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What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

nytimes.com

41–50 of 215 posts

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#41
post #19

It continually amazes me that Americans can perpetuate the myth that their government is a democratic, moral force in the world given everything they have done, and are still doing...

As compared to exactly which other government? Anywhere?

"Others do it therefore it's ok."

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#42
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American government is not a single entity, it is comprised of many people both good and bad.

And with the magic of compartmentalization, both kinds of people can work together to create a horrible organization that does all kinds of evil around the world.

Actually, compartmentalization allows the two to work together and only enact what they both agree to. The results are not always terrible, they're a mix.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#43
This puts in context why privacy is so important. If for some reason you were to become a leader of a movement and the NSA had swept up every digital bit about you for the last 30 years then they could potentially have a goldmine of information to soil your name and put the movement into disarray.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#46
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing these things come up to make the FBI's word worth less, then! We need some sort of standardised trust metric....

I'd prefer a better educated populace that realizes the "technical evidence" being submitted in many cases is essentially witness testimony and not physical evidence [e.g. fingerprints on the murder weapon] which I think many people believe. Witness testimony is perfectly fine as long as it isn't implied to be anything greater than that.

Say the issue is call metadata. They showed that I called the murderer, who then murdered someone I had a grudge against. So this evidence doesn't prove that I did order a hit, but at least proves that I had the opportunity to have done so.

The metadata is technical evidence, not witness testimony. But...

Who wrote the software that collected the metadata? Any bugs in it? Any possibility that I did not, in fact, make that call?

Where was the metadata stored? Who had access to it? Could anybody have altered it, perhaps even to cover their own tracks?

Who had custody of the data after the records got pulled from the database? Any chance that they could have altered it? Maybe they knew that the prosecution's case was weak, and they wanted to make it look better?

In this way, technical evidence does in fact depend on witness testimony.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#47
post #19

It continually amazes me that Americans can perpetuate the myth that their government is a democratic, moral force in the world given everything they have done, and are still doing...

Any system as large and complicated as this one will have failures. Our job is to learn from the past and try to prevent it from happening again in the future.

Even if you had a perfect corruption-proof government design... What can you do about it? You are not in charge, and have no way to influence the people in charge.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#48
post #19

It continually amazes me that Americans can perpetuate the myth that their government is a democratic, moral force in the world given everything they have done, and are still doing...

"Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#49
post #19

It continually amazes me that Americans can perpetuate the myth that their government is a democratic, moral force in the world given everything they have done, and are still doing...

Any system as large and complicated as this one will have failures. Our job is to learn from the past and try to prevent it from happening again in the future.

That's engineering for you. Examine the failure modes, and try to design the next system so it can't fail in any of the known ways.

In fact, that's what the authors of the Constitution were trying to do...

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