111–120 of 208 posts
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Are you seriously comparing protecting the environment to embarrassing a government in to open disclosure? Really? Two completely different things.
Still, both are examples of corporate leaders standing up to government thugs. They're only different because of how american culture treats those two different topics.
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As far as I'm aware, the country of which I am a citizen does not take an adversarial approach to other countries. If I learned that it's spying on people of other countries, I'd be just as concerned as I am about the NSA/the USG. None of that changes the fact that the NSA and the USG have a us vs. them mentality and it's only natural that Americans look at their government with a corresponding us vs. them view. I ca…
The US has organizations which look inward for terrorists - the FBI, DEA, ATF, TSA, local law enforcement, etc. We have our own country fairly well covered, with well-establish legal precedent and rules of engagement. The NSA is an intelligence gathering organization for the parts of the world we don't have covered, and its goal is to collect global intelligence. It doesn't treat anyone adversarially, as it has no "t…
It has no troops, but it has the CIA, who can assemble a makeshift covert "troop" in no time.
>You might not be part of those groups, but how do we know if we don't look at you?
Exactly the reasoning soon to be used to allow domestic mass surveillance. Mark my words.
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Corporations have morals now? Just seems like a bad idea to root for, actually it sounds very similar to the argument that there is a serious moral imperative for the govt to ignore the 4th amendment to stop terrorism. You are either for the rule of law or you arent.
Or you are for the rule of some laws and not others? Just because you are pro-pot doesn't mean you are pro-child-molestation, right?
To vastly summarize, if a law is unjust change the law.
Commandeering implies control, and the NSA does not have control. No one has "control" over the Internet. I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric that this story has turned some people towards, where the NSA are the unequivocal bad guys and we, the "little people", are the unequivocal good guys. That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done. The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (B…
"No one has "control" over the Internet." Aside from the people who control the hardware, and the NSA/others seem to have control over those people, getting them to install monitoring hardware. "I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric" I am able to be prosecuted for creating "hacking tools" while Endgame Systems has the NSA pay them a million+ a year to access data from those "hacking tools." 'There are even t…
The US military uses weapons citizens are not allowed to own or create on a regular basis. Is Lockheed Martin or Boeing not on our side because they make fighter jets that only the US government can buy?
It's only "us vs. them" in your head. You're why we can't get jack shit done in congress - people like you get time of day from congressmen and women and then when someone like me wants to talk the same conversation (except, you know, rationally), I get lumped in with crazies like you.
While I understand that Lavabit and others have taken a stand, Im not sure that I would call going out of business fighting. I see this as an NSA victory. If they could shut down all of these niche secure email businesses, what option will people have but to use less private alternatives? I would argue that a shut down is exactly what the NSA wanted from lavabit. Of course the flip side is that you don't want to be c…
If they could shut down all of these niche secure email businesses, what option will people have but to use less private alternatives? I think Ladar Levison answered that question, implicitly, in his shutdown announcement: "I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States." It is high time to provide secure services hosted in countries withou…
Absent massive efficiency advances in multi party computation and fully homomorphic encryption, most of the cloud is antithetical to privacy, no mater where it's hosted.
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So we're ready to convict the government of thought-crimes? Just because they can, doesn't mean they will. Gun owners could all go out and harm innocent people, but they generally don't, do they? At least we don't convict them before they do.
Gun owners typically shouldn't get to decide who is innocent and who is not. They're not judge, jury and executioner. So whenever they do hurt someone it's a case for an actual judge to figure out what happened and if we class it as self defence or not. Gun owners harm innocent people more often than not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US has organizations which look inward for terrorists - the FBI, DEA, ATF, TSA, local law enforcement, etc. We have our own country fairly well covered, with well-establish legal precedent and rules of engagement. The NSA is an intelligence gathering organization for the parts of the world we don't have covered, and its goal is to collect global intelligence. It doesn't treat anyone adversarially, as it has no "t…
>it has no "troops" with which to engage foreigners. It has no troops, but it has the CIA, who can assemble a makeshift covert "troop" in no time. >You might not be part of those groups, but how do we know if we don't look at you? Exactly the reasoning soon to be used to allow domestic mass surveillance. Mark my words.
edit: US citizens already get looked at by other government orgs. What you're talking about already happens.
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The potential of abuse for guns is pretty damn large, but some would argue that the US was founded on the idea of gun ownership. There's a lot of speculation about what could happen, but if we look only at what has happened, people aren't being snatched up off the streets because of the NSA's monitoring programs. The language of the above article seems too adversarial to be effective at getting anything done. If we c…
> but if we look only at what has happened, people aren't being snatched up off the streets because of the NSA's monitoring programs. They are being assassinated by drones overseas.
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Well I hope this is not the case. I am against the NSA monitoring program. I think powerful commercial interests colluding to purposefully break the rule of law is a huge negative. Lets disconnect this behavior from the specific instance's moral outrage: If Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell simultaneously came out and ignored all EPA restrictions would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market? Thi…
Are you seriously comparing protecting the environment to embarrassing a government in to open disclosure? Really? Two completely different things.
Not sure what is going on with the massive cognitive dissonance being displayed.
Government ignoring constitution/laws for perceived moral/efficiency benefits BAD, commerical entities ignoring laws for perceived moral/efficiency benefits GOOD.
Commandeering implies control, and the NSA does not have control. No one has "control" over the Internet. I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric that this story has turned some people towards, where the NSA are the unequivocal bad guys and we, the "little people", are the unequivocal good guys. That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done. The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (B…
There are many lines that one could draw to divide this whole mess into two sides. Who's the 'us' and who's the 'them'? I can think of quite a few lines to divide up the power-centers and sociological groups, and the intelligence community/military-industrial complex is almost always on the wrong side. How about Congress vs. the Executive? The people in congress, our elected representatives, have been asking serious…
Pretending like the intelligence community is some kind of evil monster is a great way to get ignored by the intelligence community, and for good reason.