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We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
91–100 of 189 posts
Re: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
#92One might hope that the Trump administration is wary of widening the federal government's ability to spy on its citizens. I do.
Re: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Californians, remember to vote Feinstein out in the Democratic primary. She's been one of the main champions of this bill and type of mass surveillance (as well as the anti-encryption bills, which she's not giving up). Senate Minority Leader Schumer has been the other main proponent. Unfortunately, New York is not really a democracy, so there is no way for us to get rid of him.
Schumer is awful on a lot of levels, but I don't seem him losing his office unless he goes the way Sheldon Silver did.
> Schumer is awful on a lot of levels, but I don't seem him losing his office unless he goes the way Sheldon Silver did.
Agreed. New York politicians can get away with attempted murder caught on videotape (literally) and there's still no chance that they'll lose re-election, thanks to the array of arcane election laws that, in practice, collectively disenfranchise New York voters.
Re: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shut the water off. There won't be enough cooling for the servers. Maybe shoot a hole in the bottom of a big, oil-filled transformer at the nearest power substation.
This is at least the second post on this topic in which logfromblammo has suggested that people perform criminal acts. (S)he earlier suggested keying cars and cutting tires. Those are simply wrong and criminal.
Wrong and criminal aren't necessarily the same. If the NSA is out of control it is our right to shut it down (hopefully without violence).
Re: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
#95EFF has proven to be an ineffectual organization. They bungled NN(infuriating me to no end), and proven partisan at every turn, which would not be a problem if they were successful. But its clear we need a nonpartisan group who can successfully rally most of America on the left and the right.
> But its clear we need a nonpartisan group who can successfully rally most of America on the left and the right.
Why? Keep the Nazis and their friends where they belong: on the dustbin of history. There is no need to further legitimize Bannon and the rest of the alt-right bunch by rallying with them. They need to be fought relentlessly.
Re: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
#96I don't want to be discouraging to anyone. Please, do anything you think will be helpful. But the NSA's equipment is still in hundreds of network equipment rooms, and the data is being split off recorded and rifled at will. They'll tell you they're "not collecting" your data, but they are. They're just using some strange NSA version of English where siphoning your data and storing it on hard drives is not "collecting…
How does one "peacefully destroy" one of the most heavily guarded military facilities that exists?
Re: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
#97Is anyone else fatigued? The effort required, ontop of just having a normal functioning life, to parse and make decisions around potential future law is incredible. Isn't this what elected officials are ment to do on our behalf?
"The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice."
The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat https://www.truthdig.com/articles/permanent-lie-deadliest-th...
This seems to me a good and complete answer as to why everything seems so hard. It's because everything that occurring is based on the "permanent" lie. The powers that be, be the deep state or whatever, cannot acknowledge facts or reality because it will loose its power. The sad part is that I think we also live in our own permanent lie in order not to see the homeless on the sidewalk, acknowledge the cow/chicken/etc raised in factory farming, the use of tax dollars to overthrow governments and kill untold number of people around the world, etc. Lots of issues that I think we need to tackle personally if we want society to do it too.
So what is your permanent lie?
Re: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, yes I am. For years, my two biggest spheres of advocacy have been environmentalism and privacy/anti-surveillance. What I've noticed, with that background, is that privacy activism has steadily become more like environmental activism. With rare exceptions (e.g. the ozone layer), environmentalism is an endless, grinding rear-guard action. Extinct species do not become unextinct. Destroyed habitats do not recover,…
Kinda off-topic but 4,500 species are critically endangered right now Based on the fact that more than 99.9% of all the species are now extinct, how is this an alarming sign? It seems like a part of the natural evolutionary process.
> 4,500 species are critically endangered right now
How many new species has evolution produced in that time? Zero?
Re: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, yes I am. For years, my two biggest spheres of advocacy have been environmentalism and privacy/anti-surveillance. What I've noticed, with that background, is that privacy activism has steadily become more like environmental activism. With rare exceptions (e.g. the ozone layer), environmentalism is an endless, grinding rear-guard action. Extinct species do not become unextinct. Destroyed habitats do not recover,…
Kinda off-topic but 4,500 species are critically endangered right now Based on the fact that more than 99.9% of all the species are now extinct, how is this an alarming sign? It seems like a part of the natural evolutionary process.
You may find this pair of articles interesting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2017/12/15/53e6147c-...
Species do go extinct, but not at the rate we are experiencing today. Even if the current rate of species loss was equal to the historical rate, that does not mean that humans wish to live in such a natural state of chaos. Did American culture lose some of its heritage with the near-extinction of the buffalo? Is it any less of a failure of humankind to drive polar bears to extinction than it would be to obliterate the complete works of Jack London from the face of the Earth? That shit is cool, and we should try to preserve it for future generations.
Re: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, yes I am. For years, my two biggest spheres of advocacy have been environmentalism and privacy/anti-surveillance. What I've noticed, with that background, is that privacy activism has steadily become more like environmental activism. With rare exceptions (e.g. the ozone layer), environmentalism is an endless, grinding rear-guard action. Extinct species do not become unextinct. Destroyed habitats do not recover,…
Kinda off-topic but 4,500 species are critically endangered right now Based on the fact that more than 99.9% of all the species are now extinct, how is this an alarming sign? It seems like a part of the natural evolutionary process.
You have to consider the period of time over which those species became extinct. Per E.O. Wilson, we're losing species at a rate that is ~1,000 times faster than anything in the past. If it continues, the loss in biodiversity will lead to the breakdown of many ecosystems that we depend on for survival.