NSA Files Decoded: What the revelations mean for you
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Congratulations to whoever put this together, it was very well done.
How on earth did they think that text selection as an event to open a popup is a good idea?!
I'm not one of them (I do it, just rarely), and I've gotta say it annoys the hell out of me too. Totally unnecessary distraction is what it is.
I was also excited to see they're using Video.js, with a super subtle theme that matches the rest of the site (when controls are showing). Really well done.
Anyway there is no 'HTML5 video'. It's H264, or VP8, or whatever.
There is HTML video - the video tag. No Flash attached.
Video: Bob Sacha
Production: Kenan Davis, Nadja Popovich, Kenton Powell, Ewen MacAskill, Ruth Spencer, Lisa van Gelder
Additional Production: Spencer Ackerman, Kayla Epstein, Paul Lewis, Amanda Michel, Katie Rogers, Dominic Rushe
Also:
By EWEN MACASKILL and GABRIEL DANCE
Produced by FEILDING CAGE and GREG CHEN
"You ask me proofs that it works, I can show you proofs that the lack of it really fails"
That is so flawed from a logic point of view that I won't even bother.
"We can't be transparent .. we have to get comfortable with the idea that we're delegating to somebody.."
There are two things here: 1) Most people agree that we can't talk about the details of implementation of a strategy agreed to by the US people to defend our country. The problem is that the mass surveillance that we've heard of in the last 5 months is not exactly a "detail of implementation" is it? It's a whole gods damn strategy that the US people didn't directly agree to. (Now yes, it's a democracy, we elected representatives who agreed to this. So what? Our constitution doesn't give full power to our representatives. If they didn't think for a second that a question of that magnitude might require some public debate, they are wrong, period).
2) He talks about trust. The problem is that trust is not something that you just ask for. If you are corrupt, lie, cheat, and all around screw up for long enough, people will stop trusting you.
Well, the people who wrote the law which the NSA is claiming authorizes this also said they didn't agree to this.
So much for any kind of "rule of law" or "oversight".
Does this seem perhaps unsavory to you? A hair totalitarian, perhaps? Should the will of the people not be the ultimate sovereign? I bid you welcome to the Republic! -- the Republic built upon the rubble of the popular-sovereignty concept as codified in the failed Articles of Confederation, the Republic which for at least the last century or so has actually done a pretty solid job of living up to its primary design goal, which put simply is to keep the levers of power safe from the mob, and vice versa. Of course, the Republic has lately grown a thick, sclerotic crust of permanent civil service at the boundary between the two, and that's hardly ideal, but given that the only plausible alternative at this point is the catastrophe of mob rule, I'm perfectly happy to take what I can get. So should you be; especially in the modern era, genuine democracy has some really nasty failure modes, not least of which was das tausendjährige Reich.
> That is so flawed from a logic point of view that I won't even bother.
Well, I don't blame you; trying to disprove p ⇒ q ∴ ¬q ⇒ ¬p would probably cost you some embarrassment.
Do bother, if you're going to show someone up as screwing around with logic, make it easy for everyone to see it too.
Proof:
In the past not everyne wore green hats and they got cancer.
Does that seem like valid reasoning?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/sen-feinsteins-nsa-bil...
Feinstein has done nothing but help the NSA so far. She's not going to just stop because she suddenly developed a conscience. I wish Californians would just recall her, because otherwise we're stuck with her and her pro-surveillance state bias until 2018. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, if she wasn't also the head of the Intelligence Committee, and having tremendous power in the Senate to continue things as they are.
And there's few political organizations in the country better at producing candidates unacceptable to the the statewide constituency they are offered to than the Republican Party of California.
For instance, it's baffling to me that Ron Conway doesn't care about this issue, given his entire portfolio is internet startups. I think Arrington was right to call him out on that.
THIS DATA CAN BE USED TO UNDERMINE YOUR STARTUP.
It's not just privacy we should be concerned about. It's our economy.
Whether it is corporations willfully collaborating in secret with the government or government secretly infiltrating corporations - either way, this presents a serious opportunity for exploitation of the public marketplace.
Because with this amount of data, the NSA has a goldmine of business intelligence that it can put to 'strategic use' via third-party 'partners' who can actively participate in the market; ie- COMPETE WITH YOU.
This is unfair and a terrible flaw in an economic system.
And really if you have the data, why not?
If you are preparing a bid at Embraer, you may get the feeling the only ones you win will be the ones Boeing finds unprofitable.
The NSA has the data to rig the economy globally, and to rig politics within the US.
Who here is going to stand up for them and say: No, they wouldn't. They have too much restraint.
gNewSense 3.0 / Iceweasel 3.5.16
Text can be captured using
w3m http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surveillance-revelations-decoded > nsa.txt
I'm not questioning why the NSA uses this argument -- clearly, they use it because it works -- people are persuaded by it. What I'm asking is, why does it work?
That is, they prefer to believe the government is a superhuman entity that has everyone's best interests at heart, rather than facing the reality that it's made up of fallible, selfish humans who are only interested in covering their own asses.
With that said, you haven't seen the Snow Fall article by the NYTimes? [1]
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...
One small tweak I would make is to have the video start playing not when it's in the middle but closer to the top of the page.
Reason is, I find myself distracted by listening to the guys speak before I finish reading the text.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/
He uses archive footage in his exceptionally well written articles to make a hybrid documentary that is not plodding (like how TV is if you actually count the words per minute) and not devoid of moving pictures (every picture tells a thousand whatever).
I wish more news and current affairs was presented in this mixed-medium way.
It's 2013, and size matters. Thirteen inches, for an article like this one, is too small.