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Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

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

#341

Post by scott_karana »

killerpopiller wrote: post #147
dirktheman wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow Dutchman here, and I couldn't agree more. I actually helped building the electronic patient file in two major hospitals, and I can't tell you enough about the massive clusterfuck that is. The government requires you to finish it before a certain date, only they provide you with the exact requirements after that date. Basic security measures like encrypting data? No way! To me, America is still the land of the…

no, it is, fanfare.., Germany. I read this above report and can't believe it. When that this happen? Our data privacy laws are thorough and sometimes an obstacle, but many projects got stopped because of privacy issues: e.g. the digital stored medical records on ones health insurance card The stop of the data retention directive by our beloved Bundesverfassungsgericht (they are awesome) is another milestone. Core of…

And what about the censorship, and the illegality of penetration testing software?

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

#342

Post by jbooth »

robomartin wrote: post #300
d23 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No government? Who said that? Where? We need a simple and limited government. No, no, no. Stop backpedaling. You said this before: > Ultra limited government. That's pretty close to "no" government, so his points still stand. The problem isn't government in general , any more than it is people in general . It's things that are broken or aren't working well. It can just as easily be said about the private sector. Ye…

No, ultra-limited government means a government with significantly reduced power, reach and size with respect to what we have today. It does not mean "no government". Considering how massive and all encompassing our governments are now, even after severely reducing it at all levels we'd still have quite a few people running our cities, states and country. You can twist it any way you want but nobody is calling for no…

It means damn near nothing, getting to ideologically have your cake and eat it too.

Reform is hard and involves details. Whining about "too much government" doesn't require any details at all. It's like Paul Ryan's budget plan that has huge line items of savings under, and I'm not making this up, "spending cuts" and "tax reform", with no further specifics. Hey, who could be against that? There's nothing negative about it, just some huge savings!

You want less government? Great. Get a marker and about 5 million pages in your printer and start printing out the US budget to mark it up for your suggestions. Because there isn't a single whole department you could cut without seriously screwing up society, you have to get into the weeds.

Want to cut this NSA program? Great, I agree with you. We do need the NSA around in some form with a smaller mandate, though.

Want to eliminate the FCC? You probably haven't thought about why it's illegal for me to buy a 1,000MW transmitter and drown out WNBC with Rick Astley on repeat.

Want to eliminate entitlements? You need a backup plan that won't have people dying in the streets, and actually spends less money. Looping in private contractors to spend more money or provide less benefits is not smaller government.

All 3 of these scenarios (and I could keep going) involve smarter government. Sure, saving money means "less" in some senses but the point is being smarter, not just randomly being upset at the aggregate size of things that you support in isolation.

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

#343

Post by jaekwon »

rvschuilenburg wrote: post #123
Proleps wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird thing is, nobody seems to care. I care, it's one of the reasons I will keep voting for the pirate party.

Same here, and it confuses the hell out of me. Everytime i tell someone about yet-another-privacy-issue, and each time they answer "well, i have nothing to hide".

Perhaps what they really mean is, "I have nothing to lose".?

If you have nothing to lose, then you only have information to gain by invading others' privacy.

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

#344

Post by goblin89 »

sigkill wrote: post #207
killerpopiller wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, it is, fanfare.., Germany. I read this above report and can't believe it. When that this happen? Our data privacy laws are thorough and sometimes an obstacle, but many projects got stopped because of privacy issues: e.g. the digital stored medical records on ones health insurance card The stop of the data retention directive by our beloved Bundesverfassungsgericht (they are awesome) is another milestone. Core of…

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…

Countries that were part of or occupied by USSR have been there as well, I think.

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

#345

Post by wolfpackk »

robomartin wrote: post #316
wolfpackk wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Really? And "go fuck yourself" is "reason" how? I am merely a mirror for the direction you chose to take. If you want to discuss the topic with civility I am all for it so long as you don't ask me to do things with my body I am quite literally biologically incapable of doing.

Merely reflecting the tone you've taken throughout this post. Then to use the passive-aggressive "May I suggest getting an education" bit is incredibly condescending, especially given that your position of less-government is universally better, after being scrubbed of the sensationalist rhetoric you are spewing, has literally 0 empirical evidence behind it. There is a reason Austrian economics is not taken seriously.

I especially like that fact that you asked less than 1.5 years ago about the best online CS program, then have the audacity to tell someone to get an education. You probably do not know jack shit about econ or cs.

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

#346

Post by pyrocat »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #255
k-mcgrady wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people did care but we see these stories so regularly now, even though I know it's a bad thing, I find it hard to care.

Second, they get in the news once, minor uproar (particularly on the internet), then... nothing. Maybe in cases like the The Pirate Bay blockade, which gets through to certain news sites from time to time whenever they get a new domain name or host, where they remind the audience that for that single web page, ISP's have been made to censor it by court order (and need to update their blocked domain names / IP address…

and this is why media conglomeration is a bad thing.

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

#347

Post by jbooth »

robomartin wrote: post #72

I hate to use this tone but, so be it. Maybe now you morons who continue to vote in the pieces of shit into our government who are bent on taking more and more power for themselves will wake up and figure it out? How much more proof do you need? Does this make you angry yet or is Obama still your diety? Oh, and Republicans don't get a pass either. The point is that all of you morons voting like robots along party lin…

Most of the conservatives I know just want to spend more money investigating Benghazi.

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

#348

Post by bmelton »

robomartin wrote: post #340
bmelton wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actu…

Agreed especially on the 'no government' mantra. I think people have been, to an extent, conditioned by party lines to think in certain ways as well.

Oftentimes, I'll suggest eliminating a program from the federal government's purview and shifting its responsibilities down to the state, especially in cases where 'one-size-fits-all' policies don't make sense or where the dollars could be spent more efficiently within local reach (and especially where spend efficiency matters, which ought to be a bigger focus than it is), and the response is to parrot that 'program x needs to exist'.

I know I'm a libertarian, and yeah, that does come with a lot of baggage, but I like to think I'm more pragmatic and comprising than most, but suggesting we get rid of the Department of Education and shift the billions of dollars to the states doesn't mean I hate education, it means that those dollars matter, and one-size-fits-all plans aren't good for America (see: no child left behind).

Regarding 'limited reach', again, I completely agree, but I think that the fault lies with the citizenry. The Constitution, if read as a cautionary tale, basically predicted that this would inevitably happen, and it's our fault for not having been vigilant enough to prevent it.

Even today, despite all this outrage, I'm guessing by the next election cycle, it will have been forgotten. If anybody loses so much as a seat over this, I'll be very surprised.

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

#349

Post by [deleted] »

dantheman wrote: post #92
wybo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you lost faith in Congress, like 94% of Americans. You might also join a realistic effort to reform it: http://www.rootstrikers.org (ran by Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law prof who also founded the Creative Commons movement)

Root Strikers is fundamentally misguided, they attack the symptoms instead of the cause. The root of all this corruption is how large the federal government is, any organization with that much power and money will be co-opted.

[deleted]

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

#350

Post by dantheman »

[deleted] wrote: post #349
dantheman wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Root Strikers is fundamentally misguided, they attack the symptoms instead of the cause. The root of all this corruption is how large the federal government is, any organization with that much power and money will be co-opted.

[deleted]

Well, specific solutions would to be close various federal agencies, e.g. the department of education. Push law making wherever feasible to the state level or lower. Simplify the tax code - i.e. end tax breaks, reduce the overall tax rate so that the government spends less money.

The key thing is to not attack our freedom to associate and speak, which is what rootstrikers are advocating. Many of the policie they advocate will be used to silence anonymous speech/activities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootstrikers#Positions

At the end of the day, their cure won't fix anything, but it will hurt a lot.

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