If elected, Clinton would support an “Encryption Commission” to help feds
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In doing so this article falls prey to much of what plagues the media during the election cycle. Broadly aligned against particular candidates and willing to take widely biased and selective approaches toward writing and editing about them, they fail to say much of anything substantive at all.
For instance this article can't come up with what a good policy might look like, any particular appraisal of either candidate's policies (it merely cites pages and makes an issue of known Clinton's backdoor policies).
The article mentions that both candidates consider Snowden a traitor, with Trump explicitly using the word and Clinton calling for Snowden to be extradited to the United States under investigation for violating the Espionage Act.
Reading between the lines the article emphasizes that Silicon Valley doesn't understand or trust the policies from either candidate, but appears to have a stronger majority support for Clinton due to issues not related to either campaign promises or policy directions.
EDIT: People below in the thread take issue with the term "libelous" so I replaced it with "ridiculing".
Only 15% of American believe that Snowden is a hero, 30% call him a traitor outright and only 25% of them believe that he should be offered any type of deal/pardon.
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/edward-snowden-rasmussen-po...
So both candidates either appeal too or represent to the vox populi.
Our republic, much like many historical republics including (crossing immediately the Godwin line) the Weimar Republic, are fervently nationalistic and willing - through fear, state disinformation, and through prejudice - to support cases against liberty in support of centralized autonomous power.
While the youth population of America either broadly support Snowden or are deadlocked (depending on the poll), the more religious and jingoistic elements of the American public and those whose generations participated in World and Cold wars have been easy to convince that civil liberty is something cheap to trade for consolidated power.
I would go as far as say that the majority of "young" (18-35) Americans would call for a trial rather than a blanket pardon.
In fact by your own poll it looks that the majority of 18-35's would favour criminal persecution since the 18-29 is 42 for 42 against and 30-49 is 56 for 36 against.
It's my impression that more 'young' people would want to see a blanket pardon over a secret trial where a defense can't be mounted.
According to that poll. I think it's a reasonable possibility that one of those buckets is shortchanged by the way polls are conducted.
You need to realise that even in the Huff's online polls e.g. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/05/edward-snowden-poll... Snowden was viewed unfavourably, and if online and the Huff is not pandering to a favourable demographic even tho on paper the poll might match the US demographics then I don't know what is.
I'm not sure I've seen anyone able to do this. The political and law enforcement communities simply don't seem to understand the tech side. While the tech community seems unwilling to acknowledge that widespread and freely available encryption is a world altering proposition for governments who have been able to use warrants to get this same information for literally hundreds of years. If some type of “Encryption Commission” is established to get these sides talking, that is at least progress.
That's a very strong statement, and AFAICT completely unwarranted. The picture depicts him thinking of a 400 pound weight, which is a reference to his statement that was quoted later in the article:
"[Hillary Clinton’s] saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China, it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds."
And the question marks on the picture are representative of the fact that his tech policy (the main subject of the piece) is incoherent and largely undefined.
> For instance this article can't come up with what a good policy might look like
Classic deflection technique. A critic does not need to be able to come up with a good answer in order to criticize someone else for not doing so. It's not Ars Technica's job to define this nation's tech policy, but it is the president's job (or at least, the president has a huge influence on it), so presidential candidates really ought to be able to define a clear policy.
To be very fair I've called out when libelous pictures are posted of Clinton. I consider anything that makes a candidate look confused or stupid or ineffective politically loaded, damaging to reputation (in the context of an election) and therefore libelous.
His quote had nothing to do with his policy (which I agree is as vacuuous as Clinton's). He was talking about attribution. Separate topic.
Regarding "deflection technique" I don't expect Ars to come up with a uniform policy. I do expect them to have standards (other than number of pages) to evaluate criteria by. The author of the article clearly doesn't. This is what I intended to say and I fully admit that I didn't say it clearly before.
You could fairly describe the picture in the article as mocking, but not libelous.
I suppose, since we don't want to keep arguing, that it will remain unresolved.
Thankfully it appears you understand my use of the term.
Or to put it another way, you're the only person who thinks it's unsolved, everybody else understands the meaning of libel and how you're using the term incorrectly. If you truly don't want to argue this, you should just accept that and move on.
I've changed the original wording.
The you are clearly misinformed as to the nature, facts, and purpose of libel law, and it would be a mistake for anyone to believe what you have to say on the matter.
Using an unflattering picture or depiction cannot be libel. Making a false statements (an in the case of public figures, such as presidential candidates) those statements must be made with "actual malice" or be published with a reckless disregard for the truth. N.B. I am not a lawyer.
It's a mistake to take everything everyone says as legalese.
I mean these terms in the vernacular sense.
It seems to me that you are trying to pick a very technical fight in a forum where it is not suited. Neither you nor I are lawyers and this is not a courtroom.
Do you understand what I mean by libelous?
I find it unfortunate that conversations can be and are derailed so effectively this way. I'll try to avoid the term in the future when speaking about both Clinton, Trump and others.
I edited the top comment to reflect this.
Why the infosec community overwhelmingly supports her is an ongoing point of confusion for me.
It's the natural approach of centrists to try to take a compromise, middle-of-the-road position. Usually that's wise; sometimes the world is quantized in a way that means you cannot split the difference.
The primary strategy by the Democratic Party and by establishment circles has been to make Trump seem as unpalatable as possible, hoping to make him so much less desirable than the historically untrusted establishment candidate that she may pull off a win at the ballot box.
Since the first-past-the-post electoral system functions to magnify strategic voting and minimize voting for values, the impression that Trump is a more dangerous and despicable candidate (traded by campaign dollars and personal connections to create information bubbles over the electorate), this strategy is not only effective but also smart.
In the end we've got two candidates we really don't want, a complete lack of examination of policy, and a 'default' to an establishment candidate seeking further erosion of civil liberties, checks and balances and civilian participation in government.
But I share the concern about HC, considering she's just far too conservative on major issues especially with regards to encryption/"national security" etc. She's not corrupt, or evil or crooked or lying or smelling as sulfur, she's just (imho) wrong. Let's hope there will be people around her who can have a positive impact on her thinking.
If she's not... why did she delete thousands of emails that were illegally on a private server? Why did she lie about the source of protests and then leave American's to die?
For someone who isn't corrupt/evil/crooked... she sure does do a lot of corrupt/evil/crooked shit.
Because she was covering up criminal behavior. You don't have to be evil to cover up criminal behavior. It's a very rational thing to do.
> Why did she lie about the source of protests and then leave American's to die?
She didn't want Americans to understand that their intelligence and military communities had supported extremist forces in Libya to oust a geopolitical opponent, and that these extremist forces themselves aren't particularly welcoming to America or its values. She didn't want comparisons to 9/11 and the Saudi support for those attacks on our home country.
She left Americans to die because she and the administration could not muster the support to mobilize, against international law, troop movements across borders as the activity in Libya had until that point been special operations and irregular warfare. It would have been difficult to breach international law to engage an enemy in the CIA annex to the State Department buildings - bases that on the record didn't exist.
All of this is very rational. Al Capone, similarly, was a very rational person, and not "evil" whatsoever. A rational person looks after themselves, their interests and the activities and events they stewart.
And of course there were emails somewhere of people predicting violence or complaining about embassy security. It's the same as those italian scientists put on trial because somebody somewhere predicted an earthquake that they didn't predict. I bet if you go through all the mail the US government gets, you'll find predictions of CERN turning into a black whole and swallowing the known universe. Does that mean the Air Force should bomb Switzerland?
This is standard leadership in America. I think it's unfair to skewer her in a biased way when most public diplomacy is just as duplicitous.
For example, the misinformation out of the Bush Administation linking in the American publics' minds Saddam Hussein with the 9/11 attacks. Republicans largly supported this falsehood and the Bush Administrations executive privilege to tell it.
It was well known that the attacks (between 9/11 and 9/12 in Benghazi) where extremist salafi. The protest over the videos were in a completely different country. The intelligence community and the leadership knew this.
I don't want to comment on the next paragraph as I don't understand it or how it is supposed to relate to the topic.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” — Douglas Adams [1]
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdash...
She's voted for wars. Left Americans to die. Lied about the reasons WHILE the Americans were still alive and able to be rescued. Destroyed evidence - and other classified information - illegally stored on private servers. (continue list of "bad things" for another few thousand pages)
You can rationalize her "evil" deeds or argue that "evil" doesn't exist till the cows come home but at the end of the day she cares about one thing: Her.
Leaving out the argument of "evil"/"goodness" (which are subjective)... she's definitely corrupt and definitely not someone who should be the most powerful person in the most powerful country.
Both candidates are fatally flawed - but one stands for Herself. The other stands for Americans.
Clinton is absolutely corrupt, and indeed corruption is unfortunately standard practice on K Street. As a practiced public official in America she does not shine out as an exception.
We do not share the assessment of the 'other' candidate but I don't know how productive that conversation would be. For me, neither candidate are aligning themselves with a departure from the practices and policies of the state that are most critical to me and that I think are crucial to the next generation of Americans (hint: civil rights). I do not assess Clinton or Trump as reestablishing the propaganda protections that have been stripped of the legal code, neither are promising reductions in surveillance, support for whistleblowers, curtailment of illegal wars and actions overseas, reestablishment of checks and balances, and foreign policy that doesn't make a joke out of 'democracy', 'human rights' and 'civil society' by making them strategic and politicized terms.
No thanks.
She deleted them for the same reason she wanted to keep them in her sphere of influence in the first place: she didn't want the conversations she has in private to become part of the public record. Indeed, we've now read tens of thousands of her emails and nobody has found anything criminal or scandalous. But plenty of people are trying to make political capital of private information, cooking recipes, or who-said-what-about-whom middle school theatrics.
We could go on for hours about what's been released so far... enough that multiple leaders have been forced to resign...
How much are you getting paid to lie so blatantly?
Can't wait for the election. Sure, the ballot-stuffing will be physically exhausting, but after inauguration, my team is gonna get itself a sweet drone. With a bit of custom js, I think I can get it connected to the downvote button.
I think that's the difference between the media outlook on the two candidates. Neither are acceptable. But I'm still waiting for journalists to write the by-now established fact that she's a lunatic.
Unfortunately I do not think that the people slotted for appointments inside the Clinton campaign are likely to have a positive aspect with regard to national security thinking, civil liberties, etc as they are primarily the same folks who are currently running national security policy today. Hoping for a radical change to policy and from appointments from a Clinton administration seems particularly silly and divorced from reasonable expectation.
In any case, it sounds like we have a consensus: the outlook for this election on core issues looks particularly dim.
Both campaigns know this fact. Trump's strategy is to target #2. Clinton's strategy is to target both #1 and #2, so of course liberals (such as myself) do not view her as progressive enough, and of course conservatives view her as too progressive, because while Clinton is pushing a "stronger together" message, the truth is that neither of the two Americas wants to come together with the other. Ultimately, Clinton's messaging is most strongly resonating with voters who aren't sure which of the two Americas they belong to.
It's abundantly clear that Clinton will win this election, simply because people hate Trump more, but Democrats can't keep broadening their base without angering the left (i.e. Bernie supporters), and Trump's electorate could very well bring him (or another candidate) to victory in 2020 if the Democrats can't hold onto both the far left and the center right.
This is what we're reduced to? Voting for the "lesser evil"? Who in a first world country should tolerate this?
I'm not voting, but I hope Trump wins. Hopefully the resulting 4 years are so terrible that voters never tolerate a candidate like Trump or Clinton again.
EDIT: I'm against Clinton's encryption policies, her pro-fracking stance, her war hawk attitude, her backroom political dealings, and her stance on privatizing social security, just to start (almost forgot! The ACA is "good enough" and we won't ever see single payer). I don't care if she's the "lesser evil", that she's a woman, whatever. She's not just a terrible candidate, but also a terrible person.
I am so tired of the "Trump is worse" rationalization.
A failure to secure the options you'd like to have in the head up to an election may prompt reflection and longer-term changes in approach to try to get better results in the future, but doesn't change that you ought to make the best (which may merely be least bad) available choice at the election.
Accelerationism is irresponsible, and the human harm it will cause is irreparable.
Prove the harm. The ACA is structurally unsound and failing. Clinton only recently has changed her immigration stance in order to woo the hispanic vote (Obama deported a record number of illegal immigrants). What harm is Trump going to do? Supreme court nominees neither candidate will be able to get through an obstructionist Congress?
If the possible harm had mattered, voters would've held the DNC responsible for their corruption (Bernie Sanders would've been a far better candidate for Democrats to run, but as the leaked DNC emails show, "the party has selected their nominee"). Voters did not, and this is the result.
EDIT: To those who have replied, HN throttling limits on my account have kicked in. You have yet to show Trump has the executive power to enact anything he's said he will do. He doesn't, which is why I am not concerned.
I would have hoped this would be obvious to anyone who's been paying attention, but allow me to list a few examples:
The fact that the Republican nominee has both admitted to, and been accused of, repeated sexual harassment and assault is already fostering a climate where such behavior is legitimized and excused. That's already bad; the endorsement associated with electing him as President would be dramatically worse.
Trump has demonstrated very poor impulse control in terms of his campaign's communications, and his public statements indicate that he would continue that behavior if made president. He said that he would sink Iranian ships if he considers their behavior insulting. That makes me very nervous about the potential for future US instigation of, and participation in, armed conflicts.
Trump is disdainful of the idea that police violence against minorities is of any particular concern -- or at least, the idea that the behavior of police officers and departments is in any way part of the problem -- and is unlikely to take any action whatsoever to curb it.
Do you not believe that these kinds of harm are likely to result from a Trump presidency, or do you just not care?
> If the possible harm had mattered, voters would've held the DNC responsible for their corruption.
Maybe I'm just not understanding your point, but I have no idea how the DNC's behavior has any causal or evidential relationship to a preference between Clinton and Trump.
No, I do not believe it will cause an actual harm delta compared to military engagements Clinton would partake in. Trump would have no control over police policies across the US. If the President could curb such behavior, would you not expect Obama would have enacted such policies over his 8 years in office? Clean Power Plan Obama enacted and now challenged by the Supreme Court? Useless. Coal plants are being deprecated regardless due to renewables and natural gas.
How Trump carries himself as a president is simply noise compared to real issues. The President has far less power than people who want to scare you into voting for Clinton would lead you to believe.
Let's be real. Yes, DNC absolutely wanted Clinton to win, not Sanders, and helped Clinton while hurting Sanders. But ultimately, the voters chose Hillary, not Bernie, by large margins [1], so even without the DNC's bias I find it highly unlikely Sanders could have won.
[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/was-the-democratic-prima...
1) suggesting that America needs to threaten to default on its debts - I can imagine the recession that would ensue.
2) his idea that we need to give more unstable nations nuclear weapons and tell them to 'have fun' - hopefully everyone understands the harms of nuclear wars
3) his idea that we need to kill the innocent family members of terrorists - I doubt this will improve our war on terror
4) his idea that we need to forcibly round up and deport 11 million illegal immigrants - this crowning achievement would be the largest forced migration in human history
5) his idea that we need to punish women who have abortions
• Doctors and vaccinations cause autism.
References here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-comments-on...
FiveThirtyEight gives a 75% chance of Democrats winning control of the Senate. If that comes to pass, Clinton will be able to get nominees through through.
The rightist [0] philosophy seems more conducive to submitting, prepping, and tacitly hoping for collapse. (I'm not meaning to be dismissive - they earnestly seem philosophically aligned)
[0] "Conservative" as a term is basically useless, as being truly conservative implies fully supporting the current state of affairs! I'd plainly use the word "reactionary" but one might take offense, although one should not.
Maybe you think your standards for a satisfactory candidate are reasonable and expectable. Trouble is, so does everyone else in America. It is incredibly improbable that your particular permutation of values will ever fully match that of, say, the POTUS, unless:
1. Your own viewpoints are so nebulous and poorly justified that you think you agree with a particular candidate simply because you don't actually have any substantive, well-considered opinions.
2. Your view of a particular politician is clouded by their marketing/propaganda/whatever, and you selectively see only the attributes of them that you agree with. This especially is true of people like JFK or Reagan—people remember what they want to remember, and history sweeps away their flaws and humanity.
Try to admire people's accomplishments, not the people themselves. Under enough scrutiny, anyone is a piece of shit. Politics has always been about people playing dirty games to further goals both good and bad.
That's why I would never base my voting decision on Clinton's email server or Trump's sexual ethics, because I assume everyone playing the game they're playing is probably a piece of shit. For all the things to hate about both candidates, there are substantive policy differences between them that have real effects on people. At the same time, I won't pretend that either one of them could enact anywhere near what they claim. Trump's border wall is an engineering nightmare, not to mention its economic improbability. And to be fair, President Clinton will get virtually nothing done in her four years, because Congress will fight her even harder than they fought Obama.
But ultimately, you have to look past the rhetoric and bullshit and understand that this is just how the world works, and rather than not voting and waiting for people to agree with you, you need to simply exert whatever puny influence you have to nudge things closer to the way you want them to be.
They do? I thought infosec community doesn't play this game. States are their natural enemies.
Second, because to all appearances so far, her opponent would be at least as bad on this issue. Remember, Trump briefly advocated a boycott of Apple if they wouldn't decrypt a phone for the FBI.
We need an active press, not one that thinks itself part of the government. One that doesn't take orders from the Administration and one that isn't afraid to ask the questions that need to be asked.
Wat. You mean like congress gives Obama a pass to do what he wants? Are you thick?
Yea, I can't believe all the scrutiny he is getting for bombing Yemen and launching a new war in Iraq. The criticism from the press has been astounding!
Hillary's position, if pursued as she has laid it out, would involve a bunch of money being spent, much of it going to infosec experts, with the result that the impossible thing she says she seeks would be shown to be impossible.
The FBI carried a ton of water for Clinton with the email investigation. We already know what the FBI's top legislative priority is. And now she owes thim a big one.
Then you have all the Wikileaks hacking. I think it's probable that Clinton will see this as further demonstration of the "lawlessness" of the Internet and the need to assert federal authority over the net.
Finally you have the fact that Clinton was already a Dianne Feinstein on this issue. There was a leak where a staffer contemplated getting Clinton to say something good about Snowden or whistle-blowers while she was fighting off Bernie but admitted that it was against her nature to take that position.
I really think that Clinton is going to be a cornucopia of goodies for the police state and the panopticon.
(Disclosure: I'm a Bernie supporter and I've early voted for Stein).
[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/...
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/267727-clinton-d...
Though, Hillary blowing a few million(or tens of millions) on some cryptography research wouldn't be the worst thing a president could do.
After Wikileaks, Trump might be more sympathetic to whistleblowers like Snowden. He seems to be making corruption a central point in his more recent rallies. And I can't imagine Clinton would have much sympathy for whistleblowers, probably associating them with Assange.
edit: How concerned about climate change could she be? She was for the TPP and she hasn't said anything about DAPL.
> a vote for one of the third-party candidates is largely wasted.
No. They will learn from this. Maybe Ranked Choice Voting will catch on.
I mean, it's smart. But it is in no way honest.
I'm hopeful this election will be the trigger that makes the mainstream consciousness reflect on democratic republic systems' grave shortcomings.
And do what in response? Abolish the current system of government? In favor of what?
If the only way to change the status-quo is to completely discard the current system, that means it's clearly not flexible enough and indeed has to be abolished. But I doubt that's the case. Open up, experiment on small scales, improve incrementally.
We keep calling that system "Democracy" as a shortcut(/newspeak), maybe it'd be good to indeed try pushing it toward a real democracy?
Furthermore, when the "lesser evil" is a subjective epsilon and up for debate, they're also responsible for fueling support for the "other" evil. Somebody who cheerleads for Clinton is actually responsible for the results of a possible Trump presidency! (And vice-versa).