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Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

politico.com

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Re: Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

#91

Post by guelo »

SllX wrote: post #68
kryogen1c wrote: post #8

> The U.S. government concluded within the last two years that Israel was most likely behind > But unlike most other occasions I don't know if im spoiled by Wikipedia, or jaded from age, or wisened by age, or rightfully lost trust in the media, or wrongfully lost trust in the media, but i find myself entirely unwilling to accept to accept claims like this. Citation. Needed. In order to believe this article, i need to…

Quick and easy way to deal with this: disregard the daily news entirely unless it profits you. Israel left listening devices around the White House? Big if true, but we have the Department of State, Intelligence Community and Department of Defense to deal with this crap in approximately that order. If it turns into anything big or is part of something bigger, someday there will be a book about it. News in all its for…

That's not how democracy is supposed to work.

Re: Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

#92

Post by Udik »

wbl wrote: post #85
Udik wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big if true, but we have the Department of State, Intelligence Community and Department of Defense to deal with this crap in approximately that order. The big news here is that nothing happened and nothing is gonna happen. People should start getting some clues from what should happen, and yet doesn't. Edit: at the time of this edit, the news is already on the front page of the Guardian and the BBC. Completely abse…

Spying is part of life. We do it, they do it, everybody foes it.

When was the last time that British or German spies were caught spying on the US president? And even in that case, the relationship between the US and Israel is a unique one: as one swears to be the best friend ever of the other, while enjoying lavish funding and unwavering political protection. While the president of the US can accuse people who vote for the opposition to be disloyal to Israel. That is, disloyal to a foreign country.

Re: Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

#93

Post by lawnchair_larry »

deathhand wrote: post #11
buyingarmor wrote: post #4

Israel and the U.S are extremely strong alliance Also the Mossad is working a lot with the secret service in the U.S I believe there is a deeper reason behind those actions that won't be revealed to us (it can also explain the lack of actions of the U.S towards this case)

Leaks have shown that with the 5 eyes 'one hand washes another' and probably spying on US citizens on behest of the US.

Israel isn’t part of five eyes.

Re: Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

#94

Post by guelo »

tryitnow wrote: post #82

If this is true can you blame the Israeli government? The US has an incredibly volatile, unpredictable president. Israel is a country surrounded by states that are openly hostile and the continued survival of Israel depends, in part, on the behavior of the US. I would be disappointed if Israel wasn't doing something like this. And I'm willing to bet the US government does this sort of stuff all over the world, includ…

Yes I can blame them. Get the fuck out of my country. And stop buying my politicians.

Re: Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

#95

Post by SllX »

guelo wrote: post #91
SllX wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick and easy way to deal with this: disregard the daily news entirely unless it profits you. Israel left listening devices around the White House? Big if true, but we have the Department of State, Intelligence Community and Department of Defense to deal with this crap in approximately that order. If it turns into anything big or is part of something bigger, someday there will be a book about it. News in all its for…

That's not how democracy is supposed to work.

That is exactly how a functioning democracy works: you protect your interests, including your collective interests (in Defense, Intelligence, Diplomacy, Trade).

The innovation with democracy is it gives members of the citizenry the chance to have a say and shape our civil institutions. News is what you use to figure out what you should be investing in or divesting from, and to keep tabs on how well your own interests are being served. Anything more than that is noise without value, an intellectual poison.

Where it fails is when individual interests win out disproportionately at the expense of the collective interest and civil institutions are left to rot and atrophy.

You can waste everything else, but you shouldn’t waste time. That’s the one asset you are innately born with that you can not recover once it is gone.

Re: Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

#97

Post by mistermann »

habnds wrote: post #87
mistermann wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike science, where at least in theory, everything is built from the ground up using first principles or built upon raw data collected, the "raw data" of journalism is just various types of conversations with people the journalist then has to verify, and gauge the reliability of. Agreed. > I personally don't think efforts to "fix the news" as a result of facebook or whatever make a lot of sense in this context. I…

I see what you're saying but I don't agree that they were presenting the officials opinion as fact. The reason we could criticize it in the first place is that it's clearly the opinion of an official who Politico judged as a credible expert on the matter of how these issues are commonly handled.

> I see what you're saying but I don't agree that they were presenting the officials opinion as fact

I don't think you really see what I'm saying. As literally written, they were presenting that particular section as fact. You may remark that I'm being excessively pedantic and that they were just writing a little sloppily, and you may be right, but at the end of the day the result is the same: each individual's mental model of the world is formed based upon the information they consume, and neither you nor I (nor scientists in the field) really know the effect this style of "news" reporting has on people at both the conscious and subconscious level.

Let me ask you this: hypothetically, let's say there was a way to enforce a law outlawing presenting speculation or opinions as if they were facts - do you think this would have an effect on society? I think HN would be a good testing ground for this experiment, but I don't sense much support for the idea.

Re: Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

#98

Post by lallysingh »

habnds wrote: post #19
kryogen1c wrote: post #8

> The U.S. government concluded within the last two years that Israel was most likely behind > But unlike most other occasions I don't know if im spoiled by Wikipedia, or jaded from age, or wisened by age, or rightfully lost trust in the media, or wrongfully lost trust in the media, but i find myself entirely unwilling to accept to accept claims like this. Citation. Needed. In order to believe this article, i need to…

Citations in journalism is a really interesting thing. Unlike science, where at least in theory, everything is built from the ground up using first principles or built upon raw data collected, the "raw data" of journalism is just various types of conversations with people the journalist then has to verify, and gauge the reliability of. In other cases it's the journalists first person experience of an event. Citations…

I think the reporter is the key here. Something analogous to an H-Index for reporters' quality over time could work. How many times has their reporting been refuted? How many times cited? Etc.

That could actually be something really big for news. Actual quantifiable credibility.

Re: Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

#99

Post by dev_dull »

kryogen1c wrote: post #8

> The U.S. government concluded within the last two years that Israel was most likely behind > But unlike most other occasions I don't know if im spoiled by Wikipedia, or jaded from age, or wisened by age, or rightfully lost trust in the media, or wrongfully lost trust in the media, but i find myself entirely unwilling to accept to accept claims like this. Citation. Needed. In order to believe this article, i need to…

And then learn about the technology, and learn about the attribution.

If there’s anything I learned from the governments attribution of the DNC “hacking”, it’s that government attribution is crap. Go ahead and search for the actual evidence used in that attribution (good luck finding anything other than click bait MSM). It’s almost as laughable as the evidence in “trump tower server back channel to Russia”. For any security-minded folks it will be good for a laugh.

Re: Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

#100

Post by nradov »

habnds wrote: post #69
roenxi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia does context amazingly well. If I go to the Wikipedia article on sandals I not only get information on sandals, I get information about why people might want to look at an article on sandals (eg, infectious disease control) and if I care to drill a little deeper a list of all the people who cared enough about sandals to edit the article. And a talk page to cover any controversies although sandals appear to…

Just putting myself in the shoes of someone at Politico, I think they would point out a few things. Is it reasonable to compare this article to a wikipedia article? The publishing time frame and the number of people involved are way different. Wikipedia isn't intended to be a source for current events. It isn't journalism. Maybe more importantly, is Wikpedia really an objective or fair look at an issue? For sandals s…

There are many Wikipedia pages on current, ongoing events. The editors even label them as such. So apparently it is intended for that purpose.
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