201–210 of 614 posts
Interesting how agencies, corporations and alike have the collective maturity of children. A grown up will say to a kid "you can't play with fire with your friend" and the kid immediately will think "he didn't say I can't play with fire with my other friend".
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> It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. The government takes the position that their agents are almost completely unconstrained by law when it comes to actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. Even we…
> The government outright tortured people for years, and nothing has come of it. I am not saying it's OK, but in that case, most US citizens aren't even affected. In the case of surveillance, data from US citizens is being directly compromised. Their attempt to do what they want to foreign individuals with surveillance actually causes some collateral damage to US citizens.
There is a very strong line of reasoning that says terrorist attacks and thousands of America soldiers killed in combat are a direct result of these kinds of foreign policies.
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> The government outright tortured people for years, and nothing has come of it. I am not saying it's OK, but in that case, most US citizens aren't even affected. In the case of surveillance, data from US citizens is being directly compromised. Their attempt to do what they want to foreign individuals with surveillance actually causes some collateral damage to US citizens.
Who cares about the collateral damage done to US citizens? The problem is the damage done to non-US citizens.
remember that democracy (even half-implemented as it is in the US) is the dictatorship or the majority (that can vote).
It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. That aside, let me re-make a point I keep making: Google had no knowledge of NSA's physical compromise of their data centers. But still, they pushed harder than anyone…
Citation required.
> Not only that, but Google launched a high-profile effort to encrypt the communications inside and between their data centers.
When exactly was that announced? Before or after Snowden went rogue? If after, the agency had to tell the PRISM partners that they were going to be exposed if they were willing participants in hosting a back-door.
Otherwise, they only got paranoid after that fact?
I'm wondering if there is a state with a particularly restrictive privacy law that can drag Larry or Sergei to the witness stand and find out if participation is willing or unwilling.
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They deserve to have their brands damaged. They didn't do their due diligence in encrypting data going through leased fibers -- they should have had the foresight to realize what a phenomenally bad thing this was. They didn't, hence why I'll never trust them again.
Do you also blame your car company when a thief breaks into it? Do you never trust banks again if a bank robbery happens? They were working on it, but full-on encryption everywhere within your internal network is expensive, and one tends to not imagine that buried dark fiber is dug up and tapped by one's own government. Let's say that they encrypted everything, and then you learn the NSA had kidnapped the children of…
Kidnapped their children? Get a hold of yourself here. Google is a tech company, it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that they get the big parts of their security model right. Not encrypting data going through leased (or even their own) fibers? Big, big mistake. NSA and US government aside, Google dropped the ball big-time here.
> Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks.
Funny you say that. Because I was pretty much a Google fanboy before all of this happened (oh, and their recent changes wrt privacy policies). I am very angry at the government, but that is a separate issue.
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> It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. The government takes the position that their agents are almost completely unconstrained by law when it comes to actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. Even we…
I am at a loss for words. Arrogant, self-righteous, disrespectful, ignorant, mendacious...nothing cuts it. It is illegal in the US but who cares about the rest of the world? I can not remember when something similar made me that angry as the current conduct of the US does. If I would not know better that this would negatively affect the whole world and innocent US citizens and that emotional reactions are usually not…
Whoah, there. Your grievances are well-placed. But keep in mind that it's a certain subset of agencies in the US government that are responsible for the problems you're upset about, not all US citizens. As for fixing things, the government has become literally unmanageable, and things are a mess right now.
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I think it is part of a more general problem: people do not spend much time thinking about the importance of any of their rights. Nobody wants to hear that a terrorist attack was successful or that a criminal walked free for the sake of their civil rights -- rights are abstract, terrorists and criminals are threats to our children and whatnot. Look at what people say about free speech rights, how quickly everyone par…
It is possible our (UK/Canada/USA/etc) societies pursuit of comfort/safety has descended into what Nietzsche calls the "last man". > the antithesis of the imagined superior being. The last man is tired of life, takes no risks, and seeks only comfort and security . > Nietzsche said that the society of the last man would be too barren to support the growth of great individuals. The last man is possible only by mankind'…
Years ago, I remember reading Richard Stallman's "How I do my computing"[1], an essay in which he explains why he usually does not connect to any websites from his own machine, downloads web pages from a headless browser running in some server, does not have any user accounts for any web applications, does not buy anything over the Internet ever, does not use any social networking sites, and otherwise abstains from using the Internet like most normal human beings.
"Jeez, that's way too paranoid," I remember thinking.
It turns out Stallman was just (far) ahead of his time -- as usual.
--
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> You know what would outrage the public? ESPN being shut down. No better way to state it. Our government is fucking us with our pants on but we're too distracted (by people getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars to throw a fucking ball around) to care.
I bet if ESPN and shows like American Idol, etc. were knocked offline until we got our government back on track things would get done pretty fast.
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>Is that an official document with an actual smiley face? It's only HN that pretends there is no feeling in professional work.
Apparently those guys felt good about what they did. That's what's upsetting people.
Everyone is happy having done a job well. It's just human nature.
/except on HN, where we are all expected to act like robots.