Sounds like you've got it all figured out. Since no one else has thought of this, or precisely your specific "isn't that hard" implementation, I take it you are actively working on the system of which you speak?
Please let me know when I can download the beta version of your product. I would also like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I would like to see this scripting environment of yours, it sounds revolutionary... I would settle for just being able to write & run scripts myself... if only I could write the scripts faster than I can click the mouse...
Just using the search bars on those sites homepages...
Then a JS URL bookmarklet like this:
javascript:var a = document.getElementsByTagName( 'a' );var b = 0; for ( var x in a ){ if ( a[x].href.match(/\bAI\b/ ) ) window.open( a[x].href ); if ( ++b >= 6 ) break; } void(0);
(open the first 6 links that have AI in the URLs, probably should be a[x].innerHTML.match(\bAI\b), meh...)
But honestly, I usually just middle button click on the interesting article links (open in new tab) faster than I could write the script or explain to my robot what I want.
I think the reason no-one has this "robot" system you speak of, is that the computer gives you what you want fast enough -- hint: "[ctrl+L]googe.com[enter]AI[enter][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click], browse away... IMHO, adding a generic all powerful robot layer would make that more complex than it needs to be.
Maybe I'm wrong -- I look forward to being proved so, having a computer system that satisfies my deepest desires without me having to use any input has only ever happened When I use XP -- It regularly reboots itself (update, crash, whatever) and my boot-loader boots the GNU/Linux partition by default (The computer somehow knew I'd rather be using Linux than MS/Windows).
Perhaps you could use Rhino to create a JS environment with the functionality of Java.awt.Robot, and OpenCV to interpret the screenshots for the AI -- now if only you had an AI to feed the data to....
You are making it a lot more complicated than it has to be. It's not hard already to do certain parts. The problem is it would take a lot of code to do it right. You don't need to use screen shots because we are talking about strings here.
It's not difficult to work with strings and regular expressions. There are a lot of capabilities already. The problem is there isn't a unified framework or backend to make it simple enough that everyone could do it.
And no I haven't decided that this will be MY project, but if nobody sees it as valuable, and I do, then at some point I will write some code and see what can and can't be done. Robots are easy to write, and so are webcrawling robots. Screen shots aren't necessary. It would have to rely on a framework from which applications run on top of.
Python scripting for example can already allow a lot of stuff. The way unix is designed, applications can communicate with each other in that the output of one application can be made into the input for another. If the framework is designed under the methodology that all applications should be able to communicate with each other, then all robots should also be able to communicate with each other. If each robot is sufficiently specialized, you can have fairly complex operations broken down into highly specialized simple tasks.
Multi-agent AIs are a hobbyist/research endeavor and does not have appeal for the masses (and some would argue) is not proper to be included with an OS. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.
You can use Silk Test, Sikuli, or expect scripts for common tasks, and if you are research inclined then perhaps you should still keep up with the research. There is a fine line between clever and lazy, and people have various degrees of both. If you want to build this, by all means go for it, but don't be surprised if it doesn't become standard.
When they said that there wasn't a Facebook, Google was still somewhat new, there wasn't a twitter, there wasn't a Web 2.0, and people weren't dealing with the amount of information they deal with now. Now it's practical and desirable to be able to search your own desktop like you search Google. Typing in a name to produce a photo, or a movie, or a song, makes sense today while 10 years ago that was considered just for hobbyists, or just a research product, because nobody could possibly have terabytes worth of files to sort, search, organize, and review.
It's 2011. Now we have users who literally have millions of files. We have users who have to multi-task more efficiency. The main reason to have robots would be to increase the multitasking capability of the user so that it can keep up with the hardware capability. We have solid state drives, quad core CPUs, 12 gigs of ram, and ridiculously fast graphics cards.
The times have changed and it's time for Linux to either get ahead of the times and paradigm shift, or always be playing catch up. Agent based AI is already here and already implemented on websites. It's already being used by Google for webcrawling robots and was implemented in Google Wave. The only reason it never caught on was because it's only being implemented on the web.
I think it's exactly the sort of technology which should be implemented on the desktop level. If I want to search 20 search engines all night long because there's thousands of search results from each, just to find a specific type of information, I should be able to define the type of information I'm looking for, and it should spend all night gathering as much information on it as possible. This would be the basic use, it would help with research.
Beyond that there are a million other uses but the only reason you can think of not to do it is because it's too powerful for the desktop? If it's too powerful why move to quad core 64bit CPU's with 12 gigs of ram if you aren't going to put it to use?
Yeah... how many decades have we dreamed about the Star Trek computer or Lt. Cmdr. Data by now? Computers aren't ever going to figure out what you're trying to do and make all the complex decisions themselves.
I never said the computer has to make decisions. I said you tell the computer precisely what to do, and it can follow instructions autonomously. It's not as difficult to code as you make it seem.
The fact of the matter is that to make it to complex things you have to write complex scripts.
I could write some of the scripts myself, so apparently it's not so complex that we (the linux community) wouldn't collectively be able to write them. Provide the right programming environment and most of us would feel right at home writing complex scripts.
And try as people may, we still haven't found anything better than the current programming languages, which most people can't grok.
Python is easy enough for most people to grok. There are plenty of people who know plenty of languages so if you support enough languages you'll have plenty of different scripts which allow the bots to do plenty of different complex activities. Using pipes you can pass information through various parts of the operation system or from one bot to another bot.
Every attempt to "humanize" it has failed because it lacks the precision to be interpreted by a computer and the computer will never realize it's doing nonsense work.
Do you have any clue what you are talking about?
Just to take one example, how's your agent going to know this link, unlike all the other links, is fetching the next results?
You use a sort algorithm, and you use a loop to check for each character in the string that makes up the link, to evaluate the string, you can encode the link via hash, and if I'm missing something there is probably some algorithm somewhere designed specifically to solve this problem. It's just a matter of sorting through a sequence of strings in some cases and in others you can just tell the robot exactly what you are looking for via regular expression, such as to look within the url http://www.slashdot.org/ and search for stories with a specific topic, and then look in those stories and search for posts containing "http://" and then evaluate the strings of the url to fetch only the ones on the topic of artificial intelligence or related. It wouldn't be as difficult as you think to program this as Google and others already have robots that do web crawling.
What about the same article on two different URLs, do we need fuzzy matching? Do you need just the article, and if so do you get it without all the navigation, header, footer and other text since it's just one HTML page? By the time I've narrowed down exactly what it is your agent to do, the "agent" is really a complex script that wasn't really all that valuable to automate anyway. Or you could have it try guessing, but then we're back to an army of Clippys again.
The agent would be as smart as the series of scripts you feed into it. So if you give it fuzzy matching capability, or any other kind of capability you think would be useful to solve your specific problem it would become better suited to solve it. But another idea would be just to train the agent via your own habits, what links do you typically click on within a slashdot article of that type? The robot could then just use your own probability ratios to figure out what you might click in that situation and only fetch those URLs. It would be a matter of setting that specific robot on learning mode and browsing slashdot enough so that it can try and learn about your browsing habits.
This would simplify the process of teaching the artificial intelligence.
They could use any shape they want to project the windows onto. They could project it on a shape with more sides than a cube. They could even wrap windows around a sphere.
The fact is we need more screen realestate and 3d is one way of getting it.
Thats actually not a bad idea. You could fit roughly 3 times the information (I hope my math is correct?) in the same space if you move from squares to cubes.
So I mentioned this in my previous post and I recognize some people don't know why or don't understand why this would be useful. So I'll give some examples of what agent based AI can do for those who don't know and how it could be implemented.
To implement multi-agent based AI on linux first there would need to be a backend or a framework of some sort that would allow scripting languages such as python, ruby, and perl to connect to it. The framework or backend would have to be written in C for certain intense data processing tasks. The front end should allow programmers of all sort to write their own scripts in their favorite scripting languages to create robots. These robots should have the ability to automate system processes.
For example I decide I need to do research on artificial intelligence because I don't know what it is, so I should be able to tell the robot to search Google, to find X amount of articles on artificial intelligence which meet certain criteria. This could be done using regular expressions. But of course this isn't all that I need to do. I have a to-do list for this specific robot related to the topic of AI, to download certain files from the net and install them, to then load up and use certain files to process certain data. All of this should be automated completely and should happen in the backround and it all should be related to the topic of AI.
The news robot on the other hand I would program to act as an RSS feed, this robot would look not just at specific websites such as slashdot, but for specific articles on slashdot and present those articles along with research on certain keywords or buzzwords it thinks or suspects I know little about or wont understand.
The log analyzer robot could analyze logs for me and highlight any potential redflags, and then if it finds them run through an automated process that I determine is best for dealing with these redflags.
Each robot would be assigned to a task. Each robot should have the ability to do what the user could do, and it should be simple to show the robot or program the robot into doing it a number of very highly complex tasks.
The problem with using computers is most of the stuff we do each day is just routine. Most of us fit into certain patterns. Robots would allow us to save time, we can leave the computer on all day or all night and it will do a number of boring clicks and boring tasks that take up a great deal of time. This saves time and increases productivity.
People who use KDE are typically coming from Windows so the default should look similar. However the good thing about linux is customizability. As long as we can customize it to look however we want most of us will be happy.
Gnome and Ubuntu Unity have removed the linux edge of customizability. It's only a matter of time before I switch from Gnome 2x to KDE 4x. The next big step for Linux would be to take advantage of 3d rendering to improve functionality further. The zoom is something I use on a regular basis. Perhaps being able to flip windows(frames) and being able to write on the back of them would be a useful feature as well. There are plenty of ideas for functional eye candy but I think linux is at the point now where it shouldn't look towards Windows or OSX for new feature ideas, and it shouldn't try to fix an interface which isn't broken, it should just be adding new features and options, new eye candy which increases usability, and new more powerful abilities, such as intelligent agents that a user can program to automate certain tasks such as burning a DVD, searching several search engines to find certain information on certain topics, all of this could benefit from agent based AI.
I suggested this to the linux community years ago and their excuse was there wasn't enough bandwidth. It's 2011. The majority of the country is broadband now. There is enough bandwidth to build an intelligent agent into KDE and if they wont do it then I might just go ahead and do it for them.
The agents in a multi-agent system have several important characteristics:[4] Autonomy: the agents are at least partially autonomous
Local views: no agent has a full global view of the system, or the system is too complex for an agent to make practical use of such knowledge
Decentralization: there is no designated controlling agent (or the system is effectively reduced to a monolithic system)[5] Typically multi-agent systems research refers to software agents. However, the agents in a multi-agent system could equally well be robots,[6] humans or human teams. A multi-agent system may contain combined human-agent teams.
The US is fascist because it appeals to civic duty in an effort to prevent sensitive information from reaching parties who may use it to inflict death (for example) to US citizens? In other words, appeal, as in 'Please?' Oh, the oppression.
A simple thought experiment: you are a nuclear engineer and are privy to some information not widely known in the literature or on the internet that, in the wrong hands, could cause great harm. Therefore, as an act of prudence, you keep it to yourself/your colleagues. Congratulations, you just 'censored' yourself. A word, like 'nuclear', which causes a Pavlovian response in a large percentage of the population, even on Slashdot.
Civic Duty. Prudence. Not bad ideas. It's the expansion of this idea to absurd lengths that's the real problem.
The wrong hands would be any hands other than yours. You think the US government wouldn't abuse it? Or any government for that matter? So unless you as a scientist have agreed to work for the US government how would you determine which hands other than your own are right or wrong?
"Snitch" is simply a pejorative term for someone who for whatever reason(s) breaks a social contract regarding secrecy, written or unwritten, that he/she had with other person(s), or that other person(s) thought that they had. Regardless of the nature of the secret one is disclosing, and to whom it is disclosed to, one is always seen as a "snitch" by the party whose secret(s) are being revealed.
Others might label "the snitch" an informant, an insider, a whistle-blower, an inside source, a concerned citizen, a witness, a patriot, a man of honor and integrity... Or a hacker, a thief, a spy, a traitor, a criminal, a terrorist, a lowlife who would sell out his/her own mother... But he/she will always be a snitch to those whose secrets he/she is revealing to the third party.
The term is SO precise and determined you may just as well use "asshole" instead. Or "cunt". It's simply a bad word for the people you don't like cause they tell on you.
There is a key difference. A snitch is a former member of one group who spills the group secrets (typically for personal gain). Another more accurate word for a snitch is a sellout. Nobody likes a sellout.
On the other hand if you never were a member of the group you hacked, such as if you are a member of a rival group and you target the enemy group, thats not snitching and theres really no basis from which to make that person out to be a snitch. That could be spying, but its certainly not snitching because you were always the enemy and always loyal to your original group.
Us typically does not include you and me. Us typically only includes those who have security clearance and who work for the feds. Everybody else is them.
The people who have the highest clearances are the least free. But the difference is those people chose to enlist. They chose to give up their freedom. And they are paid handsomely for that decision.
The rest of us who don't work for the government should not be held to secrecy. We aren't a part of the government. It's not our group.
You describe the clan like nature of this group of people precisely. They live in their own world, all their friends typically live in that same completely isolated world, they probably aren't even allowed to have friends outside of their world.
And this would be fine, just so long as they don't try to expect us to follow their rules of their world. Cops are their own group. Feds are their own group. Soldiers are their own group. And civilians are our own group.
Until we see it like that we are always going to be sucked by notions like "civic duty" into doing things against the civic interest but perhaps in the governments interest. And yes there is a huge difference. The war on drugs, and a lot of these wars are entirely in the governments interest. Not in the civilian interest because often the people being locked up, or being turned into informants against each other, are the civilians, while the fed puppet master exploits civilians to win some war or conduct some secret operation that only they know or care about.
And you are right, when they think of their country they are thinking of their isolated sheltered government community where everybody is a veteran, or their parents are veterans, and everyone works for the government in some way, or has a security clearance, and yes they'd be helping their employer so I cannot blame them for taking the stances they take, but for the rest of America they don't benefit us whatsoever.
When people think about the country they think about their own social network. And lets face it most people who believe in civic duty and who are worried about this stuff are government employees from government families.
There are just the same and as many reasons for civilians to be paranoid about leaks.
We don't like it when someone snitches on us and we go to jail. Just like the military doesn't like it when someone within their organization snitches on them.
And the governments are the organization which promotes snitching in general by fostering the us against them, everybody for themselves, sell out your community, your neighborhood, your best friend attitude.
This is the problem. Morals ought not be coded in laws. The essence of the problem we have now, and the source of our snitch culture, is the fact that law enforcement has made so many victimless activities illegal, that they now have to find a neverending source of snitches/informants. They have an agenda to turn ordinary civilians into snitches, and then complain about snitching when it affects them.
In essence in order to fight crime, you have to rely on the criminals turning on each other and selling each other out (snitching). Well now a significant amount of our population has made a lifestyle out of selling people out, now it's a career.
And when those snitches are turned on the government, and they start revealing human rights abuses and crimes committed by the members of the government and their social network, then they want to stop snitching?
I'm not into the whole moral argument. I just don't care about that. I do think we should be concerned about torture, genocide, slavery, human rights abuses. I don't think we should be concerned about what civilians do with other civilians even when its illegal.
Not even the whistleblower, I mean, snitch, I mean, leaker who leaks the secrets of the enemy.
No one likes a snitch.
Use the snitch, sure. Then make sure you either corrupt him to keep him under control, or get rid of him before he snitches on you.
Not that this is a new thing.
Of course, the only way to lose to this kind of government is to give up and fail to do your civic duty. So I disagree with you there, too.
First there are differences between leaker, snitch, whistleblower. The difference is subjective not objective, and it's determined by who is affected by the leak. If the leak benefits me, thats not a snitch, that's a hero. If the leak hurts me, thats a snitch and nobody likes a snitch. If the leak benefits my group, thats still not a snitch.
So basically in order for someone to be a snitch they have to be within your group, and they have to sell out the group. According to the US Military Bradley Manning is a snitch because he leaked in a way which made fellow soldiers look bad. But to civilians Bradley Manning is not going to be a snitch, but a leaker, or whistleblower. And to Bradley Mannings group that he is loyal to, if he has one, he is a hero.
So basically if your informant gives you the secrets of your enemy, thats a spy not a snitch. If your informant however turns around and gives your secrets to the enemy, thats a snitch. It has to do with the social network and social relation between the individuals involved. Two criminals who commit a crime together or who both benefit from a crime, if one reports on the other, the defector is a snitch. This is not the same thing as if they are sworn enemies fighting each other and they spy on each other. The difference being that spies can have loyalty to their group or their side and be acting out of absolute loyalty, while the snitch does not have loyalty to any side.
What the governments see us all as, is potential informants, snitches, terrorist, or something in between. Governments do not promote loyalty, and promote snitching to begin with, but when it finally starts to negatively affect them and their interests then they want to push civic duties onto us. It's real simple, the government wants useful idiots who they can manipulate into taking on responsibilities without being paid to do it. So now security researchers cannot release the details of their exploit to the media and take credit because they fear they could be labeled a snitch by the government?
Only that is not snitching because they weren't told government secrets. They don't work for the government. They don't have to be loyal to an entity they never swore an oath to. This is not a complicated case such as with Bradley Manning where we don't know what he knew or didn't know so we cannot know who is right between him and the government. This is civilians, people like you and me, and it is clear I'm on the side of civilians.
This means while I would not release information which would hurt civilians, I don't have some sort of civic duty to protect the feds who don't act like or consider themselves to be civilians. They are their own group, they act like their own group, and would certainly exploit me given the opportunity.
Use the snitch, sure. Then make sure you either corrupt him to keep him under control, or get rid of him before he snitches on you.
This is common sense. But which group is the group making the most use of snitches? The government. And which group complains the most about leakers/snitches? The government. So why would I have sympathy if they are complaining about a culture they helped to create? And why should I believe in the concept of civic duty? My civic duty if I choose to believe in such a concept is to civilians, not drug warriors, not cops, not soldiers, but civilians, because I'm a civilian.
This means when certain stuff gets leaked to the media that details about how governments are abusing civilians, I'm going to side with civil
One governments snitch is another governments hero.
But as civilians, we are usually caught in the middle of these snitch wars or whatever you want to call them.
Now of course it's not snitching if it's detailing human rights abuses against civilians. That is not snitching. It's snitching when the leak destroys civilian lives. An example would be if some rogue hacker decided to hack top secret FBI files and leak a bunch of files on a bunch of people to the media. That is snitching.
It doesn't matter whats in those files. It's snitching. It's also snitching if the names of informants are leaked, that too is snitching. If you know who is or isn't an informant, and you leak that, their lives are put directly at risk. Even if you don't particularly like informants, it's probably not wise to leak that kind of information.
Anonymous leaked Hal Turner's status as being an FBI informant. That is the perfect example of snitching on a snitch. It's still snitching if you do that. For people who don't believe it happened just Google Hal Turner and Anonymous.
Leaking is snitching. Or, I should say, snitching is leaking.
Snitching is only bad when we have something to hide.
Getting rid of everything we have to hide scares most people. Or, at least, scares most of the people who spend the most time talking.
The silent majority knows about the secrets and do what they can to mitigate without making much fuss of it. At least, until somebody decides to make an example of them by saying how wonderful whistleblower X or Y was.
But it's impossible to get rid of some things. Since everyone has secrets, from medical history, to sexual history, to that project you are working on that you don't want stolen before you can patent it, everybody has secrets. Of course governments have secrets too, the problem is governments don't expect or allow individuals to have secrets. Governments all around the world know everything about each one of us, and we know virtually nothing about them or what their true agenda is.
So we know and understand privacy has to exist to keep our own secrets safe that governments possess. These could be nude photographs from a body scanner, it could be surveillance records, photos, videos, or it could just be some obscure law we broke or are breaking. The simple fact is everyone has a record of doing immoral things, and governments have enough secrets about each person that any one of us could be made to look like a monster.
If you look back to COINTELPRO in the USA the FBI had secrets on virtually everybody in little FBI files locked away. Do we want "anonymous" or some leaker to leak these sorts of files to the media? Hell no of course not. So yes it does matter when it comes to whether it's leaking or snitching. When it's information being leaked about us, that hurts us, it's snitching, and when it's not hurting anybody in specific then its leaking.
Snitching can ruin lives, destroy marriage, get people killed. Leaking has minimal impact on peoples lives. Snitching would be releasing the names of all the informants in the USA. As this would put their lives at risk and probably get them all killed. Leaking would be releasing information about the COINTELPRO program itself and details on parts of it which violate human rights.
Some leaks are news worthy, and some leaks are just outright snitching, and the only way to determine which it is, is by subjective measure. Does it put civilian lives at risk? If it does then it's snitching because it hurts the people. On the other hand if it puts troops at risk, it might not be snitching unless you are a troop / fed putting troops at risk. And if it's neither of these and no ones life is going to be destroyed or at risk, then it's leaking.
Whistleblowing usually details a human rights violation. Either way the idea in this article is that civilians like Bruce Schneier should accept extra responsibility. I don't think Bruce or civilian owes the government a damn thing. I do believe as civilians that we should not snitch on other civilians, we should not for example leak the names of informants or release peoples FBI or other files to the media. We should not attack other civilians but thats my personal belief as a civilian and not all civilians follow that.
And this attitude of loose lips sink ships is fine if we are let in on whats going on.
But since they don't tell us shit, if we discover on our own why would we be expected to keep it to ourselves and keep it secret?
Loose Lips Sink Ships applies to soldiers, or people who work for the government who have access to secrets. It does not apply to graduate students, security researchers, bloggers, and ordinary people.
If we are going to apply it to ordinary people, then ordinary people should be given security clearance.
It's not just the US government. All governments act the same way and promote secrecy among their employees but don't want citizens to have any secrets and promote informing and transparency among civilians. So basically this is a matter of the military and other law enforcement factions wanting to keep secrets, which they can use, but they don't want any of us to be able to keep secrets from them because they have to enforce the law and protect themselves from us (the terrorist civilians).
So why would we want to help keep their secrets? Whats in it for you or me to not discuss something when we don't work for them? To put it more basic, whats in it for you or me to work with the government if the government isn't paying us to do it?
And if the government is willing to pay people then they can just pay for a clearance and do it properly. This looks like they want to have the benefits of a security clearance without actually paying for it. So for example government employees cannot discuss wikileaks, or government secrets, but we aren't government employees. We didn't take an oath, and we don't have a security clearance to protect, so what right does the government have to censor our speech?
It's like if Microsoft or Sony were to try to enforce an NDA on users of the software rather than on developers. the user shouldn't be subjected to an NDA but the developers are getting paid by Microsoft and Sony and signed the NDA, they can be subjected to it.
Basically this is like Microsoft and Sony deciding they don't want to bother with making people sign NDA's, people are just supposed to culturally embrace the NDA like some sort of mafia omerta. Honestly it's a fatuous idea but I suspect they will try to implement it.
Whether we are talking about the mafia with omerta, or a terrorist cell, or a full fledged government, they all rely on secrecy to maintain power.
And they all hate snitches, traitors, leakers, informers or whatever they choose to call the person who tells the secrets.
So it's nothing new. On the other hand opposing groups see the snitches, traitors, leakers, informers as heroes. Why? Because by revealing secrets and leaking, it protects lives on the opposing side, but keeping secrets protects lives on your governments side, and depending on which side you are on you will care about secrecy or not. It's completely subjective and determined more by what side you see yourself on.
This stigma of secret might work on people who swore an oath to keep secrets. These people probably do feel responsible. On the other hand ordinary civilians have no reason to give a shit or choose a side. They'll choose whichever side pays them at the time, which is all sides, or they might choose no side, or they might choose one side or another based on ideology, but they have no responsibiliy or reason to choose the US governments side.
Civic duty will not work. It's like expecting people to conduct business in a way which promotes the nation. That isn't going to happen. People aren't going to care and I highly doubt any of these people are going to give a damn what the government says unless they work for the government and their paycheck is determined by their ability to keep government secrets. (Such as if they have a clearance)
It's not hard to stigmatize snitching. It's already universally recognized as bad by everybody who doesn't work for government and who isn't a cop. And the cops only think it's good when the snitches are working for them. So basically governments don't like being snitched on, but so what? Governments are the ones funding the informants and snitching by offering prizes in cash to the biggest leaker/informant/snitch.
And governments don't have a problem trying to use morality to convince people it's right to leak when it's to them. Suddenly it's your civic duty to help the FBI solve it's crimes, or to turn on your friend to help law enforcement, but if it's the other way around and someone within the FBI reports crimes going on to the media, suddenly it's snitching again.
It's the blue code of silence. So we have to decide whether or not leaking = snitching. If leaking != snitching, then why would leaking be wrong? Why should any of us care about government agendas if we don't work for them?
Why should Bruce or Bob or Alice care about the governments private agenda? We don't know about it, so we don't have any responsibility. Also we haven't taken an oath. And finally, it's a matter of does the government care about the agenda of individuals when they are out to make arrests or conduct whatever operations? I highly doubt they would.
So lets have the debate. How much leaking is too much? When does leaking become snitching? And what are the effects of a leak or snitch culture vs a culture of secrecy? It's not like these questions have been fully discussed. So lets ask them.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you've got it all figured out. Since no one else has thought of this, or precisely your specific "isn't that hard" implementation, I take it you are actively working on the system of which you speak?
Please let me know when I can download the beta version of your product. I would also like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I would like to see this scripting environment of yours, it sounds revolutionary... I would settle for just being able to write & run scripts myself... if only I could write the scripts faster than I can click the mouse...
For now I'll just keep typing things like:
http://google.com/search/?q=AI
http://google.com/search/?q=site:slashdot.org+AI
http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=ai
-- or --
Just using the search bars on those sites homepages...
Then a JS URL bookmarklet like this:
javascript:var a = document.getElementsByTagName( 'a' );var b = 0;
for ( var x in a ){ if ( a[x].href.match(
if ( ++b >= 6 ) break; }
void(0);
(open the first 6 links that have AI in the URLs, probably should be a[x].innerHTML.match(\bAI\b), meh...)
But honestly, I usually just middle button click on the interesting article links (open in new tab) faster than I could write the script or explain to my robot what I want.
I think the reason no-one has this "robot" system you speak of, is that the computer gives you what you want fast enough -- hint: "[ctrl+L]googe.com[enter]AI[enter][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click], browse away... IMHO, adding a generic all powerful robot layer would make that more complex than it needs to be.
Maybe I'm wrong -- I look forward to being proved so, having a computer system that satisfies my deepest desires without me having to use any input has only ever happened When I use XP -- It regularly reboots itself (update, crash, whatever) and my boot-loader boots the GNU/Linux partition by default (The computer somehow knew I'd rather be using Linux than MS/Windows).
Perhaps you could use Rhino to create a JS environment with the functionality of Java.awt.Robot, and OpenCV to interpret the screenshots for the AI -- now if only you had an AI to feed the data to....
You are making it a lot more complicated than it has to be. It's not hard already to do certain parts. The problem is it would take a lot of code to do it right. You don't need to use screen shots because we are talking about strings here.
It's not difficult to work with strings and regular expressions. There are a lot of capabilities already. The problem is there isn't a unified framework or backend to make it simple enough that everyone could do it.
And no I haven't decided that this will be MY project, but if nobody sees it as valuable, and I do, then at some point I will write some code and see what can and can't be done. Robots are easy to write, and so are webcrawling robots. Screen shots aren't necessary. It would have to rely on a framework from which applications run on top of.
Python scripting for example can already allow a lot of stuff. The way unix is designed, applications can communicate with each other in that the output of one application can be made into the input for another. If the framework is designed under the methodology that all applications should be able to communicate with each other, then all robots should also be able to communicate with each other. If each robot is sufficiently specialized, you can have fairly complex operations broken down into highly specialized simple tasks.
It's easy to write a bot which bro
Multi-agent AIs are a hobbyist/research endeavor and does not have appeal for the masses (and some would argue) is not proper to be included with an OS. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.
You can use Silk Test, Sikuli, or expect scripts for common tasks, and if you are research inclined then perhaps you should still keep up with the research. There is a fine line between clever and lazy, and people have various degrees of both. If you want to build this, by all means go for it, but don't be surprised if it doesn't become standard.
When they said that there wasn't a Facebook, Google was still somewhat new, there wasn't a twitter, there wasn't a Web 2.0, and people weren't dealing with the amount of information they deal with now. Now it's practical and desirable to be able to search your own desktop like you search Google. Typing in a name to produce a photo, or a movie, or a song, makes sense today while 10 years ago that was considered just for hobbyists, or just a research product, because nobody could possibly have terabytes worth of files to sort, search, organize, and review.
It's 2011. Now we have users who literally have millions of files. We have users who have to multi-task more efficiency. The main reason to have robots would be to increase the multitasking capability of the user so that it can keep up with the hardware capability. We have solid state drives, quad core CPUs, 12 gigs of ram, and ridiculously fast graphics cards.
The times have changed and it's time for Linux to either get ahead of the times and paradigm shift, or always be playing catch up. Agent based AI is already here and already implemented on websites. It's already being used by Google for webcrawling robots and was implemented in Google Wave. The only reason it never caught on was because it's only being implemented on the web.
I think it's exactly the sort of technology which should be implemented on the desktop level. If I want to search 20 search engines all night long because there's thousands of search results from each, just to find a specific type of information, I should be able to define the type of information I'm looking for, and it should spend all night gathering as much information on it as possible. This would be the basic use, it would help with research.
Beyond that there are a million other uses but the only reason you can think of not to do it is because it's too powerful for the desktop? If it's too powerful why move to quad core 64bit CPU's with 12 gigs of ram if you aren't going to put it to use?
Yeah... how many decades have we dreamed about the Star Trek computer or Lt. Cmdr. Data by now? Computers aren't ever going to figure out what you're trying to do and make all the complex decisions themselves.
I never said the computer has to make decisions. I said you tell the computer precisely what to do, and it can follow instructions autonomously. It's not as difficult to code as you make it seem.
The fact of the matter is that to make it to complex things you have to write complex scripts.
I could write some of the scripts myself, so apparently it's not so complex that we (the linux community) wouldn't collectively be able to write them. Provide the right programming environment and most of us would feel right at home writing complex scripts.
And try as people may, we still haven't found anything better than the current programming languages, which most people can't grok.
Python is easy enough for most people to grok. There are plenty of people who know plenty of languages so if you support enough languages you'll have plenty of different scripts which allow the bots to do plenty of different complex activities. Using pipes you can pass information through various parts of the operation system or from one bot to another bot.
Every attempt to "humanize" it has failed because it lacks the precision to be interpreted by a computer and the computer will never realize it's doing nonsense work.
Do you have any clue what you are talking about?
Just to take one example, how's your agent going to know this link, unlike all the other links, is fetching the next results?
You use a sort algorithm, and you use a loop to check for each character in the string that makes up the link, to evaluate the string, you can encode the link via hash, and if I'm missing something there is probably some algorithm somewhere designed specifically to solve this problem. It's just a matter of sorting through a sequence of strings in some cases and in others you can just tell the robot exactly what you are looking for via regular expression, such as to look within the url http://www.slashdot.org/ and search for stories with a specific topic, and then look in those stories and search for posts containing "http://" and then evaluate the strings of the url to fetch only the ones on the topic of artificial intelligence or related. It wouldn't be as difficult as you think to program this as Google and others already have robots that do web crawling.
What about the same article on two different URLs, do we need fuzzy matching? Do you need just the article, and if so do you get it without all the navigation, header, footer and other text since it's just one HTML page? By the time I've narrowed down exactly what it is your agent to do, the "agent" is really a complex script that wasn't really all that valuable to automate anyway. Or you could have it try guessing, but then we're back to an army of Clippys again.
The agent would be as smart as the series of scripts you feed into it. So if you give it fuzzy matching capability, or any other kind of capability you think would be useful to solve your specific problem it would become better suited to solve it. But another idea would be just to train the agent via your own habits, what links do you typically click on within a slashdot article of that type? The robot could then just use your own probability ratios to figure out what you might click in that situation and only fetch those URLs. It would be a matter of setting that specific robot on learning mode and browsing slashdot enough so that it can try and learn about your browsing habits.
This would simplify the process of teaching the artificial intelligence.
It's not hard to make. The CPU performance will be used but CPU's have evolved steadily. Ram? Ram isn't an issue.
They could use any shape they want to project the windows onto. They could project it on a shape with more sides than a cube. They could even wrap windows around a sphere.
The fact is we need more screen realestate and 3d is one way of getting it.
Thats actually not a bad idea. You could fit roughly 3 times the information (I hope my math is correct?) in the same space if you move from squares to cubes.
So I mentioned this in my previous post and I recognize some people don't know why or don't understand why this would be useful. So I'll give some examples of what agent based AI can do for those who don't know and how it could be implemented.
To implement multi-agent based AI on linux first there would need to be a backend or a framework of some sort that would allow scripting languages such as python, ruby, and perl to connect to it. The framework or backend would have to be written in C for certain intense data processing tasks. The front end should allow programmers of all sort to write their own scripts in their favorite scripting languages to create robots. These robots should have the ability to automate system processes.
For example I decide I need to do research on artificial intelligence because I don't know what it is, so I should be able to tell the robot to search Google, to find X amount of articles on artificial intelligence which meet certain criteria. This could be done using regular expressions. But of course this isn't all that I need to do. I have a to-do list for this specific robot related to the topic of AI, to download certain files from the net and install them, to then load up and use certain files to process certain data. All of this should be automated completely and should happen in the backround and it all should be related to the topic of AI.
The news robot on the other hand I would program to act as an RSS feed, this robot would look not just at specific websites such as slashdot, but for specific articles on slashdot and present those articles along with research on certain keywords or buzzwords it thinks or suspects I know little about or wont understand.
The log analyzer robot could analyze logs for me and highlight any potential redflags, and then if it finds them run through an automated process that I determine is best for dealing with these redflags.
Each robot would be assigned to a task. Each robot should have the ability to do what the user could do, and it should be simple to show the robot or program the robot into doing it a number of very highly complex tasks.
The problem with using computers is most of the stuff we do each day is just routine. Most of us fit into certain patterns. Robots would allow us to save time, we can leave the computer on all day or all night and it will do a number of boring clicks and boring tasks that take up a great deal of time. This saves time and increases productivity.
People who use KDE are typically coming from Windows so the default should look similar. However the good thing about linux is customizability. As long as we can customize it to look however we want most of us will be happy.
Gnome and Ubuntu Unity have removed the linux edge of customizability. It's only a matter of time before I switch from Gnome 2x to KDE 4x. The next big step for Linux would be to take advantage of 3d rendering to improve functionality further. The zoom is something I use on a regular basis. Perhaps being able to flip windows(frames) and being able to write on the back of them would be a useful feature as well. There are plenty of ideas for functional eye candy but I think linux is at the point now where it shouldn't look towards Windows or OSX for new feature ideas, and it shouldn't try to fix an interface which isn't broken, it should just be adding new features and options, new eye candy which increases usability, and new more powerful abilities, such as intelligent agents that a user can program to automate certain tasks such as burning a DVD, searching several search engines to find certain information on certain topics, all of this could benefit from agent based AI.
I suggested this to the linux community years ago and their excuse was there wasn't enough bandwidth. It's 2011. The majority of the country is broadband now. There is enough bandwidth to build an intelligent agent into KDE and if they wont do it then I might just go ahead and do it for them.
(For anyone who doesn't know what an intelligent agent is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-agent_system an agent is a robot, in this case multi-agent is multiple robots which search for and process specific information you tell it to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent )
The agents in a multi-agent system have several important characteristics:[4]
Autonomy: the agents are at least partially autonomous
Local views: no agent has a full global view of the system, or the system is too complex for an agent to make practical use of such knowledge
Decentralization: there is no designated controlling agent (or the system is effectively reduced to a monolithic system)[5]
Typically multi-agent systems research refers to software agents. However, the agents in a multi-agent system could equally well be robots,[6] humans or human teams. A multi-agent system may contain combined human-agent teams.
The US is fascist because it appeals to civic duty in an effort to prevent sensitive information from reaching parties who may use it to inflict death (for example) to US citizens? In other words, appeal, as in 'Please?' Oh, the oppression.
A simple thought experiment: you are a nuclear engineer and are privy to some information not widely known in the literature or on the internet that, in the wrong hands, could cause great harm. Therefore, as an act of prudence, you keep it to yourself/your colleagues. Congratulations, you just 'censored' yourself. A word, like 'nuclear', which causes a Pavlovian response in a large percentage of the population, even on Slashdot.
Civic Duty. Prudence. Not bad ideas. It's the expansion of this idea to absurd lengths that's the real problem.
The wrong hands would be any hands other than yours.
You think the US government wouldn't abuse it? Or any government for that matter?
So unless you as a scientist have agreed to work for the US government how would you determine which hands other than your own are right or wrong?
It is nothing as differentiated as that.
"Snitch" is simply a pejorative term for someone who for whatever reason(s) breaks a social contract regarding secrecy, written or unwritten, that he/she had with other person(s), or that other person(s) thought that they had.
Regardless of the nature of the secret one is disclosing, and to whom it is disclosed to, one is always seen as a "snitch" by the party whose secret(s) are being revealed.
Others might label "the snitch" an informant, an insider, a whistle-blower, an inside source, a concerned citizen, a witness, a patriot, a man of honor and integrity...
Or a hacker, a thief, a spy, a traitor, a criminal, a terrorist, a lowlife who would sell out his/her own mother...
But he/she will always be a snitch to those whose secrets he/she is revealing to the third party.
The term is SO precise and determined you may just as well use "asshole" instead. Or "cunt".
It's simply a bad word for the people you don't like cause they tell on you.
There is a key difference. A snitch is a former member of one group who spills the group secrets (typically for personal gain).
Another more accurate word for a snitch is a sellout. Nobody likes a sellout.
On the other hand if you never were a member of the group you hacked, such as if you are a member of a rival group and you target the enemy group, thats not snitching and theres really no basis from which to make that person out to be a snitch. That could be spying, but its certainly not snitching because you were always the enemy and always loyal to your original group.
Us typically does not include you and me. Us typically only includes those who have security clearance and who work for the feds. Everybody else is them.
You made very insightful points.
The people who have the highest clearances are the least free. But the difference is those people chose to enlist. They chose to give up their freedom. And they are paid handsomely for that decision.
The rest of us who don't work for the government should not be held to secrecy. We aren't a part of the government. It's not our group.
You describe the clan like nature of this group of people precisely. They live in their own world, all their friends typically live in that same completely isolated world, they probably aren't even allowed to have friends outside of their world.
And this would be fine, just so long as they don't try to expect us to follow their rules of their world. Cops are their own group. Feds are their own group. Soldiers are their own group. And civilians are our own group.
Until we see it like that we are always going to be sucked by notions like "civic duty" into doing things against the civic interest but perhaps in the governments interest. And yes there is a huge difference. The war on drugs, and a lot of these wars are entirely in the governments interest. Not in the civilian interest because often the people being locked up, or being turned into informants against each other, are the civilians, while the fed puppet master exploits civilians to win some war or conduct some secret operation that only they know or care about.
And you are right, when they think of their country they are thinking of their isolated sheltered government community where everybody is a veteran, or their parents are veterans, and everyone works for the government in some way, or has a security clearance, and yes they'd be helping their employer so I cannot blame them for taking the stances they take, but for the rest of America they don't benefit us whatsoever.
When people think about the country they think about their own social network. And lets face it most people who believe in civic duty and who are worried about this stuff are government employees from government families.
There are just the same and as many reasons for civilians to be paranoid about leaks.
We don't like it when someone snitches on us and we go to jail. Just like the military doesn't like it when someone within their organization snitches on them.
And the governments are the organization which promotes snitching in general by fostering the us against them, everybody for themselves, sell out your community, your neighborhood, your best friend attitude.
This is the problem. Morals ought not be coded in laws.
The essence of the problem we have now, and the source of our snitch culture, is the fact that law enforcement has made so many
victimless activities illegal, that they now have to find a neverending source of snitches/informants. They have an agenda to turn ordinary civilians into snitches, and then complain about snitching when it affects them.
In essence in order to fight crime, you have to rely on the criminals turning on each other and selling each other out (snitching).
Well now a significant amount of our population has made a lifestyle out of selling people out, now it's a career.
And when those snitches are turned on the government, and they start revealing human rights abuses and crimes committed by the members of the government and their social network, then they want to stop snitching?
I'm not into the whole moral argument. I just don't care about that. I do think we should be concerned about torture, genocide, slavery, human rights abuses. I don't think we should be concerned about what civilians do with other civilians even when its illegal.
Not even the whistleblower, I mean, snitch, I mean, leaker who leaks the secrets of the enemy.
No one likes a snitch.
Use the snitch, sure. Then make sure you either corrupt him to keep him under control, or get rid of him before he snitches on you.
Not that this is a new thing.
Of course, the only way to lose to this kind of government is to give up and fail to do your civic duty. So I disagree with you there, too.
First there are differences between leaker, snitch, whistleblower. The difference is subjective not objective, and it's determined by who is affected by the leak. If the leak benefits me, thats not a snitch, that's a hero. If the leak hurts me, thats a snitch and nobody likes a snitch. If the leak benefits my group, thats still not a snitch.
So basically in order for someone to be a snitch they have to be within your group, and they have to sell out the group. According to the US Military Bradley Manning is a snitch because he leaked in a way which made fellow soldiers look bad. But to civilians Bradley Manning is not going to be a snitch, but a leaker, or whistleblower. And to Bradley Mannings group that he is loyal to, if he has one, he is a hero.
So basically if your informant gives you the secrets of your enemy, thats a spy not a snitch. If your informant however turns around and gives your secrets to the enemy, thats a snitch. It has to do with the social network and social relation between the individuals involved. Two criminals who commit a crime together or who both benefit from a crime, if one reports on the other, the defector is a snitch. This is not the same thing as if they are sworn enemies fighting each other and they spy on each other. The difference being that spies can have loyalty to their group or their side and be acting out of absolute loyalty, while the snitch does not have loyalty to any side.
What the governments see us all as, is potential informants, snitches, terrorist, or something in between. Governments do not promote loyalty, and promote snitching to begin with, but when it finally starts to negatively affect them and their interests then they want to push civic duties onto us. It's real simple, the government wants useful idiots who they can manipulate into taking on responsibilities without being paid to do it. So now security researchers cannot release the details of their exploit to the media and take credit because they fear they could be labeled a snitch by the government?
Only that is not snitching because they weren't told government secrets. They don't work for the government. They don't have to be loyal to an entity they never swore an oath to. This is not a complicated case such as with Bradley Manning where we don't know what he knew or didn't know so we cannot know who is right between him and the government. This is civilians, people like you and me, and it is clear I'm on the side of civilians.
This means while I would not release information which would hurt civilians, I don't have some sort of civic duty to protect the feds who don't act like or consider themselves to be civilians. They are their own group, they act like their own group, and would certainly exploit me given the opportunity.
Use the snitch, sure. Then make sure you either corrupt him to keep him under control, or get rid of him before he snitches on you.
This is common sense. But which group is the group making the most use of snitches? The government. And which group complains the most about leakers/snitches? The government. So why would I have sympathy if they are complaining about a culture they helped to create? And why should I believe in the concept of civic duty? My civic duty if I choose to believe in such a concept is to civilians, not drug warriors, not cops, not soldiers, but civilians, because I'm a civilian.
This means when certain stuff gets leaked to the media that details about how governments are abusing civilians, I'm going to side with civil
One governments snitch is another governments hero.
But as civilians, we are usually caught in the middle of these snitch wars or whatever you want to call them.
Now of course it's not snitching if it's detailing human rights abuses against civilians. That is not snitching.
It's snitching when the leak destroys civilian lives. An example would be if some rogue hacker decided to hack top secret FBI files and leak a bunch of files on a bunch of people to the media. That is snitching.
It doesn't matter whats in those files. It's snitching. It's also snitching if the names of informants are leaked, that too is snitching. If you know who is or isn't an informant, and you leak that, their lives are put directly at risk. Even if you don't particularly like informants, it's probably not wise to leak that kind of information.
Anonymous leaked Hal Turner's status as being an FBI informant. That is the perfect example of snitching on a snitch. It's still snitching if you do that. For people who don't believe it happened just Google Hal Turner and Anonymous.
Leaking is snitching. Or, I should say, snitching is leaking.
Snitching is only bad when we have something to hide.
Getting rid of everything we have to hide scares most people. Or, at least, scares most of the people who spend the most time talking.
The silent majority knows about the secrets and do what they can to mitigate without making much fuss of it. At least, until somebody decides to make an example of them by saying how wonderful whistleblower X or Y was.
But it's impossible to get rid of some things. Since everyone has secrets, from medical history, to sexual history, to that project you are working on that you don't want stolen before you can patent it, everybody has secrets. Of course governments have secrets too, the problem is governments don't expect or allow individuals to have secrets. Governments all around the world know everything about each one of us, and we know virtually nothing about them or what their true agenda is.
So we know and understand privacy has to exist to keep our own secrets safe that governments possess. These could be nude photographs from a body scanner, it could be surveillance records, photos, videos, or it could just be some obscure law we broke or are breaking. The simple fact is everyone has a record of doing immoral things, and governments have enough secrets about each person that any one of us could be made to look like a monster.
If you look back to COINTELPRO in the USA the FBI had secrets on virtually everybody in little FBI files locked away. Do we want "anonymous" or some leaker to leak these sorts of files to the media? Hell no of course not. So yes it does matter when it comes to whether it's leaking or snitching. When it's information being leaked about us, that hurts us, it's snitching, and when it's not hurting anybody in specific then its leaking.
Snitching can ruin lives, destroy marriage, get people killed. Leaking has minimal impact on peoples lives. Snitching would be releasing the names of all the informants in the USA. As this would put their lives at risk and probably get them all killed. Leaking would be releasing information about the COINTELPRO program itself and details on parts of it which violate human rights.
Some leaks are news worthy, and some leaks are just outright snitching, and the only way to determine which it is, is by subjective measure. Does it put civilian lives at risk? If it does then it's snitching because it hurts the people. On the other hand if it puts troops at risk, it might not be snitching unless you are a troop / fed putting troops at risk. And if it's neither of these and no ones life is going to be destroyed or at risk, then it's leaking.
Whistleblowing usually details a human rights violation. Either way the idea in this article is that civilians like Bruce Schneier should accept extra responsibility. I don't think Bruce or civilian owes the government a damn thing. I do believe as civilians that we should not snitch on other civilians, we should not for example leak the names of informants or release peoples FBI or other files to the media. We should not attack other civilians but thats my personal belief as a civilian and not all civilians follow that.
It's a war, it's a war for control of global resources and it's a covert war.
Or do you think all the world leaders sit together in a room and decide who gets what with talk?
We are always at war, which side are you on?
Basically governments exist only for war and so they are always at war even during peacetime operations.
That includes the USA. They all hate leakers and all love informants who leak to them.
And this attitude of loose lips sink ships is fine if we are let in on whats going on.
But since they don't tell us shit, if we discover on our own why would we be expected to keep it to ourselves and keep it secret?
Loose Lips Sink Ships applies to soldiers, or people who work for the government who have access to secrets.
It does not apply to graduate students, security researchers, bloggers, and ordinary people.
If we are going to apply it to ordinary people, then ordinary people should be given security clearance.
Yeah thats BS.
People on the right are just as disloyal to me as people on the left.
It's not just the US government. All governments act the same way and promote secrecy among their employees but don't want citizens to have any secrets and promote informing and transparency among civilians. So basically this is a matter of the military and
other law enforcement factions wanting to keep secrets, which they can use, but they don't want any of us to be able to keep secrets from them because they have to enforce the law and protect themselves from us (the terrorist civilians).
So why would we want to help keep their secrets? Whats in it for you or me to not discuss something when we don't work for them?
To put it more basic, whats in it for you or me to work with the government if the government isn't paying us to do it?
And if the government is willing to pay people then they can just pay for a clearance and do it properly. This looks like they want to have the
benefits of a security clearance without actually paying for it. So for example government employees cannot discuss wikileaks, or government secrets, but we aren't government employees. We didn't take an oath, and we don't have a security clearance to protect, so what right does the government have to censor our speech?
It's like if Microsoft or Sony were to try to enforce an NDA on users of the software rather than on developers. the user shouldn't be subjected
to an NDA but the developers are getting paid by Microsoft and Sony and signed the NDA, they can be subjected to it.
Basically this is like Microsoft and Sony deciding they don't want to bother with making people sign NDA's, people are just supposed to culturally embrace the NDA like some sort of mafia omerta. Honestly it's a fatuous idea but I suspect they will try to implement it.
Whether we are talking about the mafia with omerta, or a terrorist cell, or a full fledged government, they all rely on secrecy to maintain power.
And they all hate snitches, traitors, leakers, informers or whatever they choose to call the person who tells the secrets.
So it's nothing new. On the other hand opposing groups see the snitches, traitors, leakers, informers as heroes. Why? Because by revealing secrets and leaking, it protects lives on the opposing side, but keeping secrets protects lives on your governments side, and depending on which side you are on you will care about secrecy or not. It's completely subjective and determined more by what side you see yourself on.
This stigma of secret might work on people who swore an oath to keep secrets. These people probably do feel responsible. On the other hand ordinary civilians have no reason to give a shit or choose a side. They'll choose whichever side pays them at the time, which is all sides, or they might choose no side, or they might choose one side or another based on ideology, but they have no responsibiliy or reason to choose the US governments side.
Civic duty will not work. It's like expecting people to conduct business in a way which promotes the nation. That isn't going to happen. People aren't going to care and I highly doubt any of these people are going to give a damn what the government says unless they work for the government and their paycheck is determined by their ability to keep government secrets. (Such as if they have a clearance)
Snitching = bad. Right?
It's not hard to stigmatize snitching. It's already universally recognized as bad by everybody who doesn't work for government and who isn't a cop. And the cops only think it's good when the snitches are working for them. So basically governments don't like being snitched on, but so what? Governments are the ones funding the informants and snitching by offering prizes in cash to the biggest leaker/informant/snitch.
And governments don't have a problem trying to use morality to convince people it's right to leak when it's to them. Suddenly it's your civic duty to help the FBI solve it's crimes, or to turn on your friend to help law enforcement, but if it's the other way around and someone within the FBI reports crimes going on to the media, suddenly it's snitching again.
It's the blue code of silence. So we have to decide whether or not leaking = snitching.
If leaking != snitching, then why would leaking be wrong? Why should any of us care about government agendas if we don't work for them?
Why should Bruce or Bob or Alice care about the governments private agenda? We don't know about it, so we don't have any responsibility. Also we haven't taken an oath. And finally, it's a matter of does the government care about the agenda of individuals when they are out to make arrests or conduct whatever operations? I highly doubt they would.
So lets have the debate. How much leaking is too much? When does leaking become snitching? And what are the effects of a leak or snitch culture vs a culture of secrecy? It's not like these questions have been fully discussed. So lets ask them.