181–190 of 395 posts
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He was flying to Ecuador and his passport was revoked when he was in Russia. If you speak out against the war in Ukraine in Russia you get shot, and he has a wife and kids now. He's done his part imo
His passport had been revoked before he got on the plane. He got on the plane to "Ecuador" on a temporary travel document from Ecuador, knowing he was never getting off anywhere but Moscow.
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Do you think Cheney's war was significantly more justified than Putin's war? People who start wars are legitimately bad, but let's not pretend that Russia is special here .
Yes. Saddam Hussein was one of the worst leaders in history and the neocons legitimately thought they could create a free market utopia in Iraq (lmao), check out Imperial Life in the Emerald City. They fucked up horribly and made Iraq worse because they were incompetent morons who fired the entire army and didn't bother to make sure people actually had basic services. Putin wants to reestablish the Russian Empire and…
What I found particularly interesting was he had a distinct look, and either he was a trend setter or following a popular trend amongst young men as I saw it everywhere at the time amongst professionals. I would have thrown away my glasses and gotten a haircut immediately if I had been in that lane.
And he was totes a Russian spy.
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The US has Guantanamo Bay. Among others. The US did commit various war crimes in about every of their foreign engagements. Those had to be leaked of course and weren't reported by some self-correction built into the system. The US uses false narratives like "national security" to justify unjustifiable actions regularly. See their economic sanctions, Huawei, etc. pp. The list goes on of course. Now, the one thing clea…
Guantanamo Bay is thousands of times smaller in magnitude than putting millions of your own citizens in concentration camps. It's also reprehensible and should be closed, no one disagrees on that
Realistically intelligence agencies have access to whatever information they want. If they can crack encryption they're not going to tell us and they will probably act like they can't. You're compromised and you have no secrets and can't hide anything from them. The best thing we can do is stay safe from criminals.
Some cyphers maybe. But it's highly unlikely that all or even most in use are compromised. There are many cryptography researchers who aren't part of the NSA. Other nations for example. And banks obviously trust some cryptography.
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Russia commits countless war crimes on a daily basis (there is tons of documentation) and China has concentration camps. America is not perfect but they are legitimately much worse
The Ukraine used illegally cluster bombs on ethnic Russians for years. This is actually documentation. https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-c...
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I am not nearly as convinced as you that he was a Russian asset from the beginning. I think it’s also likely, absent more info, that he just had no other options than to align with and kowtow to Russia after he was in the US’ crosshairs. But I don’t think you deserve the downvotes as I believe we need to be more cognizant that Russia/China/etc absolutely run their own intelligence operations and destabilizing the US…
> he was a Russian asset from the beginning I didn’t say he was a Russian asset from the beginning. I just said he was probably a traitor from the beginning. That may be quite complicated but he ended up a Russian asset.
I guess, to me being a traitor has connotations of deliberate intent to do harm due to some kind of external loyalty. While he certainly betrayed the IC, besides him ending up in Russia (which realistically is like one of a handful of countries that would take a guy like that), I’m not aware of any signs he was acting on behalf of anybody except himself
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Russia commits countless war crimes on a daily basis (there is tons of documentation) and China has concentration camps. America is not perfect but they are legitimately much worse
This is the exact narrative that I’m talking about. It’s a hand wavy pseudo intellectual narrative that goes, Russia commits war crimes and kills civilians, China is Nazi Germany 2.0 and is trying to exterminate Muslims like the Nazis tried to do with the Jews and America is bad, you know with even more casualties in the Middle East but it’s not as bad as these cartoonishly evil regimes. I mean no offence to you by c…
Excuse me, but the camps are for free vocational training and re-education. A lot nicer than Guantanamo Bay! A lot of citizens in the US are crying out for free education!
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I’ve presented one possible rebuttal to the “I’m not interesting, so I don’t need to encrypt my communications” position. “It is OK to spy on some people sometimes” is a different position, so a different rebuttal would be necessary. It isn’t really clear to me if you are actually trying to make these arguments in and of themselves, or if you think they add light to the first point. So, I’m not sure how to respond, s…
I don't think you're being clear about what "eye of Sauron" means, but I think that's on purpose, as the argument in favor of the concept of using surveillance via warrants undermines your larger "right to privacy" point.
I think we should have lots of encrypted communication out there, to make it a normalized day-to-day thing, and to make bulk surveillance more difficult.
You are right that “eye of Sauron” evokes a different idea, which is more like investigating a specific known target. If done correctly that could be OK in some cases.