I like how the author organizes 'levels' of rolling cryptography, and generally agree with his assessment of how those strata should be organized.
1,106 karma · joined June 15, 2016
Isn't Latex Turing-Complete?
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/16/freedom-of-navigation-op...
This isn't an outlier in reporting on the situation in the South China Sea: reporting - and the diplomacy - emphasizes the need for the United States to find allies and to build a consensus of Asian countries.
The response from those would-be-allied Asian countries, the policy wonks discuss, has been ambivilent at best. They link to an article in which the Indonesian government criticizes the US for power projection and calls on the US and China to 'restrain themselves'. The Indonesian response in this regard was not an outlier.
Much of the advice to US diplomats was that the FONOPs needed to be changed because the aggressive nature of the military projection undercut the narrative that China was the bully. Advice on changing the operations included doing them silently without much public coverage, or trying to build a coalition so that the US wouldn't 'sail alone'. (The US was unable to build such a coalition.)
There's a lot to say in this regard.
I think your comment(s) are highly constructive, I take seriously what you say, and have been upvoting them.
The termination of the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty ("SAMSG") and the passage of the Taiwan Relations Act ("TRA"). In the "SAMDT" it was the policy of the United States that the Republic of China (ROC - Taiwan) was the sole legitimate sovereignty of mainland China.
President Carter terminated SAMDT, passing instead the TRA. The Taiwan Relations Act promotes a "One China Policy" - that of there being only one China. Under this policy, the US government recognizes the PRC (mainland) government, and no longer recognizes Taiwan (ROC) as a sovereignty. In this, there is no formal recognition, state-to-state diplomacy at high levels, present embassy, etc. The TRA makes provisions for the defense of the island in the case of military activity from the mainland. The TRA has been consistently reaffirmed by the United States government for 40 years.
> The settlement on that issue is that Taiwan will be fully and formally enveloped into the mainland, along with Hong Kong, the 2040s.
I have overspoken and confused the Hong Kong case with the Taiwan case. To be very clear: I am and was wrong about the timeline on a formal date for the mainland to envelop Taiwan.
The "Basic Law" of the Constitution of Hong Kong that establishes it as a separate autonomous region expires in (I had to look this up) 1947. This arrangement had been agreed to by the British and the mainland Chinese government, with the understanding the independence would cede after this time.
I had been under the impression that Taiwan had a similar provision in their constitution. However, looking this up I found that it is not the case. ROC and PRC both agree that there is "One China" as does the United States, but there remains disagreement about where the sovereignty resides. A good example of this is that ROC sided entirely with PRC with regard to the South China Sea and the international disputes and findings.
There does not appear to be a deadline on the federalization of the relationship, and I sincerely apologize that I stated this incorrectly.
Now, I do swear to have heard US diplomats and academics discussing the Hong Kong and Taiwan timeframe as a single event: "One Country, Three Systems." I have nothing formal or official to point to in this regard.
> Think Puerto Rico
There are many differences between the two cases and it was not intended to to be taken beyond the most immediate analogy. The US, as by the TRA, does not recognize the sovereignty of Taiwan as an independent sovereignty. I was trying to come up with something American readers might be able to compare that to. PR probably came to mind because it too is an island, and it too is not recognized as a sovereign state. Of course the analogy is not perfect and I would never claim it is.
Thank you for clarifying that to other readers.
There is not a strong constituency of Puerto Rico that claims independent sovereignty. I don't know if they are actively seeking political representation of any sort (as a US state?). There isn't actually much news/information (that I get anyway) about the political climate on PR.
China is treating these waters differently today for National Security reasons, and because of a unique period of history in which Chinese growth and infrastructure development has skyrocketed (China has been successfully industrializing into a modern economy). I had said: "Today, China is trying to build infrastructure, shipping routes and naval security in this area. This is important to China because of its historical vulnerability to naval embargo, through the Strait of Malacca and elsewhere."
The American media bubble is the narrative that China is being aggressive, that China is being unilateral, that China has no claims (especially vis a vis Philippines), that there is a unanimous interpretation in Asia, etc.
The media bubble in this regard isn't "something has changed" but "this is what's changed and this is what's going on."
It's a nice story about good versus evil and American freedom, sure, but that's only good for headlines and public consumption. It's not what is going to fill the history books.
It is entirely possible that, in a war or as a settlement, or under pressure, or by sale/trade, or by volunteer Russia will give the Kurils to Japan, or the United States will revise its position on Taiwan or Hong Kong (you've already see a Trump Administration send the signal he's willing to do this).
These relations are complicated, as various decisions made by different sovereignties will be replied to, can spoil relationships, can spoil trust, etc.
A nation can also ruin its reputation by being 'too flippant' in recognizing territory until its not convenient to do so any more. There's a giant fuzzy 'you-have-to-be-able-to-tell-the-future' calculus that is done in simulating various choices on how to proceed with sovereign decisions, as effects can be quite wide ranging.
America flipping its opinion on the sovereignty of the former British colony Hong Kong or on the civil war safehaven Taiwan, would represent a huge and damaging departure in relations with China. The United States may do such a thing, but would only do it if the 'realpolitik' calculus allowed it to risk - or wanted it to aggress - a war.
There's never a simple thing in geopolitics. We can only look to history, to policies and treaties and to potential outcomes to explain and predict. The United States breaking with long standing treaties would be huge news in this regard.
The official US position (shared by most of the world) is that Taiwan is Chinese territory. The settlement on that issue is that Taiwan will be fully and formally enveloped into the mainland, along with Hong Kong, the 2040s (IIRC). The US (and most of the world) does not recognize Taiwan as an independent sovereignty. Think Puerto Rico.
At the time it came to resolve the war, Japan was forced to remove itself from various occupied areas including but not limited to Korea, China, and Pacific Islands.
For instance in the Cairo Declaration it was stated that:
"Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the first World War in 1914, and that all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and The Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China. Japan will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed. The aforesaid three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent."
Note that here the United States, Britain and China together recognized Manchuria, Taiwan and the islands off of Taiwan as Chinese. Japan would need to extricate itself from Korea.
The Qing Dynasty, before the war, had explored and occupied the Paracels and the Spratlys - to a minimal degree, since it had never become a great naval power. Indeed, there are a number of instances of Vietnam and China 'trading' the Paracels back and forth to protect their ownership during the occupation of French Indochina.
These islands had also been occupied by imperial Japan (such islands are useful in naval warfare), who was forced to remove itself. The Potsdam Declaration reads "Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine." These islands were very limited indeed, did not include the Paracels/Spratlys and it should be noted that they do not include the Kurils (something today that the Americans would like to revise history on).
Similarly, section (f) of article 2 of the Potsdam Treaty reads of Japan: "Japan renounces all right, title and claim to the Spratly Islands and to the Paracel Islands."
What we have is a situation where the Philippines never had administration or territorial claims to these islands and where the Qing Dynasty had. In the post-war period, China was not only weak, but could not spend much patrolling the South China Sea - and focused primarily on it's Western Front during the Cold War.
Today, China is trying to build infrastructure, shipping routes and naval security in this area. This is important to China because of its historical vulnerability to naval embargo, through the Strait of Malacca and elsewhere.
The United States had hoped, because of weak territorial enforcement during the postwar period, to make an issue over the ownership of the islands and waters as part of a geopolitical effort to limit the expansion of Chinese influence in an area historically militarily dominated by US projection (it's own National Security concerns pertaining to its continued naval access to potential adversaries and compeditors).
The bulwark of that effort was an attempt to build an Asian consensus, centered around the Philippines (an important US ally and prior colony). However, the effort failed, with states in Asia fracturing in opinion and not willing to commit themselves to a United States led effort to persist its power projection in that way.
This is still evolving of course, but the future looks rather dim with the Philippines (the keystone of the project) backing away.
Mostly, Japan and the United States don't want it to happen. You'll see their bubble selectively translate and report on Thai, Vietnamese, etc press. I'm sorry you seem to be under the impression there's such a uniform voice.
The United States had hoped to build a uniform front and accusation against China, with the Philippines at the center.
That effort failed. And it's getting to be nearly a year.
In any case, you seem to take exception with the 'bubble accusation'. We can talk about that, if you like, but I would be interested in talking about the various declarations and treaties at the end of WWII.
If you'd like, we can go over the text of UNCLOS, Cairo and Potsdam Declarations and SF Treaty.
Many people like to underwrite this opinion with the Hague Tribunal findings, but unfortunately UNCLOS itself (article 299) states that it has no authority to decide territorial cases.
In any case, the claims to the islands in the South China Sea are hardly unilateral, as the United States recognized many of them including the Paracels and Scarborough during the Potsdam Declaration, Cairo Declaration, San Fransisco Treaty and others (at the time motivated to punish the imperial Japanese at the end of WWII).
Hell the Cairo Declaration even declared Manchuria and Taiwan as owned by China.
It's funny what the American media bubble does to history.
There is prior case law (Ellsberg) that suggests what Snowden did was legal, in that all documents exposed were done through the media and journalists.
The claim that it was illegal needs to be substantiated in court as it would be a vast departure from the case law established by the Supreme Court.
Second, Facebook is not liable for what I post on my feed and the things that I communicate to my friends and family. Nor should they be. Facebook also is a private company that makes its money from spam. It is not a law enforcement agency, and it is not and should not be required to enforce the law.
In any case, in authoritarian countries like the United States (countries where citizens are punished if they do not spy on and censor one another), there has been an increasing and dangerous trend toward claiming that legal things (such as posting information from international news sources, here The Guardian and Der Speigel) are illegal.
The argument here that such behavior is illegal is a strong and present indicator of that authoritarian streak in the American political consciousness.
It used to mean "the amount of people currently capable of working, who are not employed in work."
The new definition is "the amount of people who want a job, but can't find one".
Basically the difference between structural unemployment and transitive unemployment. America used to track transitive unemployment, but through a series of reforms have narrowed in on measuring structural unemployment.
Originally if you were not employed you would be unemployed. Slowly this was altered so that if you were not employed and hadn't found a job in a month you were unemployed (because you were looking and not finding, and therefore there was no job for you). Slowly that got moved out. I don't have the most recent numbers committed to memory, but an not employed person is not considered unemployed unless they've been looking and have not found for a large amount of time.
This article hits on that theme. The argument/opinion it expresses is that the jobs ARE there - that structural unemployment is low - but that workers aren't finding good work ("transitive unemployment is high").
There's been huge moves in the labor market as middle skilled jobs are disappearing. The only move for the labor pool is down to low-skilled labor jobs, work that masses of the labor pool are not only overqualified for, but will be compensated significantly less for and which represent much less socioeconomic mobility.
Facebook makes its money from spam, as do the news.
Because they've lost credibility there's this new huge reach to label things as condoned or not. That's not going to solve the ultimate problem, which is that the information industry has become a platform where the highest spam bidder wins dissemination on the platform, rather than what spam is shared by people.
This is just one more step in the centralization of control of social media. There's still going to be plenty of spam, it just has to pay the gatekeeper (Facebook) or otherwise be on its good side.
Take the recent opinions of anonymous officials that Russia's objective in leaking DNC corruption was to get Trump elected. That's being reported on as news and fact, with the opinion aspect of it turned down to obscurity.
I barely trusted them before and haven't trusted them since.
But it could be marked by a stamp basically telling people: "Don't look at this. Don't take it seriously." People will be trained not to click on the reason for why, and they won't have the context to - as it was the case when the Snowden Documents were first coming out - differentiate "This post was marked fake news because the government engages in 'bulk collection' NOT 'mass surveillance'" from an legitimate reason to pariah the post and poster.
The type of influence this gives Facebook as a provider is one of scale, not one of instance. If large numbers of people are discouraged from engaging with certain ideas while each individual case has to be litigated individually and during a time later when the news and narrative making is already completed and people have moved on, it's a serious problem.
I would criticize China if they intended to put branding marks on reporting, analysis and posts that they don't consider trustworthy or factual.
It is this same criticality that I aim at Facebook and the United States. There are other, better solutions. I looked at the list of 'fact-checkers'. They don't pass the sniff test.
Finally, there's no way Facebook is going to mark its advertising, partnered content and purchased 'likes' as fake. It's just not in the calculation.
I will agree with you however that the abuse of taking down posts or ranking them so that nobody sees them (another issue I've encountered) is 'worse' in its immediate affect. Though I think it's more explicit. I can talk to other people who have had their posts censored and it isn't deniable.
This solution, on the other hand, is extremely deniable.
I don't like having to pick between two poisons. I've had quite enough of that.
I do not trust Facebook as an information steward, and feel that the solution is much more dangerous than the problem. I personally do not face many problems with fake news, but have suffered a great deal from propaganda, surveillance and censorship.
These solutions seem to double down on the costs, without offering a real benefit.
To be clear by 'uncritical' I mean 'gullible' - as in 'uncritical thinking'.
These platforms only function because advertisements and political messaging have to be seen, and are seen, as credible and native to the content being traded by the people using the platform.
Users are trained to uncritically believe the things that show up on their feed, because if they were trained to be skeptical they would the platform would go bankrupt.
Similarly, news media requires readers to have full faith - almost ideological allegiance - in what they are reporting, while at the same time they need an uncritical readership so that they can promote political and consumer advertisements, sponsored and 'earned' content promotion and opinion pieces as though they were fact.
The entire industry functions on the basis of gullible and uncritical readership, media allegiance and sponsored content.
The industry has fallen to extremely low credibility ratings, and a series of nonsense and unpredictive and obvious reporting out of the 'most credible' parts of the industry have left a vacuum whereby readers do not know what to believe, and so accept whatever is most convenient and most readily available.
The solution is to create a credible news media industry, with no sponsored or partner content, no PR, no government propaganda, and where the readers (and skimmers) are the customers who pay for the information. The industry should compete to provide context and reliable information, and readership should be encouraged to be skeptical of the information presented to them at all times.
Maintaining the current mispractice of the poorly functioning industry and adding protectionist measures, gatekeeping and sponsored fact-checkers is not going to solve the problem.
"I'll tell them what to think" is not a solution to "these people are gullible."
Astroturfing of various forms is in its infancy as a technology. Yet, it's so successful even in its crude form that every successful advertiser, media company and political party participates in it. Given that paid protestors, astroturfed comments, and brigading are seen as dubious tactics each of these parties uses their brigading, astroturfing and bots to accuse their opponents and competition of using brigading, astroturfing and bots.
Therein, the situation is a manifestation of what economists call a "tragedy of the commons" where each actors' best response to collective negative behavior on account of their opponent is to participate in it better themselves.
There are few ways out of a "tragedy of the commons" situation, with regulation itself having a quite spotty record. The best way out of the situation is for the incentive structures and technologies that encourage the behavior to move toward a more healthy 'market' structure that raise the costs of the behavior and lower the effectiveness.
Any attempt to 'solve' automatically and provide the user with access to what they 'really need to know' is an escalation of this trend, and will be gamified, copied and duplicated in an automatic fashion, making the situation worse - not better.
The only solution is a critically thinking public with the tools themselves to determine what is fake and what is real.
Platforms promising to introduce fake information and advertisements as a critical and crucial feature of their network are not able to achieve both a skeptical, critically thinking user base at the same time that it encourages gullible social participation.
An example is a group in Kosovo that supports Serbian separation. Similarly, the group from Serbia is politically attached to a Eurocentrist worldview.
The list includes, for example, an NGO supported by American investors and German and American academics in places like Ukraine.
The promise that these are non-partisan sources is a nice garuntee that it is neither Democrat nor Republican. Unfortunately in many controversial political situations, there are far more opinions and perspectives than those shared by Republicans and Democrats.
Given that Facebook has been accused of being a front for American political imperialism, I don't think this list of "truth deciders" filled with American investors and groups that have American intelligence and State Department support is going to improve things. At the very least it looks bad.
1. ABC News (USA) Added Dec. 13th
2. Africa Check (South Africa, Senegal and Kenya)
3. Agência Lupa (Brazil)
4. Agência Pública - Truco (Brazil) Added Sept. 16th
5. Aos Fatos (Brazil)
6. AP (USA) Added Dec. 15th
7. Balkan Investigative Reporting Network Kosovo (Kosovo)
8. Climate Feedback (USA) Added Dec. 5th
9. Colombiacheck (Colombia) Added Nov. 11th
10. Chequeado (Argentina)
11. Demagog CZ (Czech Republic)
12. Demagog PL (Poland)
13. Doğruluk Payı (Turkey)
14. El Deber Data (Bolivia)
15. El Mercurio El Poligrafo (Chile)
16. El Objetivo La Sexta (Spain)
17. Factcheck.org (USA)
18. FactCheck Georgia (Georgia)
19. FactCheck Northern Ireland (UK)
20. FactCheck-Ukraine (Ukraine)
21. FactChecker.in (India)
22. FactsCan (Canada)
23. Faktabaari (Finland)
24. Full Fact (UK)
25. GKillCity.com (Ecuador)
26. Internews Kosova (Kosovo)
27. Istinomer (Serbia)
28. Melu Detektors (Latvia) Added Sept. 26th
29. Metamorphosis Foundation (Macedonia)
30. Observador (Portugal)
31. Ojo Publico (Peru)
32. Pagella Politica (Italy)
33. Pesa Check (Kenya)
34. PolitiFact (USA)
35. Snopes (USA)
36. South Asia Check (Nepal)
37. TheJournal.ie (Ireland)
38. UY Check (Uruguay)
39. Valheenpaljastaja (Finland)
40. VERA Files Fact Check (Philippines) Added Sept. 19th
41. VoxUkraine (Ukraine)
42. The Washington Post Fact Checker (USA)
43. Zašto ne Istinomjer (Bosnia & Herzegovina)
In many other cases technology transfer, joint management/ownership, market access, political favors, lucrative contracts, direct infiltration, nationalist instincts, and bribery are all reasons for Microsoft to work with the NSA and other intelligence agencies. They were caught providing backdoor access along with Google to all outlook (and gmail) emails to the FBI, for example.
The entire information industry is sick. It's extremely efficient at serving it's customers. It's customers are a maelstrom/cacaphony of interests trying to make broad base emotional and misrepresentative appeals to purposefully uninformed audiences.
The information industry does NOT provide a paid service to customers seeking to understand the world. The information industry provides a paid service to industries and parties seeking to influence the world.
Trying to run a partisan political line, blaming one political party (who spend incredibly SMALL amounts compared to the other strategically politicizing news) is looking perpendicular to the problem, and falling prey to its continuance.
Fake news? The Iraq War justifications. The Jessica Lynch stories. The fake army letters sent by Bush Administration PR firms. The echo chamber from the Obama Administration on the Iran Deal that they've BRAGGED about. The horribly inaccurate coverage of the Syria proxy war. The whitewashing of politically sensitive topics, like the genocide by our allies in Bahrain. Conspiracy theories about Putin and hogwash misinformation like "Putin and Trump are best friends." US coverage of the Chinese economy ("Will China fall?!") while they were slated, instead, to be welcomed into the Special Economic Basket at the IMF. The fake news coverage about the Snowden Documents.
It's just... so frustrating to see people promulgate on HN one-sided, politicized and irresponsible finger-pointing, as though propaganda and mass-media disinformation were a partisan issue.
Mainstream journalism has to regain credibility.
The first step down that road is producing credible journalism, a difficult but necessary cost the industry is going to need to swallow if it expects to survive.
The alternatives are an expansion of thought censorship from the mainstream networks to its bubbling alternative competitors.
I understand the urge to misrepresent the world to garner public support. I really do. But nature abhors a vacuum. When the information available to the public is obviously compromised it will be filled by something or someone else.
The response to that isn't to censor alternatives and continue the misreporting. The solution is to recede from propagandistic instincts, and provide the kind of analysis you want to be recorded in history books for providing to democratic deliberation. If people really understand what's at stake in issues, and what powers, people and industries has what stake where, and when they understand issues to the point where they can make discernible political decisions - be they about representation or directly on issues - rather than being emotionally coerced at scale by every media platform above water; then, and only then, will the "information war" the State Department has been waging will really be won. It won't be won by the State Department, but by the people. And it will be for the people and by the people.
Truly: the alternative to this is to continue down this folly road of doctrinal misrepresentation of the world to the American people, and to play whack-a-mole with every narrative that challenges the useless and ill-predictive emotional appeal whose vacuum is being challenged.
(I speak as an American about my country).
"In that sense, perhaps the most shocking element of the story is not the Chinese government’s agenda, but how similar it is to the path technology is taking elsewhere."
This is because, for example, surveillance of social media posts have been an input to credit scores in countries like the United States for some time. (https://www.thenation.com/article/how-companies-turn-your-fa...)
In the United States, further, social media post and social relationship information is used across America to calculate real time police "threat scores", predictive crime measurements that are applied to prioritize law enforcement and surveillance efforts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/the-new-w...
China unfortunately is not unique in this landscape of social gamification - the kind espoused by the Bush and Obama Administrations - perhaps most perfectly represented by the legal justifications and arguments by Washington insiders in the intellectual orbit of Cass Sunstein.
Blasting people with water cannons has exactly one purpose - get protestors to disburse. It isn't a tactic to control an unruly crowd into a more orderly one. The water being blasted is at high enough pressures to bruise and it is extremely cold. This is the middle of winter in Dakota - and protestors are also being sprayed during the night.
Many other police tactics and injuries are being reported.