Having tried to put some easily verifiable negative data about John Kerry into Wikipedia in 2004, I experienced the same sort of thing - from the other side of the political spectrum. When my information was removed (and the associated reference), the somewhat higher powered being (in the wiki world) commented that the reference was probably made up. He never bothered to check Amazon, where the reference was readily availabile.
Do not discount the incredible partisan divide that now exists in the US, and the extremely powerful phenomenon of confirmation bias. And, of course, there are also people who are not even willing to play by the rules at all - who intentionally use Wikipedia for propaganda. In my case, it was probably someone who simply could not believe the information I provided (in other words, it provoked cognitive dissonance in someone with extreme confirmation bias), rather than a malefactor.
Wikipedia simply fails when it gets close to controversial issues. You might as well go to talk.politics on Usenet for equally accurate information.
This is not a fault of the folks who set up the wiki, but of human nature and the wiki concept itself.
The military doesn't require blind trust. In fact, the Nuremberg principle holds soldiers accountable for following illegal orders.
However, the military does take violation of orders extremely seriously. You have to have a very good reason to violate an order, and be ready to back it up legally.
The whole area is tricky. Morale for soldiers is a life and death situation. Today, many in the US media and public life (hence reported in the US media) are going out of their way to make statements that will damage the morale of deployed soldiers - just as they did during Vietnam. It is a tribute to our soldiers that they mostly understand that this stuff is BS. I have read many, many letters from soldiers who, upon returning to the states, report that they are baffled by the negative news reports, because they simply don't square with what those soldiers observed while in the field.
BTW, I am extremely suspicious of the report that started this thread. The bias in the list of sites is so blatant that it is almost a mirror image of the bias in the Main Stream Media in the US. I find it very unlikely that the military would create such a filter - in fact, the military is hardly a bastion of single-mindedness - from the bottom to the top.
This smells like one of those stories that is just one more pile of BS so common today.
Unless we take the dubious assumption that values and systems are all intrinsically of the same value, then there must be a value and system set that is superior.
So it is hardly the height of hubris to think that it might be the American one. It might also not be. I don't know of anyone who claims that they are better than all others that have ever been or ever will be.
At the air museum at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson AZ has an SR-71 on display AND an SR-71 drone. If you think the SR-71 is cool looking, check out the drone it could launch.
I was lucky enough to be there the day they let folks sit in the cockpit of the SR-71.
Having read quite a few responses to my post - ALL of which said essentially the same thing - I stand by my statement.
Slashdot moderators (and presumably the posters) seem to have a striking lack of diversity on issues of civil liberties. It is not unreasonable to infer that this also applies to posters.
The responses to my postings, all rated insightful, fell into two general categories (at least on an issue by issue basis):
1) Civil liberties absolutism
2) An unreasonable distrust of the government - one strong enough that if the posters are consistent, they should trust no government at all. A variation is a fundamental distrust of the executive branch (this is probably a result of the Bush Lied, People Died branch of American politics).
3) A lack of knowledge of American history - especially wartime history. I would suggest that those who oppose warrantless taps on international phone calls should find out what happened to civil liberties under Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. For that matter, how many know that many of these supposedly critically important liberties were not part of American jurisprudence until the 60s and 70s?
4) Utter failure to understand what I was saying, or a attempts to twist my words.
The best example was one reply which uttely misunderstood the Benjamin Franklin issue and how his absolutist quote, a favorite of civil liberties absolutists, was not meant in an absolute sense, as based on Franklin's own support of a government in which safety was gained at the expense of liberty - the nascent US government.
If you insist that it is stupid to argue that the warrantless NSA trans-border wiretaps are legal and appropriate, I suggest you take your argument to the FISA Court of Appeals, which in fact ruled that the warrantless NSA trans-border wiretaps are legal.
Of more interest, perhaps, is the genesis of the uniformity of Slashdot opinion (as measured in this thread at the time I wrote my post).
My call for diversity of opinion represents my sadness that my fellow nerds and geeks are so uniform in their opinions on what should be a controversial topic with many nuances. Or perhams, the ones who are more informed simply don't bother to put their opinions on Slashdot anymore, knowing the blizzard of silliness they will encounter. If you really believe that this issue is so settled that arguing it is like bringing flat earth to a geologist's convention, then you really, really need to expand your reading a whole lot.
When I saw the article the first company to come to mind was Dell. I have had terrible experience with their customer service. A typical problem requires waiting on a succession of customer "service" agents, all the while listening to a recording telling me how important I am to Dell.
Yeah, right.
I have gone through this process only to have an agent hang up one me, leaving me to start over.
One time the agent was downright rude a number of times, finally putting me on hold for 20 minutes and then disconnecting. The total call time just with that agent was about 2 hours.
I have gone through tiers of agents only to be told I would have to pay a bunch of bucks (I was trying to get new copies of the original re-install disks). I tried again, went through more hours and tiers of agents, and got the disks free.
I called to extend my warranty. After a long time, I was told that I couldn't. I tried again, different agent, and was able to extend it.
In fairness, though, the people who finally solved my problems were usually in outsource centers in India or the Phillipines.
Dell's problem goes way beyond outsourcing. They have too many tiers of agents, in too many different groups, with too many who can do nothing but follow scripts. They are, in other words, simply clueless about how to do customer service.
Of course, if the Dell products I have had were more reliable, the issue of their customer service would be moot.
I have been a Dell customer for a long time (almost a decade). Only recently have they provided such horrible customer service.
Next time I need a laptop, I'm going to try to find someone who is clueful about after-sales service.
I certainly hope that somebody with some power at Dell stumbles across this threat. And cares!
I just looked through all the comments rated 4 and above...
Every single one of them contained what has become the Slashdot canonical response to any action the government takes on the war on terror... the paranoid cry...
'they're spying on me'
'they're evil'
'they are sending evil rays to control my thoughts'
(alright - I made up the last one)
While there may be something to criticise in this program (part of which was able to spot the 9-11 terrorists before the act, but was prohibited from using the information), the response on/. is so automatic as to make it painful.
Does anyone out there ever consider that there might be people in government that might actually be trying to protect us? Does anyone consider that some programs are not as bad as described in the main stream press (i.e. spying on international phone calls to terrorist suspects has been morphed into "wholesale domestic wiretaps")?
Has anyone considered that liberty can never be absolute in a world of real human beings, and that the issue is not *whether* you give up some privacy, but *when* giving it up is appropriate and when it is not?
I'd just like to see a slight bit of balance here. The monotone is becoming boring.
Oh, and to hopefully forestall some canonical responses....
Ben Franklin's quote about protection and liberty is absolutist, and he himself, by being involved in a government which provided protection at the cost of liberty proved that, so please don't raise that old quote as a response.
Yes, the measures might be abused. The same logic applies to all government powers - so the simple assertion that they may be abused and therefore are wrong is without value. It applies just as well to prosecutors, police departments and DOD. An argument based on this assertion has to be a lot more specific - it needs to show the cost of the abuses vs the cost of not implementing the program, or make an alternative recommendation.
If it were not for some perhaps over-zealous protections enacted by civil libertarian fundamentalists, the World Trade Center towers might still be standing. Of course, if it were not for perhaps over-zealous protections enacted by civil libertarian fundamentalists, we might all now be wearing GPS ankle bracelets. Go figure.
This program may be evil. Or it may have good and bad components. Or it may be very good. Remember, the evil department of defense, during the time of the Vietnam War, created the internet. Bad... oh how bad.... look how it could be abused... how it could help the government keep track of people! Obviously, people should have been alert at the time and prevented its creation.
Do you believe everything you read in the main stream media?
If the NSA is doing "wholesale spying on American civilians," it hasn't yet been revealed. What has been revealed is a program which "spies" on international phone calls, some of which have one party in the united states, and all of which have a suspected terrorist on the international end.
Now you may object to that, but to describe it as you (and too many in the MSM do) as "wholesale spyhing on American civilians" is ignorant at best and tendentious at worst.
By that logic, we should fire all prosecutors (and there are PLENTY of cases where they abuse their power), get rid of all police forces, and disband the Department of Defense.
Of course these powers can be abused! Do you know of any governmental powers that cannot?
The simple assertion that powers can be abused is not of value in determining whether the powers should or should not exist. The question is more nuanced than that. Even so, the argument is canonical on Slashdot and appears to be completely sufficient for many in making up their minds. Sad.
Subpoenas are used for more than just law violations (for example, in civil suits).
I wouldn't mind Google contesting the data (I don't know of any statutory reasons behind the request - if I did, I might change my mind). But it is hypocritical to challenge this but give in to the Chinese.
An interesting point. Given that google is the largest search engine, and the engine of choice for a whole lot of people, their statistics would be more valid if they had google data.
More interesting is Google's choice to fight this request for anonymous data, but let the Chinese dictatorship get what it wants in suppressing access to information for 1 billion people.
A huge gap. Specifically, the courts would recognize what you do not: that demanding personally identifiable data invokes much stronger protections than demanding statistically significant but anonymous data.
Yeah, according to the DHS, everything is a matter of national security. They use it as an excuse for just about everything they want to do, without being subject to scrutiny.
Utter nonsense!
One needs look no farther than the case in hand to recognize that this is exceedingly over-general tripe. One even has to look pretty hard to find a single current case where the asertion is true (for example, the NSA's spy on overseas calls case was in fact disclosed to and subject to the scrutiny of a number of members of congress - of both parties).
The government is doing research relevant to a federal law. There is nothing silly about that. Google's statement that the data has not relevance is rather absurd. The government can obviously use the data to establish information about search patterns, etc that lead to online illegal porn (or kiddie porn, or whatever they are after). Furthermore, they have requested this information in a manner that protects the privacy of the individuals making the queries. Google claims that the government cannot tell what URL's the searches would yield, which is clearly nonsense (at least in most cases) because the government can use a bot to find out!
In other words, Google is using technical obfuscation in an attempt to fool the court.
This is not to say, however, that all of Google's objections are without merit.
If Google hasn't done anything wrong... then they shouldn't have to comply.
This is ridiculous. There may be many reasons not to comply, but innocence is not one of them. Subpoenas are routinely issued to innocent parties, for very good reasons, and the parties comply.
The first computer I played with was MANIAC, a tube machine with persistent CRT memory and paper tape input. It lived across the street from my home on the campus of the University of New Mexico. But I never actually programmed it.
First computer programmed - IBM 7094.
First computer whose operating system I hacked into - GE-635/GECOS-III (later Honeywell 6000).
The jammers could have been taken out immediately, but there was no need. JDAMs have very good inertial guidance systems in them. The GPS just keeps updating it. With the GPS antenna pointing upwards (and hence with very high gain vs the direction to the jammer), the bomb gets pretty close to the target before losing the GPS signal to the jammer.
Hence, no need.
I believe in the Iraq war the jammers weren't taken out until combat units came in range, and needed GPS to work on the ground.
Jammers in general are easy targets... you just use an anti-radiation missile such as the HARM (High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile). Other missiles including anti-aircraft missiles have "home on JAM" modes.
My guess is that the jammers (Russian, I believe) were probably placed where attacking them would cause maximum damage to civilians. Furthermore, they are quite easy to make and don't cost much. Iraq could have had hundreds of them... blow one up, and another is turned on.
People of my "ilk" read history and understand several things:
The Islamofascists don't have to actually be able to convert us. If they believe they can, and are willing to sacrifice their lives in that attempt, and there are lots of them, then they can do us grievous damage. They believe that Allah has granted them them the freedom to kill 4,000,000 innocents to further that goal. Don't think they won't try. It simply doesn't matter whether they succeed or not, so your entire argument is, well, off topic and, in addition to being unnecessarily insulting, wrong.
People of your "ilk" seem to be devoid of imagination and knowledge of the details of this issue.
It is quite possible to change societies using the methods of terror, intimidation, and strategic truce (although the establishment of a new, global Caliphate is unlikely).
Just ask yourself how many newspaper editors in Europe right now are scared because they recently published sacrilegous cartoons about the prophet. Are aware of what is happening in that regard? If not, find out. Or how about Salman Rushdie... what do you think that fatwa did to the likelihood that more such books will be published?
The Islamic fanatics are already succeeding in reducing our freedom of speech. They understand that their goals don't have to be achieved in one stroke. Being deeply religious, they have a lot more patience than those in the decadent west. Being fanatics, they will threaten and perhaps actually kill people who engage in acts that upset them.
Why don't you build a website that specializes in attacking Islam? Would you feel a bit nervous? If not, you are a fool. If you would be nervous, then your freedom of speech has been already been inhibited!
Get the point?
And that's just a little taste of what fanatics like this can do.
9-11 was another example - in this case an attempt to destroy our economoy and demoralize us by killing tens of thousands of people and striking at the heart of our government. In attack, they miscalculated, because we had failed to react to a whole bunch of prior attacks, including three attempts on our soil (1993 WTC intended to kill 100 thousand, the New York bridge plot, and the 2000 millenial attempt to set off a bomb at LAX). They had good reason to think they could get away with a big attack. But they were wrong.
Now they know we can attack if they mass in a country. So they aren't doing that, which is good because it reduces their freedom of action. But they are still out there, still seeking WMDs, and have a vast number of sympathizers (a large percentage of European Muslims have said, in polls, that they support the goals of these guys, a smaller but still large percent say they would not turn in Islamofascist terrorists in their midst, and several percent - a very large number of people - reported that they would be willing to give their lives in suicide attacks to further the cause). The terrorist organizations may be holding back until we elect what they perceive to be a weaker government. Or tomorrow they may set off a nuke, bought from North Korea, in LA. For that matter, even if all they did was blow up a few school buses full of kids, it would be a very bad thing. I hope you ackhowledge that they have the capacity and will to do that.
Al Qaeda is just the visible tip of the iceberg, and the central rallying point for the Salafist terrorists.
And I haven't even mentioned Iranian-backed terrorists. They too have killed a bunch of Americans, including an acquaintance of mine, and gotten away with it. Iran may soon have a bunch of nukes, and if they are allowed to get them, they may be able to sponsor much more effective terrorists, as nobody will be willing to attack Iran itself, the terrorist sanctuary. Iran will have achieved strategic deterrence.
The current government of Iran appears to be whacko - the president believes he has a green aura. He has said that the Holocaust never happened. He claims that if he gets nukes, he will destroy Israe
Paranoia about the motivation of "the spies" is pathetic. Sure, some people in any organization are in it for themselves. But to say that all of them are in it for some sort of unreasonable self interest is simply dishonoring a lot of people who have a bit more honor than you credit them with. But even if they do it for their self interest, it would make sense to align that self interest with the interest of the people, which is what their bosses try to do. High in that self interest is defense from enemies that would kill innocents in large numbers.
Ignorance of their abilities is something I wish we all had, because then our enemies would too.
What works in counterintelligence is using many techniques. Relying only on intercepts would be really, really dumb.
Oh, and please explain why 9-11 was related to an "over reliance on high tech mass communication interception," eh? I think you pulled that out of your microphone-bereft butt!
Probably the greatest villain in not stopping 9-11 is to be too much lawyer-like thinking and artifical barriers that crippled an already under-automated and overly bureaucratic FBI. Another would be the Clinton Administration's failure of imagination (there were plenty of prior events that should have given them a clue) and the reliance upon police techniques (and legal restraints) for stopping what were really acts of war by a widespread, but loosely coordinated bunch of religious fanatics, one group of whom (Al Qaeda) had the full resources of a country (Afghanistan), lots of money, thousands of trained members (actually, tens of thousands went through their Afghanistan training camps), a keen eye for our weaknesses, and the willingness to give their own lives to kill lots of innocent Americans.
Do you think those folks are gone? Do you think they have no need to communicate? Do you think that maybe, if a loose-lipped congressman hadn't mentioned that we were tracking Osama by his sat phone comms, that we might not have done them a bit more damage? We were getting good intelligence from those high tech communications intercepts. Don't you think they still have needs to communicate?
Beyond that, it is important to recognize that the Islamofascist/Salafist terrorists are not all Al Qaeda, and are not all well trained in tradecraft. Not that 9-11 happened in spite of really pathetic mistakes in tradecraft by the hijackers. These groups are and potentially subject to detection by all the various techniques of counter-intelligence, from low tech means such as rewards, infiltration, and informants to the very high tech such as traffic analysis, data mining and intercepts.
In World War II, the *good guys* intentionally killed millions of civilians. We temporarily took away lots of civil rights, and engaged in ethnic profiling that resulted in Japanese citizens being forced into internment camps. Some of those measures were necessary, some may not have been, but nobody at the time could know which. In any case, the result is that we don't all speak German and salute a swastika, and Asia is not all part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere.
War is tough. It asks sacrifices of our citizens. Unfortunately, too many today don't understand the concept of sacrifice for their country. The government is supposed to simply leave them alone, but somehow while doing so magically protect itself so it can keep doing that. This elitist view means that those who have a better understanding are left with the sacrifices, such as those in our 100% volunteer military. And it also means that all of us are at greater risk because of the blindness that 50 years of living in a safe cocoon creates.
You miss the point entirely, while gratuitously slamming the US government.
My examples were not meant to define terrorism, but to show why those who use terrorism concluded that the US was weak enough to be a suitable target. It matters not the slightest that those who made the attacks were terrorists or not (I agree that attacks against military are not terrorist attacks - even if made by terrorist organizations).
Furthermore, it matters little whether Al Qaeda is a tightly coupled terrorist organization or a loose federation. It used to have a country at its disposal, it has trained thousands of people in terrorist techniques while indoctrinating them in Islamofascist ideology/theology. It still commands the loyalty of many terrorists (Zarqawi, for example, who has many people killing many people in Iraq), and as such represents a threat.
I find your justification for acts of terror to be disgusting, as I do your moral equivalency between them and US actions. But they are also irrelevant.
What counts is the threat, not silly justifications or nonsense moral equivalencies.
The threat to the US is not minor, because modern Islamofascist terrorists have much larger goals than the terrorists of the past - they truly intend to re-establish the Caliphate, over the entire world. Furthermore they have what Kagan has defined as a very effective weapon: the suicidal killer - a human smart bomb.
You clearly demonstrate yet one more person who simply doesn't understand modern terrorism. You view them in terms of past terrorit movements, when the real threat today is a religious movement capable of appealing to a very large number of people. What matters the conjunction of modern Salfism and the potential for its adherens acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
The combination of blaming the US, minimizing the threat and babbling about whether previous actions were terrorism or not ( irrelevant ) seems to be a common part of a common syndrome of logical irrelevancy and denial of reality.
Certainly the government should try to prevent them, to the extent that its methods of prevention are in accordance with and furtherance of the principles of liberty. If they aren't, what's the point? We'd be trading one tyrant for another. Forcing us to choose between terrorism and liberty is a false dilemma anyhow. Terrorism can be fought without compromising essential liberties.
I find this one of the most annoying arguments around. It is, to put it simply, ignorant or stupid - take your pick. Or to be more civil, it is absolutist. In any case, it p*sses me off royally because the people who put it forth are not stupid, but the argument is off the scale of stupid.
Frankly, I wouldn't mind if the NSA put a microphone up my butt if the alternative was having my daughter murdered by the bastards who murdered many other peoples' kids on 9-11. And if you are real human being, living in the real world, you wouldn't either.
The idea that listening to international phone calls is in any way equivalent to the tyranny of death, or the tyranny of Sharia law, especially in the form advocated by the Wahhabis, is so idiodic that I am amazed every time I see it come up, but here it is again. The cold choice: one tyrant or the other.
Grow the f*ck up! This isn't an academic game. This is war, whether you believe it or not. Maybe you should get some American history books. Then you would find out how war fighting, with much greater invasions of privacy, is not inconsistent with liberty, at least in the long run. Or you could look at it the way that libertarians and other lovers of liberty do, if they have half a brain: you can't have liberty if you don't protect the system that protects it for you, and that requires the loss of some liberty.
I voluntarily sacrificed a couple of years of my life, and put myself in significant danger, when the war was a heck of a lot less clear (Vietnam) than the one we are in now. Don't give me this sh*t about the equivalence between two tyrannies - one in which, gasp, you can't talk to your French girl friend without the NSA listening in, which is some way is the same as having a nuke go off in LA, with the threat of more, with the long term intended effect of putting you in an American Saudi Arabia! What frigging crap. This isn't tyrannny, it is merely a reasonable effort to avoid the civil libertarian absolutism that prevented us from stopping 9-11... when one part of the FBI had the information and was prevented from using it by civil libertarian concerns.
And don't tell me that being able to talk without intercept to a suspect Al Qaeda operative is an essential liberty. It ain't. For one thing, when you talk to someone overseas, has it ever crossed your brain that maybe, just maybe, the intelligence agency of the country on the other end might be listening in? Duh. If you really think you have some magical right to private phone calls to anyone, anywhere on earth, then you haven't graduated from diapers yet....
and then, to make it worse, you argue with the assertion that perhaps having the NSA keep some secrets doesn't benefit them. Another silly utopian viewpoint - the belief that open crypto systems are always better. BONG! Wrong! And while the NSA doesn't have a monopoly on brainpower, they have something close to it in this area, and they know a lot of stuff that you don't, and isn't public, because contrary to the simplistic view that openness in security is already good, it just isn't.
Openness for public crypto systems is often a good thing. It brings a lot of brainpower to bear (including NSA brainpower - they show up at crypto conferences too, you know). But they aren't the sort of amateurs to build secret crypto systems and imagine that they are secure. Rather, they are the sort of folks who have been dealing with crypto systems for decades that nobody else has even heard of. They were so far ahead of academia that many, many years after DES was put out, public cryptographers finally discovered differentia
Slashdot Mirror
Having tried to put some easily verifiable negative data about John Kerry into Wikipedia in 2004, I experienced the same sort of thing - from the other side of the political spectrum. When my information was removed (and the associated reference), the somewhat higher powered being (in the wiki world) commented that the reference was probably made up. He never bothered to check Amazon, where the reference was readily availabile.
Do not discount the incredible partisan divide that now exists in the US, and the extremely powerful phenomenon of confirmation bias. And, of course, there are also people who are not even willing to play by the rules at all - who intentionally use Wikipedia for propaganda. In my case, it was probably someone who simply could not believe the information I provided (in other words, it provoked cognitive dissonance in someone with extreme confirmation bias), rather than a malefactor.
Wikipedia simply fails when it gets close to controversial issues. You might as well go to talk.politics on Usenet for equally accurate information.
This is not a fault of the folks who set up the wiki, but of human nature and the wiki concept itself.
The military doesn't require blind trust. In fact, the Nuremberg principle holds soldiers accountable for following illegal orders.
However, the military does take violation of orders extremely seriously. You have to have a very good reason to violate an order, and be ready to back it up legally.
The whole area is tricky. Morale for soldiers is a life and death situation. Today, many in the US media and public life (hence reported in the US media) are going out of their way to make statements that will damage the morale of deployed soldiers - just as they did during Vietnam. It is a tribute to our soldiers that they mostly understand that this stuff is BS. I have read many, many letters from soldiers who, upon returning to the states, report that they are baffled by the negative news reports, because they simply don't square with what those soldiers observed while in the field.
BTW, I am extremely suspicious of the report that started this thread. The bias in the list of sites is so blatant that it is almost a mirror image of the bias in the Main Stream Media in the US. I find it very unlikely that the military would create such a filter - in fact, the military is hardly a bastion of single-mindedness - from the bottom to the top.
This smells like one of those stories that is just one more pile of BS so common today.
Unless we take the dubious assumption that values and systems are all intrinsically of the same value, then there must be a value and system set that is superior.
So it is hardly the height of hubris to think that it might be the American one. It might also not be. I don't know of anyone who claims that they are better than all others that have ever been or ever will be.
But I doubt it is the Taliban one.
At the air museum at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson AZ has an SR-71 on display AND an SR-71 drone. If you think the SR-71 is cool looking, check out the drone it could launch.
I was lucky enough to be there the day they let folks sit in the cockpit of the SR-71.
Very nice.
Having read quite a few responses to my post - ALL of which said essentially the same thing - I stand by my statement.
Slashdot moderators (and presumably the posters) seem to have a striking lack of diversity on issues of civil liberties. It is not unreasonable to infer that this also applies to posters.
The responses to my postings, all rated insightful, fell into two general categories (at least on an issue by issue basis):
1) Civil liberties absolutism
2) An unreasonable distrust of the government - one strong enough that if the posters are consistent, they should trust no government at all. A variation is a fundamental distrust of the executive branch (this is probably a result of the Bush Lied, People Died branch of American politics).
3) A lack of knowledge of American history - especially wartime history. I would suggest that those who oppose warrantless taps on international phone calls should find out what happened to civil liberties under Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. For that matter, how many know that many of these supposedly critically important liberties were not part of American jurisprudence until the 60s and 70s?
4) Utter failure to understand what I was saying, or a attempts to twist my words.
The best example was one reply which uttely misunderstood the Benjamin Franklin issue and how his absolutist quote, a favorite of civil liberties absolutists, was not meant in an absolute sense, as based on Franklin's own support of a government in which safety was gained at the expense of liberty - the nascent US government.
If you insist that it is stupid to argue that the warrantless NSA trans-border wiretaps are legal and appropriate, I suggest you take your argument to the FISA Court of Appeals, which in fact ruled that the warrantless NSA trans-border wiretaps are legal.
Of more interest, perhaps, is the genesis of the uniformity of Slashdot opinion (as measured in this thread at the time I wrote my post).
My call for diversity of opinion represents my sadness that my fellow nerds and geeks are so uniform in their opinions on what should be a controversial topic with many nuances. Or perhams, the ones who are more informed simply don't bother to put their opinions on Slashdot anymore, knowing the blizzard of silliness they will encounter. If you really believe that this issue is so settled that arguing it is like bringing flat earth to a geologist's convention, then you really, really need to expand your reading a whole lot.
No contradiction.
In the past, I have had just a few problems - enough to experience customer service but not enough to consider the products unreliable.
That the above response was moderated high simply illustrates my point.
When I saw the article the first company to come to mind was Dell. I have had terrible experience with their customer service. A typical problem requires waiting on a succession of customer "service" agents, all the while listening to a recording telling me how important I am to Dell.
Yeah, right.
I have gone through this process only to have an agent hang up one me, leaving me to start over.
One time the agent was downright rude a number of times, finally putting me on hold for 20 minutes and then disconnecting. The total call time just with that agent was about 2 hours.
I have gone through tiers of agents only to be told I would have to pay a bunch of bucks (I was trying to get new copies of the original re-install disks). I tried again, went through more hours and tiers of agents, and got the disks free.
I called to extend my warranty. After a long time, I was told that I couldn't. I tried again, different agent, and was able to extend it.
In fairness, though, the people who finally solved my problems were usually in outsource centers in India or the Phillipines.
Dell's problem goes way beyond outsourcing. They have too many tiers of agents, in too many different groups, with too many who can do nothing but follow scripts. They are, in other words, simply clueless about how to do customer service.
Of course, if the Dell products I have had were more reliable, the issue of their customer service would be moot.
I have been a Dell customer for a long time (almost a decade). Only recently have they provided such horrible customer service.
Next time I need a laptop, I'm going to try to find someone who is clueful about after-sales service.
I certainly hope that somebody with some power at Dell stumbles across this threat. And cares!
You are giving misanthropy a bad name.
Please go back to your cave.
I just looked through all the comments rated 4 and above...
/. is so automatic as to make it painful.
Every single one of them contained what has become the Slashdot canonical response to any action the government takes on the war on terror... the paranoid cry...
'they're spying on me'
'they're evil'
'they are sending evil rays to control my thoughts'
(alright - I made up the last one)
While there may be something to criticise in this program (part of which was able to spot the 9-11 terrorists before the act, but was prohibited from using the information), the response on
Does anyone out there ever consider that there might be people in government that might actually be trying to protect us? Does anyone consider that some programs are not as bad as described in the main stream press (i.e. spying on international phone calls to terrorist suspects has been morphed into "wholesale domestic wiretaps")?
Has anyone considered that liberty can never be absolute in a world of real human beings, and that the issue is not *whether* you give up some privacy, but *when* giving it up is appropriate and when it is not?
I'd just like to see a slight bit of balance here. The monotone is becoming boring.
Oh, and to hopefully forestall some canonical responses....
Ben Franklin's quote about protection and liberty is absolutist, and he himself, by being involved in a government which provided protection at the cost of liberty proved that, so please don't raise that old quote as a response.
Yes, the measures might be abused. The same logic applies to all government powers - so the simple assertion that they may be abused and therefore are wrong is without value. It applies just as well to prosecutors, police departments and DOD. An argument based on this assertion has to be a lot more specific - it needs to show the cost of the abuses vs the cost of not implementing the program, or make an alternative recommendation.
If it were not for some perhaps over-zealous protections enacted by civil libertarian fundamentalists, the World Trade Center towers might still be standing. Of course, if it were not for perhaps over-zealous protections enacted by civil libertarian fundamentalists, we might all now be wearing GPS ankle bracelets. Go figure.
This program may be evil. Or it may have good and bad components. Or it may be very good. Remember, the evil department of defense, during the time of the Vietnam War, created the internet. Bad... oh how bad.... look how it could be abused... how it could help the government keep track of people! Obviously, people should have been alert at the time and prevented its creation.
Finally, I love the word canonical.
NSA wholesale spying on American civilians
Do you believe everything you read in the main stream media?
If the NSA is doing "wholesale spying on American civilians," it hasn't yet been revealed. What has been revealed is a program which "spies" on international phone calls, some of which have one party in the united states, and all of which have a suspected terrorist on the international end.
Now you may object to that, but to describe it as you (and too many in the MSM do) as "wholesale spyhing on American civilians" is ignorant at best and tendentious at worst.
By that logic, we should fire all prosecutors (and there are PLENTY of cases where they abuse their power), get rid of all police forces, and disband the Department of Defense.
Of course these powers can be abused! Do you know of any governmental powers that cannot?
The simple assertion that powers can be abused is not of value in determining whether the powers should or should not exist. The question is more nuanced than that. Even so, the argument is canonical on Slashdot and appears to be completely sufficient for many in making up their minds. Sad.
Subpoenas are used for more than just law violations (for example, in civil suits).
I wouldn't mind Google contesting the data (I don't know of any statutory reasons behind the request - if I did, I might change my mind). But it is hypocritical to challenge this but give in to the Chinese.
"do no evil" unless PROFIT
An interesting point. Given that google is the largest search engine, and the engine of choice for a whole lot of people, their statistics would be more valid if they had google data.
More interesting is Google's choice to fight this request for anonymous data, but let the Chinese dictatorship get what it wants in suppressing access to information for 1 billion people.
The contrast is strong.
A huge gap. Specifically, the courts would recognize what you do not: that demanding personally identifiable data invokes much stronger protections than demanding statistically significant but anonymous data.
Yeah, according to the DHS, everything is a matter of national security. They use it as an excuse for just about everything they want to do, without being subject to scrutiny.
Utter nonsense!
One needs look no farther than the case in hand to recognize that this is exceedingly over-general tripe. One even has to look pretty hard to find a single current case where the asertion is true (for example, the NSA's spy on overseas calls case was in fact disclosed to and subject to the scrutiny of a number of members of congress - of both parties).
The government is doing research relevant to a federal law. There is nothing silly about that. Google's statement that the data has not relevance is rather absurd. The government can obviously use the data to establish information about search patterns, etc that lead to online illegal porn (or kiddie porn, or whatever they are after). Furthermore, they have requested this information in a manner that protects the privacy of the individuals making the queries. Google claims that the government cannot tell what URL's the searches would yield, which is clearly nonsense (at least in most cases) because the government can use a bot to find out!
In other words, Google is using technical obfuscation in an attempt to fool the court.
This is not to say, however, that all of Google's objections are without merit.
If Google hasn't done anything wrong ... then they shouldn't have to comply.
This is ridiculous. There may be many reasons not to comply, but innocence is not one of them. Subpoenas are routinely issued to innocent parties, for very good reasons, and the parties comply.
You don't have to be a lawyer to know this!
The first computer I played with was MANIAC, a tube machine with persistent CRT memory and paper tape input. It lived across the street from my home on the campus of the University of New Mexico. But I never actually programmed it.
First computer programmed - IBM 7094.
First computer whose operating system I hacked into - GE-635/GECOS-III (later Honeywell 6000).
The jammers could have been taken out immediately, but there was no need. JDAMs have very good inertial guidance systems in them. The GPS just keeps updating it. With the GPS antenna pointing upwards (and hence with very high gain vs the direction to the jammer), the bomb gets pretty close to the target before losing the GPS signal to the jammer.
Hence, no need.
I believe in the Iraq war the jammers weren't taken out until combat units came in range, and needed GPS to work on the ground.
Jammers in general are easy targets... you just use an anti-radiation missile such as the HARM (High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile). Other missiles including anti-aircraft missiles have "home on JAM" modes.
My guess is that the jammers (Russian, I believe) were probably placed where attacking them would cause maximum damage to civilians. Furthermore, they are quite easy to make and don't cost much. Iraq could have had hundreds of them... blow one up, and another is turned on.
People of my "ilk" read history and understand several things:
The Islamofascists don't have to actually be able to convert us. If they believe they can, and are willing to sacrifice their lives in that attempt, and there are lots of them, then they can do us grievous damage. They believe that Allah has granted them them the freedom to kill 4,000,000 innocents to further that goal. Don't think they won't try. It simply doesn't matter whether they succeed or not, so your entire argument is, well, off topic and, in addition to being unnecessarily insulting, wrong.
People of your "ilk" seem to be devoid of imagination and knowledge of the details of this issue.
It is quite possible to change societies using the methods of terror, intimidation, and strategic truce (although the establishment of a new, global Caliphate is unlikely).
Just ask yourself how many newspaper editors in Europe right now are scared because they recently published sacrilegous cartoons about the prophet. Are aware of what is happening in that regard? If not, find out. Or how about Salman Rushdie... what do you think that fatwa did to the likelihood that more such books will be published?
The Islamic fanatics are already succeeding in reducing our freedom of speech. They understand that their goals don't have to be achieved in one stroke. Being deeply religious, they have a lot more patience than those in the decadent west. Being fanatics, they will threaten and perhaps actually kill people who engage in acts that upset them.
Why don't you build a website that specializes in attacking Islam? Would you feel a bit nervous? If not, you are a fool. If you would be nervous, then your freedom of speech has been already been inhibited!
Get the point?
And that's just a little taste of what fanatics like this can do.
9-11 was another example - in this case an attempt to destroy our economoy and demoralize us by killing tens of thousands of people and striking at the heart of our government. In attack, they miscalculated, because we had failed to react to a whole bunch of prior attacks, including three attempts on our soil (1993 WTC intended to kill 100 thousand, the New York bridge plot, and the 2000 millenial attempt to set off a bomb at LAX). They had good reason to think they could get away with a big attack. But they were wrong.
Now they know we can attack if they mass in a country. So they aren't doing that, which is good because it reduces their freedom of action. But they are still out there, still seeking WMDs, and have a vast number of sympathizers (a large percentage of European Muslims have said, in polls, that they support the goals of these guys, a smaller but still large percent say they would not turn in Islamofascist terrorists in their midst, and several percent - a very large number of people - reported that they would be willing to give their lives in suicide attacks to further the cause). The terrorist organizations may be holding back until we elect what they perceive to be a weaker government. Or tomorrow they may set off a nuke, bought from North Korea, in LA. For that matter, even if all they did was blow up a few school buses full of kids, it would be a very bad thing. I hope you ackhowledge that they have the capacity and will to do that.
Al Qaeda is just the visible tip of the iceberg, and the central rallying point for the Salafist terrorists.
And I haven't even mentioned Iranian-backed terrorists. They too have killed a bunch of Americans, including an acquaintance of mine, and gotten away with it. Iran may soon have a bunch of nukes, and if they are allowed to get them, they may be able to sponsor much more effective terrorists, as nobody will be willing to attack Iran itself, the terrorist sanctuary. Iran will have achieved strategic deterrence.
The current government of Iran appears to be whacko - the president believes he has a green aura. He has said that the Holocaust never happened. He claims that if he gets nukes, he will destroy Israe
Oh, please.
Paranoia about the motivation of "the spies" is pathetic. Sure, some people in any organization are in it for themselves. But to say that all of them are in it for some sort of unreasonable self interest is simply dishonoring a lot of people who have a bit more honor than you credit them with. But even if they do it for their self interest, it would make sense to align that self interest with the interest of the people, which is what their bosses try to do. High in that self interest is defense from enemies that would kill innocents in large numbers.
Ignorance of their abilities is something I wish we all had, because then our enemies would too.
What works in counterintelligence is using many techniques. Relying only on intercepts would be really, really dumb.
Oh, and please explain why 9-11 was related to an "over reliance on high tech mass communication interception," eh? I think you pulled that out of your microphone-bereft butt!
Probably the greatest villain in not stopping 9-11 is to be too much lawyer-like thinking and artifical barriers that crippled an already under-automated and overly bureaucratic FBI. Another would be the Clinton Administration's failure of imagination (there were plenty of prior events that should have given them a clue) and the reliance upon police techniques (and legal restraints) for stopping what were really acts of war by a widespread, but loosely coordinated bunch of religious fanatics, one group of whom (Al Qaeda) had the full resources of a country (Afghanistan), lots of money, thousands of trained members (actually, tens of thousands went through their Afghanistan training camps), a keen eye for our weaknesses, and the willingness to give their own lives to kill lots of innocent Americans.
Do you think those folks are gone? Do you think they have no need to communicate? Do you think that maybe, if a loose-lipped congressman hadn't mentioned that we were tracking Osama by his sat phone comms, that we might not have done them a bit more damage? We were getting good intelligence from those high tech communications intercepts. Don't you think they still have needs to communicate?
Beyond that, it is important to recognize that the Islamofascist/Salafist terrorists are not all Al Qaeda, and are not all well trained in tradecraft. Not that 9-11 happened in spite of really pathetic mistakes in tradecraft by the hijackers. These groups are and potentially subject to detection by all the various techniques of counter-intelligence, from low tech means such as rewards, infiltration, and informants to the very high tech such as traffic analysis, data mining and intercepts.
In World War II, the *good guys* intentionally killed millions of civilians. We temporarily took away lots of civil rights, and engaged in ethnic profiling that resulted in Japanese citizens being forced into internment camps. Some of those measures were necessary, some may not have been, but nobody at the time could know which. In any case, the result is that we don't all speak German and salute a swastika, and Asia is not all part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere.
War is tough. It asks sacrifices of our citizens. Unfortunately, too many today don't understand the concept of sacrifice for their country. The government is supposed to simply leave them alone, but somehow while doing so magically protect itself so it can keep doing that. This elitist view means that those who have a better understanding are left with the sacrifices, such as those in our 100% volunteer military. And it also means that all of us are at greater risk because of the blindness that 50 years of living in a safe cocoon creates.
You miss the point entirely, while gratuitously slamming the US government.
My examples were not meant to define terrorism, but to show why those who use terrorism concluded that the US was weak enough to be a suitable target. It matters not the slightest that those who made the attacks were terrorists or not (I agree that attacks against military are not terrorist attacks - even if made by terrorist organizations).
Furthermore, it matters little whether Al Qaeda is a tightly coupled terrorist organization or a loose federation. It used to have a country at its disposal, it has trained thousands of people in terrorist techniques while indoctrinating them in Islamofascist ideology/theology. It still commands the loyalty of many terrorists (Zarqawi, for example, who has many people killing many people in Iraq), and as such represents a threat.
I find your justification for acts of terror to be disgusting, as I do your moral equivalency between them and US actions. But they are also irrelevant.
What counts is the threat, not silly justifications or nonsense moral equivalencies.
The threat to the US is not minor, because modern Islamofascist terrorists have much larger goals than the terrorists of the past - they truly intend to re-establish the Caliphate, over the entire world. Furthermore they have what Kagan has defined as a very effective weapon: the suicidal killer - a human smart bomb.
You clearly demonstrate yet one more person who simply doesn't understand modern terrorism. You view them in terms of past terrorit movements, when the real threat today is a religious movement capable of appealing to a very large number of people. What matters the conjunction of modern Salfism and the potential for its adherens acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
The combination of blaming the US, minimizing the threat and babbling about whether previous actions were terrorism or not ( irrelevant ) seems to be a common part of a common syndrome of logical irrelevancy and denial of reality.
My point exactly. The best tech doesn't keep humans from screwing up the system.
Certainly the government should try to prevent them, to the extent that its methods of prevention are in accordance with and furtherance of the principles of liberty. If they aren't, what's the point? We'd be trading one tyrant for another. Forcing us to choose between terrorism and liberty is a false dilemma anyhow. Terrorism can be fought without compromising essential liberties.
...
I find this one of the most annoying arguments around. It is, to put it simply, ignorant or stupid - take your pick. Or to be more civil, it is absolutist. In any case, it p*sses me off royally because the people who put it forth are not stupid, but the argument is off the scale of stupid.
Frankly, I wouldn't mind if the NSA put a microphone up my butt if the alternative was having my daughter murdered by the bastards who murdered many other peoples' kids on 9-11. And if you are real human being, living in the real world, you wouldn't either.
The idea that listening to international phone calls is in any way equivalent to the tyranny of death, or the tyranny of Sharia law, especially in the form advocated by the Wahhabis, is so idiodic that I am amazed every time I see it come up, but here it is again. The cold choice: one tyrant or the other.
Grow the f*ck up! This isn't an academic game. This is war, whether you believe it or not. Maybe you should get some American history books. Then you would find out how war fighting, with much greater invasions of privacy, is not inconsistent with liberty, at least in the long run. Or you could look at it the way that libertarians and other lovers of liberty do, if they have half a brain: you can't have liberty if you don't protect the system that protects it for you, and that requires the loss of some liberty.
I voluntarily sacrificed a couple of years of my life, and put myself in significant danger, when the war was a heck of a lot less clear (Vietnam) than the one we are in now. Don't give me this sh*t about the equivalence between two tyrannies - one in which, gasp, you can't talk to your French girl friend without the NSA listening in, which is some way is the same as having a nuke go off in LA, with the threat of more, with the long term intended effect of putting you in an American Saudi Arabia! What frigging crap. This isn't tyrannny, it is merely a reasonable effort to avoid the civil libertarian absolutism that prevented us from stopping 9-11... when one part of the FBI had the information and was prevented from using it by civil libertarian concerns.
And don't tell me that being able to talk without intercept to a suspect Al Qaeda operative is an essential liberty. It ain't. For one thing, when you talk to someone overseas, has it ever crossed your brain that maybe, just maybe, the intelligence agency of the country on the other end might be listening in? Duh. If you really think you have some magical right to private phone calls to anyone, anywhere on earth, then you haven't graduated from diapers yet.
and then, to make it worse, you argue with the assertion that perhaps having the NSA keep some secrets doesn't benefit them. Another silly utopian viewpoint - the belief that open crypto systems are always better. BONG! Wrong! And while the NSA doesn't have a monopoly on brainpower, they have something close to it in this area, and they know a lot of stuff that you don't, and isn't public, because contrary to the simplistic view that openness in security is already good, it just isn't.
Openness for public crypto systems is often a good thing. It brings a lot of brainpower to bear (including NSA brainpower - they show up at crypto conferences too, you know). But they aren't the sort of amateurs to build secret crypto systems and imagine that they are secure. Rather, they are the sort of folks who have been dealing with crypto systems for decades that nobody else has even heard of. They were so far ahead of academia that many, many years after DES was put out, public cryptographers finally discovered differentia