111–120 of 175 posts
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That's how a web crawler works, though, right?
But phone calls are not supposed to be public, and web crawlers only access items which are public, so your argument isn't valid.
Fixed that for you.
My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc. The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is the…
It also has a bearing on the sorry state of U.S. human intelligence, since Mormons make terrible interlocutors with foreign informants.
I'd like to know what kinds of criminals this stuff is really being used to catch, since it's clearly not being used to fight terrorism.
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It also has a bearing on the sorry state of U.S. human intelligence, since Mormons make terrible interlocutors with foreign informants.
Their language training software for missionaries is the envy of many a diplomatic agency, let me tell you.
On December 15th 2005, Barack Obama viciously denounced this and the Patriot Act. Which he now supports in the fullest.
But where are the Republicans on this issue? After what feels like about 300 years of them calling Obama a fascist who's trying to turn America into the USSR every day, what do we hear from them when soviet-type stuff actually happens on his watch? Nothing. They're too busy with Benghazi and other non-scandals.
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Their language training software for missionaries is the envy of many a diplomatic agency, let me tell you.
Any further information on this? That's an interesting comment and I'm curious now. Maybe I'll talk to them next time they knock on my door :)
The church operates Missionary Training Centers with the main one in Provo, UT and other smaller centers distributed around the world. When somebody starts their mission they go there for a few weeks for a crash course in how to teach religious priniciples, the policies for missionaries, etc. A lot of missionaries are assigned to foreign countries or even language-specific assignments in the US. Those missionaries stay for 2-3 months to learn the language. It tries to be a fairly immersive program, taught by native speakers of the language and former missionaries, and has a fairly significant software component to it as well. I don't know specifics first-hand, but it was widely spoken about that groups in governments, etc... would visit to learn more about why the program was so effective in so little time. I don't think it's entirely the software, it's a pretty good program all-around - but it's certainly nothing to dismiss.
edit: The main website is http://www.mtc.byu.edu, but as language learning consulting is hardly their main goal, I doubt you'll find much more of an answer to your question there.
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Low population density is almost redundant with "Cheap land"
Not is the case where resources are found under said land or the land is farm land.
The cost of farm land seems to be around $9000/acre, and certainly under $20,000/acre. The major exceptions are places like Sonoma County, where vineyards are still profitable even though the land can go for $100,000/acre. But this is also a place where there's high population, so excluded from consideration.
A warehouse, for 30,000 sq. foot (about 0.7 acres) costs around $3 million, as does a 20,000 sq. foot office. (On average across the US.)
It is interesting what the media and public choose to be concerned by. 15 years ago I would've guessed that this sort of wide-spread operation would never have been tolerated by either. Post 9/11, it was surely scandalous when ATT got caught providing taps, but honestly, it didn't seem that anyone cared that much. Not enough to put strong pressure on the government to, you know, stop. At this point, I'm convinced tha…
I don't know what could possibly done. If the legislature or courts got involved and told the NSA to stop, they'd just say "Ok, sure" and then continue on in secret.
My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc. The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is the…
Conversely a certain subset of Mormons are going to be very vulnerable to a certain type of attack that the regular (incl. more liberal subsets of) population would not be vulnerable to. A gay mormon (which is just as common as a gay catholic, or a gay atheist) will be likely to be in the closet. They would probably be ostracised by family and friends if they were outed, lots of people in the general community would…
If you have a very open person that engaged on the occasional responsible drink, they are much more useful to spy agencies. How do you blackmail someone whose life is an open book? On the other hand, it could be relatively easy to blackmail a Mormon over some minor (from an outsiders perspective) infraction, particularly as the price for being excluded from the Mormon community is so high
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We know exactly what's being collected: all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on. They have installed beam splitters on Internet backbones at facilities around the country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A And are funneling all of the traffic to a datacenter in Utah with "yottabyte" scale capacity, with the goal of having enough capacity to archive the data for 100 years: http://www.wired.com/threat…
Before it's crime, it's pre-crime.
More detail of the theoretical system: http://personofinterest.wikia.com/wiki/The_Machine