The U.S. Government's Most Powerful Spying Tool Is Fighting for Its Life | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. Government's Most Powerful Spying Tool Is Fighting for Its Life

wsj.com

39 pointsironyman19 comments

The inability of US government not to leverage 702 for immediate political gain of current political in power. will be its certain downfall unless certain guardrails are added in place, namely to focus on US person vs non-US-person.

But i would prefer the US-person definition to exclude the corporate part (due to foreigner's dark-money, US-based, shell corporations), but not holding my breath there.

> The inability of US government not to leverage 702 for immediate political gain of current political in power. will be its certain downfall unless certain guardrails are added ...

Or unless its use to gain political power is successful and entrenches the oligarchy and cements 702 in place.

They've gotta have this down to a checkbox by now, right?

U.S./Non-U.S.

I think the persistent issue is the identifying US/non-US partipants and the co-mingling of US/non-US participants within exchanges, and the need to understand context to make sense of it. This seems inescapably fraught. And further complicated by their desire to still pursue Americans for inadvertently discovered crimes, resorting to parallel construction to avoid revealing questionably obtained evidence.

Parallel construction is a great euphemism for "knowingly and willingly breaking the law, then deliberately lying about it".

They're literally professional criminals.

You'd think.

I honestly don't get spying/law enforcement's desire to do unconstitutional things. Most of them take oaths to uphold the constitution, and there's apparently a lot of training about it. So why do such strong guardrails have to be put in place? I would assume that NSA/CIA/FBI would recoil in horror from violating constitutional norms, but it seems just the opposite - they're itching to just mine the data and put people away.

Everybody's the hero in their own story, and heroes don't need guardrails because they would never do anything unjust, at least not without a really good reason.

Yep. And in their minds the person is guilty (and sometimes really is) and the Constitution is preventing them from a conviction. It makes intuitive sense because the system was built on Blackstone's Ratio, so it's designed to let guilty people go free sometimes to avoid convicting an innocent. To law enforcement people, this would be massively annoying.

Even when they genuinely have the best of intentions. I'm not sure who causes more harm, those bent on destruction or those stridently doing "good." They cause similar horrors. It's a wonder humanity persists.

archive/paywall: https://archive.is/1r8Wa

> The U.S. Government's Most Powerful Spying Tool Is Fighting for Its Life

You mean, they cannot wiretap all internet nodes anymore ? /s

> even as the U.S. faces renewed concerns about terrorism in the Middle East.

Looks like we're gonna see another +$2 trillion dollar go down the drain again. A new war would probably involve Iran in some way. Interesting that there are no kamikaze drone startups in the US because that's probably the next unicorn opportunity.

I'm muslim so I probably can't work on this startup idea in my garage. But I'm surprised other American startups aren't trying.

Palmer Luckey has a VTOL kamakaze drone startup. The video demos look impressive but it remains to be seen how effective they are in the field.

That being said, I'd rather we focus on peaceful endeavors that improve our quality of life, instead of on destroying things. That's a billionaire managerial class game, IMO. Make people dependent on the system so pleasing the managerial class becomes more important to survival. If history isba guide, this system will only last as long as the imperial order remains intact. There are many long term domestic & geopolitical pressures on the imperium & I would not be surprised if it collapses within my lifetime.

>The videos look impressive

Where are these videos?

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/billionaire-palmer-luckey...

If you watch the video, at the end they show a road runner. I was bracing myself for the poor little guy to get blasted to atoms. Spoiler: road runner survived.

I work in the opposite field of weapons but from the moment I saw zipline I thought their quick launching and distance was interesting. Maybe this is already how drones are launched in places like Ukraine, I don't know. I do understand that the road runner is probably much faster and able to intercept jets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c

I'm not really looking forward to drone warfare, tbh.

I wonder what the collapse looks like.

history has wonderful guides but unfortunately none of them have “split the atom” in them

yeah...also has a single country/group of countries have had such a big market, so many dependencies the rest of the world relies on and the some of the only major population growth rates? Would a collapse of this kind of a system even be possible? I guess anything is possible.

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