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Comment by judk | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps does this. The only difference is that Google informs you before you turn on location services.

It's not the only difference.

Other differences that come to mind: Google has yet to kill people with drones or send people to torture prisons in Egypt.

The NSA doesn't run operations, so they didn't do either of these things either.

It's a big government.

It sure is and if you think they have no ops i dont know what to tell you.

Yeah, and the soldiers don't make the orders, the generals don't make the politics, the politicians just try to keep the military industrial complex fat and snugly and the citizens happy, the citizens just crave security because that's what the media says is what citizens crave while the military industrial complex just seeks profit because it's required to by stockholders and everyone else involved, who are just trying to put food and/or yachts on their family.

"Just doing my job" has been deprecated in 1945. For a reason, and finding out why the hard way is considered harmful.

So why is that in polite company, even those that are opposed to our various wars are obliged to toe the line, "we support our troops"?

Even in 21st century America, we continue to fool ourselves, thinking that somehow soldiers can be noble, heroes even, all the while being engaged something that is immoral.

Perhaps because many of them are friends and family of said polite company who may have been persuaded to join with incomplete information, or lacked the economic resources to refuse to join when recruiters came calling.

I have wondered the same thing privately numerous times. I believe it is a reflexive reaction because they can easily be killed doing their jobs, which they signed up for. It is some kind of bizarre "patriotic" requirement, likely borne of the significant derision heaped upon returning Vietnam veterans. Perhaps it is a generation of people who never want to see that happen again that have created this sacred cow?

Heaping derision on people who were victims themselves, drafted into a war they did not believe in, is one thing. I totally understand why people might recoil from that.

With an all-volunteer army though? No way, it is on them as much as it is on anybody. I don't care if they joined for the GI Bill (doing it for the [college] money is a pretty fucking flimsy ethical justification), I don't care if they joined the reserves before war broke out for the GI Bill (agreeing to the possibility of a war, before you know the circumstances of that war, for the [college] money, is still a flimsy argument).

The "support the troops [bring them home]" stuff seems like it is likely backlash against the derision that we gave Vietnam veterans, but it should be re-evaluated because the situations are not equivalent.

There is the issue though that as young people, they may well not have the maturity or information to fully understand and comprehend the decision they are making.

I was going to detail this as a possible excuse - but considering this reasoning and the consequences has made me reconsider: You've made a bad choice [morally / ethically]. Now you have to live with the consequences.

Can be seen as a tough stance, but then again, so's life. Didn't really mean to fall of that cliff? Oh, here's your life back again.

There is also the "smoothtalking recruiter managed to talk a teenager into doing something dumb" angle, but that only goes so far with me.

Still, I don't hate people who join or anything... call it a very strong disapprove. However I do find it hard to associate with people who try to assure me that they're one of the good ones because "Oh, I'm not really the patriotic type, I just joined so I could go to college" line. That impresses me far less than "I joined [for my country|it was the right thing to do|for the innocent civilians over there|war is a necessary evil|I was young and naive when the recruiter came to my school|911 HUURAH!]". I don't believe people when they say the former, but if I did, I don't think I could consider them anything but mercenaries.

I agree completely.

Here is a combat veteran discussing what it is actually like. This sentiment is basically echoed among the friends that I have who have served in the military.

http://www.mediumdifficulty.com/2012/03/01/call-of-apathy-vi...

http://warprayer.org

"No, I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead." -- Mark Twain

What immoral acts do you consider US troops to currently be engaged in?

Participation in unnecessary wars.

They may not have made the decision to start a war (that is on politicians), but they made the decision to participate.

Since the disclosure of the Downing Street Memorandum it has been clear that the war in Iraq was a war without a legitimate cause, where the US and UK acted as aggressors toward goals that were withheld from the public.

My opinion isn't the question here. I'm observing first that there are many people who profess that one or more of our multiple wars are immoral; and second, that they simultaneously profess that the soldiers fighting deserve our support rather than scorn for supporting the putatively unjust war.

If you believe that the war is unjust, and you believe that it's the duty of a soldier (or any person) to refuse to perform immoral acts, then consistency dictates that you should condemn the soldiers fighting in those wars, not revere them.

That's a pretty black-and-white world you're trying to impose on folks.

I've spoken with a lot of Iraq war veterans. Every one of them has qualms with how the war was conducted, and many have doubts about the reasons for invading. But the things they have in common are an underlying desire to to "protect" their country in some sense, and the willingness to die for that cause.

There's plenty of room there for both disagreement and respect.

I think you're still misunderstanding. This doesn't have anything to do with the motivations of the soldiers.

I have friends who are absolutist peacenik liberals, who thing that GWB should burn in hell for all eternity for inveigling us in Iraq, because of "war for oil", "Halliburton will destroy the country", etc. From the point of view of one of these people, there is no moral authority to wage the war; to them, it IS black and white. Yet these very same people utter the "support our heroic troops" mantra.

Given that someone is such an extremist in their opposition to the war, it's impossible to square that person's professed beliefs with their support of the soldiers waging that war.

That is, unless we're willing to discard the idea that all people are morally bound to refuse to execute immoral commands.

Aggressive wars and war profiteering (not saying US soldiers themselves benefit from it, but that's what they're being used for). The US is not alone in this, but it's in it, too.

It's a lie of diversion / distraction.

Noam Chomsky:

Anything that's totally vacuous and diverts, after all what does it mean to be in favor of .. suppose somebody asks, do you support the people in Iowa, can you say I support them or no I don't support them. It's not even a question it doesn't even mean anything. And that's the point of public relations slogans like support our troops is that they don't mean anything, they mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa.

Of course there was an Issue -- the issue was do you support our policy but you don't want people to think about the issue that's the whole point of good propaganda, you want to create a slogan that nobody is gonna be against and I suppose everybody will be for because nobody knows what it means because it doesn't mean anything, but it's crucial value is it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something. Do you support our policy and that's the one you're not allowed to talk about.

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199201--.htm

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=G7DdWmWUa_8

Incidentally, this passage is within a larger context of public relations. A while back I was looking at terms and phrases on Google's Ngram viewer and noted something really odd: "democracy" wasn't a term in broad use until World War I, with a second major uptick during WWII.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=democracy&year...

I noted that and didn't think much more of it for a few months until I ran across a reference to Edward Louis Berneys, father of modern public relations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

Really interesting coot. Double nephew of Sigmund Freud (oh yeah: Berneys popularized Freud too -- and married advertising to psychology while he was at it), convinced women to smoke ("Torches of Freedom"), and though it's hard to believe it had to be sold, promoted bacon.

One of his first campaigns? A WWI "support the troops" message commissioned by the US government. To popularize democracy.

That's right: the principle American Value was brought to you as a marketing campaign.

(Ngram viewer is fascinating for studying the emergence / rise / fall in the popularity of words and phrases).

More on lies of diversion: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/5zrCkbzR...

Thanks, that's really interesting.

The nonsense message of American democracy is another one that's always bothered me, so it's enlightening to see how these are connected.

FWIW, despite all the propaganda and even our school history books, democracy never was a core value of America. There is virtually nothing democratic about the design of the federal government, and even those aspects that are democratic were nothing new at the time the Constitution was written. America was not a bold experiment in democracy. That was old hat: the Dutch were already doing it, and heck, the Greeks did it a couple thousand years earlier. What was a bold experiment, seemingly entirely forgotten in today's discourse on Capitol Hill, was a limited government that wielded only a small set of powers that were explicitly ceded to it by the people.

The nonsense message of American democracy

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call it "nonsense", but it definitely wasn't emphasized prior to WWI. I'd have to do some more digging through history to see what issues were driving the nation prior to that. I do think that freedom and liberty were there. Initially it was just getting things off the ground and fighting off the Brits (1776, 1812), then westward expansion, then early industrialization, then slavery, them more industrialization.

By the time of WWI there'd been some big questions raised over equity and equality (railroads, robber barrons, oil trusts), and national cohesion was somewhat at stake, more so with the Great Depression and WWII.

My study of all of this is still pretty thin, but it's a fascinating period.

CIA does directly run ops and targeting.

"The CIA's Silent War in Pakistan"

http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1900248,00.html

"CIA drone attacks in Pakistan are responsible for unlawful killings, some of which could amount to war crimes, Amnesty International says."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24618701

"CIA Drone Strike Kills Pakistan Taliban Head Before Talks"

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-03/cia-drone-strike-ki...

The division between "intelligence" and "operations" has been breached.

Have they admitted to any of these?

Does the CIA admit to even owning drones? Or are these Army operations run by the CIA?

Not sure if you're just trolling, but I'll bite:

The CIA's drone program is not secret, and hasn't been for some time.

From http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/363199/obama-plan-shift...:

"Despite their overlapping “orbits” in Yemen, the CIA and JSOC employ different surveillance equipment on their drone fleets. They also rely on separate and sometimes incompatible communications networks to transmit video feeds and assemble intelligence from multiple streams in the moments before a strike."

From http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/05/cia_pen...:

"Keeping the drones with the CIA also offers legal cover for drone strikes, former officials argued. By law, the military is not supposed to conduct hostile actions outside a declared war zone, although special forces do so on occasion acting at the CIA's behest."

The first article is an anonymous source for a website's blog.

Some other choice headlines on the site's homepage:

    Birth-Control Battle - Liberals are the agressors

    Chait-Crime: Stop assuming conservatives are racist

    Corporations Are People: The idea goes back to the Founding.

    The Return of the Queue: O'care: just like any other liberal program.

    Five Food-Stamp Myths: Does the program even work?

    The Test-Score Gap: Race and class are not to blame.

Not exactly a fantastic citation, I think you'll agree. In any event, your quote specifically refers to intelligence drones, not strike drones. I'm not actually 100% sure about this, but I'm guessing they're different, just based on the different payloads required to perform each activity. In any event, the CIA here isn't admitting to anything. It's an anonymous inside source. Right. Hyperconservative blog has high-level inside source in the intelligence community in a post-Snowden world. Got it.

As for the second article, that's exactly what I'm saying. Special forces do so, "Acting at the CIA's behest". CIA provides intel, special forces conducts the operation. That's an important distinction.

Now you're just being lazy :) The articles above are simply the first that popped up. Look around a bit and I'm sure you can find the same stories on sites that better suit your particular political bent.

If you're intent on nitpicking, then I think the likely answer to your question is that the CIA openly runs a large and mature weaponized drone program using vehicles that are outfitted by the CIA but owned (in a procurement sense) by the USAF, with the weapon triggers actually pulled (per law) by USAF service members.

If the CIA wanted to keep this program secret then they're doing a shitty job. For example, look up the things that Lean Panetta has said about his program over the last few years.

I don't (in a brief search) find a specific CIA doc, but there are multiple references to CIA drone strikes within the .gov TLD:

http://mccollum.house.gov/press-release/mccollum-amendment-f...

http://unmannedsystemscaucus.mckeon.house.gov/in-the-news/20...

http://unmannedsystemscaucus.mckeon.house.gov/afghanistan/20...

http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/pdf/04-23-13BergenTestimony....

More to the point: there's no denial that these programs are run by the CIA.

More accurate comment would be "google is not paid by those who kill people".

And that Google isn't limited by the Constitution in the ways that the Federal government supposedly is.

>And that Google isn't limited by the Constitution

I'm pretty sure it is...

Google is (modulo the corporation/person thingy) granted rights under the Constitution.

The Constitution only limits Google to the extent that it's the basis for the system of laws that do the limiting.

Further semantic hairsplitting, perhaps:

Not Google nor any other person is granted rights under the Constitution. Given the Natural Rights philosophy subscribed to by many of the founders, as described by John Locke and others, the rights of the people pre-exist, simply by virtue of their being people.

The Constitution comes later. It describes a set of enumerated powers that the people have decided to cede to the government that they're creating. The way you describe it is the other way around from this.

Not directly. Google is bound by the statutes enforced by the federal and state governments who are empowered by the Constitution to govern. That is why Google can censor its index to clear it of things it does not like, if it so desired. Additionally, it could establish that the official religion of Google is from here forth Pastafarianism and while that might run afoul of some workplace regulations in certain jurisdictions, there is nothing in the Constitution that prevents Google from doing so.

Nope.

If Google deletes your comments on a YouTube video, it's not a violation of the 1st Amendment. If Google employees take a good, long look at your email or the documents you have in Drive, it's not a violation of the Fourth.

And therein lies the the big difference. I can opt out of Google's tracking in a number of ways. Secret tracking from the NSA? I will likely not even know it is happening, and if I do, opting out is likely to be slightly more difficult. This, of course, does not even touch upon what that tracking data may then be used for.

> I can opt out of Google's tracking in a number of ways.

At face value, yes. But with the news that companies are tracking web users via browser fingerprints and other methods (even when users have "do not track" enabled), it seems that it is difficult to avoid being secretly tracked by corporations.

Within GSM any interconnected network can query at least the country of any other network's customers' handsets. It's needed for routing roaming calls, but the data is generally quite easy accessible.

There are many commercial services offering lookups (google "HLR lookup")

Triangulation as a Service has been around for a couple of years too http://developer.verizon.com/content/vdc/en/verizon-tools-ap...

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