Once the model of advertising-supported services arose, people in the third world could have nice things like e-mail and entertainment in spite of their countries' lack of means or an infrastructure where individuals could pay for whatever they used themselves.
You know that is only true because advertising is imprecise, right? Those people have no money to buy crap anyway so advertising is completely wasted on them. If the advertising people could figure out a way to avoid paying for ads targeting people like that they would and that would quickly mean that the service providers would drop them too. Kind of like how streaming video sites use geo-location to block them now.
So it isn't really a benefit so much as an accident that may be corrected at any time. We would be better off coming up with another way to get the poor online instead.
I find that about half the sites I go to don't require any whitelisting at all, another ~30% are good enough with white-listing only a couple of other sites (usually CDNs). But it does take a while to get the hang of guessing which are the required sites and which are just fluff and/or trackers.
The RequestPolicy add-on should handle this too. RequestPolicy blocks cross-site references by default and lets you whitelist individual cases. If you don't even talk to the tracker websites then they can't track you.
If the main website you access tracks you via etags the risk is limited to tracking your actions on that website which you'd have problems avoiding anyway since they can track you via ip address or if you have an account on that website.
A contract employee of a third party company not of the fucking government you idiot.
No, he was a direct employee of a contract house that handles staffing for some government agencies. His employer of record, Booz Allen, is basically a glorified temp agency.
No, he worked at a government facility. So do us all a favor and shut up until you figure out how to fact check yourself. You and your screaming ignorance only make this fight harder for the people who do know what they are talking about.
Snowdown worked on-site, not off-site and he wasn't working for the interests of his employer of record. Basically your entire point is hyperbole and that shit only hurts the cause. Quit it.
There was also a lot of praise for the Obama re-election software, which was able to help him target exactly the right people to win a very difficult re-election battle. I wonder where they got their data from.
That was no secret at all. They don't need the NSA to figure out consumer profiles, there is already a billion dollar industry doing exactly that already. BlueKai, Facebook, Doubleclick, etc. There are hundreds of companies dedicated to figuring that stuff out based on credit-card usage, loyalty card usage, census data, voter registration records, purchasing history, salary history, etc.
We *know* we have direct employees abusing their power for personal reasons.
Doing personal searches is not even in the same league as "total and full access." If you want to walk back the OP's claim to "on-site contractors could have abused their access to do unauthorized searches in individual cases," then I wouldn't be complaining. But "fotal and full access" is not even close to that - "total and full access" is the ultimate level of access it implies not only the full cooperation of the NSA it implies that the NSA's own access controls were deliberately out of the loop for these hypothetical companies use of the NSA's databases.
I don't know how you got this so badly wrong - it's not just contract employees but also outsourcing to external contracting companies off site.
I am waiting for ANY proof that people off-site of the NSA's classified facilities had "total and full access" to any of the NSA's classified databases.
I disagree. I believe it has been reported that the NSA runs 20 million searches a month on the data they collect. That kind of volume makes it impossible to audit and even separation of duties isn't going to be feasible. It isn't like you can separate the guy who chooses what to search for from the guy who looks at the results. At best you could 2-man it, but even with that the volume would prevent the second man from being able to tell the difference between results personal to the 1st man and just a widely cast net.
Not necessarily. If corporate interests are able to openly insert their own moles into the organization without rigorous oversight, then for all practical purposes it amounts to the same thing.
Yes necessarily. Contract employees have exactly the same restrictions on them as direct employees. They go through all the same vetting processes to get a security clearance and they operate under the exact same rules. You migjht as well propose that corporations have moles in the ranks of the direct employees.
If Obama can arrange to have his dog Bo airlifted to Martha's Vineyard
It isn't like the 2nd helicopter was only for the dog. It was carrying all the personnel and equipment that didn't fit in the first helicopter with the president.
Obviously the PR division at the NSA figured out a plan to trivialize the revelations.
If that's their plan, it is a stupid one. For most of the population spying on politicians and fat-cats is unrelatable. But having a lover break trust and spy on you is something just about everybody has experienced be it snooping through your phone, your email, or even just the stuff in your house.
One of the big reasons the public is apathetic to the NSA is that most people just don't see how it could ever affect them personally. With these revelations the NSA has made it crystal clear to the general public just how "icky" the NSA can be.
It might not be the best reason to be pissed off about the NSA, but it is the kind of thing that most people can immediately feel in their gut and that counts for a lot in this fight.
No, he was a contract employee. A "corporate security contractor" would be a company like Blackwater/Xe/Academi. The implication of the OP is that these private firms were able to request data from the NSA for their own purposes, not that people who worked for the NSA on contract did the same jobs as direct employees of the NSA.
It is public knowledge the corporate security contractors had full access to the information being gathered under the NSA auspices. Private for profit individuals with total and full access to all the intelligence information
I'm going to need a cite for that because I've been following this pretty closely and this is the first I've heard of private citizens having "total and full access" to the NSA's data.
Yes it was. According to the article most of these were only found out during un-related lie-detector sessions, not by any auditing system. It poses the question - how many other cases of abuse have slipped by because the employee knew how to fake out the lie detectors?
On the flip-side lack of such condemnation is too frequently used as an attack when more often than not it is simply the members of the group don't see themselves as members of the same group. I shouldn't have to apologize for the actions of somebody I don't even agree with because a 3rd party considers me and the other guy to be part of some group. Its kind of like expecting born-again christians to take responsibility for catholic pedo-priests because they are all christians.
Sure, you may be detained or arrested by police as a matter of policy, but its seriously unlikely you'll face or be convicted of any misdemeanor or criminal charge.
You might be the rap, but you won't beat the ride.
If I am reading it right, it is just circumstantial evidence based on the NZ documents using the term "selecrtors" with respect to real-time data collection. But no actual mention of NSA programs.
After the DEA and IRS were found to have access plus the boondoogle with the presidential airplane over europe and the revelation that the decision to detain Miranda came directly from the office the UK PM James Cameron, I am completely ready to give the benefit of the doubt to the reporting, I just want to make sure there isn't any more concrete proof besides what may be terminology common to multiple LE agencies.
I'm surprised that the inventor of The Internet would make such erroneous claims.
Of all places, Slashdot really ought not to fall victim to such an erroneous meme.
What Al Gore actually said: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
"In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet." - Newt Gingrich, 2000
Slashdot Mirror
Once the model of advertising-supported services arose, people in the third world could have nice things like e-mail and entertainment in spite of their countries' lack of means or an infrastructure where individuals could pay for whatever they used themselves.
You know that is only true because advertising is imprecise, right? Those people have no money to buy crap anyway so advertising is completely wasted on them. If the advertising people could figure out a way to avoid paying for ads targeting people like that they would and that would quickly mean that the service providers would drop them too. Kind of like how streaming video sites use geo-location to block them now.
So it isn't really a benefit so much as an accident that may be corrected at any time. We would be better off coming up with another way to get the poor online instead.
I find that about half the sites I go to don't require any whitelisting at all, another ~30% are good enough with white-listing only a couple of other sites (usually CDNs). But it does take a while to get the hang of guessing which are the required sites and which are just fluff and/or trackers.
The RequestPolicy add-on should handle this too. RequestPolicy blocks cross-site references by default and lets you whitelist individual cases. If you don't even talk to the tracker websites then they can't track you.
If the main website you access tracks you via etags the risk is limited to tracking your actions on that website which you'd have problems avoiding anyway since they can track you via ip address or if you have an account on that website.
A contract employee of a third party company not of the fucking government you idiot.
No, he was a direct employee of a contract house that handles staffing for some government agencies. His employer of record, Booz Allen, is basically a glorified temp agency.
He worked at a contractors site on an island
No, he worked at a government facility. So do us all a favor and shut up until you figure out how to fact check yourself. You and your screaming ignorance only make this fight harder for the people who do know what they are talking about.
Snowdown worked on-site, not off-site and he wasn't working for the interests of his employer of record. Basically your entire point is hyperbole and that shit only hurts the cause. Quit it.
There was also a lot of praise for the Obama re-election software, which was able to help him target exactly the right people to win a very difficult re-election battle. I wonder where they got their data from.
That was no secret at all. They don't need the NSA to figure out consumer profiles, there is already a billion dollar industry doing exactly that already. BlueKai, Facebook, Doubleclick, etc. There are hundreds of companies dedicated to figuring that stuff out based on credit-card usage, loyalty card usage, census data, voter registration records, purchasing history, salary history, etc.
We *know* we have direct employees abusing their power for personal reasons.
Doing personal searches is not even in the same league as "total and full access." If you want to walk back the OP's claim to "on-site contractors could have abused their access to do unauthorized searches in individual cases," then I wouldn't be complaining. But "fotal and full access" is not even close to that - "total and full access" is the ultimate level of access it implies not only the full cooperation of the NSA it implies that the NSA's own access controls were deliberately out of the loop for these hypothetical companies use of the NSA's databases.
I don't know how you got this so badly wrong - it's not just contract employees but also outsourcing to external contracting companies off site.
I am waiting for ANY proof that people off-site of the NSA's classified facilities had "total and full access" to any of the NSA's classified databases.
I disagree. I believe it has been reported that the NSA runs 20 million searches a month on the data they collect. That kind of volume makes it impossible to audit and even separation of duties isn't going to be feasible. It isn't like you can separate the guy who chooses what to search for from the guy who looks at the results. At best you could 2-man it, but even with that the volume would prevent the second man from being able to tell the difference between results personal to the 1st man and just a widely cast net.
Not necessarily. If corporate interests are able to openly insert their own moles into the organization without rigorous oversight, then for all practical purposes it amounts to the same thing.
Yes necessarily. Contract employees have exactly the same restrictions on them as direct employees. They go through all the same vetting processes to get a security clearance and they operate under the exact same rules. You migjht as well propose that corporations have moles in the ranks of the direct employees.
If Obama can arrange to have his dog Bo airlifted to Martha's Vineyard
It isn't like the 2nd helicopter was only for the dog. It was carrying all the personnel and equipment that didn't fit in the first helicopter with the president.
Obviously the PR division at the NSA figured out a plan to trivialize the revelations.
If that's their plan, it is a stupid one. For most of the population spying on politicians and fat-cats is unrelatable. But having a lover break trust and spy on you is something just about everybody has experienced be it snooping through your phone, your email, or even just the stuff in your house.
One of the big reasons the public is apathetic to the NSA is that most people just don't see how it could ever affect them personally. With these revelations the NSA has made it crystal clear to the general public just how "icky" the NSA can be.
It might not be the best reason to be pissed off about the NSA, but it is the kind of thing that most people can immediately feel in their gut and that counts for a lot in this fight.
> Wasn't Snowden a corporate security contractor?
No, he was a contract employee. A "corporate security contractor" would be a company like Blackwater/Xe/Academi. The implication of the OP is that these private firms were able to request data from the NSA for their own purposes, not that people who worked for the NSA on contract did the same jobs as direct employees of the NSA.
It is public knowledge the corporate security contractors had full access to the information being gathered under the NSA auspices. Private for profit individuals with total and full access to all the intelligence information
I'm going to need a cite for that because I've been following this pretty closely and this is the first I've heard of private citizens having "total and full access" to the NSA's data.
> Wasn't the oversight supposed to prevent this?
Yes it was. According to the article most of these were only found out during un-related lie-detector sessions, not by any auditing system. It poses the question - how many other cases of abuse have slipped by because the employee knew how to fake out the lie detectors?
Anything from a higher classified system that is to deliver data to a lower classified system,
The projects I worked on called it a data diode.
On the flip-side lack of such condemnation is too frequently used as an attack when more often than not it is simply the members of the group don't see themselves as members of the same group. I shouldn't have to apologize for the actions of somebody I don't even agree with because a 3rd party considers me and the other guy to be part of some group. Its kind of like expecting born-again christians to take responsibility for catholic pedo-priests because they are all christians.
It doesn't hurt to explicitly condemn them and distance yourself from them, though. Specifically as a white guy.
Muslims Condemn Terrorist Attacks
Muslims for Life
Muslims for Peace
Sure, you may be detained or arrested by police as a matter of policy, but its seriously unlikely you'll face or be convicted of any misdemeanor or criminal charge.
You might be the rap, but you won't beat the ride.
The converse that all terrorists are Muslim is a common sense generalization, however.
All Terrorists are Muslims... Except the 94% that Aren't
TL;DR: Old School McCarthyism
You don't know how right you are.
"Why do so many countries want to attack us?" the person asked.
The general replied that America stands in the way of them reaching their objective, which is to force everybody to comply with sharia law.
That general is Keith Alexander, head of the NSA
Yes, the head of the NSA is a fox news nutbag.
McCarthy is alive and well.
Lol, I meant David Cameron. They haven't sent a xenomorph after Snwoden, at least not yet...
If I am reading it right, it is just circumstantial evidence based on the NZ documents using the term "selecrtors" with respect to real-time data collection. But no actual mention of NSA programs.
After the DEA and IRS were found to have access plus the boondoogle with the presidential airplane over europe and the revelation that the decision to detain Miranda came directly from the office the UK PM James Cameron, I am completely ready to give the benefit of the doubt to the reporting, I just want to make sure there isn't any more concrete proof besides what may be terminology common to multiple LE agencies.
I'm surprised that the inventor of The Internet would make such erroneous claims.
Of all places, Slashdot really ought not to fall victim to such an erroneous meme.
What Al Gore actually said: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
"In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet."
- Newt Gingrich, 2000