carry and use a firearm in many places where some of my examples above would be illegal for the common person to use. I really wonder how the "right to bear arms" became the "right to carry a gun" -- it's not really that guns should be outlawed, but that they're just so inappropriate for so many situations, but people (on both sides of the fence) have come to place inappropriate expectations on what they can accomplish.
the Court GRANTS Defendants' motions to dismiss Plaintiffs' statutory claims on the basis of sovereign immunity.
So the government thinks it is a sovereign entity that can do whatever it likes? And the court takes that view? I thought the country was the sovereign entity and the government was just a part of it established by the people. When did the government or any part of it get this new status?
The people grant the government sovereign immunity to certain things as part of the governing process. Government itself would be illegal without this. It's kind of like the Library of Congress can archive all written works, even though copyright forbids this. They have sovereign immunity for the interests of the people.
Looked at another way, certain laws are written to restrict rights; the government is exempt from some of these laws as it is at cross purposes to restrict governmental rights in these areas.
So it's not the government that is a sovereign entity; it is The People; these People grant those executing their wishes certain exemptions to allow them to execute said wishes.
Now that's the simplistic view, and obviously government in the US has ripened to the point where this can be (and is) abused. But they still don't get a "get out of jail free" card -- they have to show that their purpose for going above the law is only to enable effective governmental oversight.
Seems like they did that for those two counts, but were unable to do that for the other counts levied against them.
Someone actually made a slashdotfs module for FUSE a while back that used a transparent steganographic layer to store your local data at anon -1:) Won't work for big data, but nifty for small sets:)
The CIA has had their own drones that were completely independent of the military. That said, they are now turning over their drones to the military and will no longer have their own fleet. The will need to coordinate with the military for future drone strikes.
Actually, I think the idea is that the military won't need to coordinate with the CIA for future drone strikes. The CIA WILL need to coordinate with the military to use the drones for intel gathering purposes however.
Makes much more sense than the way things were before.
Much better comment to add to your message history, and generally correct:) I was going to point these things out myself.
Doesn't make what the government did any better, but Snowden appears to have more in mind than a standard whistle blowing event; we appear to be seeing an attempt to keep the topic in the news and visible for as long as possible, until governments are actually forced to take action. It's a shame that he appears to have moved beyond simply illegal because of breaching security and into leaking things with a very calculated effect of causing diplomatic issues.
I was hoping that his leaks to this point would cause governments globally to 1) clean up their acts (at least a bit) and 2) stop being so lax in security.
It looks like the only real good that may come out of this (the political posturing so far has been just that -- posturing) is that the general population may be a bit more engaged with privacy issues.
Most of these systems do have a threshold at which they stop attempting to decompress and just either drop it or flag it for manual examination. In this systems' case, it probably flags it.
HOWEVER, another trick used is to fully scan the archive metadata (zip headers, etc) which usually provide a significant amount of information all by themselves (content filenames, CRC values, etc), even on password protected zips. So unless we're talking nested password protected zips with "zip bombs" (10gb nul-content files) included, all the information necessary for standard indexing can be gained without ever unzipping the file contents.
Much like Nickel-Zinc batteries, this is a great alternative for environmentally-unfriendly power storage.
Now I have to wonder, could this be easily recycled and refreshed to a new state?
If so, despite the lower power density, I'd buy electronics using this battery without any hesitation.
What is the output voltage of such a cell and how much power drain can it withstand without going stupid?
If it can withstand high drains and provides at LEAST 1.4V per cell, I'd be happy.
the wood-nanotube anode is the main part that would need to be replaced -- so the real question is: "what is the energy input and what are the waste products associated with creating this wood-nanotube composite anode?"
I'd rather you didn't "fix" what I wrote. I wrote can YOU translate... If we treat humankind as an entity, you're correct, to a degree (we'd get a LOT of noise with the answer).
I was ignoring the Poe's law angle... I thought that was obvious;)
Computers and computer systems are tools enabling the individual to harvest the wisdom of humanity. Google Translate, as an example again, is crowd-driven, not computer-driven. It is an expert system.
And if we can't distinguish between a parody of extremism, or subtle sarcasm reliably as humans without visual or written clues, how would you propose to tell a machine to do so?
This deserves a two part answer: 1. I wouldn't -- it wouldn't be possible. 2. As I was originally saying, there are many visual and written clues that as humans, our brains are hardwired to ignore. Computers are hardwired to remember and weight them. Therefore, while parody and subtle sarcasm may be lost on a specific individual because they didn't pick up on the subtle cues, an expert system that is designed to ferret out and correlate these cues will be able to weight the context appropriately, just as an individual who was an expert in that area and also picked up the subtle cues would.
The difference is that everybody can use the computer system in multiple places and contexts at the same time; I'd like to see the human equivalent try that.
Why would you expect the software to be any better at this than the humans?
Software tends to do what you tell it to do... think of this as a semantics translator, not a sarcasm detector. Can you translate into and out of 50 different languages? Google Translate and the Systran engine can.
I'd expect the software to be MUCH better at this than the humans, because it isn't going to get distracted by the MEANING of the phrases it is analysing. Humans tend to be really bad at communication analysis.
What I'm surprised at is that neither time was Minitel mentioned. France has been monitoring communications for a long, long time, and I thought everyone was OK with it.
If my employer, a hospital, started executing patients they had sworn to heal, I'd expect some questions even though I do research....
Methinks you took words out of his mouth and replaced them with what you wanted to hear.
The recruiting interview wasn't a stunt... sending it to the Guardian was. It was a publicity stunt, done using the standard journalistic and marketing methods. This doesn't make it bad, wrong, immoral, or invalid. If you follow the interview, you'll see that the recruiters were asked pointed questions that anyone considering working in translation for the NSA SHOULD be asking. The Guardian excerpted the juicy bits and put their own spin on it.
I'm starting to wonder why you and ThorGod are attempting to minimalize the pointed comments to such a degree... you obviously both feel passionate about protecting public servants from "undue" scrutiny and feel that the approach used here was unprofessional. Most people on slashdot appear to disagree with both of you, but you keep bringing back the same arguments again and again down the message thread. Reading your message history is definitely enlightening. You raise some good points and then destroy them by attacking the posters for their lack of right thinking instead of letting the valid points stand on their own merits. In short, you're on par with me (now that I've made this post):)
You mean they're "just following orders"? Ah, I guess it's okay then.
They're not soldiers, genocide is no where insight, your vague analogy is invalid.
Just so you know, the NSA is actually a branch of the US military. While Genocide is nowhere in sight, a branch of the US military embarking on secret AND covert operations on the people they are sworn to protect, and then intentionally misleading Congress about it when questioned, definitely holds up under the framework of the analogy. Would you rather people didn't raise a stink until it DID come to genocide?
And if you want to blame someone about the "poor recruiters just doing their job" -- their job is to interact with potential candidates. If they can't stand the heat (which they seemed to be able to do, even though it made them uncomfortable) the blame isn't with the people they invited, it's with the people who sent them out to recruit totally unprepared for what any sane person would have seen coming. That's right, instead of attempting to invalidate people's arguments on slashdot, why not put THIS blame where it is due -- with NSA HR?
What's her next target for hard-hitting investigative journalism? Interrogating the WalMart cashier about the sleazy business practices of the corporation? How about cornering the burger-flipper at McDonald's over his/her complicity in contributing to the nationwide obesity epidemic?
That's just what we need: more up-and-coming journalists that pick the low-hanging fruit and pretend that it's a raw, career-making scoop.
That's actually not a bad idea; what ALL of the places you mention fear is a bad public image. Getting international coverage of your public-facing employees obviously not being trained in public relations speaks volumes.
And I love how you equated being an NSA recruiter with being a Wal-Mart greeter or McDonald's burger flipper:D Does even more to define the NSA's image.
Not only is Obama fully responsible for the current NSA actions and keeping them secret, he lied during his campaign when he promised to end such abuses.
Obama is "fully responsible" for a program Dubya put in place? Partisan much?
Yes.
When Bush was in power, he was fully responsible for the program. When he handed it over to Obama, Obama became fully responsible for the program. That's how being President of the United States works. Being fully responsible for it, he could have chosen to end it, expand it or ignore it. This was all his responsibility, and still is.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazingly, it is legal to carry and use a firearm in many places where some of my examples above would be illegal for the common person to use. I really wonder how the "right to bear arms" became the "right to carry a gun" -- it's not really that guns should be outlawed, but that they're just so inappropriate for so many situations, but people (on both sides of the fence) have come to place inappropriate expectations on what they can accomplish.
Sounds like you pretty much agree with me, but didn't read my entire post before hit hit reply :)
As for your last sentence... that is truly the best advice, where possible.
I'd just rather live in a world where an attacker wouldn't be thinking "does she/doesn't she have a gun" but instead has to wonder "is she/isn't she armed?" or even better, doesn't even wonder, because the attacker considers attacking too risky/inappropriate by default.
Many different jobs in the computer security world have this issue -- the answer for most of them is that if you're found out using these for personal gain/fun, you've just ended your career. Nobody (not even organized crime) wants someone on board who would screw them over by haphazardly leaking this sort of information.
Plus, having the wide set of unpatched exploits is only part of the issue; the guys who are finding the new ones can just as easily do this on their own time too. But why do it? They're being paid by the government (and protected by the government) to do something that would carry hefty penalties if they did it themselves.
For that matter, many jobs in all walks of life have this issue -- but you're not overly worried about the guy who works for the City Water Department, are you?
Solve your censorship problem and you will solve a lot of your other problems. Just be prepared to see high turnover in your leadership -- something that has been needed for a very long time in China.
Interesting point here... I think a lot of people aren't up to speed on current politics in China; leadership used to be for life, but is now for a set period with mandatory retirement. The result is that this generation has seen significantly more movement in the meritocracy than ever before, and a notable decrease in cronyism and general corruption. Still a long way to go, but it's a start -- and surprisingly, improving censorship has been more of a slow-forming result than a cause.
*whoosh*
But yeah; that's due to the talking on a phone part. People need to waive their phone use prior to waving so they don't make waves.
These pieces of equipment are run by people who can't us the terms "hacker" correctly and who waive their hands in the air about "cyber attacks."
For morons, in other words.
I agree... anyone who waives their hands is a moron. You can waive my hands from my cold dead (animated) body.
Application-level multiplexing avoids repeating TCP slow start when the user agent starts downloading additional resources in parallel, such as style sheet, script, and images, or when the user agent stops a download before it has finished.
Maybe we need a Stylesheet Transfer Protocol and an Activescript Transfer Protocol. Then we can tie them all together using the Super Omni Awesome Protocol.
It's probably a good thing that IETF is codifying a standard for all this, but it's not like there aren't already standards out there in use that would be just as efficient for solving these problems. SPDY is just one of them.
Knock-knock.
Who's there?
UDP packet.
UDP packet who?
Knock-knock. ....
UDP Packet
Who's There?
But why destroy the peripherals? Why not donate everything to technology poor places like Somalia or Kandahar or Arkansas? Are they afraid people are going to extract sensitive government data from a recycled CRT? Or do we need a five million dollar initiative in order to give the all clear to give away old stuff for free?
Actually, this is a good idea in more than one way: send all the peripherals etc (everything but the HD) to some third world country. Then when the hidden keyloggers start phoning home, the spooks will have a moment of getting REALLY confused as they read through all the requests to help get their sick mother's wealth out of the country....
Of the $2.74 million spent, close to $1.5 million was on contractors.
So instead of me getting paid a boatload of money, its my wifes brother?
Let me ask his question again: "Where do I sign up?"
I think you already answered your own question... if you need to ask, you're probably not the one getting hired.
Oh; and I'd love to have an app that told me where all the dangerous SUVs were; that'd probably save more lives in the long run.
And this is less true of an SUV than it is of a gun? I don't think your distinction between items you categorize as "causes death only" and ones you categorize as "not built primarily for killing" is the most important one here.
The person you replied to made a valid, logical point about the person operating the killing device being the deciding factor in whether it causes a death. That's just as true for a driver running over her estranged lover repeatedly or plowing through a crowd at a mall in her SUV as it is for a shooter trying to see how many first graders he can kill.
That doesn't mean it's *only* the people at fault, just that they are a bigger factor than their chosen implement of destruction. Claiming "false dichotomy" is convenient and could be viewed as correct for a certain interpretation of the statements you replied to, but misses the point.
To paraphrase a fictional character from a popular movie, "A *person* is reasonable. *People* are dumb, stupid, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.", the weapon used, whether purpose-built or not, is a distant second to the wielder, in terms of what constitutes a danger.
Well, we've already got an SUV registry...
Just sayin'.
"Who the hell are you to decide when an action is grounds for the death penalty?"
Just to be crystal clear, are you saying that self-defense with a weapon is never appropriate? If so, you may wish to hold forth as to why the police should be armed, or exactly what posture someone being beaten to death should take to be most noble in your eyes. Is that the fetal position, or some sort of supplication toward the east?
He's saying that shoot to kill is not the only self-defense with a weapon, and should not be the first line of defense. Personally, I'd rather go for dislocating someone's arm (for minor agression), momentarily blinding or deafening the person or paralyzing them from the waist down or rendering them comatose (for extreme cases) to killing them outright.
Now, Guns aren't just for killing; they're also for maiming. But they're notoriously inaccurate for both unless used by a well-trained person -- plus, you don't know what the victim's response to the maiming will be. Do something to dislocate their right arm, and you know they can't use their right arm very well. Blind them with a flashbang and you know they can't see. Hit them hard in the knees with anything, and they aren't going to be ambulatory any time soon.
Amazingly, it is legal to carry and use a firearm in many places where some of my examples above would be illegal for the common person to use. I really wonder how the "right to bear arms" became the "right to carry a gun" -- it's not really that guns should be outlawed, but that they're just so inappropriate for so many situations, but people (on both sides of the fence) have come to place inappropriate expectations on what they can accomplish.
So the government thinks it is a sovereign entity that can do whatever it likes? And the court takes that view? I thought the country was the sovereign entity and the government was just a part of it established by the people. When did the government or any part of it get this new status?
The people grant the government sovereign immunity to certain things as part of the governing process. Government itself would be illegal without this. It's kind of like the Library of Congress can archive all written works, even though copyright forbids this. They have sovereign immunity for the interests of the people.
Looked at another way, certain laws are written to restrict rights; the government is exempt from some of these laws as it is at cross purposes to restrict governmental rights in these areas.
So it's not the government that is a sovereign entity; it is The People; these People grant those executing their wishes certain exemptions to allow them to execute said wishes.
Now that's the simplistic view, and obviously government in the US has ripened to the point where this can be (and is) abused. But they still don't get a "get out of jail free" card -- they have to show that their purpose for going above the law is only to enable effective governmental oversight.
Seems like they did that for those two counts, but were unable to do that for the other counts levied against them.
Someone actually made a slashdotfs module for FUSE a while back that used a transparent steganographic layer to store your local data at anon -1 :) Won't work for big data, but nifty for small sets :)
The CIA has had their own drones that were completely independent of the military. That said, they are now turning over their drones to the military and will no longer have their own fleet. The will need to coordinate with the military for future drone strikes.
Actually, I think the idea is that the military won't need to coordinate with the CIA for future drone strikes. The CIA WILL need to coordinate with the military to use the drones for intel gathering purposes however.
Makes much more sense than the way things were before.
Much better comment to add to your message history, and generally correct :) I was going to point these things out myself.
Doesn't make what the government did any better, but Snowden appears to have more in mind than a standard whistle blowing event; we appear to be seeing an attempt to keep the topic in the news and visible for as long as possible, until governments are actually forced to take action. It's a shame that he appears to have moved beyond simply illegal because of breaching security and into leaking things with a very calculated effect of causing diplomatic issues.
I was hoping that his leaks to this point would cause governments globally to 1) clean up their acts (at least a bit) and 2) stop being so lax in security.
It looks like the only real good that may come out of this (the political posturing so far has been just that -- posturing) is that the general population may be a bit more engaged with privacy issues.
Most of these systems do have a threshold at which they stop attempting to decompress and just either drop it or flag it for manual examination. In this systems' case, it probably flags it.
HOWEVER, another trick used is to fully scan the archive metadata (zip headers, etc) which usually provide a significant amount of information all by themselves (content filenames, CRC values, etc), even on password protected zips. So unless we're talking nested password protected zips with "zip bombs" (10gb nul-content files) included, all the information necessary for standard indexing can be gained without ever unzipping the file contents.
Much like Nickel-Zinc batteries, this is a great alternative for environmentally-unfriendly power storage.
Now I have to wonder, could this be easily recycled and refreshed to a new state?
If so, despite the lower power density, I'd buy electronics using this battery without any hesitation.
What is the output voltage of such a cell and how much power drain can it withstand without going stupid?
If it can withstand high drains and provides at LEAST 1.4V per cell, I'd be happy.
the wood-nanotube anode is the main part that would need to be replaced -- so the real question is: "what is the energy input and what are the waste products associated with creating this wood-nanotube composite anode?"
I'd rather you didn't "fix" what I wrote. I wrote can YOU translate...
If we treat humankind as an entity, you're correct, to a degree (we'd get a LOT of noise with the answer).
I was ignoring the Poe's law angle... I thought that was obvious ;)
Computers and computer systems are tools enabling the individual to harvest the wisdom of humanity. Google Translate, as an example again, is crowd-driven, not computer-driven. It is an expert system.
And if we can't distinguish between a parody of extremism, or subtle sarcasm reliably as humans without visual or written clues, how would you propose to tell a machine to do so?
This deserves a two part answer:
1. I wouldn't -- it wouldn't be possible.
2. As I was originally saying, there are many visual and written clues that as humans, our brains are hardwired to ignore. Computers are hardwired to remember and weight them. Therefore, while parody and subtle sarcasm may be lost on a specific individual because they didn't pick up on the subtle cues, an expert system that is designed to ferret out and correlate these cues will be able to weight the context appropriately, just as an individual who was an expert in that area and also picked up the subtle cues would.
The difference is that everybody can use the computer system in multiple places and contexts at the same time; I'd like to see the human equivalent try that.
Why would you expect the software to be any better at this than the humans?
Software tends to do what you tell it to do... think of this as a semantics translator, not a sarcasm detector. Can you translate into and out of 50 different languages? Google Translate and the Systran engine can.
I'd expect the software to be MUCH better at this than the humans, because it isn't going to get distracted by the MEANING of the phrases it is analysing. Humans tend to be really bad at communication analysis.
What I'm surprised at is that neither time was Minitel mentioned. France has been monitoring communications for a long, long time, and I thought everyone was OK with it.
If my employer, a hospital, started executing patients they had sworn to heal, I'd expect some questions even though I do research....
Methinks you took words out of his mouth and replaced them with what you wanted to hear.
The recruiting interview wasn't a stunt... sending it to the Guardian was. It was a publicity stunt, done using the standard journalistic and marketing methods. This doesn't make it bad, wrong, immoral, or invalid. If you follow the interview, you'll see that the recruiters were asked pointed questions that anyone considering working in translation for the NSA SHOULD be asking. The Guardian excerpted the juicy bits and put their own spin on it.
I'm starting to wonder why you and ThorGod are attempting to minimalize the pointed comments to such a degree... you obviously both feel passionate about protecting public servants from "undue" scrutiny and feel that the approach used here was unprofessional. Most people on slashdot appear to disagree with both of you, but you keep bringing back the same arguments again and again down the message thread. Reading your message history is definitely enlightening. You raise some good points and then destroy them by attacking the posters for their lack of right thinking instead of letting the valid points stand on their own merits. In short, you're on par with me (now that I've made this post) :)
You mean they're "just following orders"? Ah, I guess it's okay then.
They're not soldiers, genocide is no where insight, your vague analogy is invalid.
Just so you know, the NSA is actually a branch of the US military. While Genocide is nowhere in sight, a branch of the US military embarking on secret AND covert operations on the people they are sworn to protect, and then intentionally misleading Congress about it when questioned, definitely holds up under the framework of the analogy. Would you rather people didn't raise a stink until it DID come to genocide?
And if you want to blame someone about the "poor recruiters just doing their job" -- their job is to interact with potential candidates. If they can't stand the heat (which they seemed to be able to do, even though it made them uncomfortable) the blame isn't with the people they invited, it's with the people who sent them out to recruit totally unprepared for what any sane person would have seen coming. That's right, instead of attempting to invalidate people's arguments on slashdot, why not put THIS blame where it is due -- with NSA HR?
What's her next target for hard-hitting investigative journalism? Interrogating the WalMart cashier about the sleazy business practices of the corporation? How about cornering the burger-flipper at McDonald's over his/her complicity in contributing to the nationwide obesity epidemic?
That's just what we need: more up-and-coming journalists that pick the low-hanging fruit and pretend that it's a raw, career-making scoop.
That's actually not a bad idea; what ALL of the places you mention fear is a bad public image. Getting international coverage of your public-facing employees obviously not being trained in public relations speaks volumes.
And I love how you equated being an NSA recruiter with being a Wal-Mart greeter or McDonald's burger flipper :D Does even more to define the NSA's image.
Not only is Obama fully responsible for the current NSA actions and keeping them secret, he lied during his campaign when he promised to end such abuses.
Obama is "fully responsible" for a program Dubya put in place? Partisan much?
Yes.
When Bush was in power, he was fully responsible for the program. When he handed it over to Obama, Obama became fully responsible for the program. That's how being President of the United States works. Being fully responsible for it, he could have chosen to end it, expand it or ignore it. This was all his responsibility, and still is.