No means of law enforcement should be so secret that even the legal basis for it can't be revealed to voters. If that renders said means impractical, too goddamn bad.
The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing
91–100 of 179 posts
Re: The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a man in my 40s. My eldest daughter is 17. We have the same first name (spelled differently, at least) and have had many cases where medical records have gotten confused. We always double-check dosages for medications before taking them.
Wait until you live in the same zip code with another person that has the same first name, last name and date of birth!
This was a story I found amusing when I read it: "Letter from Chicago. Confusion oriented medical records."
Re: The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a man in my 40s. My eldest daughter is 17. We have the same first name (spelled differently, at least) and have had many cases where medical records have gotten confused. We always double-check dosages for medications before taking them.
Wait until you live in the same zip code with another person that has the same first name, last name and date of birth!
When I was 18 I got called up for jury duty along with someone with the same name and age. It was confusing. They started referring to us by the suburb we lived in. Luckily both of us got passed over.
Re: The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing
#94Thanks Senator Wyden. Please do not stop fighting for us.
Re: The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> congressional leadership would think of it as a good look Why do they have any power? Wyden was elected by his constituency. The "congressional leadership" can go pound sand. To the extent they have any power here it should immediately be completely neutered and then removed.
They can remove him from all his committees, including the ones that give him access to this stuff to begin with. If they really work at it, they can freeze him out to the point where he can't get anything done on this or any other issue. And they can use him revealing the information as an excuse to avoid blowback from their own constituents. It's not as bad as in the House, but it's pretty bad. Oh, and they can pro…
> and they can probably deprive him of the floor the second he starts to say anything "interesting".
So, move the show off the floor, never has it been easier to reach the population as an individual. Are the citizens that enraptured by "the floor" as it is? It seems to me, that if you were serious, this would be no problem at all.
> there are serious problems with the way Congress is organized
None of that is dictated by the constitution. You can change the way committees work overnight if you want. Some would argue that this happened in the 1970s and 1990s when party politics fully invaded what used to be assignments of seniority and experience.
> but there's probably a reason
Corruption. It's worth a lot of money to certain people. You can either design that out of the system or reduce the total power of that system relative to the population.
I'm not sure you can do much until you get down to the bedrock problems here.
Re: The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I'm never giving a penny to OpenAI again, now matter how much damage control Altman tries to do with "look, we reworded the contract to have redlines too!". Yeah, legal redlines that the administration can bypass with their secret memos and secret rubberstamp courts. This isn't even a Trump thing: the Bush DOJ wrote secret memos making torture legal, the Obama DOJ wrote secret memos making it legal to ass…
By using ChatGPT, OpenAI are losing money. So if you want them to die faster, use their services.
It will go faster if they have no customers and they are building out software with expensive engineers.
Re: The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing
#97The article lede reads: "Senator Ron Wyden says that when a secret interpretation of Section 702 is eventually declassified, the American public “will be stunned” to learn what the NSA has been doing."
Technically the full quote from Wyden is: "when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information."
It's a small thing, but I find the click-bait editorializing from techdirt a bit off-putting.
Re: The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing
#98The warnings are nice but he could just say what it is. Members of Congress have immunity for what they say on the floor of their chamber in session, classification or no.
Immunity from prosecution, maybe, but not immunity from consequence. I can’t imagine congressional leadership would think of it as a good look—and isn’t the “need to know” based on the congressperson’s role? For example don’t they brief only congresspeople in specific roles on specific matters, like the so-called “Gang of Eight” on intelligence matters? [0] It feels a little like keeping the filibuster around: maybe…
This is all true and it kind of defines the scope of the harm he is talking about: bad enough for vague warnings, but apparently not bad enough to risk consequences to seniority etc. by outright revealing it.
Worth noting his full quote is that people will be “stunned that it took so long” for the info to come out. Which is not quite the same thing as being stunned in general.
Re: The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
By using ChatGPT, OpenAI are losing money. So if you want them to die faster, use their services.
Contra the popular memes, I don’t think they’re losing money with every query sent (the money pit is capex on new models and hardware, but I don’t think inference itself is unprofitable), so this wouldn’t actually work. I was already paying for Claude Max before the War Department fiasco, so there’s not much more I can do to hurt OAI apart from complain about it online, although I did persuade several people on vario…
I think it's a lost cause. Anthropic is still getting used at Palantir[0], their software is used in strike planning whether they consent or not. We can support them all day and fight OpenAI to the last breath, but ensuring AI is used responsibly is not up to any of us. It's the government's job to hold itself accountable, and they can't do it. By digging in their heels, Anthropic is preparing for an unwinnable fight against an enemy that doesn't play fair.
Considering how many lines Anthropic has crossed, it all feels like forced outrage to me. I feel ethically justified supporting none of these companies, it's reminiscent of the forced duopoly between iOS and Android.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/12/karp-palantir-anthropic-clau...
Re: The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing
#100Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about', but my line of thinking is not 'do i trust the government' it's 'do I have faith in all future forms of government who will have access to this data' Given how fast and lose I've seen the DODGE folks play with the data they have, absolutely not . I still shudder over the fact t…
> it's 'do I have faith in all future forms of government who will have access to this data' And even this assumes that the government can and will protect the data from the various bad actors who want it, something they have absolutely failed to do on multiple occasions.
You forgot that your government is the bad actor. For them the laws do not apply