Under the circumstances, at least an independent audit would seem warranted.

The Federal Reserve is really a system, not a singular thing, composed of some Federal officials and private entities. The Federal entities, such as the board of governors (which include the Fed chair, at the moment Janet Yellen) are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and are members of the Executive branch. The actual Federal Reserve Banks, on the other hand, are private entities that are authorized by the Federal government to perform certain tasks for the government. They aren't a part of the Federal government in that their employees are not Federal employees, and thus aren't members of the executive specifically. I concede that whether the actual corporate entities themselves are a part of the Federal government is a bit more murky. If they were part of the Federal government, and to the extent they are treated as such, they would be a part of the Executive.

There is no US law that makes it illegal for you to smoke pot in Amsterdam. Conversely, if, say, money laundering is illegal in the US but not illegal in some other country, then while you are in the US if you conduct money laundering and use an overseas computer to store your records, when you are arrested in the US you can be demanded to turn over your electronic records. The US is not conducting an illegal search or seizure of your overseas computer. They are demanding that *you* produce those records, and they can find you in comtempt of court or obstructing justice if you do not. There's no need to apply for a search warrant in that overseas country unless the US government wants to actually go there and perform a search. There is no reason they need to do that if they do not want to conduct a search. They can still demand you turn over material evidence of a crime. I have no problem with that whatsoever.

The CIA is an "independent agency" of the federal government, but that term does not refer to being independent of the executive branch of government, rather its a technical term that means it operates independently of the specific executive departments such as the Department of State or Department of Defense (which are overseen by cabinet secretaries that must be confirmed by Congress). Constitutionally the CIA is a part of the executive branch. The Congress and the Executive have joint oversight of the CIA, but the Constitutional authority Congress has to oversee the CIA (or any part of the executive) is an implied power of Congress to see that the laws it passes are executed faithfully: Congress does not explicitly have the Constitutional power to direct the activities of the CIA except by passing laws. Ultimately, the CIA acts (or is Constitutionally required to act) on behalf of the President and the Executive branch in accordance with Congressional laws.

Constitutionally speaking, I'm not sure its possible for any federal agency to either belong to more than one branch of government, or alternatively belong to none. with the weird twisted historical quirk of the Office of the Vice President. Separation of powers demands that no agency (or individual) have simultaneously more than one of the power to enact legislation, execute legislation, and adjudicate legislation. I'm not sure if its possible for a federal agency to neither make laws, execute laws, or judge laws. There would be nothing left for it to do and still be a part of the federal government. If an agency can't do two or more, and can't do none, it can only do one of those. And that would automatically make it a Constitutional member of that branch of government. Congress doesn't even have the power to make a law that tries to create such a situation, because I believe that law would be ruled unconstitutional.

They were accused of doing this I believe, but the admission they made in the article that referenced the CIA internal investigation didn't claim that. I'm not saying they didn't do it, only that the article being discussed didn't assert that.

As to your last statement, there is no specific presumption that the Senate has direct authority over the CIA. In fact, under the Constitution the Senate cannot directly order the CIA to do anything as that would be a violation of separation of powers. What the CIA violated was an agreement made between the CIA (essentially the Executive) and the Senate to allow the Senate access to CIA files under certain conditions without interference. Without that agreement in place, the CIA would have broken no laws in monitoring the Senate's use of their network (that I'm aware of), no different than I would be within my legal rights to monitor the Senate's access to my network, even if court-ordered. The exact same logic also says any direct tampering of Congress' computers by the CIA would be illegal because it would represent unconstitutional interference between the two branches of government. It rarely comes to this, but the Supreme Court almost always rules that when any of the three branches of government (including the Judiciary) either directly tampers with or even gives up too much discretion to another, its unconstitutional. So unconstitutional the Supreme Court has in the past ruled that even when Congress passes a law to *grant* the Executive the right to intrude on some of their constitutional power the law itself is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced.

Its mostly for that reason I said the CIA operatives should have known better. Tampering with another branch of government is such a constitutional hot rail that you shouldn't even assume an actual law that says you can do it is automatically enough to make it legal. Presidential executive order should also not be sufficient on its face without enormous review. The default position should be to never go anywhere near this legal principle except in certain very specific circumstances (for example, its obvious the FBI has to be able to investigate illegal activity being conducted by members of other branches of government; that can't be considered unconstitutional).

The problem here is that its one thing to simply assume Brennan was lying, but its another thing to prove it. The fact that he now says an internal investigation shows members of the CIA did monitor systems operated by Congress doesn't mean he was lying when he testified they did not. It could mean that he simply didn't know, and if that's the case your prosecution would go nowhere.

You could argue he should have known, but there's two complications here. The first is that the conduct was uncovered as part of an internal CIA investigation, not an external investigator, so attempting to prosecute Brennan would be punishing him not for the misconduct, but the fact he was willing to uncover and admit it. All you would be doing is encouraging people to remain silent. The second thing is that the conduct he admitted to is not as clean-cut as the headline suggests. Apparently what happened was that the CIA created a special firewall within the actual CIA network that they configured to allow Senate investigators to gain access to CIA files. It was this firewall the CIA monitored, which had the net effect of monitoring the Senate's access to the CIA. Even that is basically illegal, but assuming you could monitor what other people did to your network sounds like the sort of mistake a lot of people would make. It would be legal in almost any other setting, but not specifically in this context.

The CIA personnel still should have known better, or rather should have known they were on questionable ground and sought very high level authorization to take that action, but I don't think this is the kind of smoking gun people think it is.

I think the degree to which the current administration aggressively attempts to prosecute whistleblowers is significantly higher than in previous administrations, but that's a subjective opinion of mine (that others share, of course). The question is whether its obviously more secretive, and its struggles with journalists notwithstanding I'm not sure that's objectively true.

Where I would agree is that for an administration that campaigned on transparency, it certainly does not meet the higher expectations that claim deserves.

On the subject of "crashed hard drives" I've seen a lot of general incompetence both in the private and public sector. So much so its very difficult to distinguish incompetence from malfeasance, because incompetence is so common. Its like the cable repair guy trying to claim as an alibi for a crime that he was several hours late getting to the alleged crime scene. On the one hand, that would be convenient. On the other hand, on any other day it would probably also be expected.

You are misusing that information. The graph you link to is the derivative classification activity graph. It doesn't show classification events. It shows classified document *usage*. Basically, that graph is the number of times a previously classified document was reused somewhere else. Quote from the report: "Derivative classification is the act of incorporating, paraphrasing, restating, or generating in new form information that is already classified."

The actual graph of documents classified is on page 5 of the same report (page nine of the PDF), which is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind.... That graph shows that original classification events (documents classified) peaked in recent times in 2004 during the Bush administration (they were even higher during the Reagan administration), and in 2011 were down 64% from that peak (127,072 vs 351,150).

On what basis do you judge that? On the fact that in the past, you didn't hear about all the things the government kept secret?

Both the initial drone strike program and the NSA surveillance programs were initially authorized and then kept secret during the Bush administration. The difference between then and now is not that this administration has kept them secret, but that they were discovered during this administration. What seems to be different is that during this administration more secret programs are coming to light rather than they are keeping significantly more secrets.

I often wonder how it is people forget that the Reagan administration included such gems as the Iran-Contra illegal arms sales and a huge number of federal investigations leading to indictment by executive officials (including James Watt, the former Secretary of the Interior), Bill Clinton was actually impeached by Congress (but not convicted), and George W. Bush started a war with Iraq costing thousands of American lives based on information we now know the administration knew was highly questionable. Even in the current far more partisan atmosphere far more Reagan officials were actually indicted or convicted of actual federal crimes, and last I checked the current administration hasn't started any questionable wars leading to thousands of casualties. Not to excuse any misconduct on the part of the current administration, but I think its an exaggeration to say this administration is objectively more secretive or less competent. It certainly isn't objectively more criminal.

Anyone remember Dick Cheney once attempted to claim simultaneously that as a member of the executive branch (being the Vice President) that he could claim executive immunity and refuse to disclose information to Congress, but also that as a member of the Senate (being the Constitutional President of the Senate by virtue of being the Vice President) the rules that apply to executive officers (including the President) when it came to security oversight did not apply to him? That's the standard upon which to judge the degree to which the current administration is "not transparent." Its a high hurdle.

If you want to go that far, what matters is that the Constitution states that the US Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution, not ordinary citizens. There are no exceptions to that rule listed within the Constitution.

The "news" he is posting is not that his phone sucks, but rather posing the (very reasonable) question of why crappy hardware tends on average to survive less unscathed in the marketplace while crappy software and feature implementations tend to survive far more readily, and poses a possible answer: that crappy hardware tends to be easy to quantify and thus summarize and highlight, while crappy software and features tend to be more subjective and more difficult to highlight in simple and concise ways to the consumer. And its not the case you can just say "buyer beware" because if a high percentage of consumers are unlikely or incapable of making such informed decisions, their purchasing power will allow the market to fill with bad software, even to the point of precluding or at least making it difficult for good software to survive to the point where educated consumers can find and purchase it. Finding ways to better educate the general masses about poorly designed or implemented software can have payoffs not just for the uneducated consumer, but also for the educated consumer that may not need that information but would benefit from the forcing function it would impress on the overall market.

Not exactly. For one thing, whether the US Constitution explicitly grants the Federal government to "interfere in X" is subject to interpretation, and has to be because the US Constitution makes a lot of common sense assumptions about how government works: that's why so many early Supreme Court rulings invoked (British) common law. The critical catch-all clause in the Constitution is Article 1 Section 8: "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof." Even at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution people debated the degree to which this clause expanded the powers of Congress.

James Madison argued in Federalist 44 that because it would be futile to attempt to anticipate all of the specific powers Congress (and the Federal government) would need for all time, the Constitution *must* grant the federal government any power necessary to fulfill the obligations the Constitution proscribes. He directly stated that trying to enumerate all of the powers the Constitution grants with explicit text would be ridiculous.

Because the question of what is "necessary and proper" is not an absolutely objective standard and the drafters of the Constitution knew this the Constitution can't be said to express explicitly enumerated powers. Even strict constructionists concede at least some of the power granted by the Constitution is implied by the intent of its text and not explicitly stated. And if you're concerned about any expansion of the Constitution's powers as being power-mongering, consider this: the Bill of Rights does not guarantee anyone in the US actually has those rights: it guarantees that the Federal Government can't intrude on them. Nothing anywhere in the text of the Constitution explicitly prohibits state governments from trampling all over, say, someone's First Amendment rights to free speech. The notion that state governments must honor the same limitations that the Constitution places upon the Federal government is another one of those power-mongering BS interpretations of the Constitution, namely the incorporation doctrine of the Fourteenth Amendment. Read the 14th Amendment: nowhere in the text does it say that States must incorporate the protections of the Bill of Rights, and nowhere in the first ten amendments does it state those protections apply to State governments, only the federal government. The incorporation doctrine of the Supreme Court was created over fifty years after the passage of the 14th Amendment, and argued that the implication of the due process clause of the 14th Amendment implies State governments must incorporate the same protections as the Federal government. But try to find that in the text.

Incidentally, the eighteenth amendment which prohibited the sale of alcohol doesn't prove that banning alcohol requires a Constitutional Amendment. The opponents of alcohol pushed for a Constitutional Amendment because it was the strongest possible ban they could strive for and they felt it was achievable. Not only could they ban alcohol sales in every State without having to convince every state to ratify the amendment, once ratified the only way to overturn the ban would be to generate enough support to amend the Constitution again: the ban could not be trivially overturned the way any Congressional law can be by successive Congresses. Its also important to note history: the (anti-alcohol) temperance movement was a very politically powerful special interest back in the day. They wielded significant power over elected officials in state legislatures. The 18th Amendment that banned alcohol sales was ratified by state legislatures, pushed strongly by temperance supporters. But the 21st Amendment that repealed the 18th Amendment was ratified by state ratification conventions which bypassed state legislatures and essentially took the matter to the people directly (via delegations to the state convention). In other words, the reason why Constitutional Amendments were the battleground for prohibition has as much to do with the political landscape of the time as anything else. The temperance people had the stranglehold on state legislatures and could get a Constitutional Amendment passed via state legislature ratification, but when opposition to prohibition reached high levels among the people Congress was able to get a separate Constitutional Amendment passed that revoked prohibition that didn't need their support.

The right answer is you build in as much redundancy as you can, but you still do the work in as careful a manner as possible during downtime windows when necessary so that you don't waste the redundancy you have. You will look like the world's biggest idiot if spend a huge amount of money and design resources maing sure you have two of everything for redundancy, and while you're cavalierly upgrading the B systems because you have redundancy the A systems go down. Which they will, precisely when you bring down B for middle of the day upgrades, because the god of maintenance hates you, always has hated you, and always will hate you.

If you can afford N+2 or N+3 redundancy *everywhere* then you shouldn't be asking anyone else for availability advice.

People often fail to try hard enough to make the test environment (assuming they even have one) match the production environment, but for some problems test never matches production, and essentially never can: some problems only reveal themselves under production *conditions*. For example, I recently spent a significant amount of time involved in the troubleshooting of a kernel bug that only arose under a very specific (and still not fully characterized) set of disk loads. Test loads including tests involving loads several times higher than the production load did not uncover the bug, which caused kernel faults, and the faults randomly started occurring about a week after the software patch went live.

You should try to keep test as close as possible to production so testing on it has any validity at all, but you should never assume that testing on the test environment *guarantees* success on production. Its for that reason that, responding to the OP, I have never attempted to do any serious production upgrades in an automated and unattended fashion, and not while I'm alive will any such thing happen on any system I have authority over. As far as I'm concerned, if you decide to automate and go to sleep, make sure your resume is up to date before you do because you might not have a job when you wake up, if you guess wrong.

Even if you guess right, I might decide to fire you anyway if anyone working for me decided to do that without authorization.

It is absolute, in that it absolutely doesn't exist. There is no "right to remain silent" in the literal sense. The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution specifies that no one "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." Nowhere is there the explicit or implicit Constitutional right to not speak under all circumstances. The difference between not speaking and not being a witness against one's self is not a semantic technicality. For example, if given immunity from prosecution, people can be compelled (in the US) to testify because they can no longer incriminate themselves, and therefore the right to not be a witness against him or herself cannot be violated by definition. Furthermore, although many articles state that people have been jailed for not actually uttering their passwords, that's often a misstatement: they can be ordered by a court to decrypt data without actually giving the literal password to authorities, and surrendering the data itself is not being asked to testify against one's self: its seizing property or evidence of a crime which someone can be compelled to due when ordered to do so under lawful due process. Being asked to decrypt files is not an exception to the rules, its fully within the current requirement for anyone when compelled by a court to produce documents, materials, or other property or material goods.

A recent court case highlighted this very distinction, in that the judge ruled that being asked if one has or knows the passwords protecting incriminating files is potentially asking someone to incriminate themselves, and the person can refuse to answer any such question. However, if its been proven that the person is capable of decrypting the files they can with due process be ordered to do so, whether they reveal the actual passwords or not. They are not being asked to speak against themselves when they are asked to produce data that they have been proven to have access to, and there is no legal right to hide incriminating evidence.

I don't think its either fair or reasonable to state that files in a locked cabinet can be subpoenaed and people can face criminal penalties if they do not comply, but files in an encrypted hard drive cannot be just because of the technology. And I don't see any specific right being violated any more than a conventional subpoena would for actual material paperwork.

It would be different, in the specific case where some people are suggesting that robots could *literally* make everyone but the very rich redundant and disposable, which implies that robots could produce basically everything the rich people - and by extension, anyone - need to live their lives. That would be a radical change, because it would not just make workers redundant, it would also make rich people redundant, something I think they are not likely to try to accomplish on their own.

Its not about being the source of economic output, in the dystopic future some describe of robots literally making human beings entirely redundant its about eliminating the need for an economy at all. Wealth only has value when it can be used to buy things other people are willing to sell. Rich people are only rich because other people want their money. In the robot-dominated future, rich people can't be rich if the non-rich don't want or need their money. Sam Walton only got rich because people wanted to buy his stuff. In a future where the poor are decimated and only rich people remain, there's no future for Walmart and no rich Waltons. There's no rich Zuckerberg when there are only rich people. There's no rich Carlos Slim, no rich Oprah Winfrey, no rich Sheldon Adelson. In capitalist societies the rich can usually only get rich if there exists people with enough wealth willing to spend it to make them rich. The rich might exploit the poor, but they need them to actually exist, and actually the more money the non-rich have the better it is for the rich overall. Some "rich assholes" don't get that, but most actually do.