111–120 of 232 posts
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You forget the security-state apparatus has secret courts and secret laws It may not be a fair trial. He's always stated his willingness to undergo a fair one
That's not how any of that works. Criminal trials are public record and there are no such things as secret laws.
The Wyden–Daines Amendment in 2020: a huge privacy amendment that would’ve limited surveillance missed the Senate by literally one vote. It would’ve stopped the government from getting American's web browsing and search history without a warrant. And honestly, I still have zero respect for anyone who voted against it. If you need a warrant to walk into my house, you should need a warrant to walk into my digital life…
Agreed. Here's the result of the vote, in case anyone notices these representatives running for reelection: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
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The most ironic thing that never came to fruition was an X-Files spinoff [1]. The pilot aired a few months before 9/11. Depiction a plot by the (I believe) CIA to crash a passenger airplane into the WTC. And the three computer freaks/conspiracy theorists that often helped Mulder trying to stop that. I watched it a few months after 9/11 happened. That definitely was an experience I will never forget. Even as a German,…
Tom Clancy also had a similar plot in the Jack Ryan series
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Right before Snowden, I met a "fiction" author whose DefCon presentation was about government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists. His SciFi writings were the technically-dense ramblings you'd expect from somebody who'd spent much of his early decades contracting for secretive government agencies. During both his speech and in the introduction to his book Mindgames, he mentions that most DoD-funded personn…
That's a sly workaround, but as it is delivered as fiction imagine that for him it must be a Cassandra-like experience.
That was a Cassandra-like experience.
If anybody has never read Vonnegut, I'd definitely recommend Piano over Thieme's Mindgames.
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I'm currently halfway through Neal Shusterman's Scythe Trilogy, which he published right before LLMs became reality. A ficticious global AI entity, known collectively as "Thunderhead," begins each chapter with its own all-knowing passage about how it perceives humanity's progression.
It's really quite creepy reading, with many of Shusterman's ficticious Thunderhead passages having already proven possible (particularly: characters maintaining friendships with chatty Thunderhead; ability to know something about everything; hallucinations; government by uncodified code; ability to lie, either intentionally or by human deception).
Really exciting storytelling, and I foresee many more of its future non-predictions becoming foreseeable future.
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>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government. Yes it does.
No it doesn't. Think about it. Some computer somewhere that is involved in bulk interception happens to record your browser connecting to, say, the Hacker News website, at various dates and times. This is stored in a dataset. No-one ever views these connection records. No-one ever writes a query for the dataset that returns these connection records. These connection records are automatically deleted after the retenti…
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Right before Snowden, I met a "fiction" author whose DefCon presentation was about government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists. His SciFi writings were the technically-dense ramblings you'd expect from somebody who'd spent much of his early decades contracting for secretive government agencies. During both his speech and in the introduction to his book Mindgames, he mentions that most DoD-funded personn…
> government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists. The Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory goes into a version of this. In the conspiracy world, there's the trope on Merlin's magic wand was made from the wood of a holly tree and was used to cause confusion and mind control type of spells.
>Merlin's holly wand
The More You Know™ [0]
[0] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-significance-of...
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"The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger." "The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center space and more th…
Exactly. That is a toy-sized data center. It would fit in the janitor's closet of a real data center.
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That's a sly workaround, but as it is delivered as fiction imagine that for him it must be a Cassandra-like experience.
I coincidentally read Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano , during my first few weeks exploring ChatGPT (~January 2023~). The book explores the rebellion of automated factory workers, drawing inspiration from Vonnegut's own mid-20th-Century experiences working at a GE manufacturing facility. That was a Cassandra-like experience. If anybody has never read Vonnegut, I'd definitely recommend Piano over Thieme's Mi…