No new boss at NSA until it answers questions on buying location, browsing data
theregister.com
theregister.com
This is the bigger problem. Classified documents have a mandatory declassification date that is only overridden in special circumstances. CUI can last indefinitely because it's an extra-legal construction designed to stay outside the classification system.
I’m unaware of the “state secret” clause in the executive section, while Congress is explicitly granted the power “To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces”.
Regulating classification sounds like “making rules for the government”.
It’s referring to rules for how the military is governed, and for how the military is regulated. So the rules control the military’s government, and the military’s regulation.
It’s somewhat fair, that the words “state secrets” do not appear, but I would hope we could agree that any sovereign state would have to be anle to keep secrets, particularly in the realm of military, war, diplomacy, law enforcement investigations, espionage, etc. It’s a power the executive must have and “ The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Of course, the Legislature and Judiciary also have the inherent right to keep secrets. The Supreme Court keeps their deliberations secret, because they feel they need to. Congress keeps some meetings secret. None of that falls into the classification system.
Where does that come from?
Consider the alternative. What if the legislature declined to provide authorization? If they decided not to approve a treaty, the nation could survive and the POTUS could still generally do their job. If the legislature denied the POTUS the right to keep secrets, it’d be utterly impossible to fulfill the duties of the office. If - per congressional mandate - he had to truthfully answer reporters questions about out nuclear capabilities and procedures, or explain to a wartime enemy his plans, reveal the identities of spies… These are all things that are so anathema the duties of the executive office that you can’t honestly say someone holds the executive power if they don’t have control over these things.
But, yeah, you’re completely fair in the fact that in constitutional law many of the most important aspects aren’t spelled out in great detail and can be up for honest debate.
The President regularly needs subordinate executive officers, staff, etc. to know and keep secrets. The Executive Privilege is enough to help them keep the secrets if they’re willing, but sometimes subordinates want to leak secrets. If it’s wartime and they’re sharing secrets with the enemy, then that may be treason, but generally there wouldn’t be any criminal penalties for leaking secrets during times of peace, etc. The classification system exists to support the President. If he says to keep his secret and you don’t, the legislature says thats a crime.
The pushback in this article (and in this thread) is against some kind of supra priviledge that you can default certain secrets to "default opt out" from standard secret rules
There is a problem with an entity that has the monopoly on violence also having a monopoly on state information
And maybe they break the law and keep getting away with it. But this doesn’t mean that’s how they are meant to work.
There is nothing more morally corrosive than a law enforcement agency betraying the trust represented by their powers.
In the most technical sense it's legal though of course it subverts the entire idea of the justice system by having a court in your pocket.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8567089/nsa-patriot-act-ruling
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-b...
The government doesn't want intelligence agencies reined in by anything but American interests. They want those agencies to be free do commit whatever evil is deemed necessary to further those interests, laws and Constitution be damned. The NSA is still spying on everyone. The CIA still runs torture camps around the world. Nothing changes. Snowden didn't change anything. Assange didn't change anything. Wyden isn't going to change anything.
The ability of the American people to hold their government to account in any meaningful way is a facade. Americans live under the oligarchy of corporations and the military industrial complex, not any kind of functional democracy. The American people, despite their guns and breathless evocations of the Founding Fathers, are not in control.
Although that statement is just an oversimplification of the situation. The government should follow domestic law even if it breaks foreign law by design.
The US constitution in particular aims to protect the people from government overreach. See the original amendments and read them in that light.
Them following the law is entirely downstream from Congress doing things like what Wyden is doing. Their existence is predicated on congressional satisfaction, and many congresspeople are at least fellow travellers to the practical frustrations many people on this site have with the NSA. It's never enough, but it's _something_.
Meanwhile plenty of countries just have their intelligence services tucked away, out of the spotlight, and with barely any legal framework to bind them.
The director of the NSA outright lied to congress while under oath and has faced zero consequences for it. There is zero meaningful oversight in the US and congress is absolutely powerless to do anything but bitch and moan about it publicly just like the rest of the American people. That was what drove Snowden to finally leak what he knew. He saw that congress had no means of knowing what was happening and therefore they couldn't do anything to stop it.
Not even the president can do anything about the NSA. Obama campaigned on ending the mass surveillance of the American people. Presidential candidates tell a lot of lies while trying to get elected, and Obama was an effective orator, but he was also a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law. I believed he meant what he was saying when he said that the NSA was ignoring the law whenever it was convent for them, and that he would oppose any bill that included retroactive immunity for telecom companies that were handing over American's data to the NSA illegally.
Of course, once he got into office everything changed and he very quickly spoke out in favor in the NSA, he vastly expanded their powers to spy on Americans, and he granted immunity to those same telecom companies. I figure that means that once he was elected the NSA showed Obama some super secret information that convinced him that violating the constitution was necessary or perhaps he was shown exactly how much dirt they had on him and his family and he was threatened to fall in line.
Either way, it doesn't appear that anyone at any level of government can oppose the NSA in a meaningful way.
Except that it's not how EULA do work. If it's made illegal by law (which GP suggess), then lawyers writing these EULAs can write anything they want in fineprint: it's not superseding the law.
I think it's perfectly fine to make ‐reselling‐ of personal data blanket illegal. Since it's my data, I might have consented to giving the data to someone for some purpose. However, they absolutely have no implied consent that they can sell that data to someone else, no matter what their EULA says. If they want to sell it, then I need to get a dividend of that sale revenue, since it's my data.
This is not a physical good that's changing owners. It will always be irrevocably linked to /me/. That's what makes it valuable. So the owner of that data will forever and always be me, no matter who "bought" it. Exactly the same way that buying a digital game does not make me an owner of that copy, but merely the owner of a perpetual-yet-revokable license to play the game on my sanctioned console.
...but that's not the same you might say. That's right, but how do you put that into law? You need actual rules, "don't be evil" is not enough. There are hundreds of cases where sharing personal data is "right" and expected, and hundreds of cases where it is "wrong". You want to allow the "right" usage and ban the "wrong" usage. And then you have lobbies trying to explain why they are on the right side and their opponents are on the wrong side, and then you will have lawyers who are really good at finding loopholes, and in the end, what you get is something like GDPR with all its complexities. You can't really escape it.
You're making an "it's all so complicated" argument, but not pointing out any actual occasion in which it might be complicated.
> There are hundreds of cases where sharing personal data is "right" and expected, and hundreds of cases where it is "wrong".
This is as close to a direct citation of the law of averages that I've seen in a long time.
> And then you have lobbies trying to explain why they are on the right side and their opponents are on the wrong side,
"Everybody is going to complain anyway..."
> lawyers who are really good at finding loopholes
The problem is lobbyists that are very good at adding loopholes.
> in the end, what you get is something like GDPR with all its complexities. You can't really escape it.
When you want to pass a law limiting what companies can do with data without the user's consent, but don't really want to limit what companies are doing in any way, you end up with weird, baroque definitions of data and consent.
If you're never willing to risk profits, or to make certain businesses completely unsustainable, then every regulation must come accompanied with either a trivial method for large enough companies to ignore it, or must be paired with a completely unrelated regulatory giveaway.
So, the most probable outcome is that this will delay the process for a few weeks at most until congress just pushes it through. At least it shines a bit light on the whole charade. Not that it makes much of a difference for me, since I'm not an US citizen, but imho the easiest and best solution would be to stop private companies from gobbling up and selling private data. But that would mean going against companies and we can't have that now, can we?
Yeah, I know. It hasn't worked out that way. But do you think other governments, starting with fewer restraints, are doing less than the US? Or more?
I could see saying that the US is doing it in higher volume, because it's got more money to spend on government excess.
lmao ycomb.
The buried lede here is: why is it legal to resell that data in the first place. (Hint: because it makes Intelligence Community's job 100x easier). This ultimatum for answers is simply theatre.
This is where the writers of the Constitution missed the boat a little. With all of their smarts they probably could have written something in there to hold accountable those who would have any part in enacting a rule or law the violates the Constitution. Not a simple task at all but a worthwhile addition IMHO.
Tell that to all of the high ranking military positions that Senator Tuberville is still holding up months later.
The Democrats may even try to use this to gain more support for the temporary rule change needed for mass approval of the military confirmations. They can say it isn't a partisan effort because they will use the rule change to override the hold of a Democrat.
Exactly. Surveillance capitalism is orders of magnitude more invasive than the NSA and does not answer to anyone. Regulations don’t even really work because they can just offshore anything shady or do it through fly by night data brokers.
"HDMI Ethernet and Audio Return Channel Introduced in HDMI 1.4, HDMI Ethernet and Audio Return Channel (HEAC) adds a high-speed bidirectional data communication link (HEC) and the ability to send audio data upstream to the source device (ARC). HEAC utilizes two lines from the connector: the previously unused Reserved pin (called HEAC+) and the Hot Plug Detect pin (called HEAC−).[51]: §HEAC-2.1 If only ARC transmission is required, a single mode signal using the HEAC+ line can be used, otherwise, HEC is transmitted as a differential signal over the pair of lines, and ARC as a common mode component of the pair."
HDMI Ethernet Channel (HEC)
HDMI Ethernet Channel technology consolidates video, audio, and data streams into a single HDMI cable, and the HEC feature enables IP-based applications over HDMI and provides a bidirectional Ethernet communication at 100 Mbit/s.[43] The physical layer of the Ethernet implementation uses a hybrid to simultaneously send and receive attenuated 100BASE-TX-type signals through a single twisted pair."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI
--------------------------------------------------
This gives me the impression that packet sniffs, and many other operations have been in play since HDMI 1.4,
possibly a subscription based desktop as a service, or game console as a service, could distribute this way, and leech off local LAN gateway, for heavy loads.
Leveling such a broad criticism against “big tech companies” isn’t helpful, especially when you personally (along with every American) is categorically guilty of the same.
Unlike private households and businesses, public companies only exist due to licenses from the state. These include limitation on liability, protection for many types of property, and much, much more. The protections even extend to securities regulations; since public companies aren’t privately owned, there is a misalignment between incentives of owners and managers. The state sides with the owners by using force on managers to prevent them from acting in their own self interest, and instead to act on behalf of the shareholder public.
The NAP cannot extend to public companies as they are not privately owned and can only exist when granted rights by the state. A lot of work has been done by libertarians on the topic of how monopolies are formed; it’s not due to private markets.
> Unlike private households and businesses, public companies only exist due to licenses from the state.
There are a few problems with this. To start, private business and private households also exist due to licensure from the state. The distinction between public and private is a matter of technicality, not categorical difference. The monopoly that the state holds on the initiation of violence applies categorically to your ability to purchase a home and pay taxes, and it applies to large tech companies.
The second problem is that public businesses were as a matter of fact private before they were public. So instead of offering shares to the public on government regulated, public markets that anyone can participate in, they could just be private instead.
Regarding your second issue, we’re in agreement. Yes it’s true under capitalism that with the heavy regulation of private individuals and firms, everything becomes the public sphere. Your house becomes a public place where your actions are subject to judgement.
Being public just means that you are selling shares to anyone on a public market. Those markets don't need a license or regulation of any sort to exist. I'm confused as to why you're trying to draw such a sharp distinction between public and private companies in terms of government regulation. Regulation of a stock market and public companies who participate is no different than regulation of private businesses. You can't really divorce the two in a sensible way within this context.
> We humans were all stateless tribes once, and some of us still are.
A tribe is a form of government (I'm not sure that the usage of state makes a difference here versus government but maybe it does make a difference for you?) and your behavior is regulated within your tribe.
Sometimes I think people confuse individual choice or individualism with how humans exist, but humans are pack animals. Always have been. So we're always within a regulated tribe, democracy, religious cult, or other form of government. Even your example of a human being born without a license seems like an unimportant technical detail that doesn't have a basis in reality, because your license would just be you conforming to the rules of your social group. Being formally issued by some people wearing funny hats in an "office" doesn't make a difference except for the purposes of management and efficiency.
Public markets cannot exist without regulation, for complex reasons you can read about elsewhere. Private markets can exist without the state and do; whether it’s drug markets or decentralized crypto trading apps. The distinction is important to understand for people working in blockchain especially; people have tried to import ideas from corporate governance with general failure. The most successful daos measured by impact are molochdaos, which are designed to be controlled by a small number of private actors. Publicly owned daos such as dash and makerdao have consistently run into issues related to governance, such as decision capture by private organizations, low voter turnout, poor returns to capital, and more. Even now in the case of MakerDao the main driving force is a single developer, Rune, while the dao mostly acts as a discussion platform for his ideas. His endgame plan even will result in the dao governance from having minimal control over the core protocol. Understanding the difference between public and private would have prevented a lot of mistakes.
How are you defining a public market? Because it seems quite clear to me that a public market can exist without state regulation. The original discussion point was:
> public companies only exist due to licenses from the state.
Which seems pretty clearly false to me unless you are defining a public company as a company in which it "has a license" from the state, but then that falls flat on its face because the vast majority of businesses have to have some licensure of some sort to operate. That could be a restaurant being required to pass food safety inspections, it could be a hotel and requirements to be ADA accessible, or various other "licensures", let alone the actual business licenses needed to be filed either at the state of federal level in order to operate.
To bring this back into focus, being irate at "big public tech companies" because they "have a special license from the state" as was implied is quite silly.
> States are parasocial, not social. It might feel like state officials are your friends, the president is like a father, and your representative is like a respected community leader you’ve known your whole life. But those relationships aren’t based in natural social human behavior; they require a media ecosystem. Arguments that humans are social and therefore statist doesn’t hold water.
I think there is merit in arguing that states work because of a shared fiction, in which a media ecosystem is, while not necessary, certainly of great benefit, but I think the key point here is one of scale, not form.
I don't draw a sharp distinction between a 25 person democracy and a 25 person tribe or community. Whether that should change as you scale to 25,000,000 people is a more interesting discussion I think.
It is reasonable to be upset at the use of force by the state to protect big tech companies that are using this protection to violate human rights. We might like the idea that the system functions differently, and perhaps some powerful individuals could institute temporary reforms, but as long as a monopoly of force exists it will be abused due to incentives.
There’s a huge difference between a 25 person “democracy” and a 25m person democracy. Firstly in common modern parlance democracy means a set of institutions with a distributed power base. That’s why Germany is democratic and China is not, even though both appeal to the “will of the people” and both have elections. Obviously a 25 person group will not have these institutions and cannot be democratic. Second the small group is based on fundamental human social relationships, while the second one is necessarily parasocial. You can personally know everyone in a 25 person group; you cannot for a 25m one.
Yes!
> They cannot exist without regulation
No! In fact, early crypto exchanges are examples of unregulated public markets. But we also know that this is incorrect because you can just imagine a world where the government doesn’t regulate these markets. The owner/agent problem you are describing can be solved without the use of government - you just find a different third party.
> It is reasonable to be upset at the use of force by the state to protect big tech companies
Sure but the criticism wasn’t “the State should stop big tech companies from doing bad things” it was:
* The big tech companies are not private; they are public companies that rely on state force to maintain their monopolies. Just as an example, intellectual property laws rely on the state for enforcement.*
Which is nonsense because being “public” and “licensed” isn’t relevant to the protection of the State here.
> China is not, even though both appeal to the “will of the people” and both have elections.
I lost track of what we were really discussing here but China does not hold elections in a way that resembles what we mean by an election. Chinese citizens don’t go to the voting booth, the appointment of the CCP ruler isn’t up to the public.
Public markets need state intervention because the application of force is required.
The point regarding democracy is that you cannot call a 25 person tribe a democracy just because they vote. “What we mean by an election” is about diverse institutions of power such as multiple parties, independent media, freedom of political speech, etc.
Debatable[1] but you can buy commodities and currencies (and even Bitcoin) on public markets in addition to your S&P 500 or shares of Nvidia.
> Public markets need state intervention because the application of force is required.
So does your home and all private business.
> The point regarding democracy is that you cannot call a 25 person tribe a democracy just because they vote.
Why?
[1] It seems as a society we're still trying to categorize and regulation crypto currencies/assets/etc. so I don't think this is settled.
It doesn’t matter whether the state says Bitcoin is an equity or not; it isn’t one. States frequently make all sorts of false claims.
Regarding democracy, in modern parlance it’s a set of institutions; a 25 person tribe is too small to support those institutions; accordingly a 25 person tribe cannot be democracy in the modern sense.
See also patent trolls, predatory DRM and copyright enforcement, and (often) the creation and maintenance of harmful monopolies.
Most of them don't want to, and let the police and the bailiffs do that kind of thing for them in the relatively rare cases it matters, just like any other form of contracting or outsourcing.
The NSA exists to spy on non-citizens, so it affects you more.
That's what's blocking instatement of a new director, so no, it won't have any effect on the data collected on foreigners.
The NSA spying on foreigners, who enjoy no protections from the Constitution, is part of its intended agenda.
The constitutional prohibitions should be applied to all government actions no matter where they are in the world, not just the land that is the US, as such the government prohibition on search should apply to all government agencies world wide. In short if it illegal for the NSA to spy on someone in Michigan, it should be illegal for them to Spy on them in Spain.
It is very strange that this prohibition applies to all persons while with in the borders of the US, and also applies to US Residents living aborad, but magically some how does not applies to non-citizens outside the US.
When in reality The Constitution does not apply to people at all, it does not grant me or any one else rights, it is a document where we the people surrender some of our power, some or our natural rights to the government for a limited purpose.
Somehow we have flipped this script, to where the constitution lays out what the government "cant" do, instead of that intention of providing a very limited list of things the government can do, of which is prohibited from all other activity
I mean, we'd appreciate your income tax, but you might not like all the gun ownership.
>> also implies that U.S. law in all other respects should apply globally.
No it does not imply that at all, again you are reversing the position I am talking about. In fact US Law probably applies too much to other nations via International Trade Agreements to other nations already.
If the US Constitution would bar the NSA from spying with out probable cause on everyone, not just US Citizens, then that has absolutely zero bearing on if the EU wants to have gun control. I am not even sure how there is a connection to the 2 at all
I don't disagree with you, but what is the philosophical reason why? I know the reason, but I'd really like people such as yourself and the GP to voice it. Because it doesn't form a consistent philosophy in the same way that the current realization of U.S. law is not consistent, simply precisely the opposite of what you (and GP) are saying it should be.
If you disagree, the at least answer this question, why is it the way it is today which is the de facto way it works?
In short, it is illegal for the NSA (or any part of the US government) to spy on Americans and legal to spy on foreigners, regardless of a given individual's location.
We generally draw the line using physical location because keeping track of whether you ended up with info on an American while spying somewhere outside America, say France or Japan, is utterly impractical. That doesn't mean the legal lines are drawn like that, though.
It's just that the operations in question will invoke "National Security" and "sovereign immunity" arguments sufficient to ensure the judiciary will either summary judgement the case. Or leave it conspicuously unreviewed.
Or, at the end of the day, a Presidential pardon will be conferred at the appropriate/most convenient opportunity.
Or actions will just be undertaken with the understanding that the participants will be operating deniably, in which case it is quite literally the Government unilaterally deciding that breaking the law is the only way.
So, I do get what you're saying. If it were federal employees directly participating they can be prosecuted in the US.But if this is done through a web of contractors it will be hard to prosecute.
You can, on common example is Sex crimes, a US Citizen can (and have been) charged with violations of various sex crime laws for actives that occurred outside the US in courts INSIDE the US, even if the activity was not a crime in the nation the activity took place in. aka "Sex Tourism" [1]
You can also be tried for Foreign crimes such as bribery in the US if you were bribing a Foreign official this applies to business as well as government.
[1] https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-homeland-security-inve...
Yes.[1][2]
As far as the US is concerned, the Constitution is the supreme authority to which Americans can and will answer to and is protected by.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court#U...
[2]: "[Bolton] added that the U.S. would do everything 'to protect our citizens' should the ICC attempt to prosecute U.S. servicemen ..."
Also all constitutions are social contracts that are only as strong as the judicial branch is at restricting the government, so its really up to interpretation on that front.
EDIT: Former NSA directors have deliberately lied under oath to Congress about their activities and actions...with no penalty or rebuke. The NSA are above the law and constitution.
Not really. It's been inferred from the text by courts, but it's been a bit of a leap, and the Supreme Court can overturn the earlier interpretations at any time. "Many originalists, including most famously Judge Robert Bork in his ill-fated Supreme Court confirmation hearings, have argued that no such general right of privacy exists."
[1] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof...
When they overturned Roe v Wade last year they simultaneously overturned the previous rulings that established a (limited by international standards) right to privacy in the US.
The public has no way of knowing if the NSA follows the law and the theoretically available technology for the NSA to use, means it's extremely unlikely they have restrained themselves from gazing into your private life at home.
I'm actually pretty fond of the US, love to visit and the culture - but not realizing we're all just living under the US empire is a bit naive. The US does whatever it wants and everyone else just accepts. Basic things such as voting against the international criminal court and having law allowing it to invade The Netherlands if it ever prosecuted a US war criminal is a funny example, but there are many more.
And it also does good things for the world as well, it's not all good or all bad, but it is the largest empire in the world, with military bases all around, colonies all over the pacific, etc, we just don't talk about it like that usually.
At the same, government by congressional hobbling and sabotage also makes a mockery of democracy through agencies not ceasing bad behavior but rather a continuous war between congress and agencies being normalized in a way that makes agencies actually more autonomous from congress. The "Washington Monument Syndrome" is just one piece of the problematic situation [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome
Try sneaking a little graft in there and get laughed at in public. It'd be great.
When the Allies in WW2 broke Germany's Enigma cipher, are you suggesting that by not telling Germany that the Allies could now read a large fraction of Germany's military communication they were endangering their own national security?!
If the NSA has broken whatever cipher suite the GRU uses, or the Iranian RG, or whomever, please explain how keeping that fact a secret endangers the USA?
Keep in mind they share info with the other Five Eyes and select other allied nations.
According to what exactly?
We should reveal every detail about our military's weapons systems so our adversaries can more easily build countermeasures against them?
It seems exceedingly unrealistic that any government, even a democracy, could keep no secrets at all and survive.
1. Security through obscurity is different from secrecy. Not at all what we were arguing. You just pulled pop sci quotes from the crypo world.
2. > Imagine if every interaction with the government; every contract, negotiation, communication was a matter of easily searchable public record.
Democracies do have FOIA but it doesn't and shouldn't extend for foreign entities.
Security for me, clarity into you, is a big problem. We should build unsurveillable homes.
It's over, privacy is dead and so is a private bedroom. We need physical answers to surveillance, electronics are totally ruined.
Sooner or later we need off this planet, surveillance has trapped everybody.
But... sorry, that's batshit. Can there be ANY definition for "reasonable" more apt than "available for legal purchase on the public market"? If we don't want this stuff for sale, we should pass a law and get it out of the market.
Absent that, honestly? I think the NSA is one of the least threatening purchasers of this junk.
If that was happening with physical property instead of digital data I don't think anyone would be confused about the legality of it.
For example Lockheed Martin is not allowed to comply with Qatari and Turkish demands to boycott and sanction Israel.
Private US citizens and companies who are not government contractors can boycott Israel as much as they want.
You are probably confusing the law with some weird Texas law that also forbids government workers from boycotting Israel.
The EU has similar laws forbidding EU companies with complying with US/Israeli sanctions against Iran.
If the answer was "no" then he wouldn't be pushing for it, so the answer is obviously yes, they are buying data of american citizens in bulk, warrantlessly
Even better, forbid its collection.
This is all theater. The answers are obvious and easy to legislate. Simply forbid the practice of collecting the data in the first place. But they won't. The fact is they want these companies to collect and aggregate our data. But recently privacy advocates have been asking for a ban on that practice. So the corrupt politicians are trying to distract the general populace with privacy theater in a desperate and pathetic attempt to alter the public gaze.
Enter this "no-action" on the NSA.
Its less of the logistics of outlawing it, it seems this is more akin to “sunlight is the best disinfectant”
I wouldn’t be surprised if this senator doesn’t have the backing or the political capital to pull this off successfully (just submitting legislature vs withholding appointment)
I think anything that can be exposed to more mainstream viewers has a higher likelihood of getting “better” sooner. (“Better” being highly relative)
They couldn't ask the question if they'd already signed the appropriate contracts on which access to SCI or other classified info is underpinned, If they had, asking the question would amount to a tacit disclosure.
Other Senators who have signed those documents have confirmed as much. Once the IC gets burned by you, even if they don't press charges due to political impossibility, you don't get invited to those parties anymore.
I guess that depends on what "general description" means. Take Stellar Wind for example, as briefings were limited to the Gang of Eight. [1] I would like to know what the "general description" of that program was and what other members were informed of.
[1]: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/brief-history-programma...
The former is likely true. However, the lack of the latter, (which I assure you, is the case as SCI (Secret Compartmentalized Information) was developed specifically for that reason), sets an upper bound on the effective capabilities of anyone tasked with the job of oversight. You must be 10% smarter than that which you oversee to really do it effectively.
If you've ever chased down a memory leak, you'll understand what I mean. Senator Wyden cannot oversee the super secret Soylent Green program until somebody slips up enough to someone for word of a program that converts people to food to make it back to him to ask about.
Thiel is at the center of so much other sci-fi military industrial complex stuff, it's scary.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveal...
The company's name is derived from The Lord of the Rings where the magical palantíri were "seeing-stones," described as indestructible balls of crystal used for communication and to see events in other parts of the world
By the Third Age - when the events of the Lord of the Rings take place - several of the Palantiri (plural) are lost. The danger of using the stones was twofold: 1) not all the stones were accounted for, you couldn’t know who was listening in and 2) Sauron had one of the stones.
A dark lord who wanted to rule the world in fire and ash and darkness had this surveillance tool and used it to corrupt the other known users of the seeing stones, Denethor and Sauroman. That was the plot structure of these stones. Aragon and Merry/Pippin were able to use them against Sauron, who thought the hobbits with Aragorn might be Frodo. But again, to me this shows the danger of making decisions based on spying technology. Sauron committed his forces against Gondor because his intel told him and it led to his eye being distracted from Frodo/Sam/Gollum sneaking over the mountains and into Mt. Doom.
Why you would name your surveillance company after that is beyond me. To me it would be like getting aboard a plane run by Icarus airlines or naming the next big boat/plane/rocketship Titanic.
> But again, to me this shows the danger of making decisions based on spying technology.
Having more information is rarely a bad thing for making decisions. So that was probably not the point.
In some cases it leads to pretty bad things though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdiagnosis
And more generally, the more information you gather, the more extraordinary processing you have to put in place to get anything useful out of it.
It’s a bad thing commonly enough that it has a name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
The caution in the tale is that attention paid to what is known might distract from what is unknown.
> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?...
https://airlinehistory.co.uk/airline/icarus-airlines/
> Icarus Airlines, known as Greece’s first airline, was formed in 1930 but went bankrupt within months
That history seems fitting. And this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icaro_Air
> Icaro Air was an airline based in Quito, Ecuador. Its main base was Mariscal Sucre International Airport, Quito.
That one operated for 4 decades.
If large space transporters ever become popular, there's no way there won't be a few named Titanic. People like those names, and the context doesn't hit as quickly as the awe.
Truthfully, the NSA should know at least as much about me as Google, or I don't know why it exists.
It may have less information overall. But that information may be of much higher value.
It is not much data to know how other countries are encrypting their political or military data. And the amount of data in there may not be that high.
The value is... tremendous. Bulk data collection, gives an overall picture. But the details that make it real, that's the secret sauce of the NSA and CIA.
I say it a lot, the state is nolonger the main threat to your freedom. This data gathering, building detailed dossiers on AL, of us all, by faceless business operators is a genuine, immediate threat
It must be stopped
Your description of your own comment is quite likely the most self-aware statement I've ever seen here on HN.
You would do well to read up on Ron Wyden's history, both as a senator and as a representative.
That's why, while party platforms are vastly different in core values, I don't care to be grouped into any party but my own beliefs, judging actions and people individually, not collectively.
Should you as a voter choose to vote for a third party candidate, you’re basically voting against your second choice and for your last choice. “Voting for a third party is throwing away your vote” is a very real phenomenon, to the point here it is an actively exploited political strategy to promote third party candidates with overlapping views to your opponent to siphon off votes. See Russian interference promoting the Green Party in 2016 as an example.
And sure you could wave your ideals around and say “but you absolutely must vote for what you think is right, that is how change happens”. But in reality, under the US system that’s how you end up ensuring the least palatable party (to you) ends up in power. There are thousands of elections every cycle, and we have overwhelming empirical evidence that third party candidates are completely inviable at basically all levels of government.
And not even that, mostly voting does nothing either, because winner-takes-all: the way to be heard is packing up and moving to another state. Make a blue state bigger demographically because voting blue in a red state does nothing (and vice versa).
As far as voting not mattering, it both does and it doesn’t. Your individual vote may not matter, but convincing large groups of people their vote does not matter does matter and has also been historically exploited as a voter suppression technique.
There’s a lot of game theory one could reason about optimizing your ability to participate in the US democracy, but unfortunately the outcomes of that exercise are generally quite depressing.
In the US it's not as simple as "voting for what you think is right", but being strategic in using your one vote to cause the most impact.
Since a 3rd party candidate with no chance to win by polls is a waste of the vote, it becomes a game of "the lesser of two evils", "the greater of two goods", or something like that.