I'm not misunderstanding it, no. I like to make wordplay; I'm sorry it was confusing. If you reread hopefully you will see we are in agreement.
534 karma · joined August 19, 2014
No disagreement there. But that doesn't mean that the document grants the right. It merely recognizes the rights.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...
These rights are not granted by the United States. The United States cannot grant or take away natural rights. That's what they are and how they were intended to work.
We can think about it this way. The United States (well, certain bureaus) do not believe that the Bill of Rights contains unalienable rights because:
1.) Foreigners ("aliens") are not 'given' what is presumably 'unalienable' to them (e.g. GitMo)
2.) Snowden Docs (in particular the US) shows how intelligence agencies will spy on one anothers' citizens on their behalf to skirt domestic law. A serious commitment to unreasonable searches and seizures would entail protecting citizens rights from foreign actors, not encouraging it. And it would also refrain from doing it to others.
3.) Fair trials are suspended where convenient, even before executions (e.g. Americans overseas, Bin Laden).
By tautological definition there are no 'extreme' circumstances under which natupal rights are no longer granted; for natural rights are not given, cannot be taken away, suspended or invalidated by geolocation.
> Rolling back freedom of speech is a non-starter.
* Governments have a free speech right to propaganda. (The techniques I suggested 'rolling back' are only used for the purposes of propaganda).
> Media can and do provide quality information.
* Despite barriers and through mires of conflicting accounts, the media is able to effectively report information to a public that doesn't pay it and is able to ignore the influence of the institutions that do.
> By and large the public know about the Patriot act and support it...
* The public has wildly different opinions about the effectiveness of Obamacare than it does the Affordable Healthcare Act. Despite countless examples like this it is because of an efficient and reliable news system that the American public has a good sense of politics, the issues that the country faces, the trade-offs inherent to national legislature and how domestic bills fit into larger policy goals and geopolitics. There is no politicization of the media, or where there is it is recognized, sourced and understood as a defining piece of narrative context.
> The reports are there yet the public has yet to be swayed.
* But despite this really good reporting there's a real debate about whether global and ubiquitous surveillance, espionage and sabotage is legitimized by counter-terror purposes even when the programs in question have nothing to do with terrorism.
> We need to convince voters that the Patriot Act is bad not pretend they have been victims of mind control.
Information control. Don't burn too many calories on the straw man.
Voters will only be informed if both social and traditional media are able to provide actionable, verifiable and non-biased reports.
Media will only be able to provide quality information when political, intelligence and profit interests have less leverage than an educated purchasing public majority.
Political/intelligence interests will only have have less leverage if we pass meaningful enforceable legislation to curtail the use of selective privilege, story seeding and psychological operations to achieve policy goals.
Congress will only pass meaningful enforceable legislation if the voters demand it.
...
I don't know what you mean by a 'sorting filter', but what I'm talking about is an algorithm that takes >40Mb of data as input (pictures of Bolt and Athens for example) and uses this data to output ~40Mb of Bolt in Athens.
I mean human artists to be an analogy: humans can 'select' a picture of Athens Bolt without enumerating all others. I don't see why computers couldn't.
With the intelligence community hacking into Senators' computers to defend themselves from investigation, even admitting it, at will, with no reprimand? And have it barely scrape the news?
Is it that easy? Can we just repeal bills like the Patriot Act? Look at how easy it was for Australia to invent a media blitz of fear to pass legislation allowing surveillance that has no counter terrorism purpose.
But what if we imagine/allow/invent the series of algorithms that 'pluck' a good picture of Usain Bolt from the set of 5MB files without inspecting too many (let's say O(log) or O(log log))?
That's only ~c25/~c5 bits of entropy to sort through, even less if the algorithm were to work in some sort of sparsity domain.
You are very wrong about this.
> assuming the left side was taken care of we could rapidly approach the right side by doing things like providing more granular permissions to applications
It's actually an unsolved problem. Granular permissions have been tried before.
You should also look through the other linked articles. Some of them include features built into iOS devices that already circumvent encryption.
More importantly, Apple's warranty canary was removed which either means they were served by National Security Letter or (if you're optimistic sort of person) that they are no longer committed to notifying consumers in the event that have been, which flies directly in face of all the PR talk of security commitment recently [7]. Plus remember, Apple can push whatever software they want to your personal device. That's how smartphones work.
We are led to two questions:
A) Why wouldn't the same tactics, National Security Letters and ORCHESTRA-type attacks work [8]? Don't we remember from the Snowden leaks that NSA agents infiltrate tech companies and backdoor software at the source when other avenues are closed or gridlocked?
B) Why all of the publicity about about how secure Apple's product are from snooping? Do we really think we can get away from ubiquidous global surveillance that easily?
I'm sorry. Investigative bodies don't publicly announce what technologies they can't track. There is no phone you can buy on the mass market that will keep your data safe with the exception of - perhaps? - the BlackPhone [9].
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-meet-with-obama-...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/17/obama-tech-executiv...
[3] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/04/apples_imessa...
[4] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/22/apple-data/
[5] https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-criminal-la...
[6] https://pentest.com/ios_backdoors_attack_points_surveillance...
[7] https://gigaom.com/2014/09/18/apples-warrant-canary-disappea...
[8] http://mirror.as35701.net/video.fosdem.org//2014/Janson/Sund...
[9] https://www.blackphone.ch/
Additional reading:
(1) https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_problems_...
(2) https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/defending_aga...
(3) https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/is_iphone_sec...
NATO can't just abandon nuclear treaties. And trust that, as it controls 90% of the pipeline of oil between Russia and Europe and that because the conflict arose during highly contented offers for Ukraine to join the EU, that NATO is doing everything it can.
"So the Shieldings' hero, hard-pressed and enraged, took a firm hold of the hilt and swung the blade in an arc, a resolute blow that bit deep into her neck-bone and severed it entirely, toppling the doomed house of her flesh; she fell to the floor. The sword dripped blood, the swordsman was elated. (1563-1569)"
Sometimes the better product makes less profit. It's hard for someone with Capitalistic incentives to respond with a better product if delaying/discouraging/regulating-out-of-existence is cheaper.
Craig Gentry did more than just discover the first theoretical scheme, he reopened an interest in FHE. Yeah all the schemes are inefficient and will remain so for decades. But already the progress on FHE is incredible.
2007 for FHE was the 1982 for Secure Multi Party Computation. It will take 30 years, but I expect someday we'll see it privately allocating contracts in sugarbeet auctions.
If you want more meat than that: the US government, and in fact the majority of modern Western-style governments, do not directly control enterprises ("that's fascism/marxism/communism") but there remains a need for governments to interact and leverage infrastructure, information and capabilities of private enterprises - a need that can not be fulfilled by the blunt instrument of eminent domain.
Western style governments instead rely on coercion and leverage and also provide market advantages (and sometimes "Soft Power"; look that up) to achieve policy goals. The idea is then that governments nudge private enterprises to efficiently allocate their resoures for the greater good that individual customers and market pressures can't account for (because the calculus of a consumer doesn't include national strategy and because access to restricted information can't make it into the marketplace).
A fantastic example of that is the global cyberintelligence war, which the US and Five Eyes would very much like to win, and you should a tleask hope that we don't lose. [The vast majority of the Snowden leaks are about international espionage and sabotage (not about 'terrorism', the 2000's boogyman; find more in previous comments by yours truly).] There are other examples such as private enterprises with shared strategic interests having been invited to participate in international treaties like the Trans Pacific Partnership.
This has its own sort of internal self-consistent logic that is somewhat grounded in, although also represents a significant departure from, the ideas of Western 'Enlightenment' thinkers.
A criticism of this sort of leverage is that it has to grow more and more intense as the need, frequency, and scope of demands intensify due to resource exhaustion, accumulating expenses/promises, and competition with large centrally organized states and other Western-style states that are willing to interfere more to compete more (the 'prisoner dilemma' or 'tragedy of the commons' scenario). Every person you ask will give you a different answer on how much of this behavior, if any at all, has been happening.
The current conception of the state is that it must correct the market where it fails to allocate things efficiently (natural monopolies, etc) and that it may also collectivize cost where chance or circumstance have the power ruin individuals (providing emergency services during storms, snowplows during winter, equal access to education even for the poverty stricken) for the same reason people collectivize risk via insurance. But that otherwise it should remain minimal in size. I acknowledge there are debates about the concept of the state that would fill libraries. These are broad strokes.
States have learned that wielding private enterprises for both Soft Power (having the world rely on US company services or Chinese goods, owning water supply [Nestle]) and coercive power (withholding access to treatments and cures of diseases, manipulating social media to stir unrest, exporting favorable financial regulations via the WTO and World Bank [why BRICS made their own]) and by giving domestic corporations favors so that they can compete internationally (traditionally tariffs, huge tax subsidies (sugar), and recently information from the cyberintelligence war) as well as financial manipulations (manipulating currency exchange rates so that they are favored for export) enable them to achieve policy goals. Countries must participate if their competitors are, sort of like a cold war but without the existential threat of annihilation.
So states play a large part in the fluxuations of markets. Some of this is highly public ("Today at 9:00, China bans bitcoins"), but others are surreptitious.
In so many words: because it is 'invisible' and because it is a 'hand'.
From what I can tell - yes - he was guilty of insider trading by the letter of the law. Sharing insider information as CEO about the future of the company with shareholders is by definition insider trading. Despite circumstances, warning that contracts were being gutted is still illegal.
It's likely that Snowden doesn't know anything about it.
Furthermore, having been served a National Security Letter, Nacchio was not able to speak to his company or shareholders about the situation.
Nacchio continued to insist on legal avenues and Uncle Sam did exactly what it threatened. Nacchio warned major stakeholders that all of the major QWest contracts were about to go belly up.
The US government threw Nacchio in prison for insider trading.
Oh and then QWest went bankrupt and was bought by competitor CenturyLink (who presumably had fewer difficulties complying).
Sometimes the market has more than one invisible hand.
Edit: A good point by a fellow commentor - no independent investigation has been performed into the QWest story. I looked but could not find FOIA information online.
Beyond that, the tech sector is made up of exactly the sort of Louie character described in the article. Mostly pale pasty males that feel obligated to sex with women more attractive than them. Boyish-men that try to out-novelty one other and whose boyish hobby (computers) just happens to be something that makes a _lot of money_ - it's like if we discovered that LEGO construction somehow helped corporate bottom lines. A culture that buys into the myth that computer pioneers,serious and careful mathematicians and technicians all, were 'geniuses' rather than driven and hard workers and that they, by knowing how to code in Python and Angular, are somehow too in that rank of elite men.
The tech industry celebrates adolescence and arrested development. It claims with a straight face it has engineers and is doing engineering, but just look at the difference in ethical standards and responsibility Software Engineering has compared to, say, Civil Engineering or Architecture. Software Engineers have no licensure. If your software kills someone (Therac-25, Great Northeast Blackout) or causes widespread instability (Black Monday, Flash Crash) or has ethically questionable goals, where are the repercussions? As a tech industry member you are shielded from your own ignorance, laziness, and carelessness. (Sure we build software faster. We could build bridges faster without licensure and regulations as well).