Well, duh!

The laws were passed and signed into law by the secret FISA Congress and the secret FISA POTUS, naturally!

I'm sure the secret FISA SCOTUS has already reviewed these laws and found them reasonable & necessary.

The Secret FISA VISA.

It's everywhere you want to spy!!

I wonder how long it will take for attacks on the NSA's and their contractors' workers by the public to start?

Strat

Not long.

Not long at all. At least, for something a bit less "sci-fi" (umm, "palm thrusters"?) but more practical for the real-world foot-soldier.

http://youtu.be/p2W23ysgWKI

But soon there will be very little need for large numbers of (human) infantry.

Atlas http://youtu.be/hFKVSLNyADk

Atlas rocky terrain and balance tests. http://youtu.be/S-WRjDsyL0s

Robot soldiers that won't question, lie, or disobey orders.

Every megalomaniacs' and oppressive police states' wet-dream.

What could possibly go wrong?

The only thing worse than a self-aware "Skynet" is a "Skynet" under human control. Machines don't enjoy needless cruelty and the deliberate infliction of pain & suffering for their own sakes.

Strat

"Nobody ever got fired for buying bipedal forklifts"?

Doesn't have the same ring.

Strat

Or, alternately, enabling people to set up their own local networks (throw in a dash of encryption, maybe?) when a government shuts down the carriers to aid in suppressing mass political/popular opposition, protests, marches, demonstrations, etc.

It could ultimately be tracked down by the government, but even with no attempts to transmission-wise obscure the source/location (well, lets be real...it would necessarily be on a low-power transmitter, so there's that) it's damned hard, particularly in a dense urban area, to locate a signal from the ground.

There's also the practical matter of logistics for the authorities. There aren't a whole lot of radio tracking & location vans around. The FCC has typically only had one or two in most of the States in the US, with exceptions for the larger States like California where the vast area of the State demands a larger fleet, but still relatively very few for covering a huge area. Michigan for instance had two (one was almost always parked and served as a backup vehicle against mechanical failures/repair) the last I'd heard.

Helicopters would be faster, but there aren't that many so equipped either, even in the military. The military signal tracking capabilities are more focused on weapons systems and target tracking, not domestic small-transmitter rabbit-hunting that doesn't involve something akin to a HARM missile taking out a half-block area. That might go largely unnoticed and be considered by many to be an improvement in large sections of Detroit, but elsewhere it would definitely cause mass anti-government public demonstrations, protests, uprisings, death, and violence.

And, I think we can *all* agree, here...

"Ain't nobody got time for that!"

Strat

I really doubt it is actually meant to blow itself up though.

If they used the right kind of battery it could ;-)

All you'd need to do is build it on a flammable PCB with a nichrome-wire-style electrical ignition element embedded within it, and discharge the (I would assume normally inaccessible without tripping the destruct) battery through it. The destruct could even have it's own built-in and seperate battery

*Poof*, original "Mission Impossible"-style.

"Good morning, Mr. Phelps..."

Sometimes the old tech is the best tech. ;-)

Strat

What was it you called a country where the government and powerful, "connected" private business interests merge?

Ohhh, silly me! *Now* I remember!

A Fascist Oligarchy, of course!

Welcome to the DRNA comrades! (Democratic Republic of North America) The new flag will be a black silhouette of a boot stomping a human face on a blood-red background.

Just wait until they run out of money they can rape from the domestic economy and begin a policy of international aggression to keep their hookers and blow flowing. The world is going to burn.

Strat

Some Christians feel the same way about your religion.

Strat

Just like the US Dollar.

There's nothing there. It's just bits in a Federal Reserve computer system. All the gold deposited by other nations at the NY Fed is gone, has been gone for years. Other nations have all but stopped loaning the US money at anywhere near sane rates. The US Treasury is now buying our own bonds to keep things from collapsing, but it cannot continue.

The US Dollar is backed by nothing more than US government propaganda. People around the world are already waking to this fact. There are already international actions under way to move away from the US dollar as a reserve currency for international trade in things like oil. It won't be long before the US Dollar and the US economy collapses, maybe two years at the outside.

And rightly so, as those in the US government are running it like some banana republic, or the Wiemar Republic.

Strat

Courts (including the SCOTUS) are not Constitutionally designated as the final arbiters of what is Constitutional. They were never intended to be.

At least, according to one of the main architects of the Constitution's writing.

"You seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy... The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal." - Thomas Jefferson

The entire aim of the modern US intelligence apparatus is to locate and identify for isolation/neutralization/eradication any new Thomas Jeffersons, Ben Franklins, John Adams, etc etc in order to protect the Oligarchs in power.

Strat

My apologies, Senator.

Strat

Sorry to ruin your fun at my expense, but the Republicans are just as guilty as the Democrats.

It's not an (R)/(D), Left/Right. Liberal/Conservative thing.

It's a "basic civil rights all humans are born with" thing.

Sell that partisan (R)/(D) crapola somewhere else. I'm not buying.

Strat

Yes, to those who believe that there should be limits to government power.

It's certainly not surprising or unexpected for those who've been paying attention.

At it's root, the cause is simple.

People want government to provide more and more stuff and do more and more things.

In order to do all that, government must have the wealth and powers to accomplish it.

Because human nature is what it is, giving any person or group that much power insures eventual corruption, and ultimately, results in an authoritarian/totalitarian regime if left unchecked.

It's like gravity, in that one cannot set in place any set of laws/rules/etc to change it. That's why the writers of the US Constitution tried to make as much of government as possible a strictly local matter and leave very little for the central government to do except things like treaties and wars. We left that behind in the early-1900s thanks to Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the Progressive movement, and haven't looked back.

In order for government to grow, individual freedom, choice, and wealth must suffer, as it is only from limiting/taking the people's wealth, freedom, and power of choice that government is able to act.

Everybody is born free, government can only limit that freedom just as government creates no wealth and can only take it from those who create actual wealth.

More government = less freedom. It's a zero-sum equation. More of one necessitates less of the other.

How much less-free do you want to be today?

Bastardizing or just plain ignoring the Constitution to grow government since the 1950s at a nearly geometric rate to feed the entitlement bread-and-circuses to buy votes and paying for it by enslaving future generations with our bills and loss of freedoms and choices has been working out *great* so far.

$17 trillion in debt and an emerging authoritarian police/surveillance state with thermonuclear/biological weapons and one of the top3, if not the top, military in the world, great.

The world needs to pay attention, because once those in the US government have secured their power here and raped the domestic economy, that military will be sent out to secure more wealth from other countries to feed the beast.

You people in other countries had better pray to whatever/whoever you hold dear that those citizens in the US fighting to try to reduce the size and power of the US Federal government succeed or, and heed my words well, what will be coming your way if they fail will make the Nazi reign of terror and death look like a Cub Scout jamboree and George Orwell's "1984" look like an independent-thinker's and truth-lover's Utopia.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Strat

No, Barbary pirates operating mostly out of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli started a program of targeted piracy against US ships in the 1800s. The same place that's in violent turmoil today.They just found another attack vector and set of tactics for today's world.

That's why the US Marines were originally formed. They were called "Leathernecks" because they wore high reinforced collars as protection against beheading by scimitar during hand-to-hand battles.

Strat

With the US government's track record for truthfulness and "transparency", particularly over the last 20 years, I'd be far more inclined to trust Joe Isuzu over the US the government.

http://youtu.be/nJMq_7alQpU

Strat

A 500 kiloton purely atomic device IS rather large.. Remember, the ones dropped on Japan were only about 20 kilotons.

Now, a thermonuclear device that was only 500KT would be quite small.

My hope with this asteroid capture plan is that, if there's a serious mistake and the object impacts Earth, it hits square in Washington, D.C. with no warning and wipes it out.

"...And nothing of value was lost..."

Strat