That was my point. They don't work for him, they work for the Federal Government. Much about their employment is regulated directly by Congress, including their budget. A President can fire a department head, but then what? That might actually not matter at all to the section heads within the NSA. The political leadership comes and goes, but the rest of the organization is self-managing. The Director of the NSA might in fact not be able to run around snapping his fingers and cause the desired effect. They manage their own budget on a blank check from Congress.

Obviously the departments that are overseen more directly by members of the Cabinet then the President has extensive access and generally better control. Except of course Law Enforcement which is all delegated as per post-Watergate rules.

Something else you might not have considered, when you fire the Director, then the Deputy Director takes over. The Director is a military position; the Deputy Director is required to be a civilian. This guarantees that it will be a "career professional" from inside the organization, but who can't be appointed as Director. This means if you fire the Director, the short term effect is turn full control over to the organization. And then the replacement has to be formally Nominated and then Confirmed by the Senate. Whoever you just fired had connections in the Senate to have gotten confirmed in the first place. So firing him upsets those people. So the replacement will likely be further from the President than whoever he fired, because he'll have a weakened hand in confirmation.

Also, the NSA is military, which means most of the President's staff don't have any say at all. Most of what the President wants to get done has to be done directly, and through the Secretary of Defense. And then most of the workers are actually civilians, so he can't give them orders as Commander in Chief. And the Secretary of Defense mostly has to go through the command structure.

Civics is actually interesting to learn about. There are real reasons it is structured the way it is.

The proof isn't going to be public at this stage, so our ignorance is not informative. It certainly doesn't imply that they lack that evidence. Lets wait until there is at least some accusation by the lawyers that such evidence is lacking.

Helicopters might not be nearly as robust as you assume. They might in fact be very touchy, and prone to a wide variety of damage.

And what if that down-draft flips the drone over and it catches an eddy? It could easily get blown up by air being forced down, even if most of the time it would get blown down.

Well, air traffic is under Federal regulation and ground vehicles are under State regulation.

Haters will hate for pointing it out, but Federal regulations are usually of higher quality.

That's a pretty big "if."

Wouldn't the existance of spies be the reason for a "no-spy list?" I mean if you're not spying on each other anyways, then why waste time and money negotiating that? Seems to be a required precondition.

This proves the status quo is spying, therefore the premise of a no-spy list is valid.

I'd prefer a more proactive response, maybe carry around a bunch of WWII concentration camp photos and wave those around whenever the Germans complain about "spying."

No they shouldn't be punished forever, but we probably should keep an eye on them forever.

And there are just as many who think Saint Reagan was the worst President EV-AH. BAR NONE. And that number was growing while he was still in office! Z O M G!

You may not know this, but the President of the United States doesn't have an office in the NSA, and doesn't have direct access to their leadership or decision-making.

So no, Obama isn't trying to achieve anything, as it is somebody else doing it.

Being able to fire the person at the top gives limited control in certain types of circumstances. In a regular business it means you have a lot of control over a department. But even a large corporation, you might not be able to succeed at getting things done the way you want just by firing department heads; and there is a cost to morale in attempting it.

In the case of Government, the workers are the same under one President and the next, and they can drag their feet and wait-out a President who tries to micro-manage them. But also, appointing department heads for a President is a political act, it has real cost, and if you try to do it with a weak hand then Congress will win that battle. Also, the departments have entrenched support from Congress-critters that have been in place longer than the President and will be in place after his terms expire.

You just can't use a small-business-owner model of Control to understand the powers of the President here. He's the one that has to explain the policies to the people, but in Intelligence and Law Enforcement, Congress has erected barriers to direct Presidential control. People often imagine that the President can just walk into any department and look at anything and order anybody around, but actually he's not a dictator, and can only move the levers of power that are provided.

Germans would riot (literally) if the US planned to close the base. It is a huge source of jobs, jobs that would otherwise go to US contractors but instead go to local German contractors.

In the past when there were plans of reducing the size of the base, they protested strongly and got us to change the plans.

The endgame is for individual politicials and political parties to distance themselves from their cooperation with US intelligence sharing programs in the eyes of their voters.

They're only arresting their own agents.

If they tried to arrest a US employee, they'd likely have to confront the fact that most of this is probably authorized under the broad information-sharing agreements that they're party to.

Online sarcasm was deprecated in 1986. Please read the manual, and get off the lawn!

lololololololololololololol "psychology today" lololololololololol

Notice that it isn't a study, or reporting on a study. It is reporting on a Technology Review article that discusses in general the work of a researched. And also says right there it disagrees with everybody else in the field in the last 100 years. ;)

But it is mostly a disagreement about the terms. If you read the details of the work they're actually adding new information to change what you recall. They're using the term "memory" to mean remembrance. By adding new information and context, they change the emotional content that is experienced when remembering. That is totally different than changing the stored memory.

The confusion is because they say memories are "not unchanging physical traces in the brain. Instead, they are malleable constructs that may be rebuilt every time they are recalled." But that is really what is shown. What is shown is that the physicality of remembering is different each time you remember.

“When you affect emotional memory, you don’t affect the content,” Schiller explains. “You still remember perfectly. You just don’t have the emotional memory.”

Also note that remembering creates new memories; memory of remembering. So your emotional state when remembering, and the context of that remembrance, are encoded as new memories that are likely to be mixed in with the old memories when remembering.

There is no reason a hypothetical memory-reading-machine could not read each of those parts separately. It would apparently expose not only the true original memory, but how you really feel about it!

Yeah, this is already well established in organized crime cases. They have a bunch of circumstantial evidence, phone meta-data, etc., and they believe the ledger is on the encrypted drive. Warrant granted.

If you can't trust the Judge issuing the warrants, then law enforcement already have unchecked power to abuse you and the rest of it doesn't matter.