Since they have 72 hours to retroactively go to the courts, why not do that instead of totally bypassing the FISA court?
A good question... and the answer probably revolves mostly around the change in context (relative to the "traditional" use of FISA). A war footing, even one that's as hard to clearly frame as the one we now find ourselves in, makes this stuff more like war-fighting than ongoing preventative FISA-ish watching of foreign intel contacts in the US. That being said, it would be better, indeed, to keep everyone happy by evolving a process that leaves the right sort of paper trail without having to turn judges into intelligence analysts looking at the raw material collected (in huge amounts), daily, as the NSA and their bretheren wade through jillions of communications.
they need to change the process. Not sidestep it.
That's definitely where the semantics comes in. No doubt the administration will continue to argue that "the process" in question (because of the defense-related security issues at play in what amounts to a hot conflict) mean that the NSA's work is being done, now, under a different process authorized by Congress in the wake of 9/11. Many people will intelligently argue for against several variations on that theme, but no one can argue that the two legislative bodies' senior intel committee members don't know about this sort of thing. That the NYT decided to hang onto what they wanted to report for a year, timing their "news" to go with a book release under their publication, and that the "whistleblower" is a guy who had his credentials yanked for pyschological problems... I think that puts a little bit of the media stink, here, in perspective.
Yes, the administration should go about crafting a more clearly defined way of dealing with what is a new (in terms of the thinking behind FISA, originally) problem. But in the meantime, you've got actual, real people with actual shoe bombs (and much, much worse) looking for some high-profile action. And when that happens, all the NYT will talk about is how little the administration did to use intelligence to stop it. *sigh*
we have a redux of what Carter did in 1978, except that this time it's been ongoing for over 4 years and is in direct contradiction to the SCOTUS ruling that lead to the creation of FISA in the first place
I believe that all of the legal/constitutional/legislative wrangling on this (not to be confused with the media wrangling, which on this, as in all things, serves every audience poorly) will revolve around the substantial differences between the examples we both cited/expanded-upon and the current (and unprecendented) circumstances. Specifically, Carter did not face a devastating attack by a loosely knit (if idealogically tight) group of multi/non-national terrorists funded by parties all over the world in cooperation (logistically, financially, etc) with people traveling through or residing in the US. Clinton did face such attacks (on embassies, a Naval vessel, and a barely-effective one on the WTC) but did much less about it, especially as it regards the countries hosting training facilities and harboring those directing the attacks. If 9/11 had happened when he still held office, even he could not have avoided taking military action and hugely ramping up wide-ranging surveilance (a la the current topic).
The point is, 4 years ago the intel agencies and the executive branch finally shifted into a necessarily more pro-active, war-like mode, as such conflicts demand. But we haven't faced such a conflict before - not exactly - and we certainly haven't been on a war footing, historically, in a time where people plotting bombings had access to cheap disposable phones and anonymous internet access.
Much of the domestic end of the communication in question is a dead end well before the 72 hours in question would even be a meaningful deadline. A phone picked up at a gas station is used for the day, and never seen again. Sounds like we need more of a reporting-to-court about this month's prowling, rather than some formatted more like a traditional warrant request, which requires someone on the court to actually think it all through. There's just too much of it (with the NSA's capabilities looking at those international calls) for even an army of judges to meaningfully, contextually review. That doesn't mean we should be without records, especially in the event that an actual action is taken based on that data mining - even a "traditional" military one, let alone domestic law enforcement (like, arresting a guy at the airport based on his radiologically-related phone calls).
Mark my words, this will turn into a constitutional crisis, especially if Bush and Chaney are not impeached for their wrongdoing
You're a little confused. The constitutional crisis would come because of some lame impeachment campaign along those lines. By the way... how do you feel about the Democrat members of the congressional and senate committees who are regularly tuned into this sort of thing? How did you feel about it when the previous administration backed up the very same type of authority and action? For example, here's Clinton's deputy Attorney General (Jamie Gorelick) testifying before the House Permanent Select Commitee on Intelligence in 1994:
"The Department of Justice believes -- and the case law supports -- that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes and that the president may, as he has done, delegate this authority to the attorney general..." She added that the same authority pertains to electronic surveilance such as wiretaps.
How about Jimmy Carter? Should he have been impeached? In 1978 his Attorney General (Griffin B. Bell) testified before a federal judge about warrantless searches he and President Carter had authorized against two US men suspected of spying for the Vietnamese government.
Were you listening, in 1994, when Clinton used his regular radio address to discuss a new policy of using warrantless searches in particularly violent US public housing developments? No?
Using intel about Al Queda associates to track down who is calling them (or being called by them) when some of those calls terminate in the US is fundamental stuff. Not using every means to track that stuff would be a dereliction. Specific warrants covering every twist and turn of electronic communications being used by someone who calls a rotating, daily-changing array of disposable cell phones is essentially impossible. That's why the NSA's data mining is so appropriate in this case, and the CinC is absolutely correct to authorize its use. When an Al Queda safe house in Pakistan is raided, and a seized laptop includes lists of phone numbers in the Middle East, we need to be able to immediately, and persistenly follow up on any call from the US that reaches out to those same numbers, and follow the trail of other people who are calling those people, especially from overseas. But you can't list that stuff in a warrant because you don't (and can't) know it in advance.
Actually, you're right, that is funny. I hope you still get my point about apps and hardware being the things that also need long-term testing and tuning, though. The most stable O/S in the world won't save your life if the hardware's flaky or the app isn't written for real life craziness.
That's entirely untrue. I do none of that, and I use linux at least three times as much as win2k. I see more crashes from win2k.
Can't imagine what apps you're using, or what sort of hardware/driver combo you've got rigged up that's causing you trouble... but I've still got something like 30 Win2K servers humming along, and they're very, very solid. Only things like bad RAM or failed drive get in the way. Yes, I have to reboot on critical patches.
On the other hand, I've had plenty of lumps and bumps with various Linux distros, even when they're just sitting there being samba servers. But rather than compare your specific experiences with mine, just keep an ear open for the larger body of people who have the same experience I do (with the O/S, used on a good hardware recipe).
I'm not sure where this worshipping of Win2k comes from. From my experience, WinXP is more stable. WinXP x64 and Win2k3 are even more stable. Before you start mumbling that XP is an eye candy, stop. They're primarily all based on newer and better kernels.
I agree. But in practice, where PCs are used to control non-traditional equipment (like, say, test equipment, manufacturing widgets, etc), things often don't move along so quickly. Stability (in implementation and support) is at least as important as those extra couple of kernal niceties, as long as things are working predictably.
I work on XP, and admin many a server doing various things under both Win2K and 2003. 2K has been very good to me, but I'm not a "worshipper" in the sense you probably think.
Actually, most of the equipment you're talking about (EKG, CT scan, etc) is stand-alone stuff from Siemens or GE that runs Unix.
Yup... also true of all sorts of manufacturing gear, etc. My point (a reply to a somewhat troll-ish comment that was trying to prop up a false dichotomy between Windows and Linux in a hospital setting) was that (in the context of this larger Linux-not-ready-for-servers-at-NASA thread) Linux is not reflexively always a better choice than Windows in real life, even for geeks. And sometimes neither is appropriate (a la your examples).
if bill gates' wife was admitted to the hospital and put on life support managed by one particular OS, which OS do you think he'd actually trust?
No doubt you're implying that he'd opt for one of the heavily scrutinized Linux distros with native support for emergency room cardio equipment? What, Red Hat hasn't done that yet? No widespread testing yet for Hoary Hedgehog, EKG Edition?
If I were Bill, I'd probably choose Win2K... but that's not really the issue. It's the application, the drivers, and the comm interfaces letting the machine talk to the life support stuff. I'd want to be hooked up to whichever of those has seen the most hours of use in the most places under the most circumsntances. And if the O/S that happens to have been the platform on which all of that use-time was racked up happens to be Bill's, then so be it. Win2K is very, very stable - especially when you're not surfing to Russian pr0n sites, installing free casino software, or trying to overclock under a beta video driver for maximum frag resolution.
Because normally, on slashdot, it would "beg questions about privacy."
As for the actual, real thrust of the summary and headline and article: nonsense. This ain't malware any more than your mom remembering that you like your eggs scrambled makes her a Malparent.
Ah, but go back to your link again. He's retracted his retraction! Snopes speculates that he first changed his story because of criticism about throwing a live mouse into a fire (what do you want to bet that at least one of those critics has gleefully put a live lobster into a pot). Perhaps we shall never know. Good catch, though, on your part.
I think you may be misreading my comment. I don't like waste, or the pointless application of government resources to any misguided project or task... but I do like that we have the infrastructure, people, practices, and willingness to gather and act on the intel that turns up (for example, on a laptop in Pakistan, followed by listening to cell phone calls from New York to Karachi an hour later). FISA allows for this because it was obviously going to be important to be able to immediately act in light of new leads. Ongoing defensive actions/intel against bad guys make the need for ad hoc actions of the same sort obviously important... life saving, even.
That's crazy. There are field operatives and missions/tasks that are only just starting to settle into being useful over a period of 10 years. Making that sort of information public would cost the covers, "legacies," and even lives of those people doing that very difficult work. When people like Aldrich Aimes let slip material twice that old, it cost lives.
The "black budget" gets very little oversight
Each agency/department has its own version of a "black" budget. The CIA's is probably the hardest to pin down because the trails left by financial transactions are exactly the sort of thing that foreign intelligence agencies use to get a picture of our operations overseas. Entities like the NSA, on the other hand, have a much more transparent budget... but it's only transparent to those reps cleared to see it. The risks of exposure are huge (see the travesty with the NY Times a few weeks ago).
You don't "have" to trust them, and you shouldn't.
Your references to local Police Departments being stupid don't change my point. You have to trust in the institution, and fix the broken individual people that pollute it. That takes politicians that are relatively brave and persuasive, and those are indeed relatively rare. It's one of the more interesting arguments for term limits.
As for the rest of your response, I don't know what it is in respsonse to, because all I said was trusting your government isn't a good idea. Secrecy in some things is, of course, necessary.
My point (in mentioning some of the bigger-budget, "blacker" stuff that government does) is that complex, sustained security activities require sustained trust in the institutions that perform those jobs. I have to trust "the government" because that's who we have in place to perform those jobs. Politicians come and go, and budgets/missions shift with time, but most of the spooky stuff that's done is done by career professionals that are on the job througout multiple administrations and legislative vintages. If you don't trust the institution, and the people who commit their lives to that work know it, they leave. And you get the revolving door of mediocrity that led up to 9/11. Years of budgetary neglect and muddled missions/objectives left the post-Cold-War intel community in a position not to be trusted... but not for the usual (sinister-ish sounding) reasons.
When we make a concerted effort to make intel work as attractive (and sane) a career as, say, working for a big-ticket private employer - that's when we'll get an even more trustworthy, professional crowd working in those circles. The CIA is busy, right now, trying to figure out how to make a long-term career there (as an analyst, for example) compelling enough to keep seriously dedicated, capable people in those roles. It's hard, on government pay.
I do agree with you, though, that a continual stream of fresh (cleared, trustworthy themselves) faces looking in on what every spooky agency is doing is appropriate and necessary. But when they blab about operational details to the NY Times (especially just to score cheap political points), that's really, really bad news.
Trusting your government is not a good idea, at least not until they've earned it, and then only two years at a time.
So, what... do we declassify everything every two years just to make sure it's all completely benign by everyone's standards, everywhere? The whole point of intelligence committees made up of your elected representatives is to regularly rotate in some people that can do a sanity check on the policies that are at work, here. Likewise, you can't operate a place like Area 51 without the bugetary approval of a lot of people. And it's not like they get one big bank transfer every year... their funds are approved/disapproved on a project-by-project basis.
The whole point of being able to quietly work on things like the SR-71 (and its more recent offspring) is to have the ability to actually use it for a while before the people it's intended to help watch fully understand the capability. Don't you think it's helpful to know as much as possible about where North Korea and Iran are parking specific pieces of their nuke infrastructures? Sure, we're getting more of that from orbit than from things being flown out of the Nevada desert, but the principle is the same: operational details made public to every citizen are thus made public to every person in the world.
I'm intensely curious about this sort of stuff, and know people in the intel line of work, but I'm very glad that I can't personally get all the details... because I don't want the guys running Taiwan-aimed Chinese missile batteries knowing them, either.
That being said, I vote every chance I get, and think long and hard about each candidate's posture on intel, degrees of budget transparency, etc. It's a fine line to walk. I don't like wasting money, I don't like pointless power grabs... but I also like knowing that, when guys on the ground in northern Pakistan sieze a laptop from a local Al Queda franchise office, that we can be - in very short order - listening in on the calls to/from the phone numbers that were stored that same day in someone's cheesily encrypted ZIPped jihaddi speed-dial spreadsheet that includes Long Island zip codes. And park a drone over the little hut in the Afghani countryside (or Syrian suburb) that's handling the calls.
Or, if you're not into that sort of thing, how about knowing that there are undercover cops infiltrating urban gangs? My city has a huge problem with central American gangs. Rapes, murder, robbery - the whole gambit. I do not want the general public knowing the names, faces, and addresses of the men and women who are tasked with breaking up those little fiefdoms. So, I trust my city and county governments with some somewhat more localized secret stuff. I have to. So, I vote for decent people to run the show. And I vote for decent people to have a hand in the legislative process that funds the executive people. It's not perfect, but it's necessary.
I do not see why people always assume that governments should not keep secrets from its citizens. Part of the government's job is to handle issues that the general public should not know about.
Dude, the groupthink is going to add an entire power of ten to your slashdot account number for uttering such heresy. You must add water to some of that rationality - you can't be serving it straight up like that. Some local readers may blow a gasket looking for negative mod points to use. Honestly, man. Think of the media-educated children who might be reading this! Next thing you'll be saying is that not everyone who does have a clearance is evil. You're taking all of the fun out of half the shows on TV.
Reading Slashdot these days is like having Al Franken shout in one ear while Sean Hannity screams into the other
Well, more like Al Franken using a giant megaphone he bought with George Soros' AmEx card, and Hannity just sort of droning, like he does. The balance on/. is, well, not.
Which begs the question (oh yes it does, you grammar nazis I just know have their response fingers twitching): why do they simply turn it off, as opposed to removing fuses or otherwise rendering it incapable of operating?
*sigh* Normally I wouldn't respond to yet another blatant misuse of "begging the question," but since you come right out and assert that you're not using it wrong, it's worth pointing out that you are, in fact, using it exactly the wrong way.
Talking about being worried about being inside the unit under some risk that it might be turned on raises the question of whether or not there's a better way to incapacitate the hardware while it's being maintained. I won't even bother coming up with an example of how you could ask a question about this thing that involves actually begging the question. Since you're just wondering about something (rather than using question-begging as rhetorical device), it's just not even the right context.
Which doesn't change the value of your underlying question (answered well alread by someone else).
You're missing my point. If you know you've got someone tied into that sort of crap, you don't call them up and say, "by the way, we're hoping to arrest your customers, too, but don't tell anyone we're onto you, OK?" It's the same thing with other organized crime, and the same thing with terror cells and funding channels.
The one who does the trampling should be found guilty of murder, especially if they ran with no obvious signs of fire
Well, now you're just being an ass.
Out of curiosity, how does your take on the 1st amendment take into account other forms of fraud (beyond deceiving people in a public place into thinking that they're about to lose their lives)? So, if a doctor maliciously tells you you only have 24 hours to live... is he just having a little 1st amendment fun? How about if I call you on the phone and tell you that if you don't do [whatever] in the next 5 minutes, that I'll kill one of your family members - someone who is not in your sight at the moment. Ah, freedom of speech!
The problem is that within information technology, many users have far too much access and trust than they should truly have.
>>God I'd hate to live in the world you would create.
Here's an idea. Start up company... say, retail, perhaps. Make sure that the data used in managing that business involves personnel records, credit card data, health insurance policies, bank info - all the usual stuff. And then hire a bunch of people, trusting all of them entirely to have access to everything. Let us know when you start your total trust campaign, and then let us know how many days (hours? minutes?) go by before something that absolutely should not be in someone's hands none the less is. Be sure that your own personal SSN and direct deposit information is out there floating around without any ACL protection, too, OK? And don't forget to put your backups on CD, and leave put them in a file cabinet in the lobby, labeled "historical payroll data."
Man, I'd hate to trust my information with a business you'd run.
I have a problem in that it was sold to the congress as a way of fighting terrorism, but in fact is used as an excuse to do warrentless wiretaps domestically without judicial oversight.
You make it sound as if allowing the people tasked with breaking up/preventing terror plots to listen in as a guy that's thought, by virtue of other information, to be involved in such a plot or group communicates with his buddies is not helpful in fighting terrorists. How would you prevent events such as 9/11 or London's train bombings, etc? Specifically? Or, are you of the investigate-afterwards-it's-only-crime camp? Do you feel the same about kiddie-pr0n rings? Some things have to be stopped before the harm is done... and when you've got a world-wide group of people actively standing up and saying how important it is to do that harm to the US, and calling for more of it, and sending money back and forth to people expressly to prepare for doing more of it... don't you want to head that off? And don't you think it's a little counterproductive (in terms of catching their buddies) to talk out loud in a public forum about who you're after and why? Judges are involved in oversight. You're probably confusing the PATRIOT provisions with the separate activity of the NSA under the congressional authorizations dealing with foreign entities and communications.
You're aware, right, that "PATRIOT" is an acronym for "Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism." That pretty well sums it up, and there's a reason why it was widely supported by congressional reps and senators across the political spectrum, and why the only real debate about its renewal, especially after lots of scrutiny from all directions, focuses on some rather subtle nuances - not on the urgent need for agencies to share intel, to allow tracking of (for example) Al Queda-supporting money launderers that use half a dozen different cell phones in one day, and so on... things that could not be done without a change in the statutes.
I have a problem with any law that mentions that you can be subject to investigation *and not be allowed tell anyone about it*.
How do you think we arrest mob figures? By talking out loud about which tax evading racketeers we're onto before we make a dozen arrests across a dozen states? It's the same problem, only worse, and with much more dire consequences.
In fact, as it turns out, the "Patriot" act has nothing to do with terrorism.
Oh, come on. The act was created because, in the wake of 9/11, it became abundantly clear how hobbled the intel and law enforcement people (previously more or less at arm's length from one another) were in dealing with a threat of this nature. Do you think that if the proto-Al Queda's first attempt at knocking down the World Trade Center (you do remember the one they botched, right?) was successful, that we wouldn't have done this sooner? Too bad it takes so many deaths to make preventing more a reasonable pursuit. It's going to take time to sort out the nuances, but if we waited until some universally acceptable bit of legislative perfection (never happen!) were crafted, we'd never get around to any of the plainly obvious necessities that are included in the Act.
Unless you believe in Intelligent Design (not an insult), I would have to say that you should be using this information in exactly the way you describe. Exercise your Darwinian right to take advantage of the competition, or perish. Cry about it all you want. If you find this information (or the access of it) threatening, then is that like realizing you are one of the slower gazelles?
Knowing that, say, your competition can stand on the street and watch you walk in and out of a prospect's business is one thing. Expecting that your personal phone traffic is private (especially from the just-plain-public), and conducting yourself accordingly, is another. I think that the vast majority of people would reasonably come to the conclusion that law enforcement could request those dumps of call data, but that Joe Blow citizen would not have access to them, any more than they'd have access to the transaction details of your banking records. It's the expectation of privacy I'm addressing, here... and I think that most people truly would be surprised to know that their competition, parents, soon-to-be ex-spouse, bookie, whatever, could easily find out to whom you've been speaking.
You're right that competition does and should thrive on having good information. But I don't think that most reasonable people would expect the information we're talking about here to be any more publicly available than the details of a business's employee healthcare records, a daily dump of which inventory items are being stocked at which competing stores, or anything else along those lines. This just strikes me as one of those information access things into which someone should have to clearly, and with considerable notice, opt in, rather than the other way around.
Why would this even be an issue with the Patriot Act still out there?
I'm one of those people that doesn't have too much trouble with the Patriot act's purpose and typical use. But I think I do have trouble with my customers, suppliers, or competition being able to see who I'm talking to. In a competitive industry (I don't know, say wholesaling wine to restaurants in a busy city), being able to look over which restaurants of "yours" that a rival wine rep has suddenly been making a lot of calls to would be seriously helpful/evil business intel.
On a more serious note, say a foreign or criminal entity was shopping around for people to blackmail/extort. Just the ability to use evidence of a stock broker's calls to his mistress as a way to get him to distort the value of some penny stock, etc... well, it's all bad movie-type stuff, except it's real. And real cheap.
At the current rate of inflation, how long will it be before "burger flipper" isn't a job capable of getting a kid an education?
Inflation (though very low right now by historical standards) is certainly a consideration. But minimum wage isn't something that most working people have to put up with much past their first summer job while they're in high school. $7 or $9 is more typical for someone that shows up reliably for even a crappy job for more than a month straight and shows any hustle whatsoever.
That being said, the real inflation culprit is cultural. When you were getting by as a student on $10k, were you armed to the teeth with a new iPod, lots of games, DVDs, $100 shoes, thousands of minutes of air time and a cell phone, etc? "Poor" students these days live like kings compared even to my own state of affairs back in the early 1980's. The expectation is that 19 year old kids should have all of the trappings of a working professional... and they spend that way, even when they can't. It's pretty ugly out there, financial rationality-wise. I think that's one of the reasons that immigrant students often do so much better... they keep their eyes on the ball better, having been raised in a more frugal environment originally.
Slashdot Mirror
Since they have 72 hours to retroactively go to the courts, why not do that instead of totally bypassing the FISA court?
A good question... and the answer probably revolves mostly around the change in context (relative to the "traditional" use of FISA). A war footing, even one that's as hard to clearly frame as the one we now find ourselves in, makes this stuff more like war-fighting than ongoing preventative FISA-ish watching of foreign intel contacts in the US. That being said, it would be better, indeed, to keep everyone happy by evolving a process that leaves the right sort of paper trail without having to turn judges into intelligence analysts looking at the raw material collected (in huge amounts), daily, as the NSA and their bretheren wade through jillions of communications.
they need to change the process. Not sidestep it.
That's definitely where the semantics comes in. No doubt the administration will continue to argue that "the process" in question (because of the defense-related security issues at play in what amounts to a hot conflict) mean that the NSA's work is being done, now, under a different process authorized by Congress in the wake of 9/11. Many people will intelligently argue for against several variations on that theme, but no one can argue that the two legislative bodies' senior intel committee members don't know about this sort of thing. That the NYT decided to hang onto what they wanted to report for a year, timing their "news" to go with a book release under their publication, and that the "whistleblower" is a guy who had his credentials yanked for pyschological problems... I think that puts a little bit of the media stink, here, in perspective.
Yes, the administration should go about crafting a more clearly defined way of dealing with what is a new (in terms of the thinking behind FISA, originally) problem. But in the meantime, you've got actual, real people with actual shoe bombs (and much, much worse) looking for some high-profile action. And when that happens, all the NYT will talk about is how little the administration did to use intelligence to stop it. *sigh*
we have a redux of what Carter did in 1978, except that this time it's been ongoing for over 4 years and is in direct contradiction to the SCOTUS ruling that lead to the creation of FISA in the first place
I believe that all of the legal/constitutional/legislative wrangling on this (not to be confused with the media wrangling, which on this, as in all things, serves every audience poorly) will revolve around the substantial differences between the examples we both cited/expanded-upon and the current (and unprecendented) circumstances. Specifically, Carter did not face a devastating attack by a loosely knit (if idealogically tight) group of multi/non-national terrorists funded by parties all over the world in cooperation (logistically, financially, etc) with people traveling through or residing in the US. Clinton did face such attacks (on embassies, a Naval vessel, and a barely-effective one on the WTC) but did much less about it, especially as it regards the countries hosting training facilities and harboring those directing the attacks. If 9/11 had happened when he still held office, even he could not have avoided taking military action and hugely ramping up wide-ranging surveilance (a la the current topic).
The point is, 4 years ago the intel agencies and the executive branch finally shifted into a necessarily more pro-active, war-like mode, as such conflicts demand. But we haven't faced such a conflict before - not exactly - and we certainly haven't been on a war footing, historically, in a time where people plotting bombings had access to cheap disposable phones and anonymous internet access.
Much of the domestic end of the communication in question is a dead end well before the 72 hours in question would even be a meaningful deadline. A phone picked up at a gas station is used for the day, and never seen again. Sounds like we need more of a reporting-to-court about this month's prowling, rather than some formatted more like a traditional warrant request, which requires someone on the court to actually think it all through. There's just too much of it (with the NSA's capabilities looking at those international calls) for even an army of judges to meaningfully, contextually review. That doesn't mean we should be without records, especially in the event that an actual action is taken based on that data mining - even a "traditional" military one, let alone domestic law enforcement (like, arresting a guy at the airport based on his radiologically-related phone calls).
Mark my words, this will turn into a constitutional crisis, especially if Bush and Chaney are not impeached for their wrongdoing
You're a little confused. The constitutional crisis would come because of some lame impeachment campaign along those lines. By the way... how do you feel about the Democrat members of the congressional and senate committees who are regularly tuned into this sort of thing? How did you feel about it when the previous administration backed up the very same type of authority and action? For example, here's Clinton's deputy Attorney General (Jamie Gorelick) testifying before the House Permanent Select Commitee on Intelligence in 1994:
"The Department of Justice believes -- and the case law supports -- that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes and that the president may, as he has done, delegate this authority to the attorney general..." She added that the same authority pertains to electronic surveilance such as wiretaps.
How about Jimmy Carter? Should he have been impeached? In 1978 his Attorney General (Griffin B. Bell) testified before a federal judge about warrantless searches he and President Carter had authorized against two US men suspected of spying for the Vietnamese government.
Were you listening, in 1994, when Clinton used his regular radio address to discuss a new policy of using warrantless searches in particularly violent US public housing developments? No?
Using intel about Al Queda associates to track down who is calling them (or being called by them) when some of those calls terminate in the US is fundamental stuff. Not using every means to track that stuff would be a dereliction. Specific warrants covering every twist and turn of electronic communications being used by someone who calls a rotating, daily-changing array of disposable cell phones is essentially impossible. That's why the NSA's data mining is so appropriate in this case, and the CinC is absolutely correct to authorize its use. When an Al Queda safe house in Pakistan is raided, and a seized laptop includes lists of phone numbers in the Middle East, we need to be able to immediately, and persistenly follow up on any call from the US that reaches out to those same numbers, and follow the trail of other people who are calling those people, especially from overseas. But you can't list that stuff in a warrant because you don't (and can't) know it in advance.
Actually, you're right, that is funny. I hope you still get my point about apps and hardware being the things that also need long-term testing and tuning, though. The most stable O/S in the world won't save your life if the hardware's flaky or the app isn't written for real life craziness.
That's entirely untrue. I do none of that, and I use linux at least three times as much as win2k. I see more crashes from win2k.
Can't imagine what apps you're using, or what sort of hardware/driver combo you've got rigged up that's causing you trouble... but I've still got something like 30 Win2K servers humming along, and they're very, very solid. Only things like bad RAM or failed drive get in the way. Yes, I have to reboot on critical patches.
On the other hand, I've had plenty of lumps and bumps with various Linux distros, even when they're just sitting there being samba servers. But rather than compare your specific experiences with mine, just keep an ear open for the larger body of people who have the same experience I do (with the O/S, used on a good hardware recipe).
I'm not sure where this worshipping of Win2k comes from. From my experience, WinXP is more stable. WinXP x64 and Win2k3 are even more stable. Before you start mumbling that XP is an eye candy, stop. They're primarily all based on newer and better kernels.
I agree. But in practice, where PCs are used to control non-traditional equipment (like, say, test equipment, manufacturing widgets, etc), things often don't move along so quickly. Stability (in implementation and support) is at least as important as those extra couple of kernal niceties, as long as things are working predictably.
I work on XP, and admin many a server doing various things under both Win2K and 2003. 2K has been very good to me, but I'm not a "worshipper" in the sense you probably think.
Actually, most of the equipment you're talking about (EKG, CT scan, etc) is stand-alone stuff from Siemens or GE that runs Unix.
Yup... also true of all sorts of manufacturing gear, etc. My point (a reply to a somewhat troll-ish comment that was trying to prop up a false dichotomy between Windows and Linux in a hospital setting) was that (in the context of this larger Linux-not-ready-for-servers-at-NASA thread) Linux is not reflexively always a better choice than Windows in real life, even for geeks. And sometimes neither is appropriate (a la your examples).
if bill gates' wife was admitted to the hospital and put on life support managed by one particular OS, which OS do you think he'd actually trust?
No doubt you're implying that he'd opt for one of the heavily scrutinized Linux distros with native support for emergency room cardio equipment? What, Red Hat hasn't done that yet? No widespread testing yet for Hoary Hedgehog, EKG Edition?
If I were Bill, I'd probably choose Win2K... but that's not really the issue. It's the application, the drivers, and the comm interfaces letting the machine talk to the life support stuff. I'd want to be hooked up to whichever of those has seen the most hours of use in the most places under the most circumsntances. And if the O/S that happens to have been the platform on which all of that use-time was racked up happens to be Bill's, then so be it. Win2K is very, very stable - especially when you're not surfing to Russian pr0n sites, installing free casino software, or trying to overclock under a beta video driver for maximum frag resolution.
but it raises concerns over privacy
Because normally, on slashdot, it would "beg questions about privacy."
As for the actual, real thrust of the summary and headline and article: nonsense. This ain't malware any more than your mom remembering that you like your eggs scrambled makes her a Malparent.
Ah, but go back to your link again. He's retracted his retraction! Snopes speculates that he first changed his story because of criticism about throwing a live mouse into a fire (what do you want to bet that at least one of those critics has gleefully put a live lobster into a pot). Perhaps we shall never know. Good catch, though, on your part.
I think you may be misreading my comment. I don't like waste, or the pointless application of government resources to any misguided project or task... but I do like that we have the infrastructure, people, practices, and willingness to gather and act on the intel that turns up (for example, on a laptop in Pakistan, followed by listening to cell phone calls from New York to Karachi an hour later). FISA allows for this because it was obviously going to be important to be able to immediately act in light of new leads. Ongoing defensive actions/intel against bad guys make the need for ad hoc actions of the same sort obviously important... life saving, even.
Two years no, but ten years sounds about right
That's crazy. There are field operatives and missions/tasks that are only just starting to settle into being useful over a period of 10 years. Making that sort of information public would cost the covers, "legacies," and even lives of those people doing that very difficult work. When people like Aldrich Aimes let slip material twice that old, it cost lives.
The "black budget" gets very little oversight
Each agency/department has its own version of a "black" budget. The CIA's is probably the hardest to pin down because the trails left by financial transactions are exactly the sort of thing that foreign intelligence agencies use to get a picture of our operations overseas. Entities like the NSA, on the other hand, have a much more transparent budget... but it's only transparent to those reps cleared to see it. The risks of exposure are huge (see the travesty with the NY Times a few weeks ago).
You don't "have" to trust them, and you shouldn't.
Your references to local Police Departments being stupid don't change my point. You have to trust in the institution, and fix the broken individual people that pollute it. That takes politicians that are relatively brave and persuasive, and those are indeed relatively rare. It's one of the more interesting arguments for term limits.
As for the rest of your response, I don't know what it is in respsonse to, because all I said was trusting your government isn't a good idea. Secrecy in some things is, of course, necessary.
My point (in mentioning some of the bigger-budget, "blacker" stuff that government does) is that complex, sustained security activities require sustained trust in the institutions that perform those jobs. I have to trust "the government" because that's who we have in place to perform those jobs. Politicians come and go, and budgets/missions shift with time, but most of the spooky stuff that's done is done by career professionals that are on the job througout multiple administrations and legislative vintages. If you don't trust the institution, and the people who commit their lives to that work know it, they leave. And you get the revolving door of mediocrity that led up to 9/11. Years of budgetary neglect and muddled missions/objectives left the post-Cold-War intel community in a position not to be trusted... but not for the usual (sinister-ish sounding) reasons.
When we make a concerted effort to make intel work as attractive (and sane) a career as, say, working for a big-ticket private employer - that's when we'll get an even more trustworthy, professional crowd working in those circles. The CIA is busy, right now, trying to figure out how to make a long-term career there (as an analyst, for example) compelling enough to keep seriously dedicated, capable people in those roles. It's hard, on government pay.
I do agree with you, though, that a continual stream of fresh (cleared, trustworthy themselves) faces looking in on what every spooky agency is doing is appropriate and necessary. But when they blab about operational details to the NY Times (especially just to score cheap political points), that's really, really bad news.
Trusting your government is not a good idea, at least not until they've earned it, and then only two years at a time.
So, what... do we declassify everything every two years just to make sure it's all completely benign by everyone's standards, everywhere? The whole point of intelligence committees made up of your elected representatives is to regularly rotate in some people that can do a sanity check on the policies that are at work, here. Likewise, you can't operate a place like Area 51 without the bugetary approval of a lot of people. And it's not like they get one big bank transfer every year... their funds are approved/disapproved on a project-by-project basis.
The whole point of being able to quietly work on things like the SR-71 (and its more recent offspring) is to have the ability to actually use it for a while before the people it's intended to help watch fully understand the capability. Don't you think it's helpful to know as much as possible about where North Korea and Iran are parking specific pieces of their nuke infrastructures? Sure, we're getting more of that from orbit than from things being flown out of the Nevada desert, but the principle is the same: operational details made public to every citizen are thus made public to every person in the world.
I'm intensely curious about this sort of stuff, and know people in the intel line of work, but I'm very glad that I can't personally get all the details... because I don't want the guys running Taiwan-aimed Chinese missile batteries knowing them, either.
That being said, I vote every chance I get, and think long and hard about each candidate's posture on intel, degrees of budget transparency, etc. It's a fine line to walk. I don't like wasting money, I don't like pointless power grabs... but I also like knowing that, when guys on the ground in northern Pakistan sieze a laptop from a local Al Queda franchise office, that we can be - in very short order - listening in on the calls to/from the phone numbers that were stored that same day in someone's cheesily encrypted ZIPped jihaddi speed-dial spreadsheet that includes Long Island zip codes. And park a drone over the little hut in the Afghani countryside (or Syrian suburb) that's handling the calls.
Or, if you're not into that sort of thing, how about knowing that there are undercover cops infiltrating urban gangs? My city has a huge problem with central American gangs. Rapes, murder, robbery - the whole gambit. I do not want the general public knowing the names, faces, and addresses of the men and women who are tasked with breaking up those little fiefdoms. So, I trust my city and county governments with some somewhat more localized secret stuff. I have to. So, I vote for decent people to run the show. And I vote for decent people to have a hand in the legislative process that funds the executive people. It's not perfect, but it's necessary.
I do not see why people always assume that governments should not keep secrets from its citizens. Part of the government's job is to handle issues that the general public should not know about.
Dude, the groupthink is going to add an entire power of ten to your slashdot account number for uttering such heresy. You must add water to some of that rationality - you can't be serving it straight up like that. Some local readers may blow a gasket looking for negative mod points to use. Honestly, man. Think of the media-educated children who might be reading this! Next thing you'll be saying is that not everyone who does have a clearance is evil. You're taking all of the fun out of half the shows on TV.
The test mice were all sound asleep when they met their ends, unlike this mouse , who went out a la Peter Jackson's Denethor.
Reading Slashdot these days is like having Al Franken shout in one ear while Sean Hannity screams into the other
/. is, well, not.
Well, more like Al Franken using a giant megaphone he bought with George Soros' AmEx card, and Hannity just sort of droning, like he does. The balance on
Which begs the question (oh yes it does, you grammar nazis I just know have their response fingers twitching): why do they simply turn it off, as opposed to removing fuses or otherwise rendering it incapable of operating?
*sigh* Normally I wouldn't respond to yet another blatant misuse of "begging the question," but since you come right out and assert that you're not using it wrong, it's worth pointing out that you are, in fact, using it exactly the wrong way.
Talking about being worried about being inside the unit under some risk that it might be turned on raises the question of whether or not there's a better way to incapacitate the hardware while it's being maintained. I won't even bother coming up with an example of how you could ask a question about this thing that involves actually begging the question. Since you're just wondering about something (rather than using question-begging as rhetorical device), it's just not even the right context.
Which doesn't change the value of your underlying question (answered well alread by someone else).
You're missing my point. If you know you've got someone tied into that sort of crap, you don't call them up and say, "by the way, we're hoping to arrest your customers, too, but don't tell anyone we're onto you, OK?" It's the same thing with other organized crime, and the same thing with terror cells and funding channels.
The one who does the trampling should be found guilty of murder, especially if they ran with no obvious signs of fire
Well, now you're just being an ass.
Out of curiosity, how does your take on the 1st amendment take into account other forms of fraud (beyond deceiving people in a public place into thinking that they're about to lose their lives)? So, if a doctor maliciously tells you you only have 24 hours to live... is he just having a little 1st amendment fun? How about if I call you on the phone and tell you that if you don't do [whatever] in the next 5 minutes, that I'll kill one of your family members - someone who is not in your sight at the moment. Ah, freedom of speech!
The problem is that within information technology, many users have far too much access and trust than they should truly have.
>>God I'd hate to live in the world you would create.
Here's an idea. Start up company... say, retail, perhaps. Make sure that the data used in managing that business involves personnel records, credit card data, health insurance policies, bank info - all the usual stuff. And then hire a bunch of people, trusting all of them entirely to have access to everything. Let us know when you start your total trust campaign, and then let us know how many days (hours? minutes?) go by before something that absolutely should not be in someone's hands none the less is. Be sure that your own personal SSN and direct deposit information is out there floating around without any ACL protection, too, OK? And don't forget to put your backups on CD, and leave put them in a file cabinet in the lobby, labeled "historical payroll data."
Man, I'd hate to trust my information with a business you'd run.
I have a problem in that it was sold to the congress as a way of fighting terrorism, but in fact is used as an excuse to do warrentless wiretaps domestically without judicial oversight.
You make it sound as if allowing the people tasked with breaking up/preventing terror plots to listen in as a guy that's thought, by virtue of other information, to be involved in such a plot or group communicates with his buddies is not helpful in fighting terrorists. How would you prevent events such as 9/11 or London's train bombings, etc? Specifically? Or, are you of the investigate-afterwards-it's-only-crime camp? Do you feel the same about kiddie-pr0n rings? Some things have to be stopped before the harm is done... and when you've got a world-wide group of people actively standing up and saying how important it is to do that harm to the US, and calling for more of it, and sending money back and forth to people expressly to prepare for doing more of it... don't you want to head that off? And don't you think it's a little counterproductive (in terms of catching their buddies) to talk out loud in a public forum about who you're after and why? Judges are involved in oversight. You're probably confusing the PATRIOT provisions with the separate activity of the NSA under the congressional authorizations dealing with foreign entities and communications.
You're aware, right, that "PATRIOT" is an acronym for "Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism." That pretty well sums it up, and there's a reason why it was widely supported by congressional reps and senators across the political spectrum, and why the only real debate about its renewal, especially after lots of scrutiny from all directions, focuses on some rather subtle nuances - not on the urgent need for agencies to share intel, to allow tracking of (for example) Al Queda-supporting money launderers that use half a dozen different cell phones in one day, and so on... things that could not be done without a change in the statutes.
I have a problem with any law that mentions that you can be subject to investigation *and not be allowed tell anyone about it*.
How do you think we arrest mob figures? By talking out loud about which tax evading racketeers we're onto before we make a dozen arrests across a dozen states? It's the same problem, only worse, and with much more dire consequences.
In fact, as it turns out, the "Patriot" act has nothing to do with terrorism.
Oh, come on. The act was created because, in the wake of 9/11, it became abundantly clear how hobbled the intel and law enforcement people (previously more or less at arm's length from one another) were in dealing with a threat of this nature. Do you think that if the proto-Al Queda's first attempt at knocking down the World Trade Center (you do remember the one they botched, right?) was successful, that we wouldn't have done this sooner? Too bad it takes so many deaths to make preventing more a reasonable pursuit. It's going to take time to sort out the nuances, but if we waited until some universally acceptable bit of legislative perfection (never happen!) were crafted, we'd never get around to any of the plainly obvious necessities that are included in the Act.
Unless you believe in Intelligent Design (not an insult), I would have to say that you should be using this information in exactly the way you describe. Exercise your Darwinian right to take advantage of the competition, or perish. Cry about it all you want. If you find this information (or the access of it) threatening, then is that like realizing you are one of the slower gazelles?
Knowing that, say, your competition can stand on the street and watch you walk in and out of a prospect's business is one thing. Expecting that your personal phone traffic is private (especially from the just-plain-public), and conducting yourself accordingly, is another. I think that the vast majority of people would reasonably come to the conclusion that law enforcement could request those dumps of call data, but that Joe Blow citizen would not have access to them, any more than they'd have access to the transaction details of your banking records. It's the expectation of privacy I'm addressing, here... and I think that most people truly would be surprised to know that their competition, parents, soon-to-be ex-spouse, bookie, whatever, could easily find out to whom you've been speaking.
You're right that competition does and should thrive on having good information. But I don't think that most reasonable people would expect the information we're talking about here to be any more publicly available than the details of a business's employee healthcare records, a daily dump of which inventory items are being stocked at which competing stores, or anything else along those lines. This just strikes me as one of those information access things into which someone should have to clearly, and with considerable notice, opt in, rather than the other way around.
Why would this even be an issue with the Patriot Act still out there?
I'm one of those people that doesn't have too much trouble with the Patriot act's purpose and typical use. But I think I do have trouble with my customers, suppliers, or competition being able to see who I'm talking to. In a competitive industry (I don't know, say wholesaling wine to restaurants in a busy city), being able to look over which restaurants of "yours" that a rival wine rep has suddenly been making a lot of calls to would be seriously helpful/evil business intel.
On a more serious note, say a foreign or criminal entity was shopping around for people to blackmail/extort. Just the ability to use evidence of a stock broker's calls to his mistress as a way to get him to distort the value of some penny stock, etc... well, it's all bad movie-type stuff, except it's real. And real cheap.
At the current rate of inflation, how long will it be before "burger flipper" isn't a job capable of getting a kid an education?
Inflation (though very low right now by historical standards) is certainly a consideration. But minimum wage isn't something that most working people have to put up with much past their first summer job while they're in high school. $7 or $9 is more typical for someone that shows up reliably for even a crappy job for more than a month straight and shows any hustle whatsoever.
That being said, the real inflation culprit is cultural. When you were getting by as a student on $10k, were you armed to the teeth with a new iPod, lots of games, DVDs, $100 shoes, thousands of minutes of air time and a cell phone, etc? "Poor" students these days live like kings compared even to my own state of affairs back in the early 1980's. The expectation is that 19 year old kids should have all of the trappings of a working professional... and they spend that way, even when they can't. It's pretty ugly out there, financial rationality-wise. I think that's one of the reasons that immigrant students often do so much better... they keep their eyes on the ball better, having been raised in a more frugal environment originally.