What about the right to life for the people being killed? You claim to be concerned about people's rights, but not theirs. The right to life if the most fundamental right and you seem to have no problem in it being violated.
You've overlooked the fact that in many places various local guerillas, terrorists, and warlords are likely to kill or drive off the aid workers trying to solve the diarrhea problem, not the mention the various other diseases and community problems they could address. Your unwillingness to acknowledge and address the second problem (lawlessness) means that the first problem (diarrhea) won't get solved either. So, diarrhea will continue. It's not cost effective to send aid workers when they will die and can't deliver the aid. Sometimes policy planning goes very badly when it overlooks questions like the security of the workers enacting the policy.
So you basically consider the existence of diarrhea deaths, for any reason, to be a license for mass murder anywhere in the world? The beautiful part of that is that the same sort of people that engage in terrorism are often the very ones that also block relief efforts and kill relief workers that would work to help reduce or end local problems with disease such as diarrhea deaths. Terrorism isn't "so called," it actually exists and kills tens of thousands of people per year directly, and more indirectly when it blocks humanitarian aid.
Some people are Indians, Some people are Chiefs. I tried my hand at being a Chief, But I came to the realization that not only did I enjoy being an Indian, I'm a damm good Indian! (And there is nothing wrong with that)
Not only is there nothing wrong with that, but making an unwilling, unsuitable, or uninterested Indian a chief tends to make the whole tribe unhappy, including the badly appointed chief. Some people lose the use of their best qualities when made a chief, others gain them, some can use them in both. Not everyone has the temperament, skill, or insight to do well as a chief - it is a different role than Indian. There are many chiefs that appear great only because they have enough great Indians with them. But that is part of the wisdom of great chiefs - to seek great Indians.
Major General Smedley Butler, United States Marine Corp, was an extraordinarily brave and devoted Marine who served the United States in an exceptional manner while in uniform, earning two Congressional Medals of Honor - the highest American medal for bravery on the battlefield. Out of uniform and in the realm of politics, however, citizen Butler involved himself in leftist fringe politics. I would be inclined to follow Major General Butler anywhere on the battlefield, but nowhere near a voting booth. In this regard he is like Chomsky, a man of exceptional virtual in his field, but a political crank (popular though he may be) and genocidedenier.
. . . . Back in the 1930s, the U.S. Communist Party recruited a former Marine Corps general, Smedley Butler, to give speeches on the eve of World War II denouncing military preparedness as a capitalist racket. The idea was that by persuading an individual man of valor to propound shameful views, those views would somehow become less shameful. It didn’t work then. I doubt it will work now. - Wesley Who?
Reading into Glen Greenwald's comments and some of his other statements, it would seem that much of the spying is used not for security purposes, rather it's to give an edge to certain select US businesses.
Unless you can point to something firmer, you probably have that garbled. The situation is rather more subtle than that.
Why We Spy on Our Allies - By R. James Woolsey, a Washington lawyer and a former Director of Central Intelligence.
What are the chances for Snowden to avoid going to prison if he returns home? Zero. Therefore it is quite clear Snowden will try to avoid it, no matter how ''correct' or 'righteous' he may be.
Not necessarily. I don't know that I agree with the view, but there is another: Give Snowden Immunity
While you're engaged in starting and stopping all the ignoring and pretending, maybe you could stop ignoring and pretending that Russia, China, France, the UK, Germany,......N aren't doing it too? Can you add some invective for them as well?
Kirk: Do you think it will work? Spock: It will depend on what Mr. Scott can coax out of the systems. Kirk: Scotty, Spock thinks that if we can boost the precision of the sensors and overlay the data on the navigation computer we may be able to navigate through the interphase rift to escape the Tholian web. Can you do it? Scotty: Aye Captain. With that last maintenance overhaul at Star Base 11 our computers were updated with the new Multitronic GPU processors. For once I have the power.
Power, the next frontier. These are the stories of the GPU maker Nvidia. Its 5 year mission: to boldly show what no graphics board has shown before.
Brought to you by: Interplanetary Business Machines. When the label says Power by IBM, you'll know the performance will be out of this world.
In my opinion, the fact that the US gov't has hunted him so furiously and has taken the exact opposite approach that they mandate regarding any other nation's political refugees...
He isn't a political refuge. He stole national defense secrets and has revealed a few of them. Nobody really knows what he is doing with the rest of them.
You seem to be missing quite a few planned attacks there. Also, I wouldn't look for the intelligence services to do much bragging. It isn't their way, they prefer to avoid their role being know when they can. That includes any assistance to the police doing the "bragging," and perhaps some of the happy "accidents" that have foiled some of the plots.
The last several heads of MI5 would seem to disagree with you about the risk. They think it is very high.
The situation in Pakistan is that the government has limited control, if any, over the tribal areas. Al Qaida and the Taliban (both Afghan and Pakistani) have exploited this to set up shop there, often to the inconvenience to the locals. At times the locals themselves have attacked al Qaida members and the Taliban. The drone attacks focus on the terrorists, often while they are moving in vehicles. That tends to isolate them and means few other people are around. There are other methods of attack, and no doubt some innocents have been killed. But I doubt it is more than a minor fraction of the total killed. Speaking of empathy, have you any for the victims of the terrorists hiding in Pakistan? They regularly slip into Afghanistan to kill, maim, and intimidate. They are making attacks more frequently in Pakistan now. Do their victims have a voice? Those victims don't number in the hundreds, it is in the thousands and tens of thousands.
The only thing that I can imagine is making ill-intended people aware they should protect their communications
That is exactly what is happening. This is following specific revelations from Snowden. It has been described as, 'really bad."
... but that affects only the stupid ones, and only if they don't want to get caught pos facto, e.g. Boston bombers.
No, it also enables them to engage in planning and execution of their attacks without being caught. Since some of those may very well be suicide attacks, as the 7/7 attacks were, getting caught is a moot point.
The purpose of training is to take the best ideas from a bunch well informed, smart people, and teach those behaviors and techniques to new people. That way they can act smart without having to be smart. What is happening now is that all the smart people, well informed people that support terrorists are watching and reading what the people in the free world think and do. They are capturing the best ideas, paying attention to the warnings, and are instructing the terrorists what to do, how to act as if they were smart. There have been several times when terrorist organizations have taken note of ideas in the press that were being discussed in the US or Europe as in, "I hope that aren't planning to do X because it would be really bad for us if they did." Before that the terrorists had never thought of X, they knew nothing about X, until they saw discussions about X in the press. Now they are trying to do X.
Once information that helps them slips out, once they get an idea from somebody, the genie is out of the bottle. There are a lot of free genies already, and people keep wanting to pull corks for all kinds of reasons. One of those reasons is, "Hey, nobody but stupid people doesn't know this, so lets tell everybody."
Show everyone where your defenses are? Tell everyone how to sneak past them? Loudly discuss your weak points? What could possibly go wrong? You might as well give them all of your admin passwords.
It sounds to me like you didn't do a proper job of accounting for the actual risk. It appears that you didn't bother to gather lists of the planned or attempted attacks that were interrupted and develop estimates as to loss of life, limb, and property had they succeeded. You aren't properly accounting for the risk fi you don't. Those numbers are rather important since many of them would have been mass casualty events such as attacks on football stadiums that could have killed hundreds and wounded thousands from truck bombs. There is another insidious aspect of terrorism that you should account for as well, and that is the fact that successful terrorist campaigns will draw more recruits. More recruits coming to support a cause allow it to conduct further attacks. It can be a self-reinforcing phenomenon. There are certainly other affects as well. If you haven't account for those, you have it wrong.
It is also nonsense to confuse random accidents with willful human behavior.
I would say you've used a rather apt phrase. Snowden's mass of public revelations are available to all, to friend and foe alike to use as they will, including for evil purposes. We have yet to see whom, if anyone, will end up being buried.
Sorry, but no. I reread it and it looks to me like simple out of place jeremiad on the 4th Amendment. If this was focused on the 3rd party data problem I would expect it to be more explicitly addressed than to be simply mentioned is passing and condemned as illegal. There are several parts of it that are simply wrong as well. However I'm sure it is well meaning and heart felt.
It's possible you're right about the GP poster's intent, although I'm not necessarily convinced.* It seems to be pretty common for certain Americans posting in stories of pure, or nearly pure, British context to go off on 4th Amendment rants which are senseless given the context. My favorite is when they do things like call for the spilling of blood of patriots to refresh the tree of liberty - Colonial American patriotic rhetoric which may be bracing to Americans, but which is probably meaningless or even insulting to Britons. It would make about as much sense if British posters were to post quotes from the British Civil Wars during a debate about some American legal dispute with no connection at all. Of course many Europeans and members of the Anglosphere outside the US go off on 4th Amendment rants themselves at times. But at least they tend to do it in an American context. So, I'm skeptical, but what you wrote is plausible.
This is all about politics and monitoring your politics and via that monitoring controlling politics (the corporate party). This enables 'individual' politicians to take actions against citizens and their families when those citizens in any way threaten the power base of those 'individual' politicians. Effectively support a third party, find your self on a no fly list or even worse the let you fly but will they radiate and sexually assault you and your family every time you or they fly. Want a job, forget it, you are now considered a security threat and are only allowed access to minimum wage jobs. Any attempt to gain social welfare, you and your family are tagged as permanently requiring extended further investigation prior to any support being provided. . . . This is the current reality and this is what is already happening.
You say this is already happening? That there are politicians in the US or UK that are using the intelligence services to target individual voters for supporting a third party candidate? That sounds like a stunning revelation you have there, especially since the intelligence agencies tend to be relatively isolated from most politicians. I'm a little surprised I haven't seen support for your dramatic revelation anywhere in the media. Can you point out where we can go for more information?
Although it is fabulous that you know about the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution, you do realize that this story is about the UK and their intelligence establishments? The UK doesn't have a 4th amendment to its unwritten constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
Labeling isn't actually the same as providing evidence. If you're worried about the tone, I see little restraint applied in attacking the US or UK.
What about the right to life for the people being killed? You claim to be concerned about people's rights, but not theirs. The right to life if the most fundamental right and you seem to have no problem in it being violated.
You've overlooked the fact that in many places various local guerillas, terrorists, and warlords are likely to kill or drive off the aid workers trying to solve the diarrhea problem, not the mention the various other diseases and community problems they could address. Your unwillingness to acknowledge and address the second problem (lawlessness) means that the first problem (diarrhea) won't get solved either. So, diarrhea will continue. It's not cost effective to send aid workers when they will die and can't deliver the aid. Sometimes policy planning goes very badly when it overlooks questions like the security of the workers enacting the policy.
So you basically consider the existence of diarrhea deaths, for any reason, to be a license for mass murder anywhere in the world? The beautiful part of that is that the same sort of people that engage in terrorism are often the very ones that also block relief efforts and kill relief workers that would work to help reduce or end local problems with disease such as diarrhea deaths. Terrorism isn't "so called," it actually exists and kills tens of thousands of people per year directly, and more indirectly when it blocks humanitarian aid.
Some people are Indians, Some people are Chiefs. I tried my hand at being a Chief, But I came to the realization that not only did I enjoy being an Indian, I'm a damm good Indian! (And there is nothing wrong with that)
Not only is there nothing wrong with that, but making an unwilling, unsuitable, or uninterested Indian a chief tends to make the whole tribe unhappy, including the badly appointed chief. Some people lose the use of their best qualities when made a chief, others gain them, some can use them in both. Not everyone has the temperament, skill, or insight to do well as a chief - it is a different role than Indian. There are many chiefs that appear great only because they have enough great Indians with them. But that is part of the wisdom of great chiefs - to seek great Indians.
Major General Smedley Butler, United States Marine Corp, was an extraordinarily brave and devoted Marine who served the United States in an exceptional manner while in uniform, earning two Congressional Medals of Honor - the highest American medal for bravery on the battlefield. Out of uniform and in the realm of politics, however, citizen Butler involved himself in leftist fringe politics. I would be inclined to follow Major General Butler anywhere on the battlefield, but nowhere near a voting booth. In this regard he is like Chomsky, a man of exceptional virtual in his field, but a political crank (popular though he may be) and genocide denier.
. . . . Back in the 1930s, the U.S. Communist Party recruited a former Marine Corps general, Smedley Butler, to give speeches on the eve of World War II denouncing military preparedness as a capitalist racket. The idea was that by persuading an individual man of valor to propound shameful views, those views would somehow become less shameful. It didn’t work then. I doubt it will work now. - Wesley Who?
Reading into Glen Greenwald's comments and some of his other statements, it would seem that much of the spying is used not for security purposes, rather it's to give an edge to certain select US businesses.
Unless you can point to something firmer, you probably have that garbled. The situation is rather more subtle than that.
Why We Spy on Our Allies - By R. James Woolsey, a Washington lawyer and a former Director of Central Intelligence.
Boeing Called A Target Of French Spy Effort
Airbus' Presentation on Boeing 787 - Bad CI Ethics?
If you're going to offer a "PROTIP" you should make an effort to be correct.
What are the chances for Snowden to avoid going to prison if he returns home? Zero. Therefore it is quite clear Snowden will try to avoid it, no matter how ''correct' or 'righteous' he may be.
Not necessarily. I don't know that I agree with the view, but there is another: Give Snowden Immunity
While you're engaged in starting and stopping all the ignoring and pretending, maybe you could stop ignoring and pretending that Russia, China, France, the UK, Germany, ......N aren't doing it too? Can you add some invective for them as well?
Actually OS/2 was 32 bit for quite some time before IBM discontinued it and Serenity Systems picked it up as eComStation.
Kirk: Do you think it will work?
Spock: It will depend on what Mr. Scott can coax out of the systems.
Kirk: Scotty, Spock thinks that if we can boost the precision of the sensors and overlay the data on the navigation computer we may be able to navigate through the interphase rift to escape the Tholian web. Can you do it?
Scotty: Aye Captain. With that last maintenance overhaul at Star Base 11 our computers were updated with the new Multitronic GPU processors. For once I have the power.
Power, the next frontier. These are the stories of the GPU maker Nvidia. Its 5 year mission: to boldly show what no graphics board has shown before.
Brought to you by: Interplanetary Business Machines. When the label says Power by IBM, you'll know the performance will be out of this world.
Aside from base assumptions, what makes you believe that Snowden entered employment with the NSA with the intent to release data he was exposed to?
Because he said that.
Snowden to newspaper: I took contractor job to gather evidence
Also, what gives you the impression that he has an interest backing him
He did manage to steal an enormous amount of wide ranging data in only 90 days of employment, don't you think?
Who Helped Snowden Steal State Secrets?
In my opinion, the fact that the US gov't has hunted him so furiously and has taken the exact opposite approach that they mandate regarding any other nation's political refugees ...
He isn't a political refuge. He stole national defense secrets and has revealed a few of them. Nobody really knows what he is doing with the rest of them.
Charles Moore: Snowden is a traitor - The beneficiaries of his betrayal are not civil liberties, but those who wish to embarrass us.
Snowden leaks give edge to U.S. rivals, officials say - Russia, China and terrorism suspects have altered how they communicate to evade U.S. detection, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.
Snowden’s Nuclear War on Intelligence
Geoffrey Ingersoll: It's Now Clear That Russian Intelligence Speaks For Edward Snowden
When you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are still voting to increase evil.
Not necessarily true. The "greater evil" is often the office holder. Voting for the "lesser evil" then decreases the "evil."
I would think your logic must allow for that.
You seem to be missing quite a few planned attacks there. Also, I wouldn't look for the intelligence services to do much bragging. It isn't their way, they prefer to avoid their role being know when they can. That includes any assistance to the police doing the "bragging," and perhaps some of the happy "accidents" that have foiled some of the plots.
The last several heads of MI5 would seem to disagree with you about the risk. They think it is very high.
The situation in Pakistan is that the government has limited control, if any, over the tribal areas. Al Qaida and the Taliban (both Afghan and Pakistani) have exploited this to set up shop there, often to the inconvenience to the locals. At times the locals themselves have attacked al Qaida members and the Taliban. The drone attacks focus on the terrorists, often while they are moving in vehicles. That tends to isolate them and means few other people are around. There are other methods of attack, and no doubt some innocents have been killed. But I doubt it is more than a minor fraction of the total killed. Speaking of empathy, have you any for the victims of the terrorists hiding in Pakistan? They regularly slip into Afghanistan to kill, maim, and intimidate. They are making attacks more frequently in Pakistan now. Do their victims have a voice? Those victims don't number in the hundreds, it is in the thousands and tens of thousands.
The vast majority of those killed by drone strike are terrorists, not innocent people. No, a drone strike isn't terrorism.
Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome
The only thing that I can imagine is making ill-intended people aware they should protect their communications
That is exactly what is happening. This is following specific revelations from Snowden. It has been described as, 'really bad."
... but that affects only the stupid ones, and only if they don't want to get caught pos facto, e.g. Boston bombers.
No, it also enables them to engage in planning and execution of their attacks without being caught. Since some of those may very well be suicide attacks, as the 7/7 attacks were, getting caught is a moot point.
The purpose of training is to take the best ideas from a bunch well informed, smart people, and teach those behaviors and techniques to new people. That way they can act smart without having to be smart. What is happening now is that all the smart people, well informed people that support terrorists are watching and reading what the people in the free world think and do. They are capturing the best ideas, paying attention to the warnings, and are instructing the terrorists what to do, how to act as if they were smart. There have been several times when terrorist organizations have taken note of ideas in the press that were being discussed in the US or Europe as in, "I hope that aren't planning to do X because it would be really bad for us if they did." Before that the terrorists had never thought of X, they knew nothing about X, until they saw discussions about X in the press. Now they are trying to do X.
Once information that helps them slips out, once they get an idea from somebody, the genie is out of the bottle. There are a lot of free genies already, and people keep wanting to pull corks for all kinds of reasons. One of those reasons is, "Hey, nobody but stupid people doesn't know this, so lets tell everybody."
Show everyone where your defenses are? Tell everyone how to sneak past them? Loudly discuss your weak points? What could possibly go wrong? You might as well give them all of your admin passwords.
It sounds to me like you didn't do a proper job of accounting for the actual risk. It appears that you didn't bother to gather lists of the planned or attempted attacks that were interrupted and develop estimates as to loss of life, limb, and property had they succeeded. You aren't properly accounting for the risk fi you don't. Those numbers are rather important since many of them would have been mass casualty events such as attacks on football stadiums that could have killed hundreds and wounded thousands from truck bombs. There is another insidious aspect of terrorism that you should account for as well, and that is the fact that successful terrorist campaigns will draw more recruits. More recruits coming to support a cause allow it to conduct further attacks. It can be a self-reinforcing phenomenon. There are certainly other affects as well. If you haven't account for those, you have it wrong.
It is also nonsense to confuse random accidents with willful human behavior.
Snowden really started an avalanche
I would say you've used a rather apt phrase. Snowden's mass of public revelations are available to all, to friend and foe alike to use as they will, including for evil purposes. We have yet to see whom, if anyone, will end up being buried.
Sorry, but no. I reread it and it looks to me like simple out of place jeremiad on the 4th Amendment. If this was focused on the 3rd party data problem I would expect it to be more explicitly addressed than to be simply mentioned is passing and condemned as illegal. There are several parts of it that are simply wrong as well. However I'm sure it is well meaning and heart felt.
It's possible you're right about the GP poster's intent, although I'm not necessarily convinced.* It seems to be pretty common for certain Americans posting in stories of pure, or nearly pure, British context to go off on 4th Amendment rants which are senseless given the context. My favorite is when they do things like call for the spilling of blood of patriots to refresh the tree of liberty - Colonial American patriotic rhetoric which may be bracing to Americans, but which is probably meaningless or even insulting to Britons. It would make about as much sense if British posters were to post quotes from the British Civil Wars during a debate about some American legal dispute with no connection at all. Of course many Europeans and members of the Anglosphere outside the US go off on 4th Amendment rants themselves at times. But at least they tend to do it in an American context. So, I'm skeptical, but what you wrote is plausible.
*I do grant your point about 3rd party data.
This is all about politics and monitoring your politics and via that monitoring controlling politics (the corporate party). This enables 'individual' politicians to take actions against citizens and their families when those citizens in any way threaten the power base of those 'individual' politicians. Effectively support a third party, find your self on a no fly list or even worse the let you fly but will they radiate and sexually assault you and your family every time you or they fly. Want a job, forget it, you are now considered a security threat and are only allowed access to minimum wage jobs. Any attempt to gain social welfare, you and your family are tagged as permanently requiring extended further investigation prior to any support being provided. . . . This is the current reality and this is what is already happening.
You say this is already happening? That there are politicians in the US or UK that are using the intelligence services to target individual voters for supporting a third party candidate? That sounds like a stunning revelation you have there, especially since the intelligence agencies tend to be relatively isolated from most politicians. I'm a little surprised I haven't seen support for your dramatic revelation anywhere in the media. Can you point out where we can go for more information?
My compliments on your link collection. ;)
Although it is fabulous that you know about the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution, you do realize that this story is about the UK and their intelligence establishments? The UK doesn't have a 4th amendment to its unwritten constitution.