171–180 of 228 posts
Sure, they have all data about someone. But, what is the use? It is like searching a needle in a haystack.
""If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." - Cardinal Richelieu
Ethics, morality and legality aside, I'd be really curious to see what information is actually stored in these "dossiers", besides (presumably) one's name, address, and other details that other branches of the government legitimately have.
Is that the sort of thing you can ask for with a FOIA request? If you have some spare time it might be worth trying--it certainly couldn't hurt. I'm not familiar enough with the actual procedure to say if it would be particularly difficult or not.
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Why should it be considered morally acceptable by those who vote? When have we had the opportunity to vote on it?
I understood mtgx's question to be based on practical grounds, not moral ones. But in answer to your question, I think of espionage as something akin to the military. Perhaps in an ideal world neither would be necessary, but unfortunately the world is not a utopia. Thus, from a realistic standpoint, spying is sort of like doing market research for a startup. It allows you to make predictive decisions instead of react…
As far as I am concerned, the two are not simply akin but deeply intertwined. Espionage can greatly improve the effectiveness of your military.
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This was the narrative toed by the Bush administration and Fox News, but many Americans and the international community by and large did not agree.
I think that's largely a case of selective memory. People often have a rosy memory of what they believed. Bush said he had clear evidence of WMD's in Iraq, that he showed this to Blair and Blair confirmed. I think it would be fair to say that most people would agree that Hussein wanted WMD's. So I think it's fair to think that most Americans and most in the international community believed that Iraq had WMD's. The ar…
Hm... "A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It's a proof. A proof is a proof, and when you have a good proof, it's because it's proven." - Jean Chretien, discussing what type of proof Canadian government wanted before assisting in a war with Iraq (which it ultimately did not)
This is going to be embarasing the next time there is a major terror attack (hopefully it won't happen, but statistically it is likely eventually) when it turns out that they had the data on everybody but somehow didn't act on it.
It's far easier, after you know what happened , to go back to the data and "connect the dots" to claim it should have been foreseen and acted upon. But beforehand, the dots could have been connected in any number of permutations and paths, so it becomes impossible to act on every possibility that can be forecast in advance.
Math is fun! You can buy a 2 TB HD for $99.99 right now. The population of the United States is 311,591,917. That's 7057 bytes per citizen, for a penny under a Franklin. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg in EPUB format, in 2.3 MB. Therefore, if you wanted to have William Shakespeare write as much text about every single citizen in the United States, as he wrote in all…
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Storing the text is easy - deciding what text is relevant enough to store is hard.
If you had the NSA's budget, you probably wouldn't need to decide what text is relevant to store.
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You're making extraordinary claims regarding the parallels with the Reichtag fire. I won't ask for extraordinary evidence, just reasonable evidence. The part I don't get is why it seems to matter so much whether 9/11 was an unexpected attack or a planned conspiracy, or whether it was anticipated but not orchestrated by the government. The effect is all that matters, and the effect was, in fact, exactly the same as th…
> the effect was, in fact, exactly the same as the Reichstag fire... Really? Exactly the same? Socialists taking over and dismantling democracy?
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If you had the NSA's budget, you probably wouldn't need to decide what text is relevant to store.
Deciding what to store is highly correlated with what information are we most likely going to find useful.
My point is that deciding what to store is expensive and error-prone, with false-positives and false-negatives. Storage is so cheap, that there's an argument to be made that they can just store everything they want to.