21–30 of 49 posts
He's made a career of banging the drum that the cyber-boogeyman apocalypse is going to happen real soon now, and the ACLU and EFF are trying to get everyone killed, since the clipper chip era.
I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility. Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely. At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie . If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as t…
If the story was 100% correct then they wouldn't have to alter it, even if said companies were somehow forced to lie to the public. It would stand up on its own merits.
I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility. Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely. At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie . If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as t…
Maybe these companies have VOLUNTARILY lied, that's possible, but that's also rather unlikely as that would suggest they are friendly with the NSA for some reason.
It has become a topic but once again, Orwell to the rescue: "the past is alterable." 1984. How true, in this case. But it has been the Post, not the Government, who altered it. Sad, shameful and pathetic.
Washington Post did revise the story. And yes, they should have issued an explicit correction. But this is still a major story: > Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who had classified knowledge of the program as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were unable to speak of it when they warned in a Dec. 27, 2012, floor debate that the FISA Amendments Act had what both of them called a “back-doo…
They had the knowledge but they could not publicly disclose a classified program. That's what "unable" means here.
> Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number.
This is what I was referring to when I said the Senators didn't know how exactly it was being used. It is pretty basic knowledge about the program.
Has the NSA incidentally collected data on 300 Americans? On 3,000? On, say, 300 million?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the story was 100% correct then they wouldn't have to alter it, even if said companies were somehow forced to lie to the public. It would stand up on its own merits.
It says right there in the slides PRISM has direct access to their servers. How the media and the public interpret that, that's different. Maybe if the government was more transparent, this wouldn't happen.
I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility. Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely. At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie . If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as t…
Being under a gag order is VERY different from being under a "legal obligation to lie". There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. You can be under a legal obligation to not disclose it, or to not talk about it, yes, but to lie about it? No, absolutely not. Maybe these companies have VOLUNTARILY lied, that's possible, but that's also rather unlikely as that would suggest they are friendly with the NSA for s…
I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility. Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely. At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie . If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as t…
Being under a gag order is VERY different from being under a "legal obligation to lie". There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. You can be under a legal obligation to not disclose it, or to not talk about it, yes, but to lie about it? No, absolutely not. Maybe these companies have VOLUNTARILY lied, that's possible, but that's also rather unlikely as that would suggest they are friendly with the NSA for s…
So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading statement is particularly meaningful in this context.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being under a gag order is VERY different from being under a "legal obligation to lie". There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. You can be under a legal obligation to not disclose it, or to not talk about it, yes, but to lie about it? No, absolutely not. Maybe these companies have VOLUNTARILY lied, that's possible, but that's also rather unlikely as that would suggest they are friendly with the NSA for s…
>There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading statement is particularly meaningful in this context.
None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.