Fuck these pieces of shit. Disband their organization, and charge every single employee and contractor with high treason. It's the only way to make things right.
So is it your intent that the Untied States abandon signals intelligence, and the protection of its diplomatic and military secrets with encryption? That would be the practical result of your exclamation. Or is this just emoting?
In traversing a hierarchical organization 3 jumps won't get you very far. If you look at the Army you call might look like this: Private calls Sergeant. Sergeant calls senior Sergeant. Senior Sergeant calls Lieutenant. So far you haven't made it out of a platoon of 30 people, a rather low echelon in the Army, and there are many platoons in any division.
In North Korea, under the, "association system", up to three generations of a persons family can be taken permanently to, "a place to make a good person through reeducation", for that person's crimes.
Yes, once again we come to the difference between a free society and a unfree society. Although it may be emotionally satisfying to compare the United States with North Korea, it isn't true in any meaningful way. Unlike North Korea, people in the United States are not routinely hauled away to prisons where they are much more likely to die than ever be free again due to the crimes of their adult children. Nor can you point to prison camps in the United States that are anything like the brutality of North Korea's finest.
In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea's largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held. Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them.
Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.
Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.
Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.
'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'....
Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime. Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power. According to the dictator, not only is a suspected dissident arrested but also three generations of his family are imprisoned, to root out the bad blood and seed of dissent.
As of December 2012, a factsheet from the center states, TIDE contained over 875,000 entries. Each one represents a known or suspected terrorist and includes all their known aliases and spelling variations on their name, the official said.
Less than one percent, or fewer than 9,000, were Americans, including both citizens and legal permanent residents, he said, adding the center does not release exact numbers.
That is a pretty small portion of both the US and world populations.
If it's true that members of Congress are angry, that's favorable news! Maybe they can be persuaded to get off their butts and do something about this.
If you review the Washington Times article it looks like Congress is of a mind to pare things back.
The lawmaker who wrote the USA Patriot Act said Wednesday that, as it stands, the House will never renew the provisions that the Obama administration uses to collect Americans’ phone records, meaning the government’s surveillance program will be cut off some time next year.
Both Democrats and Republicans told top administration officials that they reject President Obama’s claim that the law allows the intelligence community to collect the phone numbers, time, date and duration of calls made by Americans, and they said Mr. Obama needs to change the way he is running the program if he wants to keep it intact.
If they do cut back on surveillance it will probably be OK, for a while. Of course it won't just be surveillance that has been cut back. The Obama administration keeps killing terrorists instead of capturing and interrogating them which means a significant loss of intelligence information, and is one of the notable differences between Presidents Obama and Bush. (The reason: Obama doesn't want to be stuck with more prisoners and the messiness of trials. He doesn't want to use military commissions and the Congress and electorate oppose criminal law trials in civilian courts.) Beyond that, the Snowden revelations have already had the effect of causing terrorists to change their communications methods to avoid surveillance thus reducing intelligence even more. The combination of all three factors may lead to a significant loss of intelligence information.
We'll see how it turns out. I won't be surprised if in the long run it turns out to be a riff on the old medical saw: The (intelligence) operations were a success, but the citizens died.
So in short, nothing done by a Democratic president is his fault. Everything bad that happens is a Republican plot, even when they aren't in power, so Republican Presidents should be executed (the implied result of committing a "capital crime"). After 35 years nothing has changed. The country is in the best of hands.
Right wing nut jobs have been screaming about this for decades.
So they've been vindicated?
Unfortunately these measures don't stop crime.
To do that you need to either harden the target in some fashion, or stop them at the "precrime" stage. I'm not sure we want to go in the direction of "precime" in law enforcement for ordinary crime, for various interpretations of "precrime."
At best they help find the person(s) who did the deed a little faster.
There are scanners that can be mounted on the police cars. The ones I know of are about the size of a box of breakfast cereal. From what I've seen there are at least 2 of them mounted, it might be as many as 4. They are mounted on the trunk and possibly hood, pointing at about a 45 degree angle from the direction of travel to the left and right, so that is 2 rear left and right, and possibly 2 front left and right. They can scan while they are driving and check thousands of plates per hour. I expect that they keep the police cars with those scanners moving all day if they can to scan as much as they can.
The federal government has been making grants to local police departments that allow them buy the equipment. There is no way the NSA is going to get involved, they are all about signals intelligence, not the Department of Motor Vehicles.
It should be much easier to get the city or county council, or maybe the state, to regulate this than trying to do it through the federal government. After all, police departments in the US are local jurisdiction except for the relatively small state police agencies.
The Two Minute Hate you are participating in must be a privately sponsored activity since it isn't government run.
People regularly change their vote between parties of they feel the legislator or president hasn't lived up to their expectations.
The media can subvert the process by carrying water for office holders, as it has gone for Obama. They only really started stirring when it looked like their ox was being gored in the DOJ actions against reporters. And even then it hasn't been a wholesale reversal to be fair and even handed.
If you want to change things, organize. Form the "Two Minute Hate of What is Going On Now" and get people to contact their legislators.
If the law has been made in a way you disagree with, organize to see if you can change it.
Under the Law of War, POWs can be held until the end of the conflict, no trials are needed. It is misleading to suggest that there needs to be trials because they are being held as POWs, that isn't true. It is true that if you want to separately hold them accountable for specific war crimes you would need to have a trial.
Yes, I think your self labeled word games are just that regarding Anwar al-Awlaki. Many real people are dead because of his deeds. As a member of a self-declared enemy force making war against the United States he was a completely legitimate target for an attack. Attacks in a war do not require trials. His legal status was no different than that of the men depicted in this video representing men that the US government shot dead en mass without arrest, charge, trial, or conviction, and it was totally legal and appropriate.
You seem to be confusing the conduct of war with ordinary criminal justice procedures. That is not a correct understanding of things.
You aren't making any meaningful connection between Guantanamo and mass surveillance, at least not with the issues you've raised.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force makes it clear who the US is fighting again, and that it is at war. It is well settled law that such an authorization is legally equivalent to a declaration of war.
You mean that big recruitment drive for them in Iraq, where Al Qaida did not even exist before the US invasion?
Like most people in the modern era, al Qaida members are able to travel. Many of them came to Iraq to fight, some were recruited locally. If you notice from the map, Iraq is near a number of countries with a notable extremist presence, and al Qaida problem.
Iraq was a major loss for al Qaida. They made many grand announcements that turned into nothing. Many of their leaders and technical experts were captured or killed. Many of their funding sources were found out and stopped. And the biggest problem for them was that the Arab Muslim world had a ring side seat to see how their future would-be overlords behaved. Al Qaida demonstrated themselves to be barbarians before the entire Arab Muslim word. They killed huge numbers of ordinary Muslims in massive slaughters. The Muslims in the region noticed this, and al Qaida support was badly damaged.
Eventual most of al Qaida was called out of Iraq, and guess where many of them fled? To Afghanistan. That is part of the reason that Afghanistan got so hot again as Iraq was winding down.
The Taliban were created after the Russians left Afghanistan. They were a creation of Pakistan. The Taliban were not US allies. They were allied with al Qaida.
By historical standards the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have been cheap in terms of American lives lost. For dealing with Saddam and al Qaidas state within a state and training base turning out thousands of trained terrorists per year in Afghanistan, it was worth it. As to the deaths in Iraq, the Lancet study you refer to was paid for by George Soros, is bad science, and a piece of propaganda to try to mislead the public, influence an election, and derail the American war effort.
Beats "negligence or inaction" eh?
Very much so. If it had to be repeated there would need to be some fine tuning. Being as the US has been out of business of military occupation or colonial rule for a very long time it didn't have the institutional experience to make the best of the opportunities to help the Iraqi people. Part of the problem is that Saddam had diverted so many resources to building enormous palaces all over the country and to his covert rearming that the infrastructure was falling apart. What is worse is what he did to the Iraqi people, corrupting them badly. It will take them time to recover, but at least now that they are not under Saddam or his hell spawn children* Iraq has a chance. I hope they make it.
*Really, how bad are you when Saddam is the one restraining you, saying you are too cruel, as he did to at least one if not both of this sons?
WASHINGTON, June 29, 2005 – If you're a Muslim extremist captured while fighting your holy war against "infidels," avoid revealing information at all costs, don't give your real name and claim that you were mistreated or tortured during your detention. . .
Another thing to look at is police hiring. After the gun ban was in place, and crime shot up (so to speak), there was a massive increase in the hiring of police. That no doubt helped tamp things down again, but there was a cost in more than one sense.
People keep posting views like that, that the elections change very little, and I think that is nonsense. The two parties do in fact have meaningful differences between them in terms of policy and goals. There are some areas of common agreement though. Both parties uphold the American system of a Democratic Republic, an economy based on free enterprise, and so on. Neither party wants to be the one that lets large numbers of Americans be killed through negligence or inaction against al Qaida. That accounts for much of President Obama's actions in the war against al Qaida. And due to the American form of government, making substantial changes to the laws often requires substantial agreement or overwhelming majorities. But it is nonsense to claim that the parties are the same. There is little doubt that the Bush administration would have defended DOMA before the courts instead of forcing the House to do it. That might have made a difference before the courts. The Bush administration wouldn't have passed the misnamed "Affordable Care Act," also known as Obamacare. The mounting tide of government regulation that is likely to cripple some industries certainly belongs to the Democrats. The very troubling changes in the handling of accusations of rape coming from the Department of Education is also owned by the Democrats. This could go on, and on, and on. If someone thinks there is no difference, they aren't really looking, aren't paying attention, or have unrealistic expectations.
The city should have been domed, then it might not have been doomed. With a domed city nobody can get away, then they have to stay and make it work, and the city isn't doomed.
It is the logic of SciFi, it is the logic of the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck these pieces of shit. Disband their organization, and charge every single employee and contractor with high treason. It's the only way to make things right.
So is it your intent that the Untied States abandon signals intelligence, and the protection of its diplomatic and military secrets with encryption? That would be the practical result of your exclamation. Or is this just emoting?
In traversing a hierarchical organization 3 jumps won't get you very far. If you look at the Army you call might look like this: Private calls Sergeant. Sergeant calls senior Sergeant. Senior Sergeant calls Lieutenant. So far you haven't made it out of a platoon of 30 people, a rather low echelon in the Army, and there are many platoons in any division.
In North Korea, under the, "association system", up to three generations of a persons family can be taken permanently to, "a place to make a good person through reeducation", for that person's crimes.
Yes, once again we come to the difference between a free society and a unfree society. Although it may be emotionally satisfying to compare the United States with North Korea, it isn't true in any meaningful way. Unlike North Korea, people in the United States are not routinely hauled away to prisons where they are much more likely to die than ever be free again due to the crimes of their adult children. Nor can you point to prison camps in the United States that are anything like the brutality of North Korea's finest.
Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag
In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea's largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held.
Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them.
Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.
Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.
Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.
'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.' ....
Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime. Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power. According to the dictator, not only is a suspected dissident arrested but also three generations of his family are imprisoned, to root out the bad blood and seed of dissent.
The two aren't even close to being the same.
I doubt they are as highly optimized as Google's server. I'm pretty sure Balmer would object if they were loaded with Linux or *BSD.
You seem to have skipped over some key data.
Terror watch list grows to 875,000
As of December 2012, a factsheet from the center states, TIDE contained over 875,000 entries. Each one represents a known or suspected terrorist and includes all their known aliases and spelling variations on their name, the official said.
Less than one percent, or fewer than 9,000, were Americans, including both citizens and legal permanent residents, he said, adding the center does not release exact numbers.
That is a pretty small portion of both the US and world populations.
If it's true that members of Congress are angry, that's favorable news! Maybe they can be persuaded to get off their butts and do something about this.
If you review the Washington Times article it looks like Congress is of a mind to pare things back.
Obama loses support for renewal of surveillance; NSA phone program will expire next year
The lawmaker who wrote the USA Patriot Act said Wednesday that, as it stands, the House will never renew the provisions that the Obama administration uses to collect Americans’ phone records, meaning the government’s surveillance program will be cut off some time next year.
Both Democrats and Republicans told top administration officials that they reject President Obama’s claim that the law allows the intelligence community to collect the phone numbers, time, date and duration of calls made by Americans, and they said Mr. Obama needs to change the way he is running the program if he wants to keep it intact.
If they do cut back on surveillance it will probably be OK, for a while. Of course it won't just be surveillance that has been cut back. The Obama administration keeps killing terrorists instead of capturing and interrogating them which means a significant loss of intelligence information, and is one of the notable differences between Presidents Obama and Bush. (The reason: Obama doesn't want to be stuck with more prisoners and the messiness of trials. He doesn't want to use military commissions and the Congress and electorate oppose criminal law trials in civilian courts.) Beyond that, the Snowden revelations have already had the effect of causing terrorists to change their communications methods to avoid surveillance thus reducing intelligence even more. The combination of all three factors may lead to a significant loss of intelligence information.
We'll see how it turns out. I won't be surprised if in the long run it turns out to be a riff on the old medical saw: The (intelligence) operations were a success, but the citizens died.
I'm here to inform, not entertain. But I can see why people think your views are funny.
So in short, nothing done by a Democratic president is his fault. Everything bad that happens is a Republican plot, even when they aren't in power, so Republican Presidents should be executed (the implied result of committing a "capital crime"). After 35 years nothing has changed. The country is in the best of hands.
Good administrators keep humility under control. Too much of it corrodes the equipment. There are sensors for it you know.
Right wing nut jobs have been screaming about this for decades.
So they've been vindicated?
Unfortunately these measures don't stop crime.
To do that you need to either harden the target in some fashion, or stop them at the "precrime" stage. I'm not sure we want to go in the direction of "precime" in law enforcement for ordinary crime, for various interpretations of "precrime."
At best they help find the person(s) who did the deed a little faster.
Still useful.
There are scanners that can be mounted on the police cars. The ones I know of are about the size of a box of breakfast cereal. From what I've seen there are at least 2 of them mounted, it might be as many as 4. They are mounted on the trunk and possibly hood, pointing at about a 45 degree angle from the direction of travel to the left and right, so that is 2 rear left and right, and possibly 2 front left and right. They can scan while they are driving and check thousands of plates per hour. I expect that they keep the police cars with those scanners moving all day if they can to scan as much as they can.
This video is informative.
Police License Plate Scanner
The federal government has been making grants to local police departments that allow them buy the equipment. There is no way the NSA is going to get involved, they are all about signals intelligence, not the Department of Motor Vehicles.
It should be much easier to get the city or county council, or maybe the state, to regulate this than trying to do it through the federal government. After all, police departments in the US are local jurisdiction except for the relatively small state police agencies.
Won't someone think of the trees?
For many reasons there are few things add excitement to life like working with someone who habitually answers the phone with, "I didn't do it."
Using your law enforcement credentials?
The Two Minute Hate you are participating in must be a privately sponsored activity since it isn't government run.
People regularly change their vote between parties of they feel the legislator or president hasn't lived up to their expectations.
The media can subvert the process by carrying water for office holders, as it has gone for Obama. They only really started stirring when it looked like their ox was being gored in the DOJ actions against reporters. And even then it hasn't been a wholesale reversal to be fair and even handed.
If you want to change things, organize. Form the "Two Minute Hate of What is Going On Now" and get people to contact their legislators.
If the law has been made in a way you disagree with, organize to see if you can change it.
Let us know when and how you get the data to map legally.
I'm sure that the ones that get caught do feel dis-ease.
Under the Law of War, POWs can be held until the end of the conflict, no trials are needed. It is misleading to suggest that there needs to be trials because they are being held as POWs, that isn't true. It is true that if you want to separately hold them accountable for specific war crimes you would need to have a trial.
Yes, I think your self labeled word games are just that regarding Anwar al-Awlaki. Many real people are dead because of his deeds. As a member of a self-declared enemy force making war against the United States he was a completely legitimate target for an attack. Attacks in a war do not require trials. His legal status was no different than that of the men depicted in this video representing men that the US government shot dead en mass without arrest, charge, trial, or conviction, and it was totally legal and appropriate.
You seem to be confusing the conduct of war with ordinary criminal justice procedures. That is not a correct understanding of things.
You aren't making any meaningful connection between Guantanamo and mass surveillance, at least not with the issues you've raised.
What war against al Qaida?
The Authorization for Use of Military Force makes it clear who the US is fighting again, and that it is at war. It is well settled law that such an authorization is legally equivalent to a declaration of war.
You mean that big recruitment drive for them in Iraq, where Al Qaida did not even exist before the US invasion?
Like most people in the modern era, al Qaida members are able to travel. Many of them came to Iraq to fight, some were recruited locally. If you notice from the map, Iraq is near a number of countries with a notable extremist presence, and al Qaida problem.
Iraq was a major loss for al Qaida. They made many grand announcements that turned into nothing. Many of their leaders and technical experts were captured or killed. Many of their funding sources were found out and stopped. And the biggest problem for them was that the Arab Muslim world had a ring side seat to see how their future would-be overlords behaved. Al Qaida demonstrated themselves to be barbarians before the entire Arab Muslim word. They killed huge numbers of ordinary Muslims in massive slaughters. The Muslims in the region noticed this, and al Qaida support was badly damaged.
Eventual most of al Qaida was called out of Iraq, and guess where many of them fled? To Afghanistan. That is part of the reason that Afghanistan got so hot again as Iraq was winding down.
The Taliban were created after the Russians left Afghanistan. They were a creation of Pakistan. The Taliban were not US allies. They were allied with al Qaida.
By historical standards the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have been cheap in terms of American lives lost. For dealing with Saddam and al Qaidas state within a state and training base turning out thousands of trained terrorists per year in Afghanistan, it was worth it. As to the deaths in Iraq, the Lancet study you refer to was paid for by George Soros, is bad science, and a piece of propaganda to try to mislead the public, influence an election, and derail the American war effort.
Beats "negligence or inaction" eh?
Very much so. If it had to be repeated there would need to be some fine tuning. Being as the US has been out of business of military occupation or colonial rule for a very long time it didn't have the institutional experience to make the best of the opportunities to help the Iraqi people. Part of the problem is that Saddam had diverted so many resources to building enormous palaces all over the country and to his covert rearming that the infrastructure was falling apart. What is worse is what he did to the Iraqi people, corrupting them badly. It will take them time to recover, but at least now that they are not under Saddam or his hell spawn children* Iraq has a chance. I hope they make it.
*Really, how bad are you when Saddam is the one restraining you, saying you are too cruel, as he did to at least one if not both of this sons?
Interesting post. I disagree with a number of your points, but I'll limit myself to a few counterpoints.
Guantanamo bay has never even held a total of 1,000 people as prisoners. Al Qaida teaches its members to lie and carry on the jihad by any means possible. Gitmo guards often attacked by detainees As to feeding tubes - yes they can be unpleasant, but it's likely the prisoners magnify the difficulties in line with their training.
Al Qaeda Manual Drives Detainee Behavior at Guantanamo Bay
WASHINGTON, June 29, 2005 – If you're a Muslim extremist captured while fighting your holy war against "infidels," avoid revealing information at all costs, don't give your real name and claim that you were mistreated or tortured during your detention. . .
Anwar al-Awlaki wasn't targeted due to making speeches, but due to his active participation as a terrorist recruiter, trainer, and leader: Awlaki's Legacy: A Dozen Terror Plots Linked to Al Qaeda Leader
Soviets rule was not benign: The Soviet Story
Another thing to look at is police hiring. After the gun ban was in place, and crime shot up (so to speak), there was a massive increase in the hiring of police. That no doubt helped tamp things down again, but there was a cost in more than one sense.
People keep posting views like that, that the elections change very little, and I think that is nonsense. The two parties do in fact have meaningful differences between them in terms of policy and goals. There are some areas of common agreement though. Both parties uphold the American system of a Democratic Republic, an economy based on free enterprise, and so on. Neither party wants to be the one that lets large numbers of Americans be killed through negligence or inaction against al Qaida. That accounts for much of President Obama's actions in the war against al Qaida. And due to the American form of government, making substantial changes to the laws often requires substantial agreement or overwhelming majorities. But it is nonsense to claim that the parties are the same. There is little doubt that the Bush administration would have defended DOMA before the courts instead of forcing the House to do it. That might have made a difference before the courts. The Bush administration wouldn't have passed the misnamed "Affordable Care Act," also known as Obamacare. The mounting tide of government regulation that is likely to cripple some industries certainly belongs to the Democrats. The very troubling changes in the handling of accusations of rape coming from the Department of Education is also owned by the Democrats. This could go on, and on, and on. If someone thinks there is no difference, they aren't really looking, aren't paying attention, or have unrealistic expectations.
One of the key points sometimes missed is to leave air holes. Forget that and, well.....
The city should have been domed, then it might not have been doomed. With a domed city nobody can get away, then they have to stay and make it work, and the city isn't doomed.
It is the logic of SciFi, it is the logic of the future.