That is a different problem and not a fair comparison. The wave in an aquarium is being stimulated at the natural resonant frequency. If you slosh the water in a tank without the wave device, it will go back and forth at its natural frequency losing a little bit of energy with each slosh. In much the same way that you can maintain the swinging of a heavy pendulum with very little energy, the wave thingy you reference is energizing the wave at the natural frequency of the tank. If you were to try to make waves at 70% or 124% of the natural frequency, I think it would take MUCH more energy.
You can't reasonably expect the ocean to rock the boat at the resonant frequency of the internal water tanks. Therefore the ship's internal wave system is going be expending a considerable amount of energy. Ships weigh tons. To counteract the rolling motion of a several ton ship, you are going to have to move several tons of water several times per minute.
The system pushes water from side to side using compressed air to counteract rolling from ocean waves. Granted this is for use in drilling rigs (read big money), but I wonder how much power is required to run the air compressors. The compressors have to be high flow to rapidly move a lot of water, albeit at relatively low pressures-- only 4.4 psi required to generate 10ft difference in seawater (this does not take into account viscosity and inertia).
The ETag method is a clever solution to cookieless tracking. I find this method I stumbled upon a couple of weeks ago a bit startling. I had no idea the amount of information routinely sent from my browser/computer to web servers-- information about plug-ins, time zone, screen resolution, accepted headers, etc WITHOUT letting me know. It is enough to give more than 21 bits of identifying information and uniquely identifies me among the 3M visits.
During the era of Cultuurstelsel (1830—1870), the Dutch prohibited the native farmers and plantation workers from picking coffee fruits for their own use. Still, the native farmers wanted to have a taste of the famed coffee beverage. Soon, the natives learned that certain species of musang or luwak (Asian Palm Civet) consumed the coffee fruits, yet they left the coffee seeds undigested in their droppings. The natives collected these luwaks' coffee seed droppings, then cleaned, roasted and ground them to make their own coffee beverage.[9] The fame of aromatic civet coffee spread from locals to Dutch plantation owners and soon became their favorite, yet because of its rarity and unusual process, the civet coffee was expensive even in colonial times.
On my MacBook, 10 screws to get the bottom shell off then two more to get the drive out. Regardless, your point is irrelevant. The government officials had the Guardian reps take the computer apart, presumably using screwdrivers. The circuit boards were removed and then an angle grinder was used to grind off the chips. You can see pictures of the end result here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london
Taking out the circuit boards from a laptop takes a lot longer than taking out a hard drive-- even in a MacBook. Can you come up with a _rational_ explanation why they would need to grind down the circuit boards? Secret information on the firmware EEPROM? Hand written notes under the chips? Any way you slice it, their actions seem petty and irrational.
I think you are confusing Apple laptops (Macbook (pro, air, etc)) with their tablets (iPad). Look on ifixit.com and you can see that all the MacBooks have screws which can be turned with the appropriate tools to open up their insides.
Are you asking about the movie or about Greenwald's computer? In real life, it was the hard drives that were decimated. Welcome to the real world.
Did you read the summary or the referenced article? Both make reference to "sweeping up the remains of a MacBook Pro." If they had destroyed only the hard drive(s), it would be unusual to refer to the remains of a hard drive as the "remains of a MacBook Pro." Don't you think? Perhaps taking some journalistic license to make it more interesting perhaps? Maybe.
I would like to think that the government officials are rational beings exercising their powers rationally but their actions make this a dubious assumption. Yes, this is the real world we live in. What point was there to physically destroying the drives when the information on them had already been copied? Does this sound rational? Perhaps that is why I had an easy time believing they would be capable of destroying the entire computer.
Did they really destroy a functional computer to destroy the drive? Could they not have removed the hard drive and destroyed just those parts that have any persistent data retention? Even including the optical drive would have been overkill-- eject the disk. What was the purpose of destroying perfectly good hardware? Just to be sure? Why not steam roller the remains and then incinerate them in an induction furnace? Where they worried about a secret compartment? Notes scribbled on the inside? What a bunch of clowns.
I think that early detection always saves at least some lives.
Another important consideration is at what cost? For example, you get a positive screening test. To get final detection, you need to undergo an invasive biopsy (such as a needle inserted into your anus for a prostate biopsy). If the biopsy shows cancer, you might get surgery to get it taken out. Surgical complications, including death. Hospital acquired infections, blood clots, etc. For prostate surgery, a significant risk of incontinence and impotence. So take 100 men with prostate cancer, couple have significant bleeds during biopsy, a couple die during surgery (these are usually older men with other health problems), a few pneumonias, a third leak urine, half have problems getting it up any more. Perhaps the surgery is only 30% effective at eradicating cancer even at the earlier stage. You have now actively killed a few people to save some in the future. Some you put through invasive procedures and surgery without improving their overall prognosis. Given that lead-time bias, these improvements can be very difficult to find-- you can no longer use historical controls because historical controls were not diagnosed the same way-- you therefore need to use a randomized trial.
The math may or may not work out depending on how good the screening tests are, how invasive the confirmatory tests are, how dangerous the surgery is, how EFFECTIVE is the surgery at preventing cancer related deaths, etc. These are the issues that doctors (and those who set public health policy) agonize over. That is why screening recommendations evolve over time.
Butt-raping? Are they forcing a phone on you then raping your account? As far as I know, sales of "over-priced" phones are completely consensual. Buyer's remorse perhaps, but butt-raping implies lack of consent.
I would insert an XKCD joke but can't think of one so here goes:
A woman goes to put her expensive pearl necklace into a safe-deposit box. The attendant admires them but then notices they are fake. When he informs the woman, she replies, "Oh my god, I've been raped!"
That is true with prostate cancer, but not ovarian cancer.
I am leaning toward agreeing with you, but is this a true fact? I would guess this is a correct assumption given low incidence of coincidental ovarian cancers found in autopsy series, but until you actually study this question rigorously, it is still an assumption. Look at what is happening with prostate and breast cancer screening. If you had asked several decades ago, of course early detection would save lives. This is true but not for all types of breast cancer or prostate cancer. Granted ovarian cancer is not subtyped like breast cancers but perhaps there are subtleties that we are not yet aware of because there has been no good screen for early disease.
I completely understand your prioritization of concerns and worries. But I sometimes wonder whether the humans on earth will end like bacteria growing on a Petri dish. You grow bacteria on a plate and at first, things are great-- more resources than bacteria, so no worries and gangbuster (exponential) growth. As the population density increases, competition grows for nutrients so growth starts slowing. Perhaps some bacteria do better than others. Allow me to anthropomorphize the little buggers and lets say they worry about the amount of space they have, how much food they have, how many kids to have, commute time (some bacteria are motile), etc. Meanwhile the finite nutrients and space are disappearing and toxic waste products are building up. The outcome is inevitable-- nutrients and space run out after a couple of days and then the bacteria die.
For eons, life on earth was in a steady state because survival was hard and limited by food and other resources as well as predation. People and organisms had to spend a lot of time and effort to get enough to feed themselves and their offspring. Now you can take $4 to the local 7-11 and buy more calories than are good for you. The population of humans have been growing nearly exponentially for several thousand years. We worry about the daily things in life as you mentioned and this is totally logical. But I wonder if we humans are headed to the same inevitable end as the bacteria. Instead of a Petri dish, we are on earth and instead of playing out over a couple of days, our tragedy takes a couple thousand years.
Thank you for the ballistics calculations. I think that the phone throwing app would register a much lower throw than your calculations predict. Presumably the app measures the time of 0g acceleration. In that case, this would start at the end of boost, ie when the rocket motor burns out and then end when the parachute opens (sudden jolt followed by constant,1g, fall to earth).
Thank you for clearing that up. The misconceptions/ignorance about basic physics displayed in the string/yo-yo comments makes me think that an app graphing accelerometer output (3 axis and/or total) as a function of time would be an eye opening demonstration to quite a few people. Much more useful and educational than a phone throwing app. See what happens when you shake the phone, hang it on a string, spin it on a string. Of course you can throw the phone too-- figuring out how far up it went could be left as an exercise for the thrower.
I would be happy to see nuclear power regulations repealed, so long as those that build and run nuclear power plants are actually accountable for any incidents that occur as a result of preventable actions on their part. This goes to the heart of statism: the protection of corporations. Corporations are an invention of government, allowing them to esacpe culpability when their interests at risk. If I run a power plant, and I neglect to have proper safety precautions and something happens, I should be held accountable for those actions.
I don't say this often, or lightly, but this is stupid idea. This is free-market libertarianism taken to the (il)logical extreme. Are you arguing that regulations are never good or necessary? What if someone wants to build a nuclear power plant near a highly populated area? Near a large water source for easy cooling, eg Fukushima? What if they are using a design that has known flaws? Are you still OK as long as those responsible will be "accountable" in the end? What about if they cut corners to recoup their investment sooner? You mention auditing and inspection but what good are these if there are no regulations? Would the inspectors just make strong suggestions? Even with the best intentions, things go wrong-- see what is happening with the San Onofre nuclear plant that is being permanently shut down due to leakage problems. Estimations are that decommissioning will take years and nearly $3B. Whats to keep those responsible from cutting corners to make a fast buck and when things go south, declaring bankruptcy and just walking away? Do you honestly think a strong sense of personal/corporate responsibility will help in this situation? Wouldn't it be nice if the nuclear power plant operators were required to have a fund that would be used when a plant closes so that the responsible parties can't just walk away? Fortunately, the operators of San Onofre do have $2.7B in a decommissioning fund-- because of regulations.
Sometimes it is OK to have a lot of experiments to find out what works best-- I think having a lot of smaller financial institutions is preferable to having a few "too big to fail" ones. With regard to nuclear power plants, are you going to let people/corporations do 100s of experiments to find out what works best? Some failures leading in meltdown causing Chernobyl type contamination zones? No. Sometimes regulations are a good thing.
OK. I was not aware of the threats/SWATings that have occurred already. Perhaps more than the names could be redacted so that peoples identities could not be found out with bing (or another search engine). Regardless, if the people making these threats (which I don't condone by the way), then the identities of people involved are already known by at least some people.
I think that allowing the release of the Secret Service file with go a LONG way toward making amends for any wrongdoing, perceived or real. Perhaps it might satisfy some angry people enough so that they stop making threats. Blocking the FOIA request after it had been approved for release gives the appearance of something really bad being hidden from view. If MITs real reason for blocking the FOIA request is staff safety, I think a properly redacted folder could do a world of good.
It could easily be the name of the secretary that processed the relevant paperwork. The main legitimate reason to deny a FOIA request is if the documents make reference to someone who is still alive who might face danger or harassment if their name is released.
Try RTA. The names of third parties would have been redacted as SOP for FOIA releases. Try again?
Forget the masturbatory self-congratulation that is this report. They almost certainly have something to hide. A reporter at Wired submitted a FOIA request for Aaron's Secret Service file. A judge OKed the release of the file but then MIT intervened to block the release!
Supposedly, it is _extremely_ rare for non-governmental entities to block FOIA requests. There must be something in there that MIT doesn't want to see the light of day.
If I were in the NSA's shoes, I'd be panicking right now.
I wish shared your optimism. I hope that people will continue to demand answers AND changes about this but I worry America will go onto the next story if a few days or at most a few short weeks. I worry that the NSA will continue business as usual after a slap on the wrist.
I wonder why it is that background checks for gun buyers is reviled by the Republicans but wholesale datamining on all Americans is fine.
Agreed. I think the apologist argument about "people who do nothing wrong have nothing to hide" needs to be applied to government and corporations first and foremost. The fact that the government kept this secret is tacit admission that they knew what they were doing was wrong or at best questionable. With precious few exceptions our government should be open and transparent. Their argument about how this program needs to be kept secret for it to work is not plausible. Do dangerous terrorists not already go under the assumption that they are under surveillance?
Google once said that if you want something private, perhaps you should't be doing it in the first place (paraphrasing here). If Google has in fact cooperated with blanket surveillance, it would be ironic and hypocritical.
I find the number of Americans who don't mind this invasion of privacy amazingly high. Perhaps I should adjust my expectations. So many gun "enthusiasts" are worried about a government database of gun owners. I wonder how many of them are OK with blanket surveillance. Now the government can make a database for anything-- gun owners, church goers, lefties, righties, anyone who who has had an abortion, wants a girlfriend, has a girlfriend, has two girlfriends, two girlfriends and a wife... You name it, the government can make a list.
I think you would be hard pressed to come up with a government power that has not or will not be abused. This "total information awareness" carries the risk of even more abuse. If the government wants to quiet a dissident, what embarrassing information can they find out about him/her. What about family members? The governments ability to suppress dissent will become even greater-- imagine a world where the government "reminds" you the consequences of not toeing the line. America can become that.
What happened to the country where men would say "Give me liberty or give me death!" or "I'd rather die on my feet than live upon my knees" (OK he was actually Mexican but same sentiment).
Slashdot Mirror
That is a different problem and not a fair comparison. The wave in an aquarium is being stimulated at the natural resonant frequency. If you slosh the water in a tank without the wave device, it will go back and forth at its natural frequency losing a little bit of energy with each slosh. In much the same way that you can maintain the swinging of a heavy pendulum with very little energy, the wave thingy you reference is energizing the wave at the natural frequency of the tank. If you were to try to make waves at 70% or 124% of the natural frequency, I think it would take MUCH more energy.
You can't reasonably expect the ocean to rock the boat at the resonant frequency of the internal water tanks. Therefore the ship's internal wave system is going be expending a considerable amount of energy. Ships weigh tons. To counteract the rolling motion of a several ton ship, you are going to have to move several tons of water several times per minute.
The system pushes water from side to side using compressed air to counteract rolling from ocean waves. Granted this is for use in drilling rigs (read big money), but I wonder how much power is required to run the air compressors. The compressors have to be high flow to rapidly move a lot of water, albeit at relatively low pressures-- only 4.4 psi required to generate 10ft difference in seawater (this does not take into account viscosity and inertia).
Reminded me of this article a couple years back:
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/09/29/1622250/las-vegas-hotel-vdara-an-accidental-death-ray
The ETag method is a clever solution to cookieless tracking. I find this method I stumbled upon a couple of weeks ago a bit startling. I had no idea the amount of information routinely sent from my browser/computer to web servers-- information about plug-ins, time zone, screen resolution, accepted headers, etc WITHOUT letting me know. It is enough to give more than 21 bits of identifying information and uniquely identifies me among the 3M visits.
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
The real story seems to be rather interesting. From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak :
During the era of Cultuurstelsel (1830—1870), the Dutch prohibited the native farmers and plantation workers from picking coffee fruits for their own use. Still, the native farmers wanted to have a taste of the famed coffee beverage. Soon, the natives learned that certain species of musang or luwak (Asian Palm Civet) consumed the coffee fruits, yet they left the coffee seeds undigested in their droppings. The natives collected these luwaks' coffee seed droppings, then cleaned, roasted and ground them to make their own coffee beverage.[9] The fame of aromatic civet coffee spread from locals to Dutch plantation owners and soon became their favorite, yet because of its rarity and unusual process, the civet coffee was expensive even in colonial times.
On my MacBook, 10 screws to get the bottom shell off then two more to get the drive out. Regardless, your point is irrelevant. The government officials had the Guardian reps take the computer apart, presumably using screwdrivers. The circuit boards were removed and then an angle grinder was used to grind off the chips. You can see pictures of the end result here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london
Taking out the circuit boards from a laptop takes a lot longer than taking out a hard drive-- even in a MacBook. Can you come up with a _rational_ explanation why they would need to grind down the circuit boards? Secret information on the firmware EEPROM? Hand written notes under the chips? Any way you slice it, their actions seem petty and irrational.
Confirmed with pics: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london
Government agents watched as they "supervised" Guardian employees to destroy the laptop motherboard, etc using an angle grinder and a drill. Is that real world enough?
I think you are confusing Apple laptops (Macbook (pro, air, etc)) with their tablets (iPad). Look on ifixit.com and you can see that all the MacBooks have screws which can be turned with the appropriate tools to open up their insides.
Are you asking about the movie or about Greenwald's computer? In real life, it was the hard drives that were decimated. Welcome to the real world.
Did you read the summary or the referenced article? Both make reference to "sweeping up the remains of a MacBook Pro." If they had destroyed only the hard drive(s), it would be unusual to refer to the remains of a hard drive as the "remains of a MacBook Pro." Don't you think? Perhaps taking some journalistic license to make it more interesting perhaps? Maybe.
I would like to think that the government officials are rational beings exercising their powers rationally but their actions make this a dubious assumption. Yes, this is the real world we live in. What point was there to physically destroying the drives when the information on them had already been copied? Does this sound rational? Perhaps that is why I had an easy time believing they would be capable of destroying the entire computer.
...joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.
Anyone else think of the scene in Zoolander? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze3hthGRbRo
Did they really destroy a functional computer to destroy the drive? Could they not have removed the hard drive and destroyed just those parts that have any persistent data retention? Even including the optical drive would have been overkill-- eject the disk. What was the purpose of destroying perfectly good hardware? Just to be sure? Why not steam roller the remains and then incinerate them in an induction furnace? Where they worried about a secret compartment? Notes scribbled on the inside? What a bunch of clowns.
Re:CEO badmouths competitor & tries to demoral
Truncated header sounds a bit kinky. But I won't judge.
Reminds me of a recent piece in the NYTimes about wells in the midwest being used for center pivot irrigation-- you know the circles of green you see from airplanes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/us/high-plains-aquifer-dwindles-hurting-farmers.html?pagewanted=1
And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.
There is only so long earth can sustain an exponentially growing human population.
I think that early detection always saves at least some lives.
Another important consideration is at what cost? For example, you get a positive screening test. To get final detection, you need to undergo an invasive biopsy (such as a needle inserted into your anus for a prostate biopsy). If the biopsy shows cancer, you might get surgery to get it taken out. Surgical complications, including death. Hospital acquired infections, blood clots, etc. For prostate surgery, a significant risk of incontinence and impotence. So take 100 men with prostate cancer, couple have significant bleeds during biopsy, a couple die during surgery (these are usually older men with other health problems), a few pneumonias, a third leak urine, half have problems getting it up any more. Perhaps the surgery is only 30% effective at eradicating cancer even at the earlier stage. You have now actively killed a few people to save some in the future. Some you put through invasive procedures and surgery without improving their overall prognosis. Given that lead-time bias, these improvements can be very difficult to find-- you can no longer use historical controls because historical controls were not diagnosed the same way-- you therefore need to use a randomized trial.
The math may or may not work out depending on how good the screening tests are, how invasive the confirmatory tests are, how dangerous the surgery is, how EFFECTIVE is the surgery at preventing cancer related deaths, etc. These are the issues that doctors (and those who set public health policy) agonize over. That is why screening recommendations evolve over time.
Butt-raping? Are they forcing a phone on you then raping your account? As far as I know, sales of "over-priced" phones are completely consensual. Buyer's remorse perhaps, but butt-raping implies lack of consent.
I would insert an XKCD joke but can't think of one so here goes:
A woman goes to put her expensive pearl necklace into a safe-deposit box. The attendant admires them but then notices they are fake. When he informs the woman, she replies, "Oh my god, I've been raped!"
That is true with prostate cancer, but not ovarian cancer.
I am leaning toward agreeing with you, but is this a true fact? I would guess this is a correct assumption given low incidence of coincidental ovarian cancers found in autopsy series, but until you actually study this question rigorously, it is still an assumption. Look at what is happening with prostate and breast cancer screening. If you had asked several decades ago, of course early detection would save lives. This is true but not for all types of breast cancer or prostate cancer. Granted ovarian cancer is not subtyped like breast cancers but perhaps there are subtleties that we are not yet aware of because there has been no good screen for early disease.
I completely understand your prioritization of concerns and worries. But I sometimes wonder whether the humans on earth will end like bacteria growing on a Petri dish. You grow bacteria on a plate and at first, things are great-- more resources than bacteria, so no worries and gangbuster (exponential) growth. As the population density increases, competition grows for nutrients so growth starts slowing. Perhaps some bacteria do better than others. Allow me to anthropomorphize the little buggers and lets say they worry about the amount of space they have, how much food they have, how many kids to have, commute time (some bacteria are motile), etc. Meanwhile the finite nutrients and space are disappearing and toxic waste products are building up. The outcome is inevitable-- nutrients and space run out after a couple of days and then the bacteria die.
For eons, life on earth was in a steady state because survival was hard and limited by food and other resources as well as predation. People and organisms had to spend a lot of time and effort to get enough to feed themselves and their offspring. Now you can take $4 to the local 7-11 and buy more calories than are good for you. The population of humans have been growing nearly exponentially for several thousand years. We worry about the daily things in life as you mentioned and this is totally logical. But I wonder if we humans are headed to the same inevitable end as the bacteria. Instead of a Petri dish, we are on earth and instead of playing out over a couple of days, our tragedy takes a couple thousand years.
Thank you for the ballistics calculations. I think that the phone throwing app would register a much lower throw than your calculations predict. Presumably the app measures the time of 0g acceleration. In that case, this would start at the end of boost, ie when the rocket motor burns out and then end when the parachute opens (sudden jolt followed by constant,1g, fall to earth).
Thank you for clearing that up. The misconceptions/ignorance about basic physics displayed in the string/yo-yo comments makes me think that an app graphing accelerometer output (3 axis and/or total) as a function of time would be an eye opening demonstration to quite a few people. Much more useful and educational than a phone throwing app. See what happens when you shake the phone, hang it on a string, spin it on a string. Of course you can throw the phone too-- figuring out how far up it went could be left as an exercise for the thrower.
Any takers?
I would be happy to see nuclear power regulations repealed, so long as those that build and run nuclear power plants are actually accountable for any incidents that occur as a result of preventable actions on their part. This goes to the heart of statism: the protection of corporations. Corporations are an invention of government, allowing them to esacpe culpability when their interests at risk. If I run a power plant, and I neglect to have proper safety precautions and something happens, I should be held accountable for those actions.
I don't say this often, or lightly, but this is stupid idea. This is free-market libertarianism taken to the (il)logical extreme. Are you arguing that regulations are never good or necessary? What if someone wants to build a nuclear power plant near a highly populated area? Near a large water source for easy cooling, eg Fukushima? What if they are using a design that has known flaws? Are you still OK as long as those responsible will be "accountable" in the end? What about if they cut corners to recoup their investment sooner? You mention auditing and inspection but what good are these if there are no regulations? Would the inspectors just make strong suggestions? Even with the best intentions, things go wrong-- see what is happening with the San Onofre nuclear plant that is being permanently shut down due to leakage problems. Estimations are that decommissioning will take years and nearly $3B. Whats to keep those responsible from cutting corners to make a fast buck and when things go south, declaring bankruptcy and just walking away? Do you honestly think a strong sense of personal/corporate responsibility will help in this situation? Wouldn't it be nice if the nuclear power plant operators were required to have a fund that would be used when a plant closes so that the responsible parties can't just walk away? Fortunately, the operators of San Onofre do have $2.7B in a decommissioning fund-- because of regulations.
Sometimes it is OK to have a lot of experiments to find out what works best-- I think having a lot of smaller financial institutions is preferable to having a few "too big to fail" ones. With regard to nuclear power plants, are you going to let people/corporations do 100s of experiments to find out what works best? Some failures leading in meltdown causing Chernobyl type contamination zones? No. Sometimes regulations are a good thing.
OK. I was not aware of the threats/SWATings that have occurred already. Perhaps more than the names could be redacted so that peoples identities could not be found out with bing (or another search engine). Regardless, if the people making these threats (which I don't condone by the way), then the identities of people involved are already known by at least some people.
I think that allowing the release of the Secret Service file with go a LONG way toward making amends for any wrongdoing, perceived or real. Perhaps it might satisfy some angry people enough so that they stop making threats. Blocking the FOIA request after it had been approved for release gives the appearance of something really bad being hidden from view. If MITs real reason for blocking the FOIA request is staff safety, I think a properly redacted folder could do a world of good.
It could easily be the name of the secretary that processed the relevant paperwork. The main legitimate reason to deny a FOIA request is if the documents make reference to someone who is still alive who might face danger or harassment if their name is released.
Try RTA. The names of third parties would have been redacted as SOP for FOIA releases. Try again?
Forget the masturbatory self-congratulation that is this report. They almost certainly have something to hide. A reporter at Wired submitted a FOIA request for Aaron's Secret Service file. A judge OKed the release of the file but then MIT intervened to block the release!
See http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/mit-swartz-intervene/all/1
Supposedly, it is _extremely_ rare for non-governmental entities to block FOIA requests. There must be something in there that MIT doesn't want to see the light of day.
If I were in the NSA's shoes, I'd be panicking right now.
I wish shared your optimism. I hope that people will continue to demand answers AND changes about this but I worry America will go onto the next story if a few days or at most a few short weeks. I worry that the NSA will continue business as usual after a slap on the wrist.
I wonder why it is that background checks for gun buyers is reviled by the Republicans but wholesale datamining on all Americans is fine.
Agreed. I think the apologist argument about "people who do nothing wrong have nothing to hide" needs to be applied to government and corporations first and foremost. The fact that the government kept this secret is tacit admission that they knew what they were doing was wrong or at best questionable. With precious few exceptions our government should be open and transparent. Their argument about how this program needs to be kept secret for it to work is not plausible. Do dangerous terrorists not already go under the assumption that they are under surveillance?
Google once said that if you want something private, perhaps you should't be doing it in the first place (paraphrasing here). If Google has in fact cooperated with blanket surveillance, it would be ironic and hypocritical.
I find the number of Americans who don't mind this invasion of privacy amazingly high. Perhaps I should adjust my expectations. So many gun "enthusiasts" are worried about a government database of gun owners. I wonder how many of them are OK with blanket surveillance. Now the government can make a database for anything-- gun owners, church goers, lefties, righties, anyone who who has had an abortion, wants a girlfriend, has a girlfriend, has two girlfriends, two girlfriends and a wife... You name it, the government can make a list.
Given the track record for how power corrupts, this is a dangerous road to travel. Power over prisoners -> Abu Ghraib. Police database ->
http://www.itpro.co.uk/634774/police-database-abuse-hugely-intrusive
http://www.policeone.com/police-products/software/Data-Information-Sharing-Software/articles/5360910-Cops-criticized-for-misuse-of-databases/
Power to wage war -> Iraq, Afganistan.
I think you would be hard pressed to come up with a government power that has not or will not be abused. This "total information awareness" carries the risk of even more abuse. If the government wants to quiet a dissident, what embarrassing information can they find out about him/her. What about family members? The governments ability to suppress dissent will become even greater-- imagine a world where the government "reminds" you the consequences of not toeing the line. America can become that.
What happened to the country where men would say "Give me liberty or give me death!" or "I'd rather die on my feet than live upon my knees" (OK he was actually Mexican but same sentiment).