They SHOULD have
WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors
51–60 of 105 posts
Re: WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no motives. I'm commenting on an Internet forum for fun. Should we continue this EdNauseum or let it go?
I'm glad my username amused you, but you're the originator of a thread calling Assange's message into question because you "don't know his motives". "Look, we've had police combing this guy's house for weeks and we have nothing! Nobody is that clean, he must be dirty!" But of course we all believe that you're just honestly speculating.
This is literally my first time engaging in an Internet flame war. It's kind of fun.
To address your comment, Mr. Hominem, I never called Assange's motives into question. I'm providing a valuable service of an alternative perspective. The fact that I instigated a flame war is evidence of the hacker news echo chamber. I suspect once my comment crosses into -1 territory my opinions will be disregarded by the same people who would consider them when my comment was at the top of the discussion.
Propaganda is alive and well on hacker news. Luckily so is free speech, the right I assume you hold most dearly. If you want to avoid hypocrisy, it would be best to approach discussion with an open mind rather than a vindictive agenda.
I have no agenda, except that I like to keep my writing sharp and piss some people off in the process.
Re: WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors
#53While I think that your analogy is fantastic - I want to rebut it... not to rebut you, but to the intelligence community. FUCK YOU intelligence community. I fucking hate you. We are suffering from the parasite of tyranny on the human condition. fuck that condition. Humans exist as both an individual and as a community - this is the binary spectrum we exist in. The challenge is in how we understand the differences bet…
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11156136 and marked it off-topic.
Re: WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors
#54While it's arguable that Berlusconi was a sensible target...How does that justify spying on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Afghanistan? Or from previous revelations, UNICEF - the children's agency? FWIW, I've just started laying out one aspect of this debate and how intelligence operation blowback can affect the perception of neutrality of NGOs working on the ground. This increasingly se…
> How does that justify spying on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Afghanistan? Or from previous revelations, UNICEF - the children's agency? I think spycraft is a bit like logging to ELK, or sending metrics to Graphite/InfluxDB - capture all data you can, analyze later.
Yeah you're right, neither involve actual people.
Re: WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I sort of thought that's its legitimate purpose (as opposed to domestic surveillance).
Yes, spying to promote the interests of the people of the U.S. is legitimate in a world with other states with armies and the occasional bin Laden, etc. That's different from spying to promote the power of the executive, its fave corporations, the spies themselves, their counterparts in other nations, and who knows what else. The government is in theory our employees, and I feel more threatened by these employees who…
> The government is in theory our employees
Thought experiment: what would happen if you exercised any discretion in whether to continue employing them, or even how much of your income you pay them?
Re: WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad my username amused you, but you're the originator of a thread calling Assange's message into question because you "don't know his motives". "Look, we've had police combing this guy's house for weeks and we have nothing! Nobody is that clean, he must be dirty!" But of course we all believe that you're just honestly speculating.
This is literally my first time engaging in an Internet flame war. It's kind of fun. To address your comment, Mr. Hominem, I never called Assange's motives into question. I'm providing a valuable service of an alternative perspective. The fact that I instigated a flame war is evidence of the hacker news echo chamber. I suspect once my comment crosses into -1 territory my opinions will be disregarded by the same peopl…
You literally did nothing except call Assange's motives into question. You don't have anything substantive, you're nothing but motive.
Re: WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors
#57All Seeing Eye. That's the point.
Re: WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors
#58While it's arguable that Berlusconi was a sensible target...How does that justify spying on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Afghanistan? Or from previous revelations, UNICEF - the children's agency? FWIW, I've just started laying out one aspect of this debate and how intelligence operation blowback can affect the perception of neutrality of NGOs working on the ground. This increasingly se…
Corruption. Obviously we're both speculating here, but accountability is a serious problem with NGOs, along with corruption/graft/general-wastefulness. So if the US suspected massive (tens of millions of dollars, or more) corruption, that's a plausible reason. I'm not saying it's likely, just that there are possible reasons out there in the world.
I dunno, the US Government had billions of USD go mysteriously missing during our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan so it seems unlikely that the powers that be are too concerned about corruption for the sake of stamping out corruption.
Re: WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors
#59Hacker News is too USA-centric. What if Italy spied the USA? Including the metadata of all citizens' calls? It's that ok?
Thing is, Italy is not a world power with dominance in information technologies and global ambitions.
Re: WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors
#60Pope discovered to be Catholic. Now if the NSA had spied on Smokey Bear...