301–310 of 360 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I sincerely doubt the argument that dragnet surveillance has no effect. It almost certainly does. Whilst congress makes some pretty ludicrously predictably bad decisions, there must be some reports of the NSA's effectiveness. It's just whom it benefits that's in doubt. Let's face it: the number of homicides in general absolutely dwarf the maximum potential of terrorist attacks without NSA intervention. I would argu…
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whom are they protecting? Cause it sure is not the average citizen. But was there ever any indication to the contrary? How did we as Americans convert to the myth that our government, let alone our "intelligence" agencies, have any inclination to protect us or advance our interests? That has never been their practice ever. Our government spent the better part of a century not only allowing 3.5 million of us to live…
I think this is attributing too much agency to "government". Voters wanted slavery, and so public officials supported it. Voters wanted wars and a surveillance state after 9/11. Etc. (Same goes for the good things that the public sector does, of course) Yes there is inertia and self-perpetuation, like in any organisations, but not overwhelmingly much.
The policy preferences of the voting constituency in any given national election are not strongly correlated to policy results. This is shown convincingly in Benjamin Ginsberg's book, "Do Elections Matter?" I strongly recommend this book - after reading it, you will never again try to explain away an act of government by attributing it to voter sentiment.
It is a difficult-to-deny fact that, in the USA, the government frequently and quietly advances policies which do not appear to be derived from any kind electoral mandate, nor are favored by a substantial portion of the electorate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Russians and Chinese manipulate the American public every day all day. Not to mention the Americans and Western Europeans with money and influence whose interests align with theirs. How do you think we ended up with president chump?
How do you think we ended up with president chump? No. The alternative is a crook.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is attributing too much agency to "government". Voters wanted slavery, and so public officials supported it. Voters wanted wars and a surveillance state after 9/11. Etc. (Same goes for the good things that the public sector does, of course) Yes there is inertia and self-perpetuation, like in any organisations, but not overwhelmingly much.
This seems like a differently-worded variant of "we get the government we vote for." But that conclusion has been convincingly rejected by sound political science for quite a while now. The policy preferences of the voting constituency in any given national election are not strongly correlated to policy results. This is shown convincingly in Benjamin Ginsberg's book, "Do Elections Matter?" I strongly recommend this b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been citing a lot of sources here. Can you clearly cite your assertion? Over the past few weeks and several threads, you've consistently asserted that NSA/CIA don't bulk-collect Americans' data, with no citing proof. Did you fill out an SF-86 or something?
None of your sources support your claims. I've been pointing to the exact same sources. I do not work for the US government any more than you work for the Kremlin. Obama called for a "thoughtful fact based debate" over government data collection policies in the wake of the Snowden leaks. By spreading nonsense, you are preventing that debate from occurring.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that a bit of a jump, and specifically called out in the quartz article as not true? "Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No."
You should probably quote the article title too: "Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance" The gist I got from skimming it is that the CIA didn't "directly" fund them because that's handled by a differwnt group acting in their interest.
Automatically collecting everyone's cell phone data, has software automatically installed in Smart TV's everywhere, monitors your online footprint (emails, social media[of course]). All those warning from Snowden all those secret software reveals from wikileaks an untold amount of funding from congress with virtually no oversight. And yet tons of bad things keep happening to regular citizens in the US. What exactly d…
I don’t like the data collection either, but it’s impossible to know the untold disasters that it may or may not have prevented. “Assume that a legislator with courage, influence, intellect, vision, and perseverance manages to enact a law that goes into universal effect and employment on September 10, 2001; it imposes the continuously locked bulletproof doors in every cockpit (at high costs to the struggling airlines…
We do know, however, the type of disasters that mass data collection has created in the past.
IBM's mass data processing technology was crucial to the operational efficiency of the Holocaust.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is attributing too much agency to "government". Voters wanted slavery, and so public officials supported it. Voters wanted wars and a surveillance state after 9/11. Etc. (Same goes for the good things that the public sector does, of course) Yes there is inertia and self-perpetuation, like in any organisations, but not overwhelmingly much.
This seems like a differently-worded variant of "we get the government we vote for." But that conclusion has been convincingly rejected by sound political science for quite a while now. The policy preferences of the voting constituency in any given national election are not strongly correlated to policy results. This is shown convincingly in Benjamin Ginsberg's book, "Do Elections Matter?" I strongly recommend this b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that the syntactic structure makes it pretty clear that "they" refers to the voters.
i think i was unclear in what i meant - who are the people telling the voters what to do?
From Murdoch to Bezos and NRA...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. That was Clapper's cover for his perjury in front of Congress: "collected" records are labeled as such only after they are "returned as part of queries" -- which is not what people usually think "collected" means. Any normal person would consider all records potentially subject to queries have already been "collected" for that end, and should be counted as such.
If I started "collecting" stolen credit card numbers as a hobby, but not using them, did I collect any numbers? What if I only put them in a database and never run a select? I doubt that defense would hold up. I hate word games.