I see a bigger problem in the form of evidence being kept secret and used against someone in a trial. That's a bigger risk, as at that point we may as well employ the Star Chamber for "terrorism".
It is problematic for trials and other court proceedings. I have seen cases reported in which a defense attorney was given a security clearance to review the evidence and work the issues it creates. Of course that attorney is limited in what he or she can tell the defendant. And not every attorney is trustworthy in handing national security related matters.
Under the FAA, which was just renewed last December for another five years, no warrants are needed for the NSA to eavesdrop on a wide array of calls, emails and online chats involving US citizens. Individualized warrants are required only when the target of the surveillance is a US person or the call is entirely domestic. But even under the law, no individualized warrant is needed to listen in on the calls or read the emails of Americans when they communicate with a foreign national whom the NSA has targeted for surveillance.
If they are targeting a foreign national and listening to their communications, they don't need a warrant if you, an American, calls that person. It would be like the FBI conducting surveillance of a mob run business and having a warrant to tap its lines. It wouldn't need to get a warrant for each different caller so that it could listen to the conversation. That doesn't make a lot of sense, which is why Greenwald is up in arms about it.
And then there is this section:
...Contrary to the claims by NSA defenders that the surveillance being conducted is legal, the Obama DOJ has repeatedly thwarted any efforts to obtain judicial rulings on whether this law is consistent with the Fourth Amendment or otherwise legal....
There have been numerous court cases regarding even warrantless surveillance in particular circumstances. The courts have sided with the President's power to do this.
The New York Times reports that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review — the specialized federal appeals court created by the 1978 FISA statute to rule on questions involving national security surveillance — has reaffirmed that the President of the United States has inherent constitutional authority to monitor international communications without court permission.
Congress has no power to change the President's Constitutionally derived powers by ordinary law.
Greenwald is a smart man that leads many astray due to his fringe politics.
You just don't have the security clearance to view the evidence. And because such evidence will raise nasty questions about how it was collected.
Well, not all the evidence anyway. The fact that some evidence exists at all reveals important things about how it was uncovered.
For the purposes of illustration, suppose the US was able to listen in on a North Korean spy that had just delivered a load of man portable anti-aircraft missiles to an al Qaida cell*. If the al Qaida leader had told the North Korean spy that he had a plan to shoot down a passenger jet at San Francisco airport, and the spy reported that back to headquarters, the US could intercept that message and know about it. There might be enough information in the spy's report (to whom the missiles were delivered, where, when, what they would be used for) to lead to an arrest of the terrorist. But if the source of the information leading to the arrest was made public, then North Korea would know that it didn't have secure communications with its spies in the field, and would change its codes and/or communication procedures. If it did that, the US would lose its ability to conduct surveillance of the spies of a hostile nation, which would be a pretty important thing to lose. There can be plenty of conundrums that arise from this sort of thing.
...Pyongyang kidnapped at least 10 Japanese citizens and harbored Japanese Red Army terrorists since the 1970s. Until 2008, the Bush administration routinely cited the kidnappings and the presence of Japanese Red Army terrorists as justification for including North Korea on the list.
CRS cites reports describing North Korean attempts to smuggle conventional arms, including machine guns and anti-tank rocket launchers, to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers), a U.S. Government designated foreign terrorist organization in Sri Lanka. Those reports indicate the Sri Lankan navy intercepted and attacked three North Korean ships carrying arms in separate 2006 and 2007 incidents.
North Korea’s relationship with Hizballah, an Iranian terrorist proxy that is also designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., continues. CRS cites 2006 and 2007 reports detailing an extensive program by North Korea to provide arms and training to Hizballah. The training provided to Hizballah cadre lasted months and included officials such as Hassan Nasrallah, Hizballah’s secretary-general. North Korean trainers masquerading as the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation went to southern Lebanon to teach Hizballah terrorists how to develop and construct underground military facilities.
The FISA court doesn't try people. Its primary purpose is to issue warrants for national security surveillance operations. You can find some background on it at the link:
The US and the West are still free, but the people need to be politically active to maintain that freedom. Legislatures and executives must engage in oversight of their intelligence agencies.
There is still a pretty substantial difference between the Western nations and the Soviet Union. Even Russia is far from being the Soviet Union even if it is on somewhat shaky ground from time to time. (Old habits can die hard.)
The article makes sense, but I don't think the work appears to be especially innovative even if it could be very useful.
It is more than governments that buy supercomputers. They are also used in industry for things like oil and gas exploration, economic modeling, and weather forecasts. Universities and research organizations also use them for a variety of purposes. Time on an actual supercomputer tends to be highly valuable and sought after. You may disagree with the use, but that is a different question from not being used effectively.
"It is probably the biggest trend in supercomputers -- the movement away from ivory-tower research and government-sponsored research to commerce and business," Michael Corrado, an IBM spokesperson, told TechNewsWorld. In 1997, there were 161 supersystems deployed in business and industry, but that figure grew to 287 by June 2008, he noted. "More than half the list reside in commercial enterprises. That's a huge shift, and it's been under way for years."
It's only censorship when the government prevents you from exercising your free speech rights.
Entities and people unrelated to the government can engage in censorship, but not all censorship is necessarily bad.
That's an interesting comment. I would think that the only reason that you're still on Slashdot with that account is that the fine people that run it have a fairly strong commitment to free speech as opposed to censorship, and are willing to endure various types of nonsense.
A pity you didn't chose to try speaking with your own voice from the start, but instead decided to ape and harass me. You could have gone with a much better name, such as "deep fjord," or "frozen fjord," or maybe "cold logic," or even "cold fiddler." (Nudge nudge.) Now you're stuck with "coid fjord." A cheap, deceptive, knock off name that will always be confused for me, especially if I stop warning people about you. (And a warning was entirely justified given your initial behavior.) I'm glad to see you making a positive contribution even if I disagree with a fair amount of what you write. Well, at least you'll probably always be more popular with the crowd. And it's popularity that always shows what's right, isn't it?
Just looking at a couple of the columns in Mendeleev's table shows the considerable utility of the current table. You can see the properties of the elements as arranged tend to be similar to their neighbors: fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine have useful similarities. Likewise: helium, neon, argon, krypton, exon, radon - all noble gasses. Flip to the other side, and lithium, sodium, and potassium are all highly reactive metals. Then consider carbon, silicon, and germanium - all useful in creating base wafer materials for semiconductor work. It is easy to go on, and on. Although other chart formats may have their uses, I think that Mendeleev's is very difficult to improve upon. It is simple, powerful, and easy to use.
I regret to inform you that you don't know what you are talking about.
In their mind, Al Qaida is fighting on behalf of, and to reestablish, the Islamic Caliphate government that was dissolved in 1923 after the fall of the Ottoman empire. The nonsense about "never been chosen to represent a nation of people" would make the silly claim that any modern insurgency to overthrow a government by violent means isn't really a war.
The "War on Terror" is symbolic language, just like the "War on Fascism" in WW2. It is ridiculous that supposedly educated people can't figure that out. 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 can tell al Qaida and the Taliban are not ordinary criminals since they actually ran the country of Afghanistan, and have been trying to overthrow several others. The 9/11 attack is the only time that the self-defense provision of the NATO treaty has been invoked following an attack. NATO aircraft flew over American cities to protect them. The Taliban and al Qaida use heavy weapons and have been organized at the brigade level. They are regularly engaged by the US Air Force which is targeting them with missiles and dropping large bombs upon them. This isn't a problem with traffic stops gone bad, or a gang of bank robbers, or even the Crips and the Bloods.
Bin Laden was an utter failure. He made the classic mistake of dictators and would-be dictators in attacking the United States. The additional cost of the war is a pittance in the total federal budget. His organization is very badly damaged. There has been little if any genuine loss of real freedom, and modest impositions on privacy. The true threats in terms of spending come from the enormous growth in social welfare programs, and the damaged economy which is exacerbated by the current administrations over-regulation.
You've got things almost entirely wrong. It doesn't help that you get your news and views from fringe sites. Maybe you should try a few different ones.
I tried explaining to them I don't need them tracking me via scanning my card so I can save $1.50 a week, but they don't seem to understand. Instead now, I just tell them I'm an asshole. It's much more simple, and they only ask me half the time now.
It isn't unusual for companies to subject their employees to considerable pressure to get customers to sign up for various types of company cards. Some will even fire employees that don't get enough people to sign up.
but reading real books and writing on real paper makes you suspicious
Mainly if you are conservative. But you must remember the current power dynamic.
The national security apparatus acts to protect the country to prevent terrorist attacks which could result in the current administration being voted out of office and the Congress flipping.
The bureaucracy acts to suppress voting the current administration out of office.
Yes, but lots of people keep saying 'teh guberment is teh evil', but saying 'rah rah' to corporations and act like as long as someone is making a profit, that's how it's supposed to be.
Other than some tech companies, you don't tend to see many people on Slashdot leading cheers for corporations. Its almost the reverse - many people keep cheerleading for the government to both take up more functions now performed by corporations, such as healthcare, and to engage in ever more restrictive regulation of corporations. They trust the government with massive amounts of personal information about their health and finances, but are immensely suspicious of it engaging in surveillance of people connected with terrorist organizations. And based on the evidence of the recent stories on the IRS oppression of conservative political groups, most people are at best lukewarm about opposing demonstrated political oppression in the US. I don't see that as likely to end well.
The reality is what the government can't spy on you for, the corporations are more than happy to take up the slack -- or at least they get forced to hand over the data.
Much of the privacy that has gone missing is due to impatience and convenience. If you go into a bookstore or restaurant for instance, and pay by cash, there is a record of a sale, but nothing attached to your name and address. Pay by credit card, and there is suddenly a big paper trail and entries in multiple databases. Don't want to place an order and wait 5-6 weeks to pay for something in cash? Order it off of Amazon, which will create sales records tied to your account and credit card records. Want that 5-10% discount at the local Super X store? Then sign up for the "rewards card." Then you get the discount and more entries into databases. Are you reading the privacy disclosures and opting out of optional intrusions? Are you downloading and installing "free" software that in the license agreement says it will grab various bits of personally identifiable information and ship it back to the company? (Saw that one recently.) Well, those companies providing "free" software have an income stream from somewhere if it isn't from you, otherwise they wouldn't exist. Not taking advantage of the available privacy technology and settings for your OS and applications? Shame on you, if you want privacy.
Between them, you're losing your rights and privacy from both ends. The government is out of control of terrorism hunts and tells industry to play nice, and industry is out control on things like privacy and copyright, and tell the government to play nice.
There aren't really rights being lost (rights of speech, worship, voting, association, etc.), but privacy is certainly under pressure when it isn't openly compromised.
Start paying for more things in cash even if it is more expensive (ignore the bonuses to sign up for discount and rewards programs). Opt out of things. Plan ahead so you aren't buying off the net as much. Place orders by mail, and pay by money order or check. Or even take a drive to a store that carries the merchandise. It becomes truer every day that convenience and efficiency is detrimental to privacy. On the other hand, there are more of the goods and services that you want, and that information is more likely to be presented to you. Take your picks.
Terrorism from Al Qaida and company will probably be around for at least another 10-40 years. There isn't much getting around that, they have a vote. They are pursuing their own goals, and there isn't really anything we can do to make them happy other than convert to Islam, implement Sharia law in place of the Constitution, and join them. Their goal is world conquest for the glory of Islam, and reestablishing the Caliphate dissolved in 1923, even if it takes 1,000 years. There isn't much room to give there. Historically, the end of conflicts - wars, has resulted in the lessening of government
I'm afraid you have a very distorted picture of the US based on misinformation.
The US defense budget at the end of WW2 was approximately 38% of GDP. It now hovers around 4-5%. The idea of an all powerful "military industrial complex" is a distorting myth. The defense budget is in fact dwarfed by social welfare spending. And don't forget healthcare spending, which is three to four times larger share of GDP than defense spending. You can see a chart of defense spending at the link below:
Also, your idea about the nature of the conflicts doesn't really match up with the history. The 9/11 attack killed about as many people as the Pearl Harbor attacks which caused American entry into WW2. The 9/11 attacks resulted in about $100,000,000,000 in damage to the US economy. The fact that something is not an existential threat does not mean that it is not dangerous and has to be dealt with.
Saddam's invasion, conquest, and annexation of Kuwait in 1990 was also another military episode that was properly dealt with. The UN took action and a large international coalition of nations drove Saddam's army out of Kuwait. Completely proper, and justified.
I think you have a very one dimensional view of the American armed services which is an all volunteer military which both protects the United States and helps abroad.
I'll also point out that there are multiple search engines. More and more I'm splitting my traffic among them, some topics on one, others on another. That will make the profiling performed by any individual search engine shallower. You still have the web tracking to deal with, but the hosts file helps with that.
Does it matter? It stopped the plot; just lather, rinse, and repeat, and POOF! No more terrorism, with the additional bonus of not spending crazy amounts of treasure spying on millions of innocent people.
Or it just means that they change their methods to ones you either can't track, or have a harder time tracking. As a result you don't know when or where they will strike.
I like your glib hand waving though. Could you do it a little faster? It's a bit warm in my room.
Why would them hiding even more stuff make anyone trust them more?
Sunlight is the best disinfectant for politics. But keep in mind that the overuse of disinfectants and antibiotics is breeding superbugs that are now immune to all medicines. That is the future of medicine. Hopefully we don't extend those ill considered practices to national security and the fight against terrorism as well.
The very mission of intelligence agencies means a lot of what they do has to be done in the dark in order to be effective. Excessive direct sunlight makes them ineffective. Example: The Allies in WW2 were able, with enormous effort by some of the brightest minds in science, to decrypt and read German military orders and reports encrypted with the Enigma machine. There were various times when the Germans changed the configuration of the machine to make it more secure. Those changes set the Allies back to being unable to read the German orders and reports again. It was only through considerable effort that the Allies were able to read it again. At times the Germans had some suspicion that their messages weren't secure and changed Enigma. If they had actually known it was being broken, they could have made it much, much more difficult than it already was to break the encryption. That could have very easily meant a terribly different outcome to the war. One of the key targets of Enigma was the German U-boats. If Enigma had been more effective, Great Britain might have been starved into submission by the U-boats. That would have made the British isles unavailable to base the invasion force and air forces attacking Germany. The 1944 invasion of the continent might have been postponed for years. That might have allowed the Germans to increase their fighting forces on the Easter front by up to 50% which might have led to a stalemate there. Or, as an alternative, it would have meant that the first two A-bombs would have been dropped on Germany, which was always going to be the first target. Then instead of having 60 years of people carping about Hiroshima and Nagasaki we would be treated to complaints about Frankfurt and Hannover.
A heavy price to pay for casual curiosity. "Hey! I hear you guys can read German U-boat traffic! How?" "Hey Fritiz, the British can read the U-boat orders. Start changing the Enigma rotors once a week instead of once per year, and tell them to start following procedure exactly. The sloppiness in making it easy to read."
Apply the disinfectant to the areas that are actually infected. Politics can certainly stand more of that, and the IRS scandal. If there is actual evidence of political misuse of the national security apparatus, apply it there as well, but judiciously.
Yup, the reason this is interesting is the secret courts and total lack of transparency.
Don't forget the over-active imagination and wild conspiracy running through people's minds.
There is no reason the court can't be open. If you need to hide the number/person you are getting a warrant against the same procedures used to hide the identities of children from the press can be used. Just use John Doe Number X or 555-555-55XX for the number. Making it secret sure looks like they are hiding something illicit.
From what I've read, FISA warrant applications are one to two inches thick. I expect that there will be a lot more redactions than that if released to the public, followed by more outrage on Slashdot.
Making it secret makes it look like NSA is trying to protect intelligence sources and methods, and intelligence targets, from public disclosure which could be exploited by foreign intelligence organizations to protect their spies and even terrorists those foreign intelligence organizations might be controlling. And the NSA would be right.
The bottom line is many people on Slashdot can't stand government secrecy for any reason, even if it is to prevent other innocent people from their own nation or city from being killed. I assume they will be more nuanced in their thinking when it comes to their own neck if that choice is clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a bigger problem in the form of evidence being kept secret and used against someone in a trial. That's a bigger risk, as at that point we may as well employ the Star Chamber for "terrorism".
It is problematic for trials and other court proceedings. I have seen cases reported in which a defense attorney was given a security clearance to review the evidence and work the issues it creates. Of course that attorney is limited in what he or she can tell the defendant. And not every attorney is trustworthy in handing national security related matters.
Conviction of disbarred lawyer Lynne Stewart upheld for smuggling messages to jailed terrorist
It would be way better if al Qaida would simply stop attacking, but I guess there is little chance of that happening.
A key paragraph in the article being this one:
Under the FAA, which was just renewed last December for another five years, no warrants are needed for the NSA to eavesdrop on a wide array of calls, emails and online chats involving US citizens. Individualized warrants are required only when the target of the surveillance is a US person or the call is entirely domestic. But even under the law, no individualized warrant is needed to listen in on the calls or read the emails of Americans when they communicate with a foreign national whom the NSA has targeted for surveillance.
If they are targeting a foreign national and listening to their communications, they don't need a warrant if you, an American, calls that person. It would be like the FBI conducting surveillance of a mob run business and having a warrant to tap its lines. It wouldn't need to get a warrant for each different caller so that it could listen to the conversation. That doesn't make a lot of sense, which is why Greenwald is up in arms about it.
And then there is this section:
...Contrary to the claims by NSA defenders that the surveillance being conducted is legal, the Obama DOJ has repeatedly thwarted any efforts to obtain judicial rulings on whether this law is consistent with the Fourth Amendment or otherwise legal....
There have been numerous court cases regarding even warrantless surveillance in particular circumstances. The courts have sided with the President's power to do this.
Surveillance Court Upholds Bush on Warrantless Wiretapping
The New York Times reports that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review — the specialized federal appeals court created by the 1978 FISA statute to rule on questions involving national security surveillance — has reaffirmed that the President of the United States has inherent constitutional authority to monitor international communications without court permission.
Congress has no power to change the President's Constitutionally derived powers by ordinary law.
Greenwald is a smart man that leads many astray due to his fringe politics.
You just don't have the security clearance to view the evidence. And because such evidence will raise nasty questions about how it was collected.
Well, not all the evidence anyway. The fact that some evidence exists at all reveals important things about how it was uncovered.
For the purposes of illustration, suppose the US was able to listen in on a North Korean spy that had just delivered a load of man portable anti-aircraft missiles to an al Qaida cell*. If the al Qaida leader had told the North Korean spy that he had a plan to shoot down a passenger jet at San Francisco airport, and the spy reported that back to headquarters, the US could intercept that message and know about it. There might be enough information in the spy's report (to whom the missiles were delivered, where, when, what they would be used for) to lead to an arrest of the terrorist. But if the source of the information leading to the arrest was made public, then North Korea would know that it didn't have secure communications with its spies in the field, and would change its codes and/or communication procedures. If it did that, the US would lose its ability to conduct surveillance of the spies of a hostile nation, which would be a pretty important thing to lose. There can be plenty of conundrums that arise from this sort of thing.
* Manual found in Mali suggests al-Qaida training to use surface-to-air missile. State Sponsors: North Korea
Relist North Korea As a Terrorist Sponsor
...Pyongyang kidnapped at least 10 Japanese citizens and harbored Japanese Red Army terrorists since the 1970s. Until 2008, the Bush administration routinely cited the kidnappings and the presence of Japanese Red Army terrorists as justification for including North Korea on the list.
CRS cites reports describing North Korean attempts to smuggle conventional arms, including machine guns and anti-tank rocket launchers, to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers), a U.S. Government designated foreign terrorist organization in Sri Lanka. Those reports indicate the Sri Lankan navy intercepted and attacked three North Korean ships carrying arms in separate 2006 and 2007 incidents.
North Korea’s relationship with Hizballah, an Iranian terrorist proxy that is also designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., continues. CRS cites 2006 and 2007 reports detailing an extensive program by North Korea to provide arms and training to Hizballah. The training provided to Hizballah cadre lasted months and included officials such as Hassan Nasrallah, Hizballah’s secretary-general. North Korean trainers masquerading as the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation went to southern Lebanon to teach Hizballah terrorists how to develop and construct underground military facilities.
The FISA court doesn't try people. Its primary purpose is to issue warrants for national security surveillance operations. You can find some background on it at the link:
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
Any actual trials would be held in other courts.
The US and the West are still free, but the people need to be politically active to maintain that freedom. Legislatures and executives must engage in oversight of their intelligence agencies.
There is still a pretty substantial difference between the Western nations and the Soviet Union. Even Russia is far from being the Soviet Union even if it is on somewhat shaky ground from time to time. (Old habits can die hard.)
The Soviet Story (2008)
A Portrait of Stalin: Secret Police
There are plenty cans of worms to open over this.
Bank Robbery Suspect Wants NSA Surveillance Records for Defense
Agreed.
Hm... I didn't know your post was part of this thread. Oh, well; it matters not.
Are you ok? You seem to be talking to yourself.
Demand Surges for Supercomputers
Do Supercomputers Still Matter?
Oil giant Total builds "world's largest commercial supercomputer"
The article makes sense, but I don't think the work appears to be especially innovative even if it could be very useful.
It is more than governments that buy supercomputers. They are also used in industry for things like oil and gas exploration, economic modeling, and weather forecasts. Universities and research organizations also use them for a variety of purposes. Time on an actual supercomputer tends to be highly valuable and sought after. You may disagree with the use, but that is a different question from not being used effectively.
The Secret Lives of Supercomputers, Part 1
"It is probably the biggest trend in supercomputers -- the movement away from ivory-tower research and government-sponsored research to commerce and business," Michael Corrado, an IBM spokesperson, told TechNewsWorld. In 1997, there were 161 supersystems deployed in business and industry, but that figure grew to 287 by June 2008, he noted. "More than half the list reside in commercial enterprises. That's a huge shift, and it's been under way for years."
Uses for supercomputers
It's only censorship when the government prevents you from exercising your free speech rights.
Entities and people unrelated to the government can engage in censorship, but not all censorship is necessarily bad.
That's an interesting comment. I would think that the only reason that you're still on Slashdot with that account is that the fine people that run it have a fairly strong commitment to free speech as opposed to censorship, and are willing to endure various types of nonsense.
A pity you didn't chose to try speaking with your own voice from the start, but instead decided to ape and harass me. You could have gone with a much better name, such as "deep fjord," or "frozen fjord," or maybe "cold logic," or even "cold fiddler." (Nudge nudge.) Now you're stuck with "coid fjord." A cheap, deceptive, knock off name that will always be confused for me, especially if I stop warning people about you. (And a warning was entirely justified given your initial behavior.) I'm glad to see you making a positive contribution even if I disagree with a fair amount of what you write. Well, at least you'll probably always be more popular with the crowd. And it's popularity that always shows what's right, isn't it?
Spot on.
Just looking at a couple of the columns in Mendeleev's table shows the considerable utility of the current table. You can see the properties of the elements as arranged tend to be similar to their neighbors: fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine have useful similarities. Likewise: helium, neon, argon, krypton, exon, radon - all noble gasses. Flip to the other side, and lithium, sodium, and potassium are all highly reactive metals. Then consider carbon, silicon, and germanium - all useful in creating base wafer materials for semiconductor work. It is easy to go on, and on. Although other chart formats may have their uses, I think that Mendeleev's is very difficult to improve upon. It is simple, powerful, and easy to use.
I regret to inform you that you don't know what you are talking about.
In their mind, Al Qaida is fighting on behalf of, and to reestablish, the Islamic Caliphate government that was dissolved in 1923 after the fall of the Ottoman empire. The nonsense about "never been chosen to represent a nation of people" would make the silly claim that any modern insurgency to overthrow a government by violent means isn't really a war.
The "War on Terror" is symbolic language, just like the "War on Fascism" in WW2. It is ridiculous that supposedly educated people can't figure that out. 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 can tell al Qaida and the Taliban are not ordinary criminals since they actually ran the country of Afghanistan, and have been trying to overthrow several others. The 9/11 attack is the only time that the self-defense provision of the NATO treaty has been invoked following an attack. NATO aircraft flew over American cities to protect them. The Taliban and al Qaida use heavy weapons and have been organized at the brigade level. They are regularly engaged by the US Air Force which is targeting them with missiles and dropping large bombs upon them. This isn't a problem with traffic stops gone bad, or a gang of bank robbers, or even the Crips and the Bloods.
Bin Laden was an utter failure. He made the classic mistake of dictators and would-be dictators in attacking the United States. The additional cost of the war is a pittance in the total federal budget. His organization is very badly damaged. There has been little if any genuine loss of real freedom, and modest impositions on privacy. The true threats in terms of spending come from the enormous growth in social welfare programs, and the damaged economy which is exacerbated by the current administrations over-regulation.
You've got things almost entirely wrong. It doesn't help that you get your news and views from fringe sites. Maybe you should try a few different ones.
National Review
The Weekly Standard
PJ Media
I tried explaining to them I don't need them tracking me via scanning my card so I can save $1.50 a week, but they don't seem to understand. Instead now, I just tell them I'm an asshole. It's much more simple, and they only ask me half the time now.
It isn't unusual for companies to subject their employees to considerable pressure to get customers to sign up for various types of company cards. Some will even fire employees that don't get enough people to sign up.
Best Buy Firing Employees for Not Pushing Company Credit Card Apps?
but reading real books and writing on real paper makes you suspicious
Mainly if you are conservative. But you must remember the current power dynamic.
The national security apparatus acts to protect the country to prevent terrorist attacks which could result in the current administration being voted out of office and the Congress flipping.
The bureaucracy acts to suppress voting the current administration out of office.
Simple to understand.
My doppelganger does tend to exaggerate.
Yes, but lots of people keep saying 'teh guberment is teh evil', but saying 'rah rah' to corporations and act like as long as someone is making a profit, that's how it's supposed to be.
Other than some tech companies, you don't tend to see many people on Slashdot leading cheers for corporations. Its almost the reverse - many people keep cheerleading for the government to both take up more functions now performed by corporations, such as healthcare, and to engage in ever more restrictive regulation of corporations. They trust the government with massive amounts of personal information about their health and finances, but are immensely suspicious of it engaging in surveillance of people connected with terrorist organizations. And based on the evidence of the recent stories on the IRS oppression of conservative political groups, most people are at best lukewarm about opposing demonstrated political oppression in the US. I don't see that as likely to end well.
The reality is what the government can't spy on you for, the corporations are more than happy to take up the slack -- or at least they get forced to hand over the data.
Much of the privacy that has gone missing is due to impatience and convenience. If you go into a bookstore or restaurant for instance, and pay by cash, there is a record of a sale, but nothing attached to your name and address. Pay by credit card, and there is suddenly a big paper trail and entries in multiple databases. Don't want to place an order and wait 5-6 weeks to pay for something in cash? Order it off of Amazon, which will create sales records tied to your account and credit card records. Want that 5-10% discount at the local Super X store? Then sign up for the "rewards card." Then you get the discount and more entries into databases. Are you reading the privacy disclosures and opting out of optional intrusions? Are you downloading and installing "free" software that in the license agreement says it will grab various bits of personally identifiable information and ship it back to the company? (Saw that one recently.) Well, those companies providing "free" software have an income stream from somewhere if it isn't from you, otherwise they wouldn't exist. Not taking advantage of the available privacy technology and settings for your OS and applications? Shame on you, if you want privacy.
Between them, you're losing your rights and privacy from both ends. The government is out of control of terrorism hunts and tells industry to play nice, and industry is out control on things like privacy and copyright, and tell the government to play nice.
There aren't really rights being lost (rights of speech, worship, voting, association, etc.), but privacy is certainly under pressure when it isn't openly compromised.
Start paying for more things in cash even if it is more expensive (ignore the bonuses to sign up for discount and rewards programs). Opt out of things. Plan ahead so you aren't buying off the net as much. Place orders by mail, and pay by money order or check. Or even take a drive to a store that carries the merchandise. It becomes truer every day that convenience and efficiency is detrimental to privacy. On the other hand, there are more of the goods and services that you want, and that information is more likely to be presented to you. Take your picks.
Terrorism from Al Qaida and company will probably be around for at least another 10-40 years. There isn't much getting around that, they have a vote. They are pursuing their own goals, and there isn't really anything we can do to make them happy other than convert to Islam, implement Sharia law in place of the Constitution, and join them. Their goal is world conquest for the glory of Islam, and reestablishing the Caliphate dissolved in 1923, even if it takes 1,000 years. There isn't much room to give there. Historically, the end of conflicts - wars, has resulted in the lessening of government
I'm afraid you have a very distorted picture of the US based on misinformation.
The US defense budget at the end of WW2 was approximately 38% of GDP. It now hovers around 4-5%. The idea of an all powerful "military industrial complex" is a distorting myth. The defense budget is in fact dwarfed by social welfare spending. And don't forget healthcare spending, which is three to four times larger share of GDP than defense spending. You can see a chart of defense spending at the link below:
Defense Spending as Percentage of GDP Well Below Historical Average
Also, your idea about the nature of the conflicts doesn't really match up with the history. The 9/11 attack killed about as many people as the Pearl Harbor attacks which caused American entry into WW2. The 9/11 attacks resulted in about $100,000,000,000 in damage to the US economy. The fact that something is not an existential threat does not mean that it is not dangerous and has to be dealt with.
Saddam's invasion, conquest, and annexation of Kuwait in 1990 was also another military episode that was properly dealt with. The UN took action and a large international coalition of nations drove Saddam's army out of Kuwait. Completely proper, and justified.
I think you have a very one dimensional view of the American armed services which is an all volunteer military which both protects the United States and helps abroad.
U.S. Aircraft Carrier Leaving Disaster Zone After Tsunami
U.S. Military Relief Mission in Haiti Ends
To expect anything less than the worse from the NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA... etc is just a little naive.
I think your concept of "anything less than the worse" is poorly calibrated.
Taliban Hangs Afghan Boy, 7, for Spying
17 Beheaded in Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan for Attending Wedding Party with Dancing
Torture, Al-Qaeda Style
One mustn't overlook the change in social values that makes formerly taboo subjects acceptable in ordinary conversation.
I'll also point out that there are multiple search engines. More and more I'm splitting my traffic among them, some topics on one, others on another. That will make the profiling performed by any individual search engine shallower. You still have the web tracking to deal with, but the hosts file helps with that.
The actual NSA home page is www.nsa.gov
Your impersonator seems smarter than you. Maybe you should just let him do the talking.
Not if you know what you're talking about. But feel free to enjoy his posts. It's a free country, even for the uninformed.
Does it matter? It stopped the plot; just lather, rinse, and repeat, and POOF! No more terrorism, with the additional bonus of not spending crazy amounts of treasure spying on millions of innocent people.
Or it just means that they change their methods to ones you either can't track, or have a harder time tracking. As a result you don't know when or where they will strike.
I like your glib hand waving though. Could you do it a little faster? It's a bit warm in my room.
Because sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Why would them hiding even more stuff make anyone trust them more?
Sunlight is the best disinfectant for politics. But keep in mind that the overuse of disinfectants and antibiotics is breeding superbugs that are now immune to all medicines. That is the future of medicine. Hopefully we don't extend those ill considered practices to national security and the fight against terrorism as well.
The very mission of intelligence agencies means a lot of what they do has to be done in the dark in order to be effective. Excessive direct sunlight makes them ineffective. Example: The Allies in WW2 were able, with enormous effort by some of the brightest minds in science, to decrypt and read German military orders and reports encrypted with the Enigma machine. There were various times when the Germans changed the configuration of the machine to make it more secure. Those changes set the Allies back to being unable to read the German orders and reports again. It was only through considerable effort that the Allies were able to read it again. At times the Germans had some suspicion that their messages weren't secure and changed Enigma. If they had actually known it was being broken, they could have made it much, much more difficult than it already was to break the encryption. That could have very easily meant a terribly different outcome to the war. One of the key targets of Enigma was the German U-boats. If Enigma had been more effective, Great Britain might have been starved into submission by the U-boats. That would have made the British isles unavailable to base the invasion force and air forces attacking Germany. The 1944 invasion of the continent might have been postponed for years. That might have allowed the Germans to increase their fighting forces on the Easter front by up to 50% which might have led to a stalemate there. Or, as an alternative, it would have meant that the first two A-bombs would have been dropped on Germany, which was always going to be the first target. Then instead of having 60 years of people carping about Hiroshima and Nagasaki we would be treated to complaints about Frankfurt and Hannover.
A heavy price to pay for casual curiosity. "Hey! I hear you guys can read German U-boat traffic! How?" "Hey Fritiz, the British can read the U-boat orders. Start changing the Enigma rotors once a week instead of once per year, and tell them to start following procedure exactly. The sloppiness in making it easy to read."
Apply the disinfectant to the areas that are actually infected. Politics can certainly stand more of that, and the IRS scandal. If there is actual evidence of political misuse of the national security apparatus, apply it there as well, but judiciously.
Yup, the reason this is interesting is the secret courts and total lack of transparency.
Don't forget the over-active imagination and wild conspiracy running through people's minds.
There is no reason the court can't be open. If you need to hide the number/person you are getting a warrant against the same procedures used to hide the identities of children from the press can be used. Just use John Doe Number X or 555-555-55XX for the number. Making it secret sure looks like they are hiding something illicit.
From what I've read, FISA warrant applications are one to two inches thick. I expect that there will be a lot more redactions than that if released to the public, followed by more outrage on Slashdot.
Making it secret makes it look like NSA is trying to protect intelligence sources and methods, and intelligence targets, from public disclosure which could be exploited by foreign intelligence organizations to protect their spies and even terrorists those foreign intelligence organizations might be controlling. And the NSA would be right.
The bottom line is many people on Slashdot can't stand government secrecy for any reason, even if it is to prevent other innocent people from their own nation or city from being killed. I assume they will be more nuanced in their thinking when it comes to their own neck if that choice is clear.