First US appeals court hears argument to shut down NSA database
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Straight from the history books, it's one of the last phases of the plan that goes like this:
1) leverage an extraordinary event to scare everyone into supporting emergency measures
2) perpetuate fear and argument on all sides to distract, divide, and conquer public opinion, raising the possibility that these emergency powers might be (necessary|good|here to stay)
3) put on the suits and officially vent dissent to devnull (you are here)
4) everyone gives up and you can peel off the emergency sticker, pointing to your new law as precedent and tradition to uphold
5) PROFIT !
Because that is what this is all about (excessive wealth == power).
This way they'll be able to maintain some argument of 'democracy', while being able to identify any threats to their usurpation by democratic means.
[edit]
to clarify, the reason I made this comment is to note a case where this strategy has been used in history, as mentioned by the parent post. Not to compare Obama/Bush to Hitler.
She mostly approaches the issues from an economical perspective, mainly focusing on inhumane economic policies that both Thatcher and Reagan implemented, but the gist is similar.
Therefore it is not surprising that shocking events lead to controversial laws. Shocking events arguably lead to most laws; it's hard to get something done unless something shocking gets the public's (and members of congress') attention and causes a reaction.
Of course, people in power are aware of this phenomenon and plan their tactics to take advantage of it. I remember reading that many provisions of the Patriot Act were written long before 9/11 and its authors had been awaiting an opportunity. Or as the Obama administration said early in its tenure (IIRC), 'never waste a crisis'.
"It's the second oldest profession"..."this is what countries do, they spy on each other".
This is already the most commonly used defense for spying, even on HN, despite modern espionage being very different than even a decade or two ago.
However for posterity it's clear that the NSA is not about terrorism:
* The Inspector General Report on the Boston Bombings and the US's failure to discover them do not talk about the NSA (except to mention it in passing just two times). "We focused our review on the entities that were the most likely to have had information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the bombings – the FBI, the CIA, DHS, and NCTC, which maintains the U.S. government’s database of classified identifying and substantive derogatory information on known or suspected terrorists."
* The NSA's mission statement itself is "The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Information Assurance (IA) products and services, and enables Computer Network Operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances."
* The NSA's actions regarding the Natanz nuclear processing facility, capturing data from German officials during the Eurozone crisis, of off shore oil drilling bids from Brazilian PETROBOL, programs such as HACIENTA that specifically target countries, blatant references to political and financial targets, etc
* Programs such as QUEEN, ORCHESTRA, MINERVA, BIRDSONG/BADGER/GATEWAY/SLIPSTREAM, JTRIG, literature and research on social contagions and PsyOps (related to recent recent USAID Cuban Twitter project and Lincoln Group)
Together these tell us that the NSA is an arm of us finance, espionage, sabotage and influence/propoganda targeting political upheaval in target nations.
http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metada...
If you want to know what the FBI does with guns, you can't just inspect what their guns are capable of. You have to look at their mission statement, their actions, their other technological investments, reviews and investigations of the FBI, etc.
The NSA works with bureaus that handle domestic terrorism. They provide some small tools and data for that. Some selectors and social analysis of phone metadata are surely part of that. But if you look at what the NSA does, what their capabilities are, what their mission is and objectives are, and reports about their internal posture and attitudes you quickly learn that their programs are not broadly about counter-terrorism, although sometimes they partner for these purposes.
This is theater. They have absolutely no intention of ever shutting down the NSA, or restricting them, or deleting one single file in their database... the one that's so huge they had to put it in the desert.
http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/sites/default/files/Greenp...
A random example: [1] http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/12/data-centers-desert-technol...
EDIT: Am I wrong?
They then get upset when courts just rule on the laws as laws, as they are supposed to.
While I'm steadfastly rooting for this to happen, I also fear that whatever replaces it will be much worse.
Are you implying this is possible without blockchain technology, but impossible with? I can't imagine what attribute of an unforgeable ledger would do that.
People who believe in the mythic notion of "social contracts" should embrace blockchains with open arms. Minorities now have a concrete method to create enforceable agreements among each other. Isn't that what government should be -- an agreement amongst the people?
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html
I think Satoshi must have read all of Szabo's work!
Long before the Bitcoin paper, Szabo argues that technology can supplant existing bureaucratic means of recording claims to property rights (but he notes that it doesn't directly supplant existing institutions for enforcing those rights, or beliefs about how the rights are acquired or transferred).
I thought of this piece when reading this week's xkcd what-if:
("[...] you could edit all the property records on Earth to say that you own all the land and edit all the banking records to say you own all the money. But everyone else would disagree with those records, and they would edit them back or ignore them [...]")
Whether they chose to arm themselves with a keyboard and coded editor is another matter entirely.
Thanks for the kind words about Utter.io!
You realize that when the next Reign of Terror happens, it's us on the chopping block, right? The real elite will be on the first chartered flight to Hong Kong or Singapore or some similarly authoritarian place. Meanwhile, militarized San Francisco natives will start burning Google Shuttles.
Unlike the NSA headquarters location, the data center sites are in locales with low exposure to geological and other risks, both sites sit on major fiber aggregation points, and power is inexpensive. Frankly, it makes pragmatic sense to put them there.
It isn't that different than Facebook putting a huge data center in the Oregon high desert. It may be far from civilization but from a data center economics standpoint it makes perfect sense. One of the curiosities of the western high deserts is that there are several industries where that environment is conducive to efficient and economical facilities. Data centers are one of those use cases.
Criticism of use cases aside, I would hope that the government would build sensible and economically efficient data centers. If I was building a massive scale data center, I would probably locate similarly.
Yes, because we sure as hell wouldn't want all these these billions of records on random innocent U.S. citizens to die along with us in a nuclear blast, would we?
It may wind up being the case that the NSA's and similar surveillance architectures become the last great archive of human thought and culture, should something horrible happen. Unless archive.org has some serious Cryptonomicon-like servers hidden deep in a cave somewhere, governments seem to be at least putting more effort into the preservation of digital knowledge than anyone else has.
If it's any consolation, there have been efforts underway to get the water rights for the NSA's Utah DC revoked[1]. Personally, I think it is deplorable that they built a data center that will use nearly two million gallons of water a day in one of the driest places in the US. It irks me every time I look across the valley and see it.
1. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/12/utah-lawmaker-n...
2. http://fox13now.com/2014/04/25/bluffdale-releases-water-bill...
Others in this thread have already explained why the NSA might build a data center in Utah.
I fail to see how it could be anything other than coincidence (with the possible exception of good connectivity to the rest if the world).
The irony of this has simply passed them all by.
I happen to disagree. Americans are not 'uneducated idiots' but rather the target of perhaps the most sophisticated, ubiquitous, and persistant propaganda effort ever seen in human history. When you consider the stakes involved (massive military, very large economy) it is not such a surprise. As for what to do about that, I propose going to the source: reduce the size of the military, and reduce the size of the economy (by splitting it into several pieces).