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> Really sounds like 'security theater', like Senator Feinstein is having fun straining her arm patting herself on the back for "protecting the US"

When this disgusting heretic blob said on the news today that we have, quote, "this culture of leaks", I thought I will throw-up inside. How on earth would you want to call this "free country", "home of the brave", democracy, whatever, if people in the company called "government" that you hired and that you pay their salary from your own pocket, keeps everything secret from you, and take full advantage of that, while breaking the law and raping you in the wide open in the name of "terrorist" ? And then when someone in that company reports (to media) that bunch of people are breaking the law, they become a criminal and, as Feinstein said: "need to be persecuted". How can you believe, in your sound mind, that there will be ANY freedom left in this country within next 5-7 years?? HOW??

Guess what Feinstein? You are much bigger terrorist with your pen and big stupid mouth, than all the terrorist combine out there together!

I realize I'm unfairly ignoring 90% of your rant, but I just want to say I disagree with "too much government" as the issue here. When my computer breaks, I don't throw away my computer. I fix the problem. Size doesn't matter. Focus does. Large organizations can have plenty of thoughtful focus, too.

When two terrorists explode bombs at a public event, I definitely don't want less "gumment." I want effective government.

In this case, every Senator knew about the wiretapping. Why did they allow it to continue? We elected our government. The government isn't the problem. We are. So in that respect, I agree with you. We're short on well-informed citizens.

yeah, but when your computer breaks it doesn't pull out a firearm and order you to add drives, a better graphics card, more monitors and a faster internet connection. And then raid your bank account if you don't do it fast enough. Size does matter.

I don't think the government has done that to any US citizen regarding NSA wiretapping or data collections under FISA. Please don't conflate secret national security courts and closed meetings with fantasy. It doesn't help any discussion.

the fantasy would be if we didn't have the secret courts and illegal wiretapping by an administration that promised to be the most transparent in history.

I tried to make clear: Big gumment brings two problems. First, it wastes money. That's the smaller problem but still quite significant (we need to get our economy going, and wasting money hurts). Second, big gumment is a real threat to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and nearly everything we want.

But you want to emphasize "effective" gumment. Okay. So did I: I said that we should get the NSA being "safe and effective" for our country. "Safe" mostly means that the NSA doesn't trash our Constitution and ruin the US, and "effective" means what you want, catch the bad guys.

Now we come to the hard part: Catching the bad guys. In the case of Boston, as I pointed out, Russia told us. Russia was correct. So, really, it's getting clear: The NSA's ideas of all that 'big data' is not very effective. I know; I know; some of the Senators will say that in the secret hearings the NSA, FBI, DHS, CIA, etc. guys explain all the bad guys they stopped, bad guys that never made the news. Given Boston, I don't believe it! What I believe is that they go after some guy in the second grade in the lunch room who takes the bread from his sandwich, cuts it out to like like a gun, shows it around his lunch table, and the big gumment guys shut down the school. Or they go after Aaron Swartz. They are just not competent. So, they are not effective.

"Big" is always a threat: Ike warned about the military-industrial complex, and the bigness is much of the positive feedback loop that has it grow.

Sure, we'd both like more competence. Remember 9/11? Or, remember one of the core reasons? Right: Some semi-, pseudo-, quasi-bright guy had one of his better ideas: If a terrorist tries to take over an airplane in mid-flight, then don't resist and, instead, let him have it. Presto: Open, engraved invitation to 9/11. Bet you can't do that now. Even if managed to get on an airplane with various weapons, bet couldn't take over the plane and fly it into a big building. So, need the TSA, DHS, and NSA for that? Nope: Just change the silly rule that says give an airplane to any terrorist who asks.

Competence is more difficult. I'm all for more in competence. But big and competent don't go well together.

Look, it's not worth trashing our Constitution, setting up an organization that could take us to Hitler, and wasting the big bucks to set up an NSA that could catch another Boston bomber, even if such an organization could catch another bomber, which likely they can't. Heck, again, the Russians told us about those two loser, wacko nutjobs, which is much better info than we could have hoped for from the NSA, and still we did nothing.

Big gumment in England? Go after a guy because of something about pictures of nude children on his computer that turned out to be his grandchildren playing with water in the yard.

Big gumment in the US? Have some Department of Natural Resources (DNR) go after a couple with several cats, several dogs, and a five year old deer they had raised from a fawn whose mother had just been killed in an auto accident, really, a minute or so before the fawn was born. So the DNR has in their imagination that deer, with their hoofs, can hurt people. Of course, in this case, the deer has been just fine, in the house, with several dogs and cats, for five years, not even hurting the furniture. Big gumment.

And we have the Aaron Swartz case, gumment going wacko over some PDF files readily available to everyone at MIT for free and in paper form in nearly every research library in the world for the cost of photocopying. Big gumment.

We saw in the IRS case big gumment abusing its powers. Well, the NSA data would be an engraved invitation to more such abuses -- shakedowns, blackmail, payoffs, kickbacks, etc.

In reality, the more effective gumment you want will have to be smaller gumment.

There's a recent example with the F-35. Supposedly part of the problem with that program is that someone wants to change the specifications on some screw, so they have a meeting all day with everyone affected, 600 people, that is a representative from each of all the possibly affected subcontractors or some such. The solution? The Lockheed Skunk Works deliberately kept small enough to keep up communications and keep down the huge meetings.

For the NSA phone data, that sounds like the old project Total Information Awareness or some such. There has been a little company on a few floors of a not very attractive office building on the space of a shopping mall in a suburb of Boston. Once I went for an interview. I used to do 'artificial intelligence', i.e., 'expert systems', and they were big on that, likely from what some people at DARPA are still dreaming about. So, they wanted to get data on phone calls, maybe e-mail messages, postcards, whatever, with data on from, to, and date, and then build a big directed graph with an arc for each communication and a node for each person sending or receiving. Then they wanted to do some analysis of the graph, look for 'cliques' or some such. While they explained, I tried to stay awake, but being really interested was asking too much. BS. Total BS. But it looks like the graph people have taken over the NSA. All the brighter people in Russia are likely doing a ROFL. I'm not laughing: It's expensive, dumb, and dangerous. Just cut it back.

while you make good points, please stop spelling it 'gumment', it makes you sound like one of the nutjobs.

I honestly had no idea what he meant by "gumment" and thought it was similar to a gauntlet or something. Had to say it out loud before I finally got it. Whats the fucking point of abbreviating something like government to gumment? It just makes you look unintelligent...

It made me hungry for gumbo.

'Government' is too respectful.

'Gumment' has the contempt of some barefoot guy in the hills of east Tennessee out in the woods with a home built still. I find that contempt very appropriate.

Otherwise your point is well taken.

I've never been able to figure the gumment/gubmint guys out. Are they making fun of rednecks? Or are they assuming the role of some sort of redneck freedom fighter? Do rednecks even say "gumment?"

I don't remember just where I got 'gumment', but I did spend a lot of time in Tennessee!

But, I stand corrected and more highly polished before the more sensitive HN audience and will use 'government' (cough, cough, upchuck).

But we should always keep in mind who's paying the bills: They are supposed to be working for us.

In the United States I'm not so certain that you can place the blame on uninformed citizens given that you effectively have a 2 party political system and both parties have been complicit in domestic surveillance.

In general, you put both the McDonald's and Wendy's close together in the best location on Main Street so that they can each get a good shot at half the business. Else one of those two is out at one end or the other of Main Street and gets only about 1/4th business.

Much the same for political parties: They look like there's not much difference. Some of the Dems are a bit left of Mao, and some of the Repubs are a bit to the right of Genghis Khan, still the actual parties want to look close to the center.

But where is the 'center'? And what issues are hot in the center? That depends a lot on the voting citizens and what the media thinks they can get away with pushing.

I contend that with better informed citizens, we would have had political debates on a much higher level, have just avoided The Great Recession because we never would have done something as dumb as the bubble blowing, and done much better on addressing the issues in foreign policy that got us to throw away a few trillion dollars, etc.

Clinton was paying off the national debt; without the costs of the wars and with the taxes from full employment instead of the unemployment from The Great Recession, we could have had the debt paid off by now or nearly so. Why would it be good to pay off the debt? Because then the US Treasury is not borrowing so much money and, then, interest rates are lower for the rest of us and, in effect, our economy has more 'seed corn', investment capital for growth.

For all those years since Clinton, we could have the economy charging ahead, without inflation, so fast that companies would be recruiting in the poor areas, providing buses from the poor areas to the offices, paid training in the offices, etc. It was happening in the 1960s.

Let's take one issue: Abortion. I claim that in reality, in practice, no matter what you believe about abortion, good, bad, or indifferent, actually there's no real issue. Why? Because Roe v Wade was decided about 40 years ago, and there's no chance it will be changed. When we are well on the way to getting 2/3rds of the House, 2/3rds of the Senate, and 3/4ths of the states ready to change Roe v Wade, abortion can be an issue again.

In the meanwhile, what is abortion in politics? Sure, a way to get some people all wound up over something that's not going to change. Why? Because some Repubs feel strongly that abortion is really bad and want to hear that some politician is 'against it'. Because a lot of Dems believe that someday they might need an abortion and want that option open to them so want to hear some politician is 'for it'. Either way, Roe v Wade's not going to be changed. So, with better informed voters, just informed enough to realize that Roe v Wade is 40 years old and a constitutional amendment takes the 2/3rds, 2/3rds, and 3/4ths, we could just quit talking about abortion and move on to, say, how to get the economy going and how to say out of absurd foreign adventures.

In our democracy, the voters get the government they deserve. Better informed voters stand to get better government. If the voters get smarter, then the two seemingly dumb-dumb parties will keep up with the voters.

"The Hellman guy, of course, had been explaining public key crypto-systems that heavily embarrassed the NSA and, really, essentially put it out of business for its stated mission, is smiling. As I recall, he had blond hair long, nearly to his waist. "

The Hellman guy was probably Whitfield Diffie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie

Thanks! I think you got it!

It's all a giant scam. All this technology requires huge IT contracts for some of the biggest corporations in the country.

It's all kind of a hilariously sad cycle:

1. Energy/resources corps "encourage" the US into war or political involvement/coups to protect their assets (i.e. oil rights in Iran, Iraq, etc. War involves much spending which goes to big contractors)

2. Meddling in the region provokes resentment from locals against US, breeding terrorism (more intelligence spending)

3. Terrorists strike back at US

4. US freaks out about terrorism, ups defense/security/intelligence spending which is outsourced to big contractors.

Your 1. is not the only spark of the process you describe, with considerable accuracy. E.g., the US bent itself all out of shape in Viet Nam and did a lot in Korea, and oil or assets of big US companies were not saved or much at risk or involved. But, yes, some big US companies -- Ike's military- industrial complex -- got big bucks.

And in Viet Nam, a lot of oil was burned, and I have long guessed we burned enough oil to enable the power of OPEC. Keeping B-52 bombers in the air 24 x 7 in the 1950s also burned a lot of oil.

Part of the US overreactions is that from the President on down, it's easier to play cover thy ass by spending US blood and treasure than to speak the often sad, ambiguous, no good option truth to the American people. E.g., in Viet Nam, nearly no one in public office wanted to open themselves to accusations of "Who lost Viet Nam" as happened with "Who lost China" when Mao took over and drove Chang Kai Shek to Taiwan. We finally gave up in Viet Nam when nearly every young person in the country saw someone die in Viet Nam that they had known in high school and the demonstrations were too big to ignore. Even then, President Ford, at the last moment, tried for another big chunk of cash and supplies to Saigon. Congress didn't go along, but Ford had then tried to put the 'blame' on Congress. In some of the earlier days, say, after the Tonkin Gulf thing, there were only a few voices in Congress warning that we were heading for vast disasters with half-vast reasons.

But, we should be able just to say no to absurd foreign adventures and hysterical, ineffective overreactions at home; lot's of other countries do: E.g., in Afghanistan, the EU countries mostly stay out of harm's way. In Gulf War I, there was a fairly significant international effort to push Saddam out of Kuwait, but Gulf War II was essentially just a US effort. Why? For Gulf War II nearly all other countries looked at Saddam and saw a thug in Iraq and concluded that he was just Iraq's problem.

The old remark, maybe from Churchill, that "America always does the right thing after trying everything else" has some truth to it. We are too eager to squander our blood and treasure on absurd foreign adventures. And not just foreign: Now the NSA, FBI, DHS, and more are all going hysterical running around in circles, stirring up dust, and accomplishing next to nothing good and possibly doing a lot of harm.

But as soon as someone rolls back the DHS, the other party will be out for blood at the next pressure cooker in a shopping mall.

It's an old story: In medicine it was long, "The person is sick. We don't know why they are sick. We don't know what to do. But we must do something." which was often harmful. So, a few terrorists do this and that, take advantage of our old silly policy to give any airplane to any terrorist that asks, and we go all hysterical and start bankrupting ourselves and throwing away our Constitution.

Solution: Have the voters wise up. Get that by better information from the Internet. A current case is Syria: We could sit here and debate for hours which is worse, Assad or some of, maybe the most powerful of, the rebels. What do we want there, Assad, in with Iran, wants to attack Israel, a thug in his home country, or some rebels that might lead to an Al Qaeda takeover, turn Syria into a base for radical Islam, attack Israel, etc.? It's ugly there; people are suffering and dying; the US should do something? My guess is, the US should do little or nothing. The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Well, not always!

Have the voters wise up and then what ? Vote for either Romney or Obama ?

I don't want to oversimplify, but if the voters wise up, then we will get better candidates.

Also, supposedly both Clinton and W saw the housing bubble blowing and the threat but believed that politically there was nothing they could have done about it. So, they just hoped for the best -- and wrecked the US and advanced world financial system the worst since the 1930s.

With smarter voters, no way could Obama, the CBC, Frank, etc. get Fannie and Freddie to back junk paper that was the real gasoline for the heat for the bubble blowing. E.g., get the 'Frontline' piece with its interview with the COB of Wells Fargo: He was very clear. He saw the bubble blowing, told lots of the right people in various committees in DC, put such a warning in his annual report, and told people that we were not going to like the results. Still, we did nothing.

With better informed voters, a president could have put 10 minutes in one of his State of the Union addresses showing the strong parallels -- bubble blowing from over leveraged financial assets where the bubbles pop and wipe out much of the financial system and take much of the economy down with it -- with The Great Depression and stated clearly that the only responsible thing to do was to get a soft landing and save the country. Then have some meetings, say, about the CRA, Fannie, and Freddie, AIG, some of the CDS swap manipulations, the fast and loose work by the bond ratings agencies, the abuses of the variable rate mortgages and no-doc loans, etc.

In 1980 I was in Ohio and heard some of the stories about the suffering then in the Rust Belt. Just take a list about every bad thing that could happen to people, families, and communities, and that's what happened. So, got domestic violence, street crime, alcohol abuse, drugs, infant mortality, divorces, heart attacks, suicides, all through the roof.

Bad gumment can be really ugly stuff, hurt the middle class a lot and hurt the poor much more.

I'm no fan of Obama, and while I see a lot to like in Romney I thought that from his 47% remark on he just blew his campaign.

But my reading of Obama is that in part he reads the winds and sometimes goes with them, maybe only temporarily, reluctantly, ineffectually, but is willing to appear to go with the flow. Well, with better informed voters speaking more loudly, I suspect that he can actually pretend to go with the winds and at least mostly get out of the way as Congress does the real work.

I believe it's in the hands of the voters and, then, from the media, and now from the Internet.

It's simple. This movement in security and spying on your own citizens is driven by the military industrial complex.

Here's a VICE documentary on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL_3Qg-SADY

Hopefully an official response can add some accountability to the process. I put up a White House petition here, which can hopefully get an official response: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/cease-overbroad-su...

well woudl you take what the FSB says on face value? I sure the FSB told MI5 that Litvinenko was a "wacko nutjob"

Ahem

Litvinenko was assassinated by Putin for working for MI6, and the assassination was very carefully planned to end up in London to send a very pointed message. He was tasked with "getting nuclear materials out of Russia". Well, he managed that all right...

The more you know.

Seriously: this is well known, look for Telegraph coverage, radiation on the plane ("in his tea" cover - yeah, nice one), Litvinenko's business network connections and so on. Is Putin a nice guy? Nope, but poisoning is his personal signature, and MI6 aren't exactly angels either.

I'm sure I'll pick up more "down votes" from the HN crowd, but hey: I thought you were all wise to info-bubbles?

p.s.

MI5 is the internal Security division for the UK; MI6 is the external Security division for the UK

Helps if you know the difference, and for that matter - it helps if know that the FSB is also the domestic Security division, so wouldn't be contacting MI6 anyhow.

Top marks all around for generally bullshitting there.

That was a Joke :-) and i was using FSB as its the most commonly know bit of the ex KGB and its the Security Service and SIS not MI5 and MI6.

But the line from Russia was that Litvinenko was a wrongun.

Certainly not at face value. Instead, have to take what they say as a starting point, a lead, but one from possibly a quite well informed source. Of course, we can't really trust the source, even if they are well informed.

But, heck, all we will get from the NSA and their Utah computers are leads that are just starting points.

As I recall, one of the US three letter acronyms, well before the Boston Marathon, actually did look into the two Boston loser, wacko nutjobs and then mostly dropped the effort. Looks like we needed just better police work.

Maybe this time the Russians actually tried to help. Good. Then Tchaikovsky's music isn't the only good thing from Russia! Maybe next time the Russians will try to fool us; they will accumulate a track record, and in time we will see.