Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am interested in knowing your examples.
PRISM is a good one...? National security letters as well. Black sites. The penal/prison system in general.
None of these originated in the current administration.
PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack
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Re: PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am interested in knowing your examples.
Does this [1] from 2015 meet your criteria? [1] It’s Time to Put an End to the NSA’s Bulk Collection of Americans’ Metadata https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/04/its-time-put-end-nsas...
I don't know what this has to do with the current administration...
Re: PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
If wearing a mask stopped the government from being able to listen in on my phone calls I'd wear it in the shower. This new normal means I don't have to put on deodorant and I can get away with shaving every other day, I love it.
At a recent happy hour, a friend-of-a-friend who is into all government conspiracy theories (including thinking Covid is a hoax) was there. It got kind of heated, and one question I asked him was "If the government is so hellbent on instituting surveillance technology everywhere, why would they also advocate for you to wear a mask, which hinders current face recognition capabilities?" Unsurprisingly, he didn't have a…
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/how-china-built-...
>How China built facial recognition for people wearing masks: Hanwang says its technology has reached 95% accuracy in identifying mask wearers.
Re: PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack
#234PRISM sucks, but would we really know if it led to stopping an attack? Would it's use be hidden with parallel construction?
On the other hand, there is probably tremendous marketing value in publicizing any wins produced by the system.
Re: PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One vital rule of gun handling is to never point it at something until you’re ready to shoot... Not so much, never point a gun at something unless you're willing to shoot -- a double barrel shotgun has a lot of power to make someone rethink their life choices when pointed at them without having to actually shoot.
There are numerous formulations of this rule. The one used by the US Marines is 'Never point the weapon at anything you do not INTEND to shoot.' In this formulation of the rule, pointing a gun with the intent to threaten isn't valid, since an intention to threaten is not an intention to shoot.
What they tell you and what actually happens on the battlefield are two different things.
I've pointed weapons at people without the intention of shooting them while covering other solders and on occasions where they "just didn't look right" -- can't just randomly start shooting people but you also don't want to be caught off guard if they decide to start shooting at you. The last time this happened some car rolled up on our guard post and all of us were pointing our weapons at said vehicle while we sent someone out to figure out what they wanted (which turned out to be the main gate so they could find out what happened to one of their relatives who was arrested or something). Nobody intended on shooting them but if they didn't stop short or acted suspiciously we would've lit them up with the .50cal.
Re: PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Snowden showed that these orgs were compromised by prism, not that they willingly joined. Not true. Snowden showed that Apple and Google were "commercial partners" with PRISM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure... .
That doesn’t mean they willingly joined PRISM, knew that they had joined, or knew what data the NSA was taking. As has been discussed elsewhere there are legitimate and legal reasons for them to cooperate with the NSA in certain ways. Those two words change nothing more than that there was a partnership of some kind . No evidence has ever been produced of these companies knowingly participating in the kind of bulk da…
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Re: PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re not going to garner much sympathy for the McCloskeys. One vital rule of gun handling is to never point it at something until you’re ready to shoot, and she pointed it at people with her finger on the trigger .
Well in her case, she knew the gun wouldn't fire. It turned out the firing pin was assembled backwards for it to be used in a play. (The police took apart the gun and put to back together to charge her; it's in the evidence documents) But I agree, she should have treated the gun like it was armed and ready. She flagged the back of her husband's head several times. BUT, that isn't in and of itself criminal. In fact, n…
> Well in her case, she knew the gun wouldn't fire. It turned out the firing pin was assembled backwards for it to be used in a play. (The police took apart the gun and put to back together to charge her; it's in the evidence documents)
Along with never pointing your gun at something you don't want to destroy, you always assume a gun is loaded. That's not just a gun you pickup, that's any gun anywhere. If someone else is holding it then it's loaded too.
> In fact, nothing they did was criminal. They were in a gated neighborhood, people ripped the iron gate down, and I think it's clear they were reasonably defending their homes.
Bullshit. Brandishing is a crime in pretty much every US state and Canadian province. There are affirmative defenses to Brandishing, like real physical threats to life or property, but that gate was community property and not theirs alone.
I could see them getting out of the charges and having enough reasonable doubt to do so. Right now it's being leveraged as a kulturekamf headline to make 2nd Amendment nuts get angry.
But make no mistake, if you point a real gun at people, with a finger on the trigger, you're implying you're going to kill someone. You'd better have a damned good reason for it, and be ready to stand to any consequences; "judged by a jury instead of by St. Peter", etc.
Re: PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack
#238A certain Noam Chomsky quote comes to mind: "If you want to stop terrorism: stop participating in it"
Re: PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "Patriot Act" is so maliciously named its more funny than sad. Reminds me of George Carlin's show about changing words to make them softer.[1] An good example he used to show this is the condition the fighters get from shock in combat. In WW1, it was called Shell Shock, a terrifying name. The same condition in WW1 was called Battle Fatigue, a nicer name. In the Korean War, the name changed to Operational Exhausti…
It comes to my mind the names of the ministries in 1984 (Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Love).
Don't forget the Ministry of Truth.
Re: PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Government obfuscation by nomenclature is a useful and reliable tell.
Could one use NLP/ML to score a metric on the distance between the phrase and the concept? I think it needs some historical context as well. Like when "School of the Americas" got renamed to, "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation" which are both names for sniping civilians and throwing people out of helicopters. I could see _eating a copper banana_ as a euphemism for assassinating a south american la…
Perhaps we should first try to teach the difference to more people, before we try to teach it to an AI.