It's the size of a small planet. Actually... it IS a small planet. It's not like we are pissing into a kiddie pool here, or disrupting a delicate piece of clockwork.
Doing more than making some scratches on the surface and just under it is unlikely to be within our capabilities for the foreseeable future.
Oddly enough, when we're talking about aliens, they're more likely to know we were there by our trash on the Moon, than they would by us maintaining a nice pristine, clean moon.
Humans: "Don't shoot alien overlord! We are an advanced civilization too!"
Alien: "Uh, I really don't see that. Prove it."
Human: "We have gone to the Moon!"
Alien: "Bullshit. There's *nothing* there I could find"
Human: "Well there's a flag and some landers and a buggy or two. We tried to keep the place tidy".
Alien: "Your moon is the size of what you primates call a 'dwarf planet'. I'm not going looking for one flag on a planet, the very thought is ridiculous. You must think I am stupid. Prepare to die."
That's right. Pen testers *could* have all those skills, and perhaps you want to hire that level of professional if you need solid gold security, but those people are usually researching new threats, not taking their time setting up testing for a stream of customers.
Most pen testers are there to fulfill pen test requirements in standards like PCI where something like Metasploit would be a sufficient "best effort", and actually pretty decent if you have someone who really knows how to use it. Companies aren't expecting to be 100% secure against the latest custom threat, they just don't want to be taken down by exploits that everyone already knows about where you could legitimately hold the company responsible for not doing due diligence.
Let's face it, we all know that if an intelligence agency, or some very, very good cracker is attacking you with custom code against stuff they discovered through long research or genius level skills, they're going to get in if there is any hole at all. And there almost always is. It's just that those sorts of people don't attack your run of the mill organization. The money in cracking systems is in volume, so unless you are a very, very special snowflake or very, very unlucky, you just accept the risk of the elite cracker and close the many, many vulnerabilities that we do know about. That keeps out the kiddies and the petty criminals, which is your pool of most likely attackers.
Yeah, except you're not going to opt out. Not really. Oh sure, you might opt out of Google or some specific company for some specific purpose, but you're still going to opt-in everywhere else and they're all collecting your data.
You're more likely to be hit with annoyances like targeted sales calls or social engineering from random non-governmental actors than you ever will be by something like the NSA. The NSA doesn't care about you, it doesn't care about me. Not unless you fit a profile, and that profile isn't going to be "person who doesn't like the US government", because that covers 99.9999% of the non-comatose US population at one point or another.
Cameras? Who needs cameras when you have Edward Snowden?
Privacy is a problem even for the NSA. It just doesn't manifest in the same way for agencies as it does for people.
If you can take a relatively idealistic employee of an agency and have them be willing to flee the country for nothing other than principle? I'd say that is an issue.
Some people are going to be more effective at protecting themselves than others, but if the NSA can't keep its secrets, just about anyone is vulnerable.
Although I am not as certain as you are, I agree that the NSA could use that power nefariously. I just think the outrage is missing the point. We're piling our dislike on one agency, while calmly ignoring the threat of the whole.
I'm not defending the NSA. Far from it. I just want to clarify that I feel that the NSA is merely on the bleeding edge of that sort of abuse. We could throw every NSA staffer in jail and shut down all its functions, and all we've done is put a finger in an increasingly unstable dyke because we're not addressing the actual problem, just the symptom.
The problem is simply that all of that information is there, whether it is the NSA or the FSB or Google that has it. The NSA isn't some shadowy organization using alien technology hundreds of years ahead of us, it's just slightly ahead of the curve. Until you address that, you're just going to play whack-a-mole with whatever agency decides to overstep its bounds next Tuesday.
A charter is a piece of paper to those who have power and know how to get around it.
We're effectively assuming that we can trust some government bureaucrats in a government but not others. What makes the IRS more trustworthy? We have some evidence that at least some of them are not. Do we wait until they've more fully broken our trust before we question their desire to accumulate more and more information?
Candidly, I am not entirely sure I see the difference between what the NSA is collecting, and what we actually give the government every day of our own volition. In the end, I think it is only because we see value in one and not the other. And that's fine, if that is the trade off, but in the end, my original point is simply that the NSA isn't killing privacy, privacy is a false construct outside of the shadows that are increasingly becoming flood lit. I think the sooner we accept that, the sooner we understand how to deal with the implications of it.
You can define your iPhone or Google searches as sancrosanct because you fear the government can use it against you, but that ignores the fact that increased centralization and expansion of government services can create the same information gathering effect without the NSA's involvement.
And neither can the NSA. Technically. Unlike the CIA, the NSA is a signals intelligence organization with no enforcement power and no operational branch to speak of. It's threat is simply that it can provide information very efficiently.
In reality, any government organization has the capability to get you arrested, even the fire department, based on either an interesting interpretation of their powers, or their ability to turn over information to someone who can arrest or otherwise harm you.
I'd also point out that in a certain book, the "firemen" were those who entered areas to burn that which threatened the existing order. The parallel is intentional. The government is what its powers are and how they use them. Labeling something as "fire department" or "police" or "signals intelligence" or "health care" is only valid in the sense that the government maintains that separation or can somehow be forced to do so.
The problem with the NSA is *not* that they collect intelligence on US citizens. Your internet provider accidentally does that every day for troubleshooting purposes. It is that we fear that the NSA can turn into an organization bereft of limitations on what they can *use* the information for and who they can share that information with. The ability to get away with that can affect any agency of the Federal government, from DHS to HHS.
I disagree with your assessment of the comparative threat. All of those things are interesting, to be sure, but were never actually *private*, as in privileged or personal. There was just never a particularly easy to put that information together, but for the most part, none of that is actually personal.
Heath care information is actually personal, and includes a lot of details, including payment details, specific and possibly embarrassing health conditions, and a lot of other things you'd have no other way of obtaining except through attacking straight through doctor patient confidentiality. You don't need much imagination to understand how that is very, very useful information. Not least because it has been harder to come by.
Any old internet provider could choose to give up your data at any time, and they have with relatively minimal fight in many cases. Cracking a more closely held sort of data than that is something that would be an innovation.
The NSA is no more the enemy than the IRS or any other government agency that will keep information on us. Used with the best possible intentions, the NSA is no more threatening than the fire department. With the wrong intentions, even the fire department becomes nefarious.
The very act of having an nationalized health care system would put as much personal information in the hands of the US Government any random NSA snoop of Wikipedia or break in on someone's mobile would. Yet, for understandable reasons, no one really complains much about that. Sure there are "privacy laws" and "health care regulations". Like that would stop anyone who had the power and the capabilities.
Privacy is dead. Perhaps it never really existed except as a capability gap between what we do and what could be tracked. It's time we got used to that and acted accordingly.
If the NSA is carrying out a dragnet operation on lookups, it is literally going to bring up millions of people who have looked up these things. Your one lookup would be barely worth the storage space that its taking up in some datacenter.
To even get close to noticed, you need to have significant correlation. The reality is that a wikipedia lookup isn't going to even be close to a membership on a board dedicated to discussing jihadi themes. Look at the people they are arresting. They aren't arresting people who looked things up on wikipedia, they're looking up people who sought out terrorist groups in a purposeful way. Oh yeah, and maybe they looked up something on a web site too.
While they may throw your wikipedia lookups at you in a prosecution, it is never going to be a primary cause for an investigation, let alone a prosecution. You could probably search weapons design, radical political theory, high value targets on wikipedia all day every day and you won't even rate an analyst assigned to you. Sign up on a jihadist board or something a little closer to that, and yes, welcome to the watch list.
I've looked up atomic weapons design on wikipedia fairly often. I could probably find enough knowledge to build a crude one. Knowledge isn't the problem, or Iran and North Korea would already have MIRV'ed ICBMs with fusion weapons in every warhead. You need rare and hazardous materials. You need high explosives. You need high quality and specialized production apparatus. You need the skill to operate said apparatus. You need power and space and environmental controls. Shall I go on?
No one believes you're going to build a nuclear bomb yourself because you look it up on wikipedia. No one believes you're a jihadist because you looked up what jihad is or related incidents. You need to do a bit more than use an encyclopedia.
I suppose I understand the Wikimedia Foundation's reasoning, but I will be so mad if they end up not having enough to actually operate the site itself someday because they decided to get involved in this sort of thing. Money I give to them is to maintain the knowledge and the service behind it. Threatening THAT is more dangerous to me than twenty NSA snooping programs, so I hope and presume that they've planned this appropriately. More to the point, I am not interested in giving to a political program in the guise of operating an encyclopedia.
I don't see the point of making a plane disappear, particularly if no one took any credit for it. It would be a lot of work for no understandable payoff. A terrorist group, for instance, would trumpet about how they crashed the plane. Even if it didn't go exactly according to their plan, they just successfully killed a couple hundred people. Mission accomplished, right? Even if it was a lone wolf, where is the YouTube manifesto?
In this case, the only understandable motive to me for a plot is making Malaysian Airlines look like a bad carrier. As terrorists could care less about that, it implies some sort of business sabotage. Then having a plane go erratic and disappear without a trace would be effective.
And then having a team of "Russian rebels" shoot down a plane of the same airline just a bit later makes more sense. But that would be one hell of a plot if they can infiltrate into a war zone, and get someone to shoot down a plane with a missile. I'd hate to piss off the guy who was able to make both happen. That's state actor/super-villain territory.
Of course, what is possible isn't the same as what is probable. What is most probable is actually a massive system failure causing a loss of communications and navigation and then simply the pilots getting lost while flying without navigation systems. That is consistent with a wrong turn leading out into open ocean and flight until fuel runs out.
True about the "born rich", but I include Daddy and the lawyers that their money buys as a resource. The rich have something like those, or they become middle class (or even in jail) rather quickly. Just take a look at this or that Hollywood star/entertainer who finds themselves shorn of their money and in IRS trouble when they get bad advice.
Simply being rich is not self-perpetuating unless you do the maintenance on it.
And frankly, I partially blame regulation (especially bad, populist regulation) for how bad the rich have gotten. It has put the pressure on them to evolve, sort of like half-assed use of antibiotics causes the resistant strains of infectious microbes to flourish and occupy the niches. I think our attempts to grind out the irresponsible rich have simply caused us to invent a better cockroach while causing collateral damage all around them.
Although I am skeptical about the NSA retaliating without oversight, sending proof to a judge and through bureaucratic channels as you suggest would take hours. Possibly days.
A well planned attack could be over and done within an hour, if they know what to attack. In the worst case, serious damage could be almost immediate if they know exactly what they are attacking and can issue a direct command.
Will anyone will be fast enough to lean on the "fire photon torpedoes" button, even without having to communicate to USSTRATCOM? Probably not.
You pretty much need to write automated retaliation for things like this. That can be dangerous, of course, if someone smart does a false flag attack, which causes the US to launch a full attack on a third party. I'm sure ISIS would love to convince the US that China or Russia are attacking our precious bodily... I mean, infrastructure.
Short of automated retaliation, you air gap the stuff that you can't have go down. Then physical security and slower things may work.
And if you have a closed infrastructure network, you really don't need to worry about annihilating some innocent third party's network. Any node on that network is authorized and agrees to allow themselves to be snooped or shut down without legal battles. And hopefully, it is set up with the understanding that an autoimmune response could be purposely triggered and we prepare for that.
Yeah, but you know the reason for the rules. Populist measures to get the "rich" citizens who live overseas. We're building our own wall, you see. That's why it may become more effective than the Berlin Wall ever was.
That's why I just shake my head at measures like that. Rich people didn't get that way, nor do they stay that way, if they are without resources and/or intelligence. The only way to really target people is by gaining their cooperation, which is surprisingly possible in many scenarios.
Heck, even if you kill them all in a glorious revolution of the 99%, then the 1% of the 99% will take over from where the last 1% left off. After killing 20% of the rest of us in the process.
Actually, that does sound sort of silly on Iceland's part. They want you to prove a negative with a certificate?
Why does it matter if you were married in another country, and why does it matter specifically from the country you were a citizen of? What if you were married to a foreign national in another country? Does that make anything different?
If you were married before, chances are good, the previous "other party" would let Iceland know, assuming that you're running away from something. In that case a self-signed affidavit should be good enough because if you're a bigamist or running away from child support, then you perjured yourself on an official document and invalidated the terms of your marriage license or registration or whatever.
Harm to art or not, flash photography is also annoying. That is another reason for not allowing it in museums where people go to actually appreciate the artwork and would prefer to not be strobe lit all the time.
I agree. Wannabe certainly sounds to me like he was never commissioned or in any way successful. Heinlein wasn't a wannabe naval officer, he *was* a commissioned naval officer.
You could say he was a wannabe captain or admiral, perhaps, but "wannabe" implies he didn't have it in him to be either of those things and there is no evidence that he lacked the ability to have an otherwise long and successful career, especially on the eve of WWII. Being forced out for a legitimate medical reason does not indicate that he was a failed officer in the way that the term implies.
So yeah, not a very good way to put it. "Frustrated" in his attempt to have a full naval career, is what I might say if I actually believed that his frustrations were being acted out in his fiction. Which I don't.
Saddam would have eventually fallen apart, or one of his erratic sons would have. And then you would have potentially worse scenarios. You might even have had a full-on Iranian invasion to support the Shiite majority, causing a union of those two countries. Now that would be worse than ISIS.
Even if Saddam didn't end up out of power, he may have been holding things together, but even brutal dictators like him can't do that forever. Something was going to give.
There is no outcome in the Middle East that is going to go well. Even if the West packed up and left, they'd just start killing each other until the strongest one won. And I'm not sure anyone would like that scenario. Particularly if they decided to start by putting the Israelis under enough pressure that they go "Never again" on the Arabs and start nuking people.
The current start of the ME is bad, but it is nowhere near as bad as it could get.
Other "end of the world" cults have been engaged by military forces and they died just the same.
Their ideology will result in needless death when it comes to taking them down, but letting them continue what they are doing is only adding to the number who will end up dying once someone has to deal with them. Don't be confused. The price they demand will be paid one way or another. You're not going to be able to go in there and arrest them peaceably. It's too late for that, and if we let it go long enough, they will make their war, even if we won't give it to them.
We already sort of do that. All they need to do is either tell everyone that they have bombs in them, or go collecting them in pickup trucks with machine guns. At that point, they'll re-paint them with ISIS logos and "provide" them to themselves or their population.
These guys aren't stupid, they control the ground, and they've been turning our own shit back on us for years. You need to give the regular people some hope that ISIS isn't going to rule them forever and then you may have some uptake. Maybe.
Slashdot Mirror
One question I ask myself whenever I see some new creature is "I wonder how it tastes".
Like chicken.
See how easy that was?
"Nice robe."
It's the size of a small planet. Actually... it IS a small planet. It's not like we are pissing into a kiddie pool here, or disrupting a delicate piece of clockwork.
Doing more than making some scratches on the surface and just under it is unlikely to be within our capabilities for the foreseeable future.
Oddly enough, when we're talking about aliens, they're more likely to know we were there by our trash on the Moon, than they would by us maintaining a nice pristine, clean moon.
Humans: "Don't shoot alien overlord! We are an advanced civilization too!"
Alien: "Uh, I really don't see that. Prove it."
Human: "We have gone to the Moon!"
Alien: "Bullshit. There's *nothing* there I could find"
Human: "Well there's a flag and some landers and a buggy or two. We tried to keep the place tidy".
Alien: "Your moon is the size of what you primates call a 'dwarf planet'. I'm not going looking for one flag on a planet, the very thought is ridiculous. You must think I am stupid. Prepare to die."
The End.
That's right. Pen testers *could* have all those skills, and perhaps you want to hire that level of professional if you need solid gold security, but those people are usually researching new threats, not taking their time setting up testing for a stream of customers.
Most pen testers are there to fulfill pen test requirements in standards like PCI where something like Metasploit would be a sufficient "best effort", and actually pretty decent if you have someone who really knows how to use it. Companies aren't expecting to be 100% secure against the latest custom threat, they just don't want to be taken down by exploits that everyone already knows about where you could legitimately hold the company responsible for not doing due diligence.
Let's face it, we all know that if an intelligence agency, or some very, very good cracker is attacking you with custom code against stuff they discovered through long research or genius level skills, they're going to get in if there is any hole at all. And there almost always is. It's just that those sorts of people don't attack your run of the mill organization. The money in cracking systems is in volume, so unless you are a very, very special snowflake or very, very unlucky, you just accept the risk of the elite cracker and close the many, many vulnerabilities that we do know about. That keeps out the kiddies and the petty criminals, which is your pool of most likely attackers.
Yeah, except you're not going to opt out. Not really. Oh sure, you might opt out of Google or some specific company for some specific purpose, but you're still going to opt-in everywhere else and they're all collecting your data.
You're more likely to be hit with annoyances like targeted sales calls or social engineering from random non-governmental actors than you ever will be by something like the NSA. The NSA doesn't care about you, it doesn't care about me. Not unless you fit a profile, and that profile isn't going to be "person who doesn't like the US government", because that covers 99.9999% of the non-comatose US population at one point or another.
Galactic sprawl at its finest.
Cameras? Who needs cameras when you have Edward Snowden?
Privacy is a problem even for the NSA. It just doesn't manifest in the same way for agencies as it does for people.
If you can take a relatively idealistic employee of an agency and have them be willing to flee the country for nothing other than principle? I'd say that is an issue.
Some people are going to be more effective at protecting themselves than others, but if the NSA can't keep its secrets, just about anyone is vulnerable.
Although I am not as certain as you are, I agree that the NSA could use that power nefariously. I just think the outrage is missing the point. We're piling our dislike on one agency, while calmly ignoring the threat of the whole.
I'm not defending the NSA. Far from it. I just want to clarify that I feel that the NSA is merely on the bleeding edge of that sort of abuse. We could throw every NSA staffer in jail and shut down all its functions, and all we've done is put a finger in an increasingly unstable dyke because we're not addressing the actual problem, just the symptom.
The problem is simply that all of that information is there, whether it is the NSA or the FSB or Google that has it. The NSA isn't some shadowy organization using alien technology hundreds of years ahead of us, it's just slightly ahead of the curve. Until you address that, you're just going to play whack-a-mole with whatever agency decides to overstep its bounds next Tuesday.
A charter is a piece of paper to those who have power and know how to get around it.
We're effectively assuming that we can trust some government bureaucrats in a government but not others. What makes the IRS more trustworthy? We have some evidence that at least some of them are not. Do we wait until they've more fully broken our trust before we question their desire to accumulate more and more information?
Candidly, I am not entirely sure I see the difference between what the NSA is collecting, and what we actually give the government every day of our own volition. In the end, I think it is only because we see value in one and not the other. And that's fine, if that is the trade off, but in the end, my original point is simply that the NSA isn't killing privacy, privacy is a false construct outside of the shadows that are increasingly becoming flood lit. I think the sooner we accept that, the sooner we understand how to deal with the implications of it.
You can define your iPhone or Google searches as sancrosanct because you fear the government can use it against you, but that ignores the fact that increased centralization and expansion of government services can create the same information gathering effect without the NSA's involvement.
And neither can the NSA. Technically. Unlike the CIA, the NSA is a signals intelligence organization with no enforcement power and no operational branch to speak of. It's threat is simply that it can provide information very efficiently.
In reality, any government organization has the capability to get you arrested, even the fire department, based on either an interesting interpretation of their powers, or their ability to turn over information to someone who can arrest or otherwise harm you.
I'd also point out that in a certain book, the "firemen" were those who entered areas to burn that which threatened the existing order. The parallel is intentional. The government is what its powers are and how they use them. Labeling something as "fire department" or "police" or "signals intelligence" or "health care" is only valid in the sense that the government maintains that separation or can somehow be forced to do so.
The problem with the NSA is *not* that they collect intelligence on US citizens. Your internet provider accidentally does that every day for troubleshooting purposes. It is that we fear that the NSA can turn into an organization bereft of limitations on what they can *use* the information for and who they can share that information with. The ability to get away with that can affect any agency of the Federal government, from DHS to HHS.
I disagree with your assessment of the comparative threat. All of those things are interesting, to be sure, but were never actually *private*, as in privileged or personal. There was just never a particularly easy to put that information together, but for the most part, none of that is actually personal.
Heath care information is actually personal, and includes a lot of details, including payment details, specific and possibly embarrassing health conditions, and a lot of other things you'd have no other way of obtaining except through attacking straight through doctor patient confidentiality. You don't need much imagination to understand how that is very, very useful information. Not least because it has been harder to come by.
Any old internet provider could choose to give up your data at any time, and they have with relatively minimal fight in many cases. Cracking a more closely held sort of data than that is something that would be an innovation.
The NSA is no more the enemy than the IRS or any other government agency that will keep information on us. Used with the best possible intentions, the NSA is no more threatening than the fire department. With the wrong intentions, even the fire department becomes nefarious.
The very act of having an nationalized health care system would put as much personal information in the hands of the US Government any random NSA snoop of Wikipedia or break in on someone's mobile would. Yet, for understandable reasons, no one really complains much about that. Sure there are "privacy laws" and "health care regulations". Like that would stop anyone who had the power and the capabilities.
Privacy is dead. Perhaps it never really existed except as a capability gap between what we do and what could be tracked. It's time we got used to that and acted accordingly.
And so what if they do flag you? Or me?
If the NSA is carrying out a dragnet operation on lookups, it is literally going to bring up millions of people who have looked up these things. Your one lookup would be barely worth the storage space that its taking up in some datacenter.
To even get close to noticed, you need to have significant correlation. The reality is that a wikipedia lookup isn't going to even be close to a membership on a board dedicated to discussing jihadi themes. Look at the people they are arresting. They aren't arresting people who looked things up on wikipedia, they're looking up people who sought out terrorist groups in a purposeful way. Oh yeah, and maybe they looked up something on a web site too.
While they may throw your wikipedia lookups at you in a prosecution, it is never going to be a primary cause for an investigation, let alone a prosecution. You could probably search weapons design, radical political theory, high value targets on wikipedia all day every day and you won't even rate an analyst assigned to you. Sign up on a jihadist board or something a little closer to that, and yes, welcome to the watch list.
I've looked up atomic weapons design on wikipedia fairly often. I could probably find enough knowledge to build a crude one. Knowledge isn't the problem, or Iran and North Korea would already have MIRV'ed ICBMs with fusion weapons in every warhead. You need rare and hazardous materials. You need high explosives. You need high quality and specialized production apparatus. You need the skill to operate said apparatus. You need power and space and environmental controls. Shall I go on?
No one believes you're going to build a nuclear bomb yourself because you look it up on wikipedia. No one believes you're a jihadist because you looked up what jihad is or related incidents. You need to do a bit more than use an encyclopedia.
I suppose I understand the Wikimedia Foundation's reasoning, but I will be so mad if they end up not having enough to actually operate the site itself someday because they decided to get involved in this sort of thing. Money I give to them is to maintain the knowledge and the service behind it. Threatening THAT is more dangerous to me than twenty NSA snooping programs, so I hope and presume that they've planned this appropriately. More to the point, I am not interested in giving to a political program in the guise of operating an encyclopedia.
I don't see the point of making a plane disappear, particularly if no one took any credit for it. It would be a lot of work for no understandable payoff. A terrorist group, for instance, would trumpet about how they crashed the plane. Even if it didn't go exactly according to their plan, they just successfully killed a couple hundred people. Mission accomplished, right? Even if it was a lone wolf, where is the YouTube manifesto?
In this case, the only understandable motive to me for a plot is making Malaysian Airlines look like a bad carrier. As terrorists could care less about that, it implies some sort of business sabotage. Then having a plane go erratic and disappear without a trace would be effective.
And then having a team of "Russian rebels" shoot down a plane of the same airline just a bit later makes more sense. But that would be one hell of a plot if they can infiltrate into a war zone, and get someone to shoot down a plane with a missile. I'd hate to piss off the guy who was able to make both happen. That's state actor/super-villain territory.
Of course, what is possible isn't the same as what is probable. What is most probable is actually a massive system failure causing a loss of communications and navigation and then simply the pilots getting lost while flying without navigation systems. That is consistent with a wrong turn leading out into open ocean and flight until fuel runs out.
True about the "born rich", but I include Daddy and the lawyers that their money buys as a resource. The rich have something like those, or they become middle class (or even in jail) rather quickly. Just take a look at this or that Hollywood star/entertainer who finds themselves shorn of their money and in IRS trouble when they get bad advice.
Simply being rich is not self-perpetuating unless you do the maintenance on it.
And frankly, I partially blame regulation (especially bad, populist regulation) for how bad the rich have gotten. It has put the pressure on them to evolve, sort of like half-assed use of antibiotics causes the resistant strains of infectious microbes to flourish and occupy the niches. I think our attempts to grind out the irresponsible rich have simply caused us to invent a better cockroach while causing collateral damage all around them.
Although I am skeptical about the NSA retaliating without oversight, sending proof to a judge and through bureaucratic channels as you suggest would take hours. Possibly days.
A well planned attack could be over and done within an hour, if they know what to attack. In the worst case, serious damage could be almost immediate if they know exactly what they are attacking and can issue a direct command.
Will anyone will be fast enough to lean on the "fire photon torpedoes" button, even without having to communicate to USSTRATCOM? Probably not.
You pretty much need to write automated retaliation for things like this. That can be dangerous, of course, if someone smart does a false flag attack, which causes the US to launch a full attack on a third party. I'm sure ISIS would love to convince the US that China or Russia are attacking our precious bodily... I mean, infrastructure.
Short of automated retaliation, you air gap the stuff that you can't have go down. Then physical security and slower things may work.
And if you have a closed infrastructure network, you really don't need to worry about annihilating some innocent third party's network. Any node on that network is authorized and agrees to allow themselves to be snooped or shut down without legal battles. And hopefully, it is set up with the understanding that an autoimmune response could be purposely triggered and we prepare for that.
Solar death panels.
Yeah, but you know the reason for the rules. Populist measures to get the "rich" citizens who live overseas. We're building our own wall, you see. That's why it may become more effective than the Berlin Wall ever was.
That's why I just shake my head at measures like that. Rich people didn't get that way, nor do they stay that way, if they are without resources and/or intelligence. The only way to really target people is by gaining their cooperation, which is surprisingly possible in many scenarios.
Heck, even if you kill them all in a glorious revolution of the 99%, then the 1% of the 99% will take over from where the last 1% left off. After killing 20% of the rest of us in the process.
Actually, that does sound sort of silly on Iceland's part. They want you to prove a negative with a certificate?
Why does it matter if you were married in another country, and why does it matter specifically from the country you were a citizen of? What if you were married to a foreign national in another country? Does that make anything different?
If you were married before, chances are good, the previous "other party" would let Iceland know, assuming that you're running away from something. In that case a self-signed affidavit should be good enough because if you're a bigamist or running away from child support, then you perjured yourself on an official document and invalidated the terms of your marriage license or registration or whatever.
Harm to art or not, flash photography is also annoying. That is another reason for not allowing it in museums where people go to actually appreciate the artwork and would prefer to not be strobe lit all the time.
I agree. Wannabe certainly sounds to me like he was never commissioned or in any way successful. Heinlein wasn't a wannabe naval officer, he *was* a commissioned naval officer.
You could say he was a wannabe captain or admiral, perhaps, but "wannabe" implies he didn't have it in him to be either of those things and there is no evidence that he lacked the ability to have an otherwise long and successful career, especially on the eve of WWII. Being forced out for a legitimate medical reason does not indicate that he was a failed officer in the way that the term implies.
So yeah, not a very good way to put it. "Frustrated" in his attempt to have a full naval career, is what I might say if I actually believed that his frustrations were being acted out in his fiction. Which I don't.
Saddam would have eventually fallen apart, or one of his erratic sons would have. And then you would have potentially worse scenarios. You might even have had a full-on Iranian invasion to support the Shiite majority, causing a union of those two countries. Now that would be worse than ISIS.
Even if Saddam didn't end up out of power, he may have been holding things together, but even brutal dictators like him can't do that forever. Something was going to give.
There is no outcome in the Middle East that is going to go well. Even if the West packed up and left, they'd just start killing each other until the strongest one won. And I'm not sure anyone would like that scenario. Particularly if they decided to start by putting the Israelis under enough pressure that they go "Never again" on the Arabs and start nuking people.
The current start of the ME is bad, but it is nowhere near as bad as it could get.
Other "end of the world" cults have been engaged by military forces and they died just the same.
Their ideology will result in needless death when it comes to taking them down, but letting them continue what they are doing is only adding to the number who will end up dying once someone has to deal with them. Don't be confused. The price they demand will be paid one way or another. You're not going to be able to go in there and arrest them peaceably. It's too late for that, and if we let it go long enough, they will make their war, even if we won't give it to them.
We already sort of do that. All they need to do is either tell everyone that they have bombs in them, or go collecting them in pickup trucks with machine guns. At that point, they'll re-paint them with ISIS logos and "provide" them to themselves or their population.
These guys aren't stupid, they control the ground, and they've been turning our own shit back on us for years. You need to give the regular people some hope that ISIS isn't going to rule them forever and then you may have some uptake. Maybe.