Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans • Hacker News Board

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#331

Post by crusso » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 4:20 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #323

crusso wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sort I think that a bubble sort can be effective in that it's easy to write and does the job. I'm not addressing the rest of your post, just the one part that has nothing to do with what you were really saying.

I addressed the part that I most cared about. In privacy discussions like these, it's often the case that people lament the fact that the public cares more about things like abortion than the NSA collecting call metadata. My point is that the legal status of abortion (or gay rights, etc) is not the kind of minor issue that some people like to dismiss as merely "wedge issues." On the list of things that aren't in the…

You keep mentioning "privacy" as though I argued its merits relative to abortion. I didn't even use the word.

My post was all about the size and power of the Federal government trumping all other issues such as whether or not abortion is good or bad. Once you've abdicated your liberty, your ability to complain or resolve other issues is gone.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#332

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 4:21 PM UTC

digitalengineer wrote: post #82

Dutch person here with a little insight what's to come for you guys. Some information about our tiny little country (in Wester Europe, very pro-US) with just 17 million people. Our government listens in on more calls every year than in the whole of the US combined. All our telecommunications providers are forced to have the capability to intercept all traffic (phone and internet). Encrypted data must be stored for an…

[deleted]

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#333

Post by robomartin » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 4:21 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #315

kunai wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I voted for Romney You are part of the problem. When someone is a fucking idiot, you don't vote for the slightly less idiotic idiot, you vote third-party. You are not independent, and it's an embarrassment to say you are if you only vote for the lesser of two evils, and not one that cares about our country, like Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein.

> it's an embarrassment to say you are if you only vote for the lesser of two evils, and not one that cares about our country, like Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein. Its quite possible to think that, of Obama and Romney, Romney is the lesser of two evils, and to think that for any X in (Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein), Romney would still be the lesser of two evils when considering Romney vs. X. Its also quit…

> Based on this, it would be counterproductive to vote third party, and the responsible thing would be to vote for Romney.

Exactly right. When faced with wasting your vote the intelligent thing to do is to try to mitigate damage and cast a vote for the person who is likely to do the most good where it matters. Obama, as it turns out, isn't even qualified to run a cookie-baking operation. We really needed someone with a deep understanding of business and economics at the helm. The only electable choice was Romney. Any other vote would have been a wasted vote.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#334

Post by tripzilch » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 4:24 PM UTC

digitalengineer wrote: post #82

Dutch person here with a little insight what's to come for you guys. Some information about our tiny little country (in Wester Europe, very pro-US) with just 17 million people. Our government listens in on more calls every year than in the whole of the US combined. All our telecommunications providers are forced to have the capability to intercept all traffic (phone and internet). Encrypted data must be stored for an…

Also Dutch. Didn't know about the drones, got a link for that? I believe you (esp. given all the other crap they pull), I'm curious how and where they use the drones.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#335

Post by jaekwon » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 4:24 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #281

talmand wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't say nor have I ever heard a libertarian claim they wanted no government. I believe that's a different ideology.

He said, "Ultra limited government." Does ultra-limited government include government-provided roads, infrastructure, safe food, safe cars, electricity, water, internet?

No reason it couldn't. It's not the size of a government that determines its efficacy, esp with the right kind of private-sector support.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#336

Post by khuey » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 4:25 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #205

loup-vaillant wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't reboot the system, rewrite it. Instead of a representative government most western countries suffer, switch to democracy. I mean, democracy . Where the people decide for their rules directly. Where real democratic processes such as random trials are used, instead elections which by nature are heavily influenced by a tiny elite. Where the constitution itself is not written by those who will later rule the countr…

Keep the representative system, but add a ton of direct democracy influences to it. You can even take real world examples from countries like Germany or Finland, I believe, where the citizens can create their own bills, and then pass them through a referendum. It doesn't need to be 100% democracy, and it doesn't need to be 80-90% representative like US, either. It definitely needs to be a lot more towards direct demo…

I think the state of California is a pretty good counter-example to the purported benefits of increased direct democracy.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

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Post by jaekwon » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 4:26 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #275

bilbo0s wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...When are you going to understand that a conservative Libertarian (as opposed to extreme and nearly anarchist) approach is the only path to recovery?..." I think this is the issue in a nutshell. Partisanship. Even people who do not like the Demopublicans... are 'partisan'. I know it was probably not intended, but your post provides illustration of the issue by way of example. I'd wager you, like the average Democr…

Wrong. I voted for Obama the first time. Then, when I learned he had no clue, lied about everything, did not do as promised, plunged us into more debt, is a total union whore, etc, I voted for Romney. I am a true independent in the full sense of the word. To be fair, our system is based on political parties. If these were abolished and politicians had to run without party affiliation then one could vote outside clans…

You think voting for Romney shows that you learned anything? Shame on you.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

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Post by tripzilch » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 4:28 PM UTC

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #241

sigkill wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to be honest, in retrospect the present Germans are lucky as compared to other countries that they already are educated either first, or second hand about the issue of government knowing everything. Another point could be made is that thank god it happened during the low tech era and not today because a Hitler-esque figure armed with a German equivalent of Google would positively fuck up the entire world with ev…

Germany occupied NL during that time frame, I'm sure the Dutch are familiar with it too. Most of Western Europe is, actually.

Sort of, yes, back then our state records showed nicely who was and wasn't Jewish. So we got a law that forbids religion to be listed in these records. And now we log everything else.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

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Post by cakebread » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 4:33 PM UTC

wolfpackk wrote: post #311

robomartin wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is better to remain silent and be thought... May I suggest that getting an education might do wonders for your life? Just a thought.

resorting to ad hominems rather than reason, pretty typical for the moronic libertarian technophiles that seem to be all over hn.

Getting a chubby at any chance to say "ad hominem" is also typical HN.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

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Post by robomartin » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 4:33 PM UTC

bmelton wrote: post #308

robomartin wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The net, basically, is that privacy is nobody's 'hot-button' issue because even while somebody can espouse the inherent ignorance of the "If you have nothing to hide..." argument, we, for the most part, don't have anything to hide. So while we don't acquiesce to these intrusions of privacy, we let them fall by the wayside in the wake of more important issues Perfectly stated. Not sure what the solution might be oth…

At the risk of losing whatever credibility I might have gained by my previous post, an alternative suggestion would be to simply take the power of legislation for non-legislative realms out of the hands of politicians. Without getting into the merits of how large a government ought to be, it's not really debatable that the government isn't very good at providing services like the ones you described. There are pockets…

I don't have any issues with what you are proposing. In more general terms what we might need is an open national discussion about how to mutate our government into something that will serve us well for the next century or so. This two-hundred year old system could be improved. Not thrown away, improved.

It's interesting to watch people in this thread misinterpret "limited government" to mean "no government" and actually focus on numbers. To be sure, we probably have too many people working in government (twenty million according to the us census). Yet "limited government" means "limited reach" much more so than "limited count". In other words, an improvement in quality.