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Do you have a secret?

doyouhaveasecret.org

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Re: Do you have a secret?

#81

Post by skunkworks »

sliverstorm wrote: post #77
cheez wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blame it on faulty software and faultier human interpretation So you mean blame it on no one but a man's life gets destroyed. And you wonder why they get away with murder...

Something bad happens, and the first thing on your mind is, "We have to blame this on somebody!" And you wonder why America is mocked as such a litigious country...

It is a common coping mechanism to find arbitrary things to blame in tragedies where there isn't one. It's part of our rational mind to find meaning and patterns in the natural world. We do this to understand. It's often wrong -- our eyes turn clouds into animals and mere static into design. This is not endemic to America.

Re: Do you have a secret?

#82

Post by SoftwareMaven »

jrockway wrote: post #56

Brandon Mayfield was arrested as a material witness, not as a suspect. The problem here is the increasing use of material witness warrants to arrest people suspected of a crime, rather than actually getting an arrest warrant. According to Wikipedia, "Ensuing lawsuits have resulted in a formal apology from the U.S. government and a $2 million settlement." I'll be honest: I feel like I'm being swindled by doyouhaveasec…

And that's just as bad as the government wanting to search my laptop.

No, no it isn't. It isn't in the same league of bad. Even if they were lying outright, it wouldn't be.

The government has the power to put you in prison for life or even take your life. Any bad from an organization like that will always be far worse than an attempt to get an emotional reaction to a cause by stretching the truth.

Re: Do you have a secret?

#83

Post by incision »

jrockway wrote: post #56

Brandon Mayfield was arrested as a material witness, not as a suspect. The problem here is the increasing use of material witness warrants to arrest people suspected of a crime, rather than actually getting an arrest warrant. According to Wikipedia, "Ensuing lawsuits have resulted in a formal apology from the U.S. government and a $2 million settlement." I'll be honest: I feel like I'm being swindled by doyouhaveasec…

I agree to some degree.

However, I think it's easy to underestimate the benefit of hindsight here.

I seriously doubt Mr. Mayfield was thinking "Awwww yeah, I'm about to get paid off this bullshit!" when he was arrested.

More likely, just thinking over the possibilities of being wrongfully implicated in a horrific act of terrorism took a few years of his life.

Re: Do you have a secret?

#84

Post by incision »

kingkawn wrote: post #66
malandrew wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad part is that the people we have to convince that these laws are a bad idea will only be swayed by emotion. It's emotion that convinced them to support bills like this and it is going to take an appeal to emotion to convince them otherwise. It sucks to admit that, but it's how many humans work.

Physicians contended for a long time that they were too educated, thoughtful, and professional to be swayed by advertising and other promotional efforts that were not directly related to efficacy and cost of drugs: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=192314 Nobody is immune to advertising, PR, or emotional appeals. Some of us are more/less impacted by specific types of advertising, but we are all susce…

Interesting.

It seems physicians have a long history pompous bullshit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_...

Re: Do you have a secret?

#85

Post by MichaelApproved »

sliverstorm wrote: post #77
cheez wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blame it on faulty software and faultier human interpretation So you mean blame it on no one but a man's life gets destroyed. And you wonder why they get away with murder...

Something bad happens, and the first thing on your mind is, "We have to blame this on somebody!" And you wonder why America is mocked as such a litigious country...

Im always surprised by peoples aversion for trying to put blame on someone or some thing. Finding where the fault was is part of the process to make sure an error doesn't happen again.

I think there's confusion with the "blame game". As in, once you can blame someone, the problem is over and solved but that's just the start to solving the problem. I always want to know who did something wrong and how it happened so we could work to prevent it from happening again in the future.

Re: Do you have a secret?

#86

Post by downandout »

jrockway wrote: post #56

Brandon Mayfield was arrested as a material witness, not as a suspect. The problem here is the increasing use of material witness warrants to arrest people suspected of a crime, rather than actually getting an arrest warrant. According to Wikipedia, "Ensuing lawsuits have resulted in a formal apology from the U.S. government and a $2 million settlement." I'll be honest: I feel like I'm being swindled by doyouhaveasec…

> Brandon Mayfield was arrested as a material witness, not as a suspect.

If I'm sitting in jail and have not committed a crime, the underlying legal excuse for my unjust detention isn't going to matter to me. The net result is the same.

Re: Do you have a secret?

#87

Post by kingkawn »

incision wrote: post #84
kingkawn wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physicians contended for a long time that they were too educated, thoughtful, and professional to be swayed by advertising and other promotional efforts that were not directly related to efficacy and cost of drugs: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=192314 Nobody is immune to advertising, PR, or emotional appeals. Some of us are more/less impacted by specific types of advertising, but we are all susce…

Interesting. It seems physicians have a long history pompous bullshit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_...

Which puts them in the beautiful company of the rest of humanity.

Edit: Also Semmelweis was a badass.

Re: Do you have a secret?

#88

Post by tptacek »

Retric wrote: post #21
tomku wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice rhetoric, but when you disregard the truth in order to keep up in the arms race of lies that you claim the other side started, you become as reprehensible as them.

Telling lies and X is not equally as bad as telling lies and not X. EX: Where X is killing people. 'Smoking cigarettes makes you popular smoking cigarettes makes you unpopular.'

When the currency of the debate is lies, the party that tells the best lies wins. The best liars rarely happen to be the ones you want to win.

Re: Do you have a secret?

#89

Post by einhverfr »

robotmachine wrote: post #40

No, I don't have a secret. That isn't really what privacy is about. You don't have to have something to hide in order to not want everything you do/say and everywhere you go tracked. This makes it seem like everyone is hiding a folder full of kiddie porn or emails from their other girlfriend and therefore that is why you should care about privacy protection.

I think the key here is the ability of massive surveillance to be used to find something to use to prosecute "bad guys" especially when combined with vague laws. Really, everyone needs to read "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent."

Exhibit A: The Lori Drew prosecution. A lot of people thought that because she did something bad, that we should find something to charge her with, so the US attorney in California charged her with unauthorized access to MySpace's computer systems for the "crime" of violating their terms of service. After she was convicted of misdemeanor and acquitted of felony charges, the judge held the law was too vague as applied and threw out the convictions.

Exhibit B: The Daniel Hurwitz prosecution. Here was a doctor following exactly what the DEA's public guidance was, who was prosecuted and eventually convicted on the basis that he had some knowledge of the statistical certainty that some of his patients were selling narcotics on the street from his prescriptions. And indeed when the defence noted that they had the DEA's public guidance to submit into evidence the DEA's response was to remove it from their web site.

The fact is that total surveillance + vague laws is exactly what the USSR used to lock people up and exactly what China uses to lock people up. The comparison to China on the page in question is actually a very good one.

Re: Do you have a secret?

#90

Post by einhverfr »

kingkawn wrote: post #87
incision wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. It seems physicians have a long history pompous bullshit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_...

Which puts them in the beautiful company of the rest of humanity. Edit: Also Semmelweis was a badass.

We have this interesting idea that modern medicine is what is responsible for greatly extending life expectancy. Semmelweis's work largely showed at least in his day that for women it was the opposite (remember his work started with the question of why midwives had so much lower maternal mortality rates than physicians), and even today, it is probably a distant third behind year-round food supply and modern sanitation.
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