31–40 of 208 posts
If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook simultaneously came out and published all statistics that the government is not allowing them to publish, and declared that they will continue to publish those as they come in and be entirely transparent about the tracking that the NSA asked of them, would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market? I don't think so. I think the NSA would fold…
If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook simultaneously came out and published all statistics that the government is not allowing them to publish, and declared that they will continue to publish those as they come in and be entirely transparent about the tracking that the NSA asked of them, would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market? I don't think so. I think the NSA would fold…
Too big to fail civil disobedience
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keith Alexander believes that terrorists live amongst us, trying to implement Sharia and create a Caliphate. To fight this, he needs to "Collect it all". It's just as important to understand his motivation as it is to understand ours, and assess the reasonableness of each in comparison to the other, comparing our current situation to others in history that were similar, and the result they had.
Firstly, does he seriously believe that, or are you just demonizing him because it'll get you agreement? If he said something to that effect, that's concerning, but if he hasn't, can we stick to things which have actually happened? And secondly, is not the motivation to stop terrorists in the US from harming US citizens a noble goal, in theory? Now granted, we shouldn't have to sacrifice our privacy to get that done,…
If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook simultaneously came out and published all statistics that the government is not allowing them to publish, and declared that they will continue to publish those as they come in and be entirely transparent about the tracking that the NSA asked of them, would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market? I don't think so. I think the NSA would fold…
Will they? They're of course competitors, they could be played off against each other by the government. Anyways, such talks would have to remain ultra-secret.
If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook simultaneously came out and published all statistics that the government is not allowing them to publish, and declared that they will continue to publish those as they come in and be entirely transparent about the tracking that the NSA asked of them, would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market? I don't think so. I think the NSA would fold…
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?
This sound like a good thing to anyone?
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…
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 target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year. The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million.[1]'
In this environment of immunity granted to profiteers while my friends and I are prosecuted, it is "us vs. them."
Stop attempting to blow out meaningless opinions like "The NSA is on our side" in response to articles showing the opposite.
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…
Of course, you won't see the story about a federal judge ruling NYPD's stop-and-frisk was illegal[0], despite it being a much graver offense to individual rights, because it doesn't affect rich, white techies. But an email service you never used shut down and cited "NSA did it!" as its reason? Put that shit all over the front page!
[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-pr...
If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook simultaneously came out and published all statistics that the government is not allowing them to publish, and declared that they will continue to publish those as they come in and be entirely transparent about the tracking that the NSA asked of them, would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market? I don't think so. I think the NSA would fold…
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…
It happens all the time, though, if you look at the financial, banking, insurance and oil industry - even without the slightest (moral) excuse. And nobody goes to jail, just some ridiculous fines to pay.
This time, there is a very serious moral imperative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the NSA does not have control. How do you know? The Internet backbone was developed using US government funding. How do you know that the US government did not put backdoors there? It did in the case of the long-distance telephone network. We can have our cake (terrorist monitoring) and eat it too (maintain individual privacy) I agree that this could be done in theory; I'm not sure it can be done in practice.
I don't know in the epistemological sense, but there's just no reason to believe such a thing to be true.
None of that counts to you because "there's just no reason to believe such a thing." You are essentially saying you don't believe anything you may have read in the past few years counts as control.
What IS control then, other than the ability to control others, which the US/NSA has attempting to keep on top of since the shift in data traffic trends in the 1990s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
'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.' How can you possibly know this? In fact I would argue as much as we 'know' anything at all related to the NSA program we know that it has lead to interventions. The NSA claims this surveillance has been instrumental to stopping 'doz…
I know it for the same reason I know unicorns and leprechauns don't exist - there is no credible evidence supporting it. Ignore and refuse to participate in wild speculation until evidence appears. That's how we have to operate, lest we succumb to every conspiratorial fantasy the Internet can come up with.
but arguing that the NSA program has never lead to anyone being 'snatched up off the streets', is WILDLY disconnected from reality. The whole purpose of the program is to snatch terrorists up off the streets, the whole purpose of it being classified is to enable it to function without explicitly giving terrorists a good understanding of our ways and means...
how on earth is assuming a program is used for at least what the government claims it is used for a conspiratorial fantasy?