Wiliam Binney explains what has taken place and why. He labels Dick Cheney and the Bush Admin for panicking after 9/11. What he fails to mention is that the Obama Administration brought the illegality to new lows.
And, if this passes, is there any way to protect myself? Obviously if the NSA is hoarding zero-days there isn't much you can do, but what are some practical steps?
1) avoid airports and security cameras
2) use an offshore VPN at all times
3) don't use the phone, use E2E encrypted calling like Signal
4) use cash as often as possible, or cryptocurrency
What's your threat model? Unless you name what you're afraid of and what you're trying to hide, you're just feeding paranoia and it's unhealthy. And I'm not trying to say you should do nothing - the steps you suggest would at the very least increase the cost for NSA to collect data, potentially making it scale less or even make you fly under the radar. Still, if you want those rather uncomfortable actions to become habits, you'll need to have some motivation and for that you probably need to name your worries first.
The government knowing literally everything about my life (yes, I know they almost certainly do already)
> what I'm trying to hide
More like what I'm trying to protect: the naive assumption that the government does not deserve to have this depth and breadth of information on literally every citizen for no legitimate reason.
I have a deep moral opposition to this kind of spying, and making it more difficult is an end in and of itself. I also don't consider them terribly uncomfortable, but that is my opinion and no one else's.
I also personally would prefer not to be spied on. I do not want my day-to-day activities monitored by anyone but myself. In the event that the government starts curtailing freedoms or particular kinds of behavior and thought, I do not want to be left susceptible. So I guess my threat model is "generalized spying". I assume I would be powerless to stop anything specifically targeted at me, so I would like to avoid becoming a target in the first place.
If and when I start buying oxidizing chemicals, drug precursors, or ammunition, then you are more than welcome to start tracking my purchases and usage of those products.
Well it’s time to ask yourself, are those morals and values worth sacrificing your comfort, your sanity, and maybe even your life? Which do you value more?
My Instagram account is long gone, my Facebook account will be gone before the end of the month (I use it once a week at most anyway), and I've long since stopped using any Google account for anything. I run multiple browser extensions that help me delete cookies, block Javascript, etc. The VPN should hopefully take care of my ISP. It try to avoid even sending emails to Gmail accounts.
I haven't tried Tails, but I will look into it when I get some time free.
> Unless you name what you're afraid of and what you're trying to hide
I think of it a little differently. I am trying to be part of a collective movement toward as much privacy as possible so that those who do need to protect themselves can have access to the tools they need and won't stick out when they use them. A sort of herd immunity.
I guess a good start are habits that neutralize automated mass surveillance. Targeted surveillance would be a whole other ballgame and unfortunately I don't think our tools are at a place to make this feasible for me to practice.
>I am trying to be part of a collective movement toward as much privacy as possible so that those who do need to protect themselves can have access to the tools they need and won't stick out when they use them. A sort of herd immunity.
by creating a standard you are effectively creating an easy way and/or justification to automate against that standard. I think your logic is sound, but consider the big picture. The more people do things in a certain way, the higher the incentive to investigate that way.
Sure, the principle doesn't always blindly work. If everyone uses one technology, that can be a single point of failure (one backdoor and we're all doomed). But think about https for example. It's just plain good for security and anonymity and everyone should use it as much as possible.
might want to check if your potential offshore vpn is hosted in a country with an intelligence data sharing agreement with the united states or any of its intelligence partners
Is anyone else fatigued? The effort required, ontop of just having a normal functioning life, to parse and make decisions around potential future law is incredible.
Isn't this what elected officials are ment to do on our behalf?
Yes. I give to the EFF and a few other select causes each year, but I just can't keep up with individual issues. I just plan on waiting it out for the next 4 years.
I just plan on waiting it out for the next 4 years.
You're not thinking that if the Democrats manage to take the White House, that this situation will improve - are you? I mean, most of this damage was done when Pres. Obama was in the White House and the Congress skewed more toward Democrats. The idea that the Democrats will defend our privacy and 4th Amendment is absurd.
The boat was built and set sail under Bush and the GOP congress, under the super-Orwellian PATRIOT Act. I am not happy Obama expanded their powers but fail to see how the GOP would make the situation better.
The boat has been under construction for decades. The FISA courts were set up in 1978 (that's the Democrat Carter, and I believe that it was Democratic Congress at the time, too), but even that was only a response, trying to rein in the national surveillance apparatus that was already running wild. Reagan upped it a notch with Exec Order 12333, GWB obviously built on top of that, and Obama went hog-wild with it. There's plenty of blame to drown both parties.
Obama expanded the program, yes. He did not create it. And also, many other groups I donate to are just swamping me with non-NSA stuff related to Trump and the GOP, so that's also what I meant.
But still, yes, I feel democrats have a better chance of at least listening to constituent concerns about privacy. The GOP wallies about small government, except for the military and they view the NSA/FBI/CIA as the same.
But even if not--I don't see it improving with another R in power either. Or do you?
Trump's views on privacy are obvious and awful, yes - he has Sessions as AG.
But Dianne Feinstein is one of the fiercest surveillance advocates in Congress. Hillary Clinton had vastly more support from intelligence agencies than Trump did, and refused to condemn what was described in the Snowden releases.
Meanwhile, Rand Paul ended bulk phone record collection for a few hours in 2015, defying much of both parties to do so. He filibustered over drone strikes, and promised to restrict NSA searches if he was elected.
There's a lot to dislike about Rand Paul, and libertarians aren't the only people opposing surveillance - Bernie Sanders made similar promises from the far opposite end of the spectrum.
But I think framing this as "bad under Democrats, hopeless under Republicans" makes it harder to address the problem. The mainstream of both parties are similarly awful, even if the Democrats talk a bit more softly about it, while the fringes of both parties are often strong surveillance opponents.
> Rand Paul ... Bernie Sanders made similar promises from the far opposite end of the spectrum.
Referring to Libertarian and left-libertarian as opposite ends of the spectrum is a grave disservice, and feeds directly into our contemporary fallacious polarization.
Either view it as a two-dimensional circle, or just ignore the secondary "Left"-"Right" marketing and analyze the primary characteristic of libertarian-authoritarian.
I chose 'spectrum' since the comment I was referring to was starting from a "which party" question - the spectrum I was envisioning was "fringe to mainstream" within a given party.
I certainly agree that framing political beliefs themselves as linear is misleading, though. I should have been clearer about that.
Why does that matter? There's a lot of distrust for both parties, from both sides at the moment. That seems like a good time for a 3rd party to come on in.
I'm tired and bitter, but: there's no rule saying good outcomes are possible.
It's entirely possible to say "this is a false dichotomy, both parties are fundamentally hopeless on this issue" and also say "third party candidates are completely unelectable".
I'm not entirely fatalistic; I think "a major party greatly realigns its views on privacy" is possible, if hard and unlikely. I mentioned Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders as contrarian voices each pulling their party away from bulk surveillance, and I hope we'll see more such voices in the future. A realignment looks increasingly possible, and increasingly necessary. But I honestly don't think "third parties are powerless" should be seen as a reason to have any hope at all for our existing options.
Yes, we are all fatigued, and that is how they win. Can't get your Bill through? Rename it and submit again. Still won't work? Tack it onto a Medicaid / NASA funding bill. Still won't get through? Change the wording so that it becomes more vague and open to interpretation in your favour and start again.
Bonus points if you give it a name involving patriotism, freedom, economic or personal health, or a backromym that spells out the same.
It wasn't a comment about lobbying for NSA expansion specifically, but I imagine there's plenty of companies who would benefit from NSA expansion that provide services to the US government.
Robert's Rules of Order (the Cadillac of parliamentary procedure texts) contains a few simple rules concerning this issue.
Simply put, no person may add content to a proposal that is not directly related to the original proposal. You want to add a rider to an HHS funding bill to also fund your pet project? Too bad. You want to include language in a standard farm bill about the second amendment? Not gonna happen.
Under these rules, proposals/bills are forced into MUCH smaller packages and the ability of any particular legislator to sneak in lobbied language becomes stymied.
Congress does not have these simple rules in place. We should force them to adopt the relevant section(s) of Robert's Rules of Order.
>"Bonus points if you give it a name involving patriotism, freedom, economic or personal health, or a backromym that spells out the same."
Indeed, and this "cognitive dissonance" technique is so widespread now that you can generally invert the message to find out the actual intention of the legislation is. Examples:
If you are cutting taxes for the wealthy donor class say it is bill to "help the middle class and the poor."
If you want to take health care away from people say "it is a bill that will help the American people."
If you want to empower a monopoly just state that "this is a bill designed to foster competition."
It's hardly so black and white, and people's failure to recognize this and operate in a respectful middle ground is a large factor in our current situation (which is worsening).
We've assimilated so many political positions into our cultural signaling subroutines that almost every issue is seen as "identity politics" nowadays. This occurs by design, because political profiteers are profited by creating clear boogeymen and corralling "their side" by shaming them for even considering the other side's POV.
We need to get back to a political ethos based on mutual respect, and an understanding that the "other side" is not an evil, but rather a check that is necessary to keep things balanced and smooth. Conservative principles do not arise out of the liberal caricatures that Republicans hate the poor, and liberal principles do not arise out of the conservative caricature that Democrats are communists vying for totalitarian economic control.
We cannot see each other as separate tribes and expect to succeed. We have to see each other as people of goodwill, on the same team, working for the same ultimate purposes.
Politics has been commoditized into television entertainment. There is no better indicator of this than TV showman Donald Trump employing those tactics to win the presidency. And like everything else on TV, what start out as mild differences gradually become "Flanders-ized" [0], and we hardly realize it until we look back to see how it was.
There are going to be winners and losers in any political action. That's a reality of political life and it's why we have the carefully-designed representative government systems that we have.
We need to acknowledge and weigh the costs on both sides instead of ignoring one side of the equation and saying "This bill ONLY exists to hurt Class Y!" or "This bill is great and has no negative consequences for anyone!"
Regardless, changes in technology including air travel, telecommunication, and 24-hour live news have permanently shifted our political landscape. We should think about how we can change our processes, our use of this technology, and/or both to ensure that we maintain a coherent and peaceful union, and stop the polarization. Polarization only serves the interests of pirates and opportunists.
People aren't arguing against Conservative values though. They're arguing against the Republican party. How can you negotiate with a group of people that don't argue in good faith?
For example, the Democrats compromised on deficits. The Republicans insisted - deficits are important. Okay, we disagree. However, we'll respect some deficit rules to help keep it down. Okay.
Hey, Republicans have majority! First thing to do, massively increase deficits!
My original comment was only referring to devaluation of speech. But lets take the three examples that I used:
Trying to repeal health care provisions as your most pressing piece of legislation but not bothering to have an alternative plan to present to the population as a replacement.
Passing legislation which gives permanent tax breaks to corporations but then only temporary breaks to regular people(expires after 8 years.)
Repealing internet regulation in a monopolistic environment.
Please help me to understand how any of the above provides benefit to the average person? Where is the grey part of the spectrum I am not able to see. And by grey I mean the average voter being better off because of it.
I am not sure why you are reframing the context as left vs right. It's not about that, its about governments that represent people and not corporations and campaign contributions.
I was trying to keep this short. :C See last section for tl;dr.
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Health care repeal: Insurance premiums have skyrocketed since the ACA went into effect. Just this year, I know a small business owner whose premium for high-deductible family plan has gone up 2.5x. My employer-provided health insurance premium increased a little (relatively at least), but both the individual and family deductibles jumped by about 40%.
Repealing the ACA doesn't include artificial price controls, etc., but the common belief is that the ACA is one of the biggest reasons that premiums have gone up, and that repealing it will allow them to come back down.
I understand that the causal relationship is arguable, but you asked for a perspective on how it helps the average person. The perspective is that the average person who isn't getting subsidized health insurance is getting raked over the coals (along with their employer, who usually pays 60-80% of the monthly premium), and that perspective is absolutely reflected in the real world where people are being forced to pay thousands more for less than they had last year.
"Without a replacement" isn't considered a big issue because it's not like repealing the ACA shuts down the medical facilities/industry in any real way. They'll continue to operate and health care will still be available. Everyone is not going to die because the medical system reverts to the regulatory structure that was in place five years ago. The insurance situation will get better for some and worse for others, but that's at worst a lateral movement, and it's arguably a positive because it allows people to forgo health insurance altogether again, which means the insurers will have to offer something for the "Well I'm not even going to bother" crowd.
This is another situation where polarization has caused us to miss the forest for the trees. The medical-industrial complex in this country is completely out of control. Completely. Everyone knows this. We need an elegant solution (and most conservatives don't consider a blank check from the government elegant), but we're not going to get one with each group playing off of each other and their politicians just toggling the situation in favor of their base every 4-8 years.
We have to hold our politicians accountable and demand something that is workable and stable for everyone. The heart of the matter is that the insurance companies have got to go, but we're never going to get other traditional conservatives on board with that if we don't engage in a real dialogue and build up trust.
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Permanent tax breaks to corporations with temporary to non-corporations is a polarizing misdirection. People comprise corporations and cutting corporate taxes means that more of that money is available for normal people who've earned it to use and deploy, rather than for the government to appropriate and reserve for the purposes of a handful of unmovable bureaucrats. Most conservatives consider this a default good.
The permanent nature of the corporate tax cut is not an insult unless you choose to make it one. Every dollar of corporate tax does not have to be replaced by a dollar of individual tax; the goal is to pay less tax, not just to shift it around.
If the the corporate tax rate was too high, it should be brought down, regardless of the implementation details on the individual tax side. The overall goal is to keep direct taxes minimized in general.
How does this help the average citizen? First, there is individual tax relief already baked in for at least 8 years. That's an immediate tax savings and that's great. Second, allowing resources to flow to the people who are capable of commanding them from the marketplace allows these people to expand their operations, hire others, develop new technology and goods, etc. etc. -- all the basics of our economy. And perhaps the key difference is that conservatives see themselves not just as po...
>""Without a replacement" isn't considered a big issue because it's not like repealing the ACA shuts down the medical facilities/industry in any real way"
No, taking important things like health care away from people and not presenting any kind of a replacement is a huge deal.
>"Net neutrality is an example of polarization run amok, because I think that there would be a lot more bipartisan support for a real solution if there wasn't a sentiment that agreeing with "the other side" was an automatic stain."
Again all you can do is reframe reality into people being led astray by cable news pundits. Do you believe the majority of the population in the US are dummies? Where was the solution that was posited? Oh wait, there was none. Another subtractive, zero sum motion.
>"These are subjective perspectives informed by individual life experiences, and it's necessarily colored by our private biases,"
Again with the "there's no real issue here" - this is just people being led astray by the political media. Plenty of people with good critical thinking skills believe that their governments are representing moneyed interests ahead of them. I find your whole reductionist view that this is all just a big misunderstanding brought on by biased news media to be not only insulting but dangerous.
Again, this isn't about "left vs right" or "blue vs red" its about governments that prioritize the will of moneyed interests over people. The "other side" that people are worried about isn't a democrat or a republican the "other side" is a government that is not acting in their citizen best interests.
Equating a change in insurance benefits and costs based on changes to the ACA with "taking ... health care away from people" is simultaneously dramatizing the negative effect of the policy you dislike and minimizing the effect of the policy you prefer. As above, there are a lot of people whose "health care is being taken away", to use your terminology for "undesired fluctuations in insurance benefits and costs, including being completely priced out of their former policy", with the ACA in place. In reality, people are rarely rendered unable to access important health care services regardless of their insurance status.
Referring to "the citizen's best interest" is a tautology; political dialogue fundamentally arises from differing perspectives on how those interests are best served. In a free country, political discourse and representative government is the process by which "the citizen's best interest" is determined.
But I want to avoid the nitpicks. The issue is that when we hear coherent, valid perspectives that don't align with our own, we feel "not only insulted, but [endangered]". That's the sentiment we have to get away from.
I feel like I spent a pretty good amount of effort fulfilling your request. I presented reasonable perspectives that describe how the policies you mentioned can be interpreted to benefit the average citizen. That doesn't prove they're perfect or that they have no downsides, and it definitely doesn't mean that you'll agree. But as a society, we need to be able to engage in this dialogue without name-calling, threatening, or berating -- without condescension -- if we want to be able to stay stable and unified.
This is obviously not a simple task. What things could help us improve the mutual toleration and respect for actually-different POVs and the people who hold them? How can we refrain from hyperbolizing issues (e.g., pretending that a change to the current insurance regulations will leave scores dying in the streets, or conversely the confiscation of private medical facilities and destruction of all private medical industry) and present them in a way that allows each other to acknowledge the middle ground and agree to disagree?
>"I feel like I spent a pretty good amount of effort fulfilling your request."
No you haven't and that's the amazing part. You have spent hundreds of words contending a position that I never posited in the firs place. I have repeatedly states it wasn't about partisan politics but it was an issue with a system that increasingly only works for moneyed interests. It doesn't matter whether that money is from the left or for the right.
Yet for all of your talk about understanding and respect and toleration you have chosen to completely ignore my original and repeated premise. The irony is incredible.
This is why I believe all bills should have to state who the authors of the bill where, even if they just fixed an incorrect punctuation or spelling error. We actual do not know who writes the legislation, only who brings it to the table.
Stephen Frye did a nature series a few years ago called "last chance to see" in which he expressed the notion that environmentalists are so dismayed and tired that they are ready to give up and accept the future. I'm starting to feel that way about US democracy. I used to work in the US (lawyer) but have returned to Canada. I feel like I am sitting on a hill watching Rome burn. Why bother trying to help when the Romans are setting fire to their own houses?
As much as Canada’s own legislation is shaped by US events, I hope you don’t sit on that hill long- you should be offline gathering metaphorical water buckets.
Or we wait until it is in rubble, until the Romans realize what they have done to themselves, and then document the destruction so that nobody forgets the mistakes. That's what I think Disney just did. That Trump robot will be terrorizing people for generations to come.
For years, my two biggest spheres of advocacy have been environmentalism and privacy/anti-surveillance.
What I've noticed, with that background, is that privacy activism has steadily become more like environmental activism.
With rare exceptions (e.g. the ozone layer), environmentalism is an endless, grinding rear-guard action. Extinct species do not become unextinct. Destroyed habitats do not recover, at least not within hundreds of years. Draining the Glen Canyon Dam will not restore Glen Canyon; Church Rock will never be remediated. And the threats are endless and everywhere: 4,500 species are critically endangered right now, global warming is set for 3+ degrees Celsius, the Great Barrier Reef might die entirely.
Attacks on privacy aren't new, but they seem have changed. The Clipper Chip was a central, recognizable enemy, promoted by branches of the government citizens can relate to. 24 hour turnaround on surveillance legalization for intelligence agencies is part of a new and horrible political landscape. SOPA and PIPA were indirect attacks, part of a state-corporate partnership that lets each party do the things the other is barred from. And even those were too central and easy to oppose - now they're coming back piecemeal, in budget bills and trade agreements where they're harder to address.
And as with the environment, what's lost is lost. Repealing surveillance laws is rare and unsustainable. Fighting surveillance in open courts is impossible; fighting it in FISA courts is a Kafkaesque nightmare of secret evidence and lack of standing. Corporate data-gathering is unprovable, and user information breaches are irreversible. Stolen identities can't be changed or recaptured.
So yes: I'm tired. I'm tired, and it's not an accident, because we're on the wrong end of an asymmetric fight.
But it's to prevent attacks in the short-term. If passing these laws were more immediately damaging than an actual attack (ie moving long-term consequences up) they might stop doing this.
Laws that give the government broad surveillance power give money and power to defense contractors (reliable political donors), and give power to the political group that currently holds power.
These laws damage freedom for all citizens, and they undercut political opponents.
As such, the laws might be harmful to democracy, but are valued by those who have power and wish to further consolidate it.
Based on the fact that more than 99.9% of all the species are now extinct, how is this an alarming sign? It seems like a part of the natural evolutionary process.
Maybe the critically endangered species are not competitive with humans so they're cute and nice, while the species that thrive are competitive with humans so they're ugly, dirty and scary?
Do you want to live in a world without any other living things? How many living things do you want? Is life less interesting if there are only two types of living beings?
I think that the world as we know it is valuable to us because we enjoy it, and nothing more. If we can't appreciate the beauty of life (most of us can't persist on the pure beauty of mathematics or conceptual analysis), what's the point?
I agree that biodiversity is a source of joy and education for me, and I'd add that it's also because we know something about ourselves--we know of the insatiability, the psychopathy, and the destructive nature that comes hand-in-hand with classical capitalism. Many of us see our conservation efforts as a necessary opposing force and as a way of saving ourselves from ourselves.
In terms of exploring a new planet, by the time people land on mars, the area they land on would have been explored by spacecraft and rovers in high detail.
In terms of shaping a planet the way we want, we can do that on earth, and more so if we figured out how to live without being dependent on other earth organisms.
Species do go extinct, but not at the rate we are experiencing today. Even if the current rate of species loss was equal to the historical rate, that does not mean that humans wish to live in such a natural state of chaos. Did American culture lose some of its heritage with the near-extinction of the buffalo? Is it any less of a failure of humankind to drive polar bears to extinction than it would be to obliterate the complete works of Jack London from the face of the Earth? That shit is cool, and we should try to preserve it for future generations.
Sure. A mass extinction event which will take humans with it. Then a few million years down the line new speciation will fill all of the ecological niches in whatever equilibrium arises. The planet and life themselves are unlikely to be completely wiped out, absent some future technology we can’t yet imagine.
As long as you don’t have any attachment to anything more narrow than “all life on earth” (e.g. your family, language, city, country, culture, species, ...) thriving for a long time into the future, there’s no reason not to just shrug at whatever impending apocalypse.
Interesting wording - I indeed don't have any attachment to the things you mention. I do want intelligent life (for now, humanity) to survive and stay powerful, but I'll take the bet that we're adaptable enough to manage even if 90% of the other species perish.
You realize we're not in a massive extinction event now right? You're comparing things like giant meteors killing all the dinosaurs to right now? If you can see the sun, we shouldn't have all these animals dying.
> You realize we're not in a massive extinction event now right?
We are, in fact, in a mass extinction event right now, with extinction rates estimated at 1-2 orders of magnitude greater than any previous such event.
You have to consider the period of time over which those species became extinct. Per E.O. Wilson, we're losing species at a rate that is ~1,000 times faster than anything in the past. If it continues, the loss in biodiversity will lead to the breakdown of many ecosystems that we depend on for survival.
The species extinction rate is very high at the moment, but large impact events probably produce a higher rate and larger ecosystem disruption. The Chicxulub impact extinction event was a much worse than our current situation.
The short version - pandas are just find for their habitats, and aren't going out of business.
The traits of pandas sound odd, but they're actually common to lots of highly-successful animals. They mate just fine in the wild and are bulk feeders that can easily consume lots of low-efficiency food. Their population hasn't been in any kind of steady decline, but has plummeted twice, each time when large portions of their habitat were destroyed.
They mate fine. Most of the problem has been linked to their zoo habitats, at least in the west. They were so precious that they weren't given the climbing structures (ie trees) to properly exercise in case they fall. The Chinese give them lots of climbing exercise and are breeding them just fine. Give humans too much food and no exercise and they stop breeding too.
Natural doesn't mean good. Climate change is natural in that humans arose naturally and have mostly followed our instincts. What we care about is keeping the environment in a state that works for us, not just letting natural processes play out.
You dying at mid 30s instead of living until your 80s and 90s is also a natural thing. It's not desirable just because it's natural.
But putting in practical terms of "what do I have to gain?", let me say this: every species is carrying unique genetic information that we can learn and employ to our advantages. Maybe a particular species doesn't have anything we can use right now, but might have in the future. Letting it be extinct mean we lose that information forever.
Genetic information is like nature's source code. Now imagine we can't write code, we can just use what's already out there. Every time a species dies, it's source code forever lost.
Like... plants in the Amazon forest. A lot of them served as the material for medicine. We used their "source code" to fight diseases, and fix human problems. And we are losing genetic source code we never even had time to analyze yet!
There are animals that can kind of rejuvenate, and they never die of old age. Imagine being able to "steal" their code and use it to make our health better! If they go extinct, we lost that source code. Forever.
There's no going back, no un-extinction. And we can't go to other planets to analyze their animals, since we haven't found alien life yet. All we have is the life that is available, and we're getting rid ot that life fast.
Maybe we'll end up with a new political subculture that derives pride and some sense of personal identity from fighting this stuff; just like gun people almost enjoy supporting the NRA. (In some way I think computer rights would be a lot more fun to support if a large fraction of the public was against it, then we would have the satisfaction of arguing.)
A large fraction of the gun community actually HATES the NRA for exactly the same reasons everybody else does. There's just no highly visible organizations for gun owners that, y'know, promote reasonable gun control and don't try and whip their members into wannabe race war frenzies.
Source: sitting in the gunsmith shop I work in right now
I'd be happy to give EFF posting ability for this issue on my social media accounts. And I'd be fine with them using my voice and signature to generate voicemails and letters to my elected officials. if they abuse that power (which I doubt they would) I bet they'd be much more responsive to "their constituents" and also social media at least it's easy enough to de-auth integrations.
- call it Automated, Permissioned Grassroots Campaigning
- Users permit designated Orgs to post on their behalf on social media and other online forums
- Users guide priorities & tone of posts
- ML for content generation
- Aided by collaborative computer-human workflow
I'd quibble with 'biasing', more like reporting. The bright line between this kind of delegation and FCC-style comment-bots is that each communication still only represents the will of one individual human. Just that they don't have to manually act each time, as they've already made their position clear.
Really it's just about changing EFF's emails from "Act now!" to "We're about to do this on your behalf! (opt out if you want)."
I am fatigued constantly fighting for NN, Healthcare, Women's choice, environment etc. Don't have any energy left to fight for privacy. I suspect this is by design.
So completely fatigued. It is exhausting keeping up with everything, and on top of that, many issues are truly important, not merely in the realm of political junkie. What's depressing is that so much of what's going on right now feels like a waste of time; provide the means by which I can stay healthy and safe, and I'd much prefer to be thinking about a totally different set of policies.
The next time you are working, totally in the zone, or in a research meeting talking about fascinating new technology, or really doing anything of substance, just stop. And think about the fragile shit happening with policy changes and tweets. what. the. fuck.
I wonder what would happen if everyone advocating against these individual things put all of those fights on hold and spent every bit of lobbying effort into campaign finance reform.
The greatest ruse ever perpetrated on the American people was that we stand divided from one another and our own self interests based on ideological lines; articulated by ego-driven flesh puppets, vote for your favorite color like a 4 year old posed with the same inquiry. "What's your favorite color?" Bleh, we need real representation, real discussion of building the real utilitarian future. I think a good start would be choice between real representatives acting on behalf of more than one side of the same bloody coin. In short, liberal lovey-dovey pussies like me and knuckle-dragging conservatards agree, this mother fucker needs to burn.
"The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice."
This seems to me a good and complete answer as to why everything seems so hard. It's because everything that occurring is based on the "permanent" lie. The powers that be, be the deep state or whatever, cannot acknowledge facts or reality because it will loose its power. The sad part is that I think we also live in our own permanent lie in order not to see the homeless on the sidewalk, acknowledge the cow/chicken/etc raised in factory farming, the use of tax dollars to overthrow governments and kill untold number of people around the world, etc. Lots of issues that I think we need to tackle personally if we want society to do it too.
You need to work on the deeper roots of the problem. Campaign finance in Congress is the big one. It blocks common sense reform on the left and the right.
That's what you hire lobbyists for and pay them. They will just keep working on it until they get it done. As citizen you can't sustain the effort to fight them, so eventually they will get their way.
Wow I thought the only "bad" law that was passing was a big tax cut. Shame on me for paying attention to the news media. Good timing for NSA, though! Suspiciously good...
I don't want to be discouraging to anyone. Please, do anything you think will be helpful.
But the NSA's equipment is still in hundreds of network equipment rooms, and the data is being split off recorded and rifled at will. They'll tell you they're "not collecting" your data, but they are. They're just using some strange NSA version of English where siphoning your data and storing it on hard drives is not "collecting" it.
I advocate the peaceful destruction of their facility in Utah and any other similar facility.
> I advocate the peaceful destruction of their facility in Utah...
How? Either voting doesn't work or we as a people are too collective stupid to vote for anyone different. How many like Reid, Fienstien and Hatch just keep getting elected despite their actions? Maybe we need some real people to run? Maybe we need to be smart enough to vote them in (and out when their time is up - I'm looking at you, Hatch).
A there letter agency doesn't just disappear because we complain to each other. It is going to take years to undo what is being done.
I don't think the problem is that we're too stupid. It's just that first past the post voting inevitably results in Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum, both of whom support, e.g., continuing the drug war, expanding mass surveillance, etc.
This is at least the second post on this topic in which logfromblammo has suggested that people perform criminal acts. (S)he earlier suggested keying cars and cutting tires.
I’m curious at what point civility breaks down in a failing state, at what level does his course of action make sense? I like to establish these limits before emotion can cloud judgement. He may be brash but he’s not wrong yet.
I don't think there ever is a discontinuity. It just slowly ramps up, such that the only ones who notice are the ones who just woke up from comas. Every line in the sand is crossed slowly, with shuffling feet, so the line is wiped out as it is approached. Watershed events that are a clear trigger or threshold are rare. Mostly, it just gets worse slowly enough that no one ever hits their limit and breaks.
That's how we got to 2017 from 1967, after all--one hour after another, without pause, for 50 years. And then one day, you think "WTF just happened? How did everything get so incredibly awesome and yet also completely awful at the same time?"
If you think, "Gee, I should have done Y way back when X happened," then you should probably be doing Y now, even long after X happened.
I think about how it must feel for ordinary people when important history is happening around them, and if they would have even noticed at the time. It probably feels a lot like a fish feels after biting down on the bait. Everything is fine and normal, then boom, something grabbed me and is pulling me and now the water is gone and some blobby hairy thing has its appendages stuck into my gills and I flop and squirm and flop some more and the water is still gone and everything's going dim and my mouth hurts and the blobby thing is cutting my belly open with its shiny claw and now I can't feel my body and a gull just ate my eye and is tugging at my guts and I can't even flop any more. And I... And it was all so fast... I want to go back...
At what point is it acceptable for the fish to start fighting? It has to start while it is still in the water, while it still can fight. But it doesn't yet know that it should. What do you do if the event that makes it perfectly clear that you should have been doing something all along is also the event that makes it impossible for you to do it? What if the event that would have retroactively justified your behavior never happens?
Certainly criminal. Wrong is an ethical judgment that is up to the individual.
"Tit-for-tat" strategy tends to beat "always cooperate" strategy in simplified social gaming models. People who always obey all laws, regardless of circumstances, are chumps who will inevitably be exploited by those who write the laws and those who selectively enforce them. In general, the law exists for the protection of everyone in society, but there exist exceptions when breaking the law is the right thing to do.
Peaceful, lawful protest is no longer protecting minority voter blocs. Continuing to do it in the expectation that it will eventually work is just as insane as implementing trickle-down economic policy for the Nth time and expecting that it will benefit the middle class this time, when it failed to do so the previous N-1 times.
> It would also give FBI agents the power to decide whether or not to seek a warrant to read American communications collected under Section 702
Hoover would be so proud. This bill basically legitimizes the relentless surveillance apparatus of his era by allowing the FBI to use the NSA's haystack resources without a warrant.
Considering the way the FBI has acted in the last 100yr (big organizations can only change their operational culture so far so fast and government is particularly slow because the incentives discourage turnover), their mission and their jurisdiction I think this is very bad. There's no way this power can not be abused. Warrants are so trivially easy to get that the only reason to not get them for stuff like this is to do things that you can't justify asking for a warrant for.
That's exactly it. It's also pretty hilarious that the GOP is trying to extend the FBI's power and oversight - given the current situation with their dear leader.
And FISA reauthorization always happens a few days before Christmas.
Californians, remember to vote Feinstein out in the Democratic primary. She's been one of the main champions of this bill and type of mass surveillance (as well as the anti-encryption bills, which she's not giving up).
It's probably one of the reasons why she decided to go back on her promise not to run again, so she can pass it once more in a few years. Her husband also makes big bucks from the defense industry and from government contracts - probably not a coincidence at all. She's one of the richest Congress people - again, likely not a coincidence.
> Californians, remember to vote Feinstein out in the Democratic primary. She's been one of the main champions of this bill and type of mass surveillance (as well as the anti-encryption bills, which she's not giving up).
Senate Minority Leader Schumer has been the other main proponent. Unfortunately, New York is not really a democracy, so there is no way for us to get rid of him.
> Schumer is awful on a lot of levels, but I don't seem him losing his office unless he goes the way Sheldon Silver did.
Agreed. New York politicians can get away with attempted murder caught on videotape (literally) and there's still no chance that they'll lose re-election, thanks to the array of arcane election laws that, in practice, collectively disenfranchise New York voters.
There isn't a Democratic primary in California, their system is ridiculous. All candidates are in the primary, the top two are on the ballot. Last election had two Democrats against each other, one of them got 19% of the primary vote. Getting Feinstein off the ballot is nearly impossible.
"Not structured around political parties" amounts to "only one party." Given California's Democrat majority, and the type of people that vote in primaries, the system removes any chance of a third party candidate and requires the Republican's candidate to be a consensus choice before the primary vote.
In a Democrat primary, Feinstein getting 49% of the vote could end with her removed from the ballot. In this system, 20% could see her on the ballot.
With their revealed preferences, people have signaled that they want convenience more than privacy.
Really, surveillance barely even seems necessary any more. People already voluntarily tell Facebook, Uber, Instagram, Amazon and their credit cards companies every detail of their lives. I'm not even sure we can reasonably stop that.
The issue to me isn't so much people gathering data, because it's obvious that will happen. Rather we need restrictions on how that data can be stored, shared, integrated across datasets, and mined.
I think it's more accurate to say, people have signaled that they understand the immediate benefits of convenience, but have trouble evaluating the harms of privacy loss. (At least, I know this is true for me.)
Cory Doctorow likened it to maintaining a diet. If see could see/feel the calories turning into fat instantly, it would be easier to avoid eating as much.
Something that startles me is the number of Telegram users who get openly angry when Telegram pushes a security or privacy update instead of an update with random new features.
It just blows my mind that there are people who actually exist -- a lot of them -- who want animated stickers that much more more than anything at all privacy or security related.
Bad tax reform that benefits mostly corporations and the 1% reported by foreign news outlets get flagged here, but talk about a spy group or internet regulation and suddenly politics is fair game.
I'm sick of the echo chamber and the pathetic rules of civility strangling human communication, the invisible voting down of opinions people don't like, the moderation filters that carve out a single world view catered to an angel investor's whims.
I guess I'll just read the New York Times. It's annoying and devoid of useful commentary but at least I'll get a complete news feed and not have to watch a sad oppressive ecosystem strangle intelligent debate.
3 years ago I was able to get news from reddit that was faster and sometimes more reliable than, say, CNN. It now takes hours for a relevant story to siphon to the top because of certain vested interests downvoting it.
It's made me miss CNN and NYT. I've started drifting back to conventional news outlets because bad actors destroyed the ones I loved.
NY Times is Carlos Slim(e). There is no news outlet that is objective anymore--none. Maybe there never was. "News" is just propaganda for whoever owns them now.
HN isn't a generic news site. Nor is it a site for the discussion of all social topics. Many people are here because of that, but it appears that you want something different.
"We only have hours"? What are we supposed to do in those hours? Make phone calls that won't get through? Tweet? Forget it. Senators and congressmen don't fear their constituents so they're not going to listen to their constituents.
We may only have hours left to watch elected representation completely ignore the welfare of the electorate again, but we probably still have months left to choose who exactly it is that we will be shoving up against the wall when the revolution comes. At this point, when they obviously don't fear losing their office, they need to fear something else.
If you can't bring yourself to do physical violence, you can maybe plan out some property crimes. Keying cars and slashing tires is a traditional method of expressing anger against specific individuals, and those types of crimes are infrequently investigated, and even more rarely solved--at least when the insignificant people are the victims. When the catalytic converter was stolen off the bottom of my car, I never even saw a cop; I had to fill out the report myself, and the police apparently never actually did anything about it. Why should they, after all? They aren't working for us. Why not give them something to do for their real bosses?
Watching C-SPAN last night, the shouting and chanting did nothing. There was no effect at all. The sergeant-at-arms will restore order in the gallery, and we will continue to pretend that those people don't matter. The sit-ins have done nothing. The communications campaigns had no effect. More of the same will yield more of the same. Try something different.
I get that you're angry. That's totally valid. I'm also angry and also have violent fantasies. I'm certain that everyone does, its a psychology fact.
But why not channel your destructive urges into dismantling internalized oppression? The ways that you and I go about maintaining these very structures we are each so angry about?
I'm a musician. I once played at a fancy downtown club that took my band's working/middle class crowd for granted. They had two shows every night: an early set with very expensive tickets and international artists, and a late night set with local artists and cheap tickets.
They once made our audience... Hundreds of people... wait for an two hours, standing in the lobby, on valentines evening, because a bunch of drunk rich people had paid $150/ea for an earlier show, and they didn't have the guts to tell them to leave after it was over. We didn't get to sound check. I didn't get a monitor. Our friends and family waited for two hours to hear us play. We had to cut our set in half.
After that I refused to play there anymore. This was a regular place at the time, but I told my friends that I was done, and explained myself. I loved the staff there. The sound was amazing. They had great food and lighting and all that. But I was tired of the management's priorities. They willingly engaged in segregating our communities to squeeze out the money. They weren't curating, they were leaching. I was over it.
Know what happened? Not much at first. People kept asking me to play there. I said "nope, I'm done".
Two years later, hardly anyone I know plays there ever. My little stand made a real difference.
There are other venues in town that have been similarly 86'd by a few trusted leaders in the community. It makes space for new ways of doing things to let go of an old, tired staple.
Why not find something like that in your life that you can do to take a stand?
Violence is a proven effective tool and it is used as a last resort (to be considered justified).
There is no denying people are feeling powerless and not represented.
Your method of protesting doesn't work if you care about the national debt, quantitative easing, inflation, interest rates, crony capitalism, the rent economy, the value of your money growing worthless day by day while the cost of living is artificially getting higher despite technological advances.
What do you do to address those issues? Not participate in the economy? Create your own currency, your own bank and somehow escape regulation? Vote?
They keep pushing people into a corner and expecting us to submit. Technological innovation (e.g cryptocurrencies, encrypted wallets, globalisation etc.) and violence are the only tools we have to fight back. Any other system (e.g voting) has been gamed to serve their interest or rendered useless (e.g protesting but don't be inconvenient)
Don't get me wrong, your vote still counts (in non gerrymandered districts) and I'm sure you can voice your opinion on gay marriage; but the stuff that actually matters, you are voiceless and expected to obey or die.
Proven effective? To what end? And what kind of violence?
Also, b.t.w., I'm not trying to judge you if you think violence is effective. I'm just convinced that it's actually self-sabotaging in the long run.
The actions I'm describing are violent, but not in the war-mongerer's way. They're violent in the same sense that Slavoj Žižek (regardless of your opinion about him) says love is violent.
My point is not so much that our huge problems have easy, one-stop fixes, it's moreso that we often reinforce the bigger problems with a multitude of little, normal habits that we can exercise control over if we choose to.
Go ahead and stomp out those big bad enemies with your violence. Their seeds sprout daily in most of our hearts. After the fire, what's gonna grow back if we haven't learned to cultivate justice in a positive sense? The same old shit.
Paulo Friere writes about this in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Everyone in capitalist societies is educated to desire to become like the oppressor. Kids wanna grow up and be rich, have servants. What are we doing to break that cycle in ourselves?
My example was just one wake up call showing me that I do have some power. It's rare that you get to see that your actions have consequences. This one was dramatic for me. For the record, a lot of my musician peers are cultivating their own events these days instead of using the booze/drug clubs. It's a movement, and I was a small, real part of it.
Platitudes/things I believe are powerful:
Fix shit instead of tossing it. Go on regular hikes instead of flying to another country every time you need a break.
Cut out the petty shit talk about people. Stuff propagates fast and it only takes the right straw to break the camels back. Take care of yourself so you can shed your bitternesses. Practice forgiveness.
Don't take debt, only to pass its burden onto others. Don't encourage others to take debt. Don't tell young kids to take debt because it's "what adults do". When you do this, you're propagating the very thing you wish deep down to violently destroy.
Quit it with the "adultism".
You're awesome. Keep learning why, so we can be free of the burden of proving yourself by putting others down.
As for the housing thing... I understand that the solutions to this problem are radical and associated with stereotypes like "hippy" and "college student". We need to shed that. Here's an organization devoted to assisting people in building equitable housing relationships: https://coophousing.org/
Keep striving to look past peoples' educational degrees/class/race/culture/intelligence. Cut your superficial judgements out with the same violence you're imagining against "the system".
Learn to recognize non-traditional intelligence. Learn to have deep conversations with conventionally unintelligent people. If you think people with down's syndrome are dumb, you are enacting the oppression you hate.
In positive terms, keep striving to love and understand people, to be teachable, to be open hearted.
Walk/bus/bike more. Slow down.
> What do you do to address those issues? Not participate in the economy? Create your own currency, your own bank and somehow escape regulation? Vote?
As much as it's possible for you. But also: divest from inequitable businesses as much as possible. I mean this in a big way. For example: stop using amazon prime when ebay would be just as good. Use the slow shipping. That itself is a small, radical act.
Buy an old, used computer/phone, upgrade the ram, fix the little broken stuff.
Plant a garden.
Last but not least, call your representative and tell them we want score votin...
If the fancy club for rich people is the US, the only way you can get paid and not have the club take its cut is to move to another planet. You might be able to get around its house rules for performances by playing somewhere else, but it is literally the only available venue within 650 miles. If you even tried to set up a stage somewhere closer, bouncers loyal to the fancy club always arrive sooner or later to kick you out and burn it down.
That's more than $100 in gas money, and at least 20 hours on the road, just to get to and from a gig at a different club. So there is a cost to you in sticking it to the club management by peacefully refusing to play for them on their stage.
They know this when negotiating terms with you, and it allows them to capture some of that cost from the performers. Anyone willing and able to burn down the whole club can capture some of the potential cost of rebuilding it from the owners. "Yes, we could pay you a $20 stage fee and wait 3 hours to play, and not have to drive all the way to Club Canadia #3, or you could pay us $500 to go on stage right now, and you won't die in a fire and have your ashes added to the porcelain for the new urinals." You probably won't ever have to actually do that; they just have to believe your threat is credible in order to agree to a better deal.
That's what the petty violence is good for. It makes the other guy have an inkling that maybe, just maybe, this person could murder them and/or burn everything they own, and so they shouldn't act like a complete ass. It still works when that other guy is completely devoid of empathy, conscience, or courtesy.
Even if you don't believe in violence on principle, surely you must recognize the perception of weakness that can generate when in a negotiation with someone who does?
I'm afraid you've lost me. It sounds like you're upset about taxes and big government? I'm thinking about movements. Movements can go and evolve their way out of the old incentive models. Jesus said "give ceasar his money" cause, e.g. you can't eat money, so why cling to it in the first place?
I'm saying: transcend the club. Don't even try to compete with the old model, just outgrow it. You don't need to go anywhere and there will be nothing the old club owners would even recognize to burn down. Let them win at their game and find other ways to thrive.
Many of the people here are employed to fix problems. Mostly, those problems get fixed with the versatile multitool of general purpose computing using high-level programming languages. At a larger scale, we have no problem standing behind an entrepreneur to jump in, create a startup, and disrupt the status quo. Generally, those startups use the preferred solution to the smaller problem--computers--to be as efficient as possible.
That works out great for problems solvable by a new competitive option in the free market--probably the best way to handle it, actually. The people implementing the best solutions to the problem get paid the most money, and everyone is happy.
But that only works up to a certain scale. If your problem's solution requires a capitalization of more than $100M, you're not going to fix it with a hip, cool, dynamic startup tech company, with the founder-CEO right there directing traffic. At larger scales, you need a lot of people: investors, employees, and managers. You have to deal with the principal-agent problem, where the selfish concerns of an individual may be in conflict with the overarching goals of the whole group, and they have the individual authority to act on their own behalf as they act in the name of the group.
That is the realm of multinational corporate governance and governments. The essence of a government is a controlled monopoly on the uses of force considered to be legitimate. The government is a cartel enforcer. It is there to ensure that if any one person acts too much in his own interest at the expense of the public interest, the cartel enforcer may impose a penalty to encourage a better outcome for the whole cartel in the future. There is no enforcer for the enforcer. If the government becomes corrupted, it can cease to function for its intended purposes. In particular, if a portion of a government that is designed for self-repair ceases to function, there is no possible in-band activity that can reliably restore it. Even if that self-correcting element only partially ceases to function, it may still be cheaper or easier to fix the problem using out-of-band signaling activity.
That out-of-band signaling behavior for a government is all the behaviors explicitly banned by the government: lawbreaking. That can run from relatively innocuous law-scoffing, such as blocking downtown traffic for an hour without a valid municipal demonstration permit, to a full-on bloody rebellion, which is probably the most illegal thing you can do.
The important questions:
- Is the self-regulation function of government compromised? If so, how badly has it been damaged?
- What is the minimum level of unlawful behavior necessary to restore government to its proper functioning (the proper functions being a subjective judgment) as cartel enforcer?
If you maintain that government is functioning as intended, there is no problem to fix. For you. Carry on. Those who do think there are problems may attempt to work around you. They might also go through you. So it helps to be aware of your neighbors and surroundings.
If you maintain that zero amount of unlawful behavior is necessary or sufficient to fix the outstanding problems, then you can continue working within the system. If your efforts aren't yielding results, you have no choice but to double down and do all the same things even harder next time.
Violence is just one tool in the toolbox. Its the one that may still work after all others have failed, the "last argument of kings". You can't take it out of the toolbox. It's always there, even if you don't talk about it. Let us not forget that the US is the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons on the battlefield. The US has the same order of magnitude for population size and for number of firearms. I recently got some polling results from Cards Against Humanity [0] reporting that 33% of the US population believes another civil war may start within the next decade. You don't have to believe ...
Let me clarify. By "fear", I mean fear of losing their seats, not their heads. Clearly, they don't fear either but I'm only implying that government would work better if elected positions were easier to lose.
EFF has proven to be an ineffectual organization.
They bungled NN(infuriating me to no end), and proven partisan at every turn, which would not be a problem if they were successful.
But its clear we need a nonpartisan group who can successfully rally most of America on the left and the right.
> But its clear we need a nonpartisan group who can successfully rally most of America on the left and the right.
Why? Keep the Nazis and their friends where they belong: on the dustbin of history. There is no need to further legitimize Bannon and the rest of the alt-right bunch by rallying with them. They need to be fought relentlessly.
And you will do nothing... as usually. You will just dream about having any influence on the world going on.
I'm not a US citizen, so my voice doesn't count. But does your voice count if you are a US citizen? Nope. The corporations and politicians decide, we can just be allowed to have nice sits in the front row and watch how the corporations world grow.
Happy watching. Tickets are expensive, and mandatory. Nice dreaming.
Is that why women and black people can vote, because what citizens think and their voices don't matter?
Is that why gay people can get married in the US (but not in 160 other countries), because what US citizens think doesn't count? (the majority in the US support gay marriage)
Is that why the house and US Senate recently voted almost perfectly in step, overwhelmingly in favor, of rolling back civil asset forfeiture abuses? Congress has nothing to fear from it, they do however know their voters are angry about it.
Is that why the Obama Admin put net neutrality into place, because votes & voices don't matter? It was in fact overwhelmingly demanded by Obama's voters. Votes, of course, matter in a big way as it turns out: had Hillary bothered to fight for the blue wall state voters, we'd still have net neutrality.
I live in Oregon, where I am pretty sure my representatives will oppose this bill (as they have a history of doing so). What I really want to do is voice my opinion to my old state of Pennsylvania, where I am less confident.
As more people move to where the jobs are at, the country will become more blue/red divided.
I find it very interesting that this bill is being pushed by Devin Nunes. In case anyone here is unaware, he is involved in an ongoing surveillance-related controversy - he is one of the leaders alleging a scandal that HRC 2016 campaign paid Fusion GPS to produce the Steele Dossier as evidence for the FBI to wiretap Trump Tower using an Obama-appointed FISA court judge. [0]
I find the idea of him expanding the FISA court powers contradictory to his stated purpose of seeking justice in the matter of his supposed 2016 election scandal. Note that this idea is the EFF's interpretation of the bill & not my own view.
If that were the case, then perhaps his intent is to leverage the expanded NSA powers to spy on the FBI, which he seems to believe is working against the current administration. This would not be the first time different parts of the US government were spying on each other. [1]
I don't believe that is the intent of this bill. After reviewing, it seems more likely that the intent of the bill covers two goals:
1. To require added accountability to the FISA application process such that abuses of the FISA court are easier to identify. There are a number of sections in the bill which require disclosures by the FBI which were not necessary before.
2. To remove bureaucratic barriers limiting the Attorney General, who in the case of this political situation, will be relied upon to investigate the government itself.
So I can see where the EFF is coming from with their take on this bill, and certainly there is a political divide over whether or not this bill is a good thing.
3.6 Trillion; The Quantum Technological Revolution that I own and the Murder, Torture, Coercion, and Theft behind it...
Send my intellectual property to every Patent Attorney and person that you know.
The intelligence community has stolen and prevented the filing and sale of my intellectual property. I own the Quantum Technological Revolution worth Trillions of Dollars.
Botched CIA Murder Operation in Russia; CSIS Murdering Ring of Citizens; World-Changing Physics
Help Me - I will pay a premium (Millions) - No Fail Contingency Case of a lifetime!
This CIA has tried to kill me multiple times in conjunction with CSIS.
Botched CIA Murdering Operation in Russia: http://www.basrc.biz/help
Send everywhere and publish everywhere! World-Changing Physics
Help my Family and Me!
I need the attached information (unequivocal truth) uploaded for everyone to see. I have tried unsuccessfully.
Good afternoon, my name is Benjamin Allen Sullivan. I have world and humanity changing discoveries (Mathematics, Physics, and Otherwise) that have been prevented from recognition and academic accreditation by the intelligence community. Below is the information that I have sent to thousands of Media, Government, my Fellow Americans, Academia, and every legitimate faucet of Democracy relentlessly without success (manipulation by the CIA et al.).
I have attached my discoveries (Unification) and the patents that I own (including filing certificates) for the Quantum Technological Revolution (Quantum Radio and Communications, Quantum Imager, and Quantum Encryption Systems and Software) are available at the links provided below.
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Good afternoon, my name is Benjamin Allen Sullivan and I desperately need your help and legal counsel.
I have information substantiating years of torture, abuse, multiple attempts at my life, a botched CIA operation in Russia, theft of my intellectual property, and decimation of my life by the CIA and CSIS.
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These people have manipulated my life in every way and prevented the sale and filing of my intellectual property and prevented the establishment of my business to exploit my discoveries, physics, and science.
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This intellectual property is worth trillions of dollars and it has been stolen (I possess the patents for a quantum radio, quantum communications system, quantum imager, quantum encryption and associated software – filing certificates attached and other intellectual property prevented from filing). I can pay you/your firm with the recovery and filing of this intellectual property which is an integral component of this case. This is the contingency case of a lifetime and I am willing to pay a premium for your firm’s legal help.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-qgmRnqces
Wiliam Binney explains what has taken place and why. He labels Dick Cheney and the Bush Admin for panicking after 9/11. What he fails to mention is that the Obama Administration brought the illegality to new lows.
And, if this passes, is there any way to protect myself? Obviously if the NSA is hoarding zero-days there isn't much you can do, but what are some practical steps?
1) avoid airports and security cameras
2) use an offshore VPN at all times
3) don't use the phone, use E2E encrypted calling like Signal
4) use cash as often as possible, or cryptocurrency
Or does none of that matter?
The government knowing literally everything about my life (yes, I know they almost certainly do already)
> what I'm trying to hide
More like what I'm trying to protect: the naive assumption that the government does not deserve to have this depth and breadth of information on literally every citizen for no legitimate reason.
I also personally would prefer not to be spied on. I do not want my day-to-day activities monitored by anyone but myself. In the event that the government starts curtailing freedoms or particular kinds of behavior and thought, I do not want to be left susceptible. So I guess my threat model is "generalized spying". I assume I would be powerless to stop anything specifically targeted at me, so I would like to avoid becoming a target in the first place.
If and when I start buying oxidizing chemicals, drug precursors, or ammunition, then you are more than welcome to start tracking my purchases and usage of those products.
In this case, you should be proactive not only against NSA, but GOOG, FB, your ISP etc.
You should look into Tails OS if you haven't already.
My Instagram account is long gone, my Facebook account will be gone before the end of the month (I use it once a week at most anyway), and I've long since stopped using any Google account for anything. I run multiple browser extensions that help me delete cookies, block Javascript, etc. The VPN should hopefully take care of my ISP. It try to avoid even sending emails to Gmail accounts.
I haven't tried Tails, but I will look into it when I get some time free.
I think of it a little differently. I am trying to be part of a collective movement toward as much privacy as possible so that those who do need to protect themselves can have access to the tools they need and won't stick out when they use them. A sort of herd immunity.
I guess a good start are habits that neutralize automated mass surveillance. Targeted surveillance would be a whole other ballgame and unfortunately I don't think our tools are at a place to make this feasible for me to practice.
by creating a standard you are effectively creating an easy way and/or justification to automate against that standard. I think your logic is sound, but consider the big picture. The more people do things in a certain way, the higher the incentive to investigate that way.
>Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.
https://qubes-os.org
This would actually be far more likely to enable collection of your traffic, whereas US Persons cannot be queried.
Isn't this what elected officials are ment to do on our behalf?
You're not thinking that if the Democrats manage to take the White House, that this situation will improve - are you? I mean, most of this damage was done when Pres. Obama was in the White House and the Congress skewed more toward Democrats. The idea that the Democrats will defend our privacy and 4th Amendment is absurd.
Partisanship is one hell of a drug.
As well as politicized and weaponized.
But still, yes, I feel democrats have a better chance of at least listening to constituent concerns about privacy. The GOP wallies about small government, except for the military and they view the NSA/FBI/CIA as the same.
But even if not--I don't see it improving with another R in power either. Or do you?
Trump's views on privacy are obvious and awful, yes - he has Sessions as AG.
But Dianne Feinstein is one of the fiercest surveillance advocates in Congress. Hillary Clinton had vastly more support from intelligence agencies than Trump did, and refused to condemn what was described in the Snowden releases.
Meanwhile, Rand Paul ended bulk phone record collection for a few hours in 2015, defying much of both parties to do so. He filibustered over drone strikes, and promised to restrict NSA searches if he was elected.
There's a lot to dislike about Rand Paul, and libertarians aren't the only people opposing surveillance - Bernie Sanders made similar promises from the far opposite end of the spectrum.
But I think framing this as "bad under Democrats, hopeless under Republicans" makes it harder to address the problem. The mainstream of both parties are similarly awful, even if the Democrats talk a bit more softly about it, while the fringes of both parties are often strong surveillance opponents.
Referring to Libertarian and left-libertarian as opposite ends of the spectrum is a grave disservice, and feeds directly into our contemporary fallacious polarization.
Either view it as a two-dimensional circle, or just ignore the secondary "Left"-"Right" marketing and analyze the primary characteristic of libertarian-authoritarian.
I certainly agree that framing political beliefs themselves as linear is misleading, though. I should have been clearer about that.
It's entirely possible to say "this is a false dichotomy, both parties are fundamentally hopeless on this issue" and also say "third party candidates are completely unelectable".
I'm not entirely fatalistic; I think "a major party greatly realigns its views on privacy" is possible, if hard and unlikely. I mentioned Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders as contrarian voices each pulling their party away from bulk surveillance, and I hope we'll see more such voices in the future. A realignment looks increasingly possible, and increasingly necessary. But I honestly don't think "third parties are powerless" should be seen as a reason to have any hope at all for our existing options.
Bonus points if you give it a name involving patriotism, freedom, economic or personal health, or a backromym that spells out the same.
Our system is definitely broken, but I have no idea what type of changes might prevent these abuses
Elect enough people willing to self-regulate and pass those bills. The current climate with lobbying money won't ever pass something like that.
Simply put, no person may add content to a proposal that is not directly related to the original proposal. You want to add a rider to an HHS funding bill to also fund your pet project? Too bad. You want to include language in a standard farm bill about the second amendment? Not gonna happen.
Under these rules, proposals/bills are forced into MUCH smaller packages and the ability of any particular legislator to sneak in lobbied language becomes stymied.
Congress does not have these simple rules in place. We should force them to adopt the relevant section(s) of Robert's Rules of Order.
As long as a human or group of humans is capable of removing choices for others, there is will be no possible idea of how to prevent the abuse.
Indeed, and this "cognitive dissonance" technique is so widespread now that you can generally invert the message to find out the actual intention of the legislation is. Examples:
If you are cutting taxes for the wealthy donor class say it is bill to "help the middle class and the poor."
If you want to take health care away from people say "it is a bill that will help the American people."
If you want to empower a monopoly just state that "this is a bill designed to foster competition."
We've assimilated so many political positions into our cultural signaling subroutines that almost every issue is seen as "identity politics" nowadays. This occurs by design, because political profiteers are profited by creating clear boogeymen and corralling "their side" by shaming them for even considering the other side's POV.
We need to get back to a political ethos based on mutual respect, and an understanding that the "other side" is not an evil, but rather a check that is necessary to keep things balanced and smooth. Conservative principles do not arise out of the liberal caricatures that Republicans hate the poor, and liberal principles do not arise out of the conservative caricature that Democrats are communists vying for totalitarian economic control.
We cannot see each other as separate tribes and expect to succeed. We have to see each other as people of goodwill, on the same team, working for the same ultimate purposes.
Politics has been commoditized into television entertainment. There is no better indicator of this than TV showman Donald Trump employing those tactics to win the presidency. And like everything else on TV, what start out as mild differences gradually become "Flanders-ized" [0], and we hardly realize it until we look back to see how it was.
There are going to be winners and losers in any political action. That's a reality of political life and it's why we have the carefully-designed representative government systems that we have.
We need to acknowledge and weigh the costs on both sides instead of ignoring one side of the equation and saying "This bill ONLY exists to hurt Class Y!" or "This bill is great and has no negative consequences for anyone!"
Regardless, changes in technology including air travel, telecommunication, and 24-hour live news have permanently shifted our political landscape. We should think about how we can change our processes, our use of this technology, and/or both to ensure that we maintain a coherent and peaceful union, and stop the polarization. Polarization only serves the interests of pirates and opportunists.
[0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization
For example, the Democrats compromised on deficits. The Republicans insisted - deficits are important. Okay, we disagree. However, we'll respect some deficit rules to help keep it down. Okay.
Hey, Republicans have majority! First thing to do, massively increase deficits!
Let's now re-negotiate with that side?
Trying to repeal health care provisions as your most pressing piece of legislation but not bothering to have an alternative plan to present to the population as a replacement.
Passing legislation which gives permanent tax breaks to corporations but then only temporary breaks to regular people(expires after 8 years.)
Repealing internet regulation in a monopolistic environment.
Please help me to understand how any of the above provides benefit to the average person? Where is the grey part of the spectrum I am not able to see. And by grey I mean the average voter being better off because of it.
I am not sure why you are reframing the context as left vs right. It's not about that, its about governments that represent people and not corporations and campaign contributions.
----
Health care repeal: Insurance premiums have skyrocketed since the ACA went into effect. Just this year, I know a small business owner whose premium for high-deductible family plan has gone up 2.5x. My employer-provided health insurance premium increased a little (relatively at least), but both the individual and family deductibles jumped by about 40%.
Repealing the ACA doesn't include artificial price controls, etc., but the common belief is that the ACA is one of the biggest reasons that premiums have gone up, and that repealing it will allow them to come back down.
I understand that the causal relationship is arguable, but you asked for a perspective on how it helps the average person. The perspective is that the average person who isn't getting subsidized health insurance is getting raked over the coals (along with their employer, who usually pays 60-80% of the monthly premium), and that perspective is absolutely reflected in the real world where people are being forced to pay thousands more for less than they had last year.
"Without a replacement" isn't considered a big issue because it's not like repealing the ACA shuts down the medical facilities/industry in any real way. They'll continue to operate and health care will still be available. Everyone is not going to die because the medical system reverts to the regulatory structure that was in place five years ago. The insurance situation will get better for some and worse for others, but that's at worst a lateral movement, and it's arguably a positive because it allows people to forgo health insurance altogether again, which means the insurers will have to offer something for the "Well I'm not even going to bother" crowd.
This is another situation where polarization has caused us to miss the forest for the trees. The medical-industrial complex in this country is completely out of control. Completely. Everyone knows this. We need an elegant solution (and most conservatives don't consider a blank check from the government elegant), but we're not going to get one with each group playing off of each other and their politicians just toggling the situation in favor of their base every 4-8 years.
We have to hold our politicians accountable and demand something that is workable and stable for everyone. The heart of the matter is that the insurance companies have got to go, but we're never going to get other traditional conservatives on board with that if we don't engage in a real dialogue and build up trust.
----
Permanent tax breaks to corporations with temporary to non-corporations is a polarizing misdirection. People comprise corporations and cutting corporate taxes means that more of that money is available for normal people who've earned it to use and deploy, rather than for the government to appropriate and reserve for the purposes of a handful of unmovable bureaucrats. Most conservatives consider this a default good.
The permanent nature of the corporate tax cut is not an insult unless you choose to make it one. Every dollar of corporate tax does not have to be replaced by a dollar of individual tax; the goal is to pay less tax, not just to shift it around.
If the the corporate tax rate was too high, it should be brought down, regardless of the implementation details on the individual tax side. The overall goal is to keep direct taxes minimized in general.
How does this help the average citizen? First, there is individual tax relief already baked in for at least 8 years. That's an immediate tax savings and that's great. Second, allowing resources to flow to the people who are capable of commanding them from the marketplace allows these people to expand their operations, hire others, develop new technology and goods, etc. etc. -- all the basics of our economy. And perhaps the key difference is that conservatives see themselves not just as po...
No, taking important things like health care away from people and not presenting any kind of a replacement is a huge deal.
>"Net neutrality is an example of polarization run amok, because I think that there would be a lot more bipartisan support for a real solution if there wasn't a sentiment that agreeing with "the other side" was an automatic stain."
Again all you can do is reframe reality into people being led astray by cable news pundits. Do you believe the majority of the population in the US are dummies? Where was the solution that was posited? Oh wait, there was none. Another subtractive, zero sum motion.
>"These are subjective perspectives informed by individual life experiences, and it's necessarily colored by our private biases,"
Again with the "there's no real issue here" - this is just people being led astray by the political media. Plenty of people with good critical thinking skills believe that their governments are representing moneyed interests ahead of them. I find your whole reductionist view that this is all just a big misunderstanding brought on by biased news media to be not only insulting but dangerous.
Again, this isn't about "left vs right" or "blue vs red" its about governments that prioritize the will of moneyed interests over people. The "other side" that people are worried about isn't a democrat or a republican the "other side" is a government that is not acting in their citizen best interests.
Referring to "the citizen's best interest" is a tautology; political dialogue fundamentally arises from differing perspectives on how those interests are best served. In a free country, political discourse and representative government is the process by which "the citizen's best interest" is determined.
But I want to avoid the nitpicks. The issue is that when we hear coherent, valid perspectives that don't align with our own, we feel "not only insulted, but [endangered]". That's the sentiment we have to get away from.
I feel like I spent a pretty good amount of effort fulfilling your request. I presented reasonable perspectives that describe how the policies you mentioned can be interpreted to benefit the average citizen. That doesn't prove they're perfect or that they have no downsides, and it definitely doesn't mean that you'll agree. But as a society, we need to be able to engage in this dialogue without name-calling, threatening, or berating -- without condescension -- if we want to be able to stay stable and unified.
This is obviously not a simple task. What things could help us improve the mutual toleration and respect for actually-different POVs and the people who hold them? How can we refrain from hyperbolizing issues (e.g., pretending that a change to the current insurance regulations will leave scores dying in the streets, or conversely the confiscation of private medical facilities and destruction of all private medical industry) and present them in a way that allows each other to acknowledge the middle ground and agree to disagree?
No you haven't and that's the amazing part. You have spent hundreds of words contending a position that I never posited in the firs place. I have repeatedly states it wasn't about partisan politics but it was an issue with a system that increasingly only works for moneyed interests. It doesn't matter whether that money is from the left or for the right.
Yet for all of your talk about understanding and respect and toleration you have chosen to completely ignore my original and repeated premise. The irony is incredible.
"Patriot act"
All "right to work" laws
For years, my two biggest spheres of advocacy have been environmentalism and privacy/anti-surveillance.
What I've noticed, with that background, is that privacy activism has steadily become more like environmental activism.
With rare exceptions (e.g. the ozone layer), environmentalism is an endless, grinding rear-guard action. Extinct species do not become unextinct. Destroyed habitats do not recover, at least not within hundreds of years. Draining the Glen Canyon Dam will not restore Glen Canyon; Church Rock will never be remediated. And the threats are endless and everywhere: 4,500 species are critically endangered right now, global warming is set for 3+ degrees Celsius, the Great Barrier Reef might die entirely.
Attacks on privacy aren't new, but they seem have changed. The Clipper Chip was a central, recognizable enemy, promoted by branches of the government citizens can relate to. 24 hour turnaround on surveillance legalization for intelligence agencies is part of a new and horrible political landscape. SOPA and PIPA were indirect attacks, part of a state-corporate partnership that lets each party do the things the other is barred from. And even those were too central and easy to oppose - now they're coming back piecemeal, in budget bills and trade agreements where they're harder to address.
And as with the environment, what's lost is lost. Repealing surveillance laws is rare and unsustainable. Fighting surveillance in open courts is impossible; fighting it in FISA courts is a Kafkaesque nightmare of secret evidence and lack of standing. Corporate data-gathering is unprovable, and user information breaches are irreversible. Stolen identities can't be changed or recaptured.
So yes: I'm tired. I'm tired, and it's not an accident, because we're on the wrong end of an asymmetric fight.
The sheer damage politicians across the world are inflicting on future generations with these privacy laws are very depressing.
Laws that give the government broad surveillance power give money and power to defense contractors (reliable political donors), and give power to the political group that currently holds power.
These laws damage freedom for all citizens, and they undercut political opponents.
As such, the laws might be harmful to democracy, but are valued by those who have power and wish to further consolidate it.
How many new species has evolution produced in that time? Zero?
I think that the world as we know it is valuable to us because we enjoy it, and nothing more. If we can't appreciate the beauty of life (most of us can't persist on the pure beauty of mathematics or conceptual analysis), what's the point?
In terms of shaping a planet the way we want, we can do that on earth, and more so if we figured out how to live without being dependent on other earth organisms.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2017/12/15/53e6147c-...
Species do go extinct, but not at the rate we are experiencing today. Even if the current rate of species loss was equal to the historical rate, that does not mean that humans wish to live in such a natural state of chaos. Did American culture lose some of its heritage with the near-extinction of the buffalo? Is it any less of a failure of humankind to drive polar bears to extinction than it would be to obliterate the complete works of Jack London from the face of the Earth? That shit is cool, and we should try to preserve it for future generations.
If we always preserve what we have, there will be no room for something new to develop.
As long as you don’t have any attachment to anything more narrow than “all life on earth” (e.g. your family, language, city, country, culture, species, ...) thriving for a long time into the future, there’s no reason not to just shrug at whatever impending apocalypse.
We are, in fact, in a mass extinction event right now, with extinction rates estimated at 1-2 orders of magnitude greater than any previous such event.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
> If you can see the sun, we shouldn't have all these animals dying.
Not all previous mass extinctions have involved the sun be blotted out by impact or volcanic events, though several have.
No, they haven't; extinction rates in the current mass extinction event are much higher than previous ones.
And they're going out of business. Isn't that evolution?
The short version - pandas are just find for their habitats, and aren't going out of business.
The traits of pandas sound odd, but they're actually common to lots of highly-successful animals. They mate just fine in the wild and are bulk feeders that can easily consume lots of low-efficiency food. Their population hasn't been in any kind of steady decline, but has plummeted twice, each time when large portions of their habitat were destroyed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2rmf6h/til_t...
But putting in practical terms of "what do I have to gain?", let me say this: every species is carrying unique genetic information that we can learn and employ to our advantages. Maybe a particular species doesn't have anything we can use right now, but might have in the future. Letting it be extinct mean we lose that information forever.
Genetic information is like nature's source code. Now imagine we can't write code, we can just use what's already out there. Every time a species dies, it's source code forever lost.
Like... plants in the Amazon forest. A lot of them served as the material for medicine. We used their "source code" to fight diseases, and fix human problems. And we are losing genetic source code we never even had time to analyze yet!
There are animals that can kind of rejuvenate, and they never die of old age. Imagine being able to "steal" their code and use it to make our health better! If they go extinct, we lost that source code. Forever.
There's no going back, no un-extinction. And we can't go to other planets to analyze their animals, since we haven't found alien life yet. All we have is the life that is available, and we're getting rid ot that life fast.
Source: sitting in the gunsmith shop I work in right now
I'd be happy to give EFF posting ability for this issue on my social media accounts. And I'd be fine with them using my voice and signature to generate voicemails and letters to my elected officials. if they abuse that power (which I doubt they would) I bet they'd be much more responsive to "their constituents" and also social media at least it's easy enough to de-auth integrations.
Really it's just about changing EFF's emails from "Act now!" to "We're about to do this on your behalf! (opt out if you want)."
The next time you are working, totally in the zone, or in a research meeting talking about fascinating new technology, or really doing anything of substance, just stop. And think about the fragile shit happening with policy changes and tweets. what. the. fuck.
The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat https://www.truthdig.com/articles/permanent-lie-deadliest-th...
This seems to me a good and complete answer as to why everything seems so hard. It's because everything that occurring is based on the "permanent" lie. The powers that be, be the deep state or whatever, cannot acknowledge facts or reality because it will loose its power. The sad part is that I think we also live in our own permanent lie in order not to see the homeless on the sidewalk, acknowledge the cow/chicken/etc raised in factory farming, the use of tax dollars to overthrow governments and kill untold number of people around the world, etc. Lots of issues that I think we need to tackle personally if we want society to do it too.
So what is your permanent lie?
But the NSA's equipment is still in hundreds of network equipment rooms, and the data is being split off recorded and rifled at will. They'll tell you they're "not collecting" your data, but they are. They're just using some strange NSA version of English where siphoning your data and storing it on hard drives is not "collecting" it.
I advocate the peaceful destruction of their facility in Utah and any other similar facility.
How? Either voting doesn't work or we as a people are too collective stupid to vote for anyone different. How many like Reid, Fienstien and Hatch just keep getting elected despite their actions? Maybe we need some real people to run? Maybe we need to be smart enough to vote them in (and out when their time is up - I'm looking at you, Hatch).
A there letter agency doesn't just disappear because we complain to each other. It is going to take years to undo what is being done.
Maybe shoot a hole in the bottom of a big, oil-filled transformer at the nearest power substation.
Those are simply wrong and criminal.
That's how we got to 2017 from 1967, after all--one hour after another, without pause, for 50 years. And then one day, you think "WTF just happened? How did everything get so incredibly awesome and yet also completely awful at the same time?"
If you think, "Gee, I should have done Y way back when X happened," then you should probably be doing Y now, even long after X happened.
I think about how it must feel for ordinary people when important history is happening around them, and if they would have even noticed at the time. It probably feels a lot like a fish feels after biting down on the bait. Everything is fine and normal, then boom, something grabbed me and is pulling me and now the water is gone and some blobby hairy thing has its appendages stuck into my gills and I flop and squirm and flop some more and the water is still gone and everything's going dim and my mouth hurts and the blobby thing is cutting my belly open with its shiny claw and now I can't feel my body and a gull just ate my eye and is tugging at my guts and I can't even flop any more. And I... And it was all so fast... I want to go back...
At what point is it acceptable for the fish to start fighting? It has to start while it is still in the water, while it still can fight. But it doesn't yet know that it should. What do you do if the event that makes it perfectly clear that you should have been doing something all along is also the event that makes it impossible for you to do it? What if the event that would have retroactively justified your behavior never happens?
"Tit-for-tat" strategy tends to beat "always cooperate" strategy in simplified social gaming models. People who always obey all laws, regardless of circumstances, are chumps who will inevitably be exploited by those who write the laws and those who selectively enforce them. In general, the law exists for the protection of everyone in society, but there exist exceptions when breaking the law is the right thing to do.
Peaceful, lawful protest is no longer protecting minority voter blocs. Continuing to do it in the expectation that it will eventually work is just as insane as implementing trickle-down economic policy for the Nth time and expecting that it will benefit the middle class this time, when it failed to do so the previous N-1 times.
Hoover would be so proud. This bill basically legitimizes the relentless surveillance apparatus of his era by allowing the FBI to use the NSA's haystack resources without a warrant.
Considering the way the FBI has acted in the last 100yr (big organizations can only change their operational culture so far so fast and government is particularly slow because the incentives discourage turnover), their mission and their jurisdiction I think this is very bad. There's no way this power can not be abused. Warrants are so trivially easy to get that the only reason to not get them for stuff like this is to do things that you can't justify asking for a warrant for.
Step 2: corrupt power - well it isn't like the FBI hasn't done that in the past.
Maybe they're buying some agents of their own, to even things out.
Californians, remember to vote Feinstein out in the Democratic primary. She's been one of the main champions of this bill and type of mass surveillance (as well as the anti-encryption bills, which she's not giving up).
It's probably one of the reasons why she decided to go back on her promise not to run again, so she can pass it once more in a few years. Her husband also makes big bucks from the defense industry and from government contracts - probably not a coincidence at all. She's one of the richest Congress people - again, likely not a coincidence.
Senate Minority Leader Schumer has been the other main proponent. Unfortunately, New York is not really a democracy, so there is no way for us to get rid of him.
Agreed. New York politicians can get away with attempted murder caught on videotape (literally) and there's still no chance that they'll lose re-election, thanks to the array of arcane election laws that, in practice, collectively disenfranchise New York voters.
I figure [without much supporting evidence or data] that one vote equals $50, so you can "vote" as much as you want, quite cheaply.
And why does this system make it harder to get Feinstein off the ballot?
In a Democrat primary, Feinstein getting 49% of the vote could end with her removed from the ballot. In this system, 20% could see her on the ballot.
Really, surveillance barely even seems necessary any more. People already voluntarily tell Facebook, Uber, Instagram, Amazon and their credit cards companies every detail of their lives. I'm not even sure we can reasonably stop that.
The issue to me isn't so much people gathering data, because it's obvious that will happen. Rather we need restrictions on how that data can be stored, shared, integrated across datasets, and mined.
It just blows my mind that there are people who actually exist -- a lot of them -- who want animated stickers that much more more than anything at all privacy or security related.
https://youtu.be/GH68bSJXGE8
The end consumer will eventually see the costs of losing NN. The cost of losing privacy is not as obvious in the short-term.
I'm sick of the echo chamber and the pathetic rules of civility strangling human communication, the invisible voting down of opinions people don't like, the moderation filters that carve out a single world view catered to an angel investor's whims.
I guess I'll just read the New York Times. It's annoying and devoid of useful commentary but at least I'll get a complete news feed and not have to watch a sad oppressive ecosystem strangle intelligent debate.
3 years ago I was able to get news from reddit that was faster and sometimes more reliable than, say, CNN. It now takes hours for a relevant story to siphon to the top because of certain vested interests downvoting it.
It's made me miss CNN and NYT. I've started drifting back to conventional news outlets because bad actors destroyed the ones I loved.
If you can't bring yourself to do physical violence, you can maybe plan out some property crimes. Keying cars and slashing tires is a traditional method of expressing anger against specific individuals, and those types of crimes are infrequently investigated, and even more rarely solved--at least when the insignificant people are the victims. When the catalytic converter was stolen off the bottom of my car, I never even saw a cop; I had to fill out the report myself, and the police apparently never actually did anything about it. Why should they, after all? They aren't working for us. Why not give them something to do for their real bosses?
Watching C-SPAN last night, the shouting and chanting did nothing. There was no effect at all. The sergeant-at-arms will restore order in the gallery, and we will continue to pretend that those people don't matter. The sit-ins have done nothing. The communications campaigns had no effect. More of the same will yield more of the same. Try something different.
But why not channel your destructive urges into dismantling internalized oppression? The ways that you and I go about maintaining these very structures we are each so angry about?
I'm a musician. I once played at a fancy downtown club that took my band's working/middle class crowd for granted. They had two shows every night: an early set with very expensive tickets and international artists, and a late night set with local artists and cheap tickets.
They once made our audience... Hundreds of people... wait for an two hours, standing in the lobby, on valentines evening, because a bunch of drunk rich people had paid $150/ea for an earlier show, and they didn't have the guts to tell them to leave after it was over. We didn't get to sound check. I didn't get a monitor. Our friends and family waited for two hours to hear us play. We had to cut our set in half.
After that I refused to play there anymore. This was a regular place at the time, but I told my friends that I was done, and explained myself. I loved the staff there. The sound was amazing. They had great food and lighting and all that. But I was tired of the management's priorities. They willingly engaged in segregating our communities to squeeze out the money. They weren't curating, they were leaching. I was over it.
Know what happened? Not much at first. People kept asking me to play there. I said "nope, I'm done".
Two years later, hardly anyone I know plays there ever. My little stand made a real difference.
There are other venues in town that have been similarly 86'd by a few trusted leaders in the community. It makes space for new ways of doing things to let go of an old, tired staple.
Why not find something like that in your life that you can do to take a stand?
Your method of protesting doesn't work if you care about the national debt, quantitative easing, inflation, interest rates, crony capitalism, the rent economy, the value of your money growing worthless day by day while the cost of living is artificially getting higher despite technological advances.
What do you do to address those issues? Not participate in the economy? Create your own currency, your own bank and somehow escape regulation? Vote?
They keep pushing people into a corner and expecting us to submit. Technological innovation (e.g cryptocurrencies, encrypted wallets, globalisation etc.) and violence are the only tools we have to fight back. Any other system (e.g voting) has been gamed to serve their interest or rendered useless (e.g protesting but don't be inconvenient)
Don't get me wrong, your vote still counts (in non gerrymandered districts) and I'm sure you can voice your opinion on gay marriage; but the stuff that actually matters, you are voiceless and expected to obey or die.
Also, b.t.w., I'm not trying to judge you if you think violence is effective. I'm just convinced that it's actually self-sabotaging in the long run.
The actions I'm describing are violent, but not in the war-mongerer's way. They're violent in the same sense that Slavoj Žižek (regardless of your opinion about him) says love is violent.
My point is not so much that our huge problems have easy, one-stop fixes, it's moreso that we often reinforce the bigger problems with a multitude of little, normal habits that we can exercise control over if we choose to.
Go ahead and stomp out those big bad enemies with your violence. Their seeds sprout daily in most of our hearts. After the fire, what's gonna grow back if we haven't learned to cultivate justice in a positive sense? The same old shit.
Paulo Friere writes about this in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Everyone in capitalist societies is educated to desire to become like the oppressor. Kids wanna grow up and be rich, have servants. What are we doing to break that cycle in ourselves?
My example was just one wake up call showing me that I do have some power. It's rare that you get to see that your actions have consequences. This one was dramatic for me. For the record, a lot of my musician peers are cultivating their own events these days instead of using the booze/drug clubs. It's a movement, and I was a small, real part of it.
Platitudes/things I believe are powerful:
Fix shit instead of tossing it. Go on regular hikes instead of flying to another country every time you need a break.
Cut out the petty shit talk about people. Stuff propagates fast and it only takes the right straw to break the camels back. Take care of yourself so you can shed your bitternesses. Practice forgiveness.
Don't take debt, only to pass its burden onto others. Don't encourage others to take debt. Don't tell young kids to take debt because it's "what adults do". When you do this, you're propagating the very thing you wish deep down to violently destroy.
Quit it with the "adultism".
You're awesome. Keep learning why, so we can be free of the burden of proving yourself by putting others down.
As for the housing thing... I understand that the solutions to this problem are radical and associated with stereotypes like "hippy" and "college student". We need to shed that. Here's an organization devoted to assisting people in building equitable housing relationships: https://coophousing.org/
Keep striving to look past peoples' educational degrees/class/race/culture/intelligence. Cut your superficial judgements out with the same violence you're imagining against "the system".
Learn to recognize non-traditional intelligence. Learn to have deep conversations with conventionally unintelligent people. If you think people with down's syndrome are dumb, you are enacting the oppression you hate.
In positive terms, keep striving to love and understand people, to be teachable, to be open hearted.
Walk/bus/bike more. Slow down.
> What do you do to address those issues? Not participate in the economy? Create your own currency, your own bank and somehow escape regulation? Vote?
As much as it's possible for you. But also: divest from inequitable businesses as much as possible. I mean this in a big way. For example: stop using amazon prime when ebay would be just as good. Use the slow shipping. That itself is a small, radical act.
Buy an old, used computer/phone, upgrade the ram, fix the little broken stuff.
Plant a garden.
Last but not least, call your representative and tell them we want score votin...
That's more than $100 in gas money, and at least 20 hours on the road, just to get to and from a gig at a different club. So there is a cost to you in sticking it to the club management by peacefully refusing to play for them on their stage.
They know this when negotiating terms with you, and it allows them to capture some of that cost from the performers. Anyone willing and able to burn down the whole club can capture some of the potential cost of rebuilding it from the owners. "Yes, we could pay you a $20 stage fee and wait 3 hours to play, and not have to drive all the way to Club Canadia #3, or you could pay us $500 to go on stage right now, and you won't die in a fire and have your ashes added to the porcelain for the new urinals." You probably won't ever have to actually do that; they just have to believe your threat is credible in order to agree to a better deal.
That's what the petty violence is good for. It makes the other guy have an inkling that maybe, just maybe, this person could murder them and/or burn everything they own, and so they shouldn't act like a complete ass. It still works when that other guy is completely devoid of empathy, conscience, or courtesy.
Even if you don't believe in violence on principle, surely you must recognize the perception of weakness that can generate when in a negotiation with someone who does?
I'm saying: transcend the club. Don't even try to compete with the old model, just outgrow it. You don't need to go anywhere and there will be nothing the old club owners would even recognize to burn down. Let them win at their game and find other ways to thrive.
Advocating violence - and implying worse - is a step beyond inappropriate on HN.
That works out great for problems solvable by a new competitive option in the free market--probably the best way to handle it, actually. The people implementing the best solutions to the problem get paid the most money, and everyone is happy.
But that only works up to a certain scale. If your problem's solution requires a capitalization of more than $100M, you're not going to fix it with a hip, cool, dynamic startup tech company, with the founder-CEO right there directing traffic. At larger scales, you need a lot of people: investors, employees, and managers. You have to deal with the principal-agent problem, where the selfish concerns of an individual may be in conflict with the overarching goals of the whole group, and they have the individual authority to act on their own behalf as they act in the name of the group.
That is the realm of multinational corporate governance and governments. The essence of a government is a controlled monopoly on the uses of force considered to be legitimate. The government is a cartel enforcer. It is there to ensure that if any one person acts too much in his own interest at the expense of the public interest, the cartel enforcer may impose a penalty to encourage a better outcome for the whole cartel in the future. There is no enforcer for the enforcer. If the government becomes corrupted, it can cease to function for its intended purposes. In particular, if a portion of a government that is designed for self-repair ceases to function, there is no possible in-band activity that can reliably restore it. Even if that self-correcting element only partially ceases to function, it may still be cheaper or easier to fix the problem using out-of-band signaling activity.
That out-of-band signaling behavior for a government is all the behaviors explicitly banned by the government: lawbreaking. That can run from relatively innocuous law-scoffing, such as blocking downtown traffic for an hour without a valid municipal demonstration permit, to a full-on bloody rebellion, which is probably the most illegal thing you can do.
The important questions:
- Is the self-regulation function of government compromised? If so, how badly has it been damaged?
- What is the minimum level of unlawful behavior necessary to restore government to its proper functioning (the proper functions being a subjective judgment) as cartel enforcer?
If you maintain that government is functioning as intended, there is no problem to fix. For you. Carry on. Those who do think there are problems may attempt to work around you. They might also go through you. So it helps to be aware of your neighbors and surroundings.
If you maintain that zero amount of unlawful behavior is necessary or sufficient to fix the outstanding problems, then you can continue working within the system. If your efforts aren't yielding results, you have no choice but to double down and do all the same things even harder next time.
Violence is just one tool in the toolbox. Its the one that may still work after all others have failed, the "last argument of kings". You can't take it out of the toolbox. It's always there, even if you don't talk about it. Let us not forget that the US is the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons on the battlefield. The US has the same order of magnitude for population size and for number of firearms. I recently got some polling results from Cards Against Humanity [0] reporting that 33% of the US population believes another civil war may start within the next decade. You don't have to believe ...
Edit: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/365718-house-set...
But its clear we need a nonpartisan group who can successfully rally most of America on the left and the right.
Why? Keep the Nazis and their friends where they belong: on the dustbin of history. There is no need to further legitimize Bannon and the rest of the alt-right bunch by rallying with them. They need to be fought relentlessly.
I'm not a US citizen, so my voice doesn't count. But does your voice count if you are a US citizen? Nope. The corporations and politicians decide, we can just be allowed to have nice sits in the front row and watch how the corporations world grow.
Happy watching. Tickets are expensive, and mandatory. Nice dreaming.
Is that why gay people can get married in the US (but not in 160 other countries), because what US citizens think doesn't count? (the majority in the US support gay marriage)
Is that why the house and US Senate recently voted almost perfectly in step, overwhelmingly in favor, of rolling back civil asset forfeiture abuses? Congress has nothing to fear from it, they do however know their voters are angry about it.
Is that why the Obama Admin put net neutrality into place, because votes & voices don't matter? It was in fact overwhelmingly demanded by Obama's voters. Votes, of course, matter in a big way as it turns out: had Hillary bothered to fight for the blue wall state voters, we'd still have net neutrality.
As more people move to where the jobs are at, the country will become more blue/red divided.
I find the idea of him expanding the FISA court powers contradictory to his stated purpose of seeking justice in the matter of his supposed 2016 election scandal. Note that this idea is the EFF's interpretation of the bill & not my own view.
If that were the case, then perhaps his intent is to leverage the expanded NSA powers to spy on the FBI, which he seems to believe is working against the current administration. This would not be the first time different parts of the US government were spying on each other. [1]
I don't believe that is the intent of this bill. After reviewing, it seems more likely that the intent of the bill covers two goals: 1. To require added accountability to the FISA application process such that abuses of the FISA court are easier to identify. There are a number of sections in the bill which require disclosures by the FBI which were not necessary before. 2. To remove bureaucratic barriers limiting the Attorney General, who in the case of this political situation, will be relied upon to investigate the government itself.
So I can see where the EFF is coming from with their take on this bill, and certainly there is a political divide over whether or not this bill is a good thing.
Personally I am hoping it will pass.[2]
[0] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/08/head-house-ethics...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/03/12...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4478...
3.6 Trillion; The Quantum Technological Revolution that I own and the Murder, Torture, Coercion, and Theft behind it...
Send my intellectual property to every Patent Attorney and person that you know.
The intelligence community has stolen and prevented the filing and sale of my intellectual property. I own the Quantum Technological Revolution worth Trillions of Dollars.
Botched CIA Murder Operation in Russia; CSIS Murdering Ring of Citizens; World-Changing Physics
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