The way I summarize these problems is that the problem with most college graduates is that they thought and behaved as if the purpose of their college years was to learn stuff, when it was really to learn how to learn stuff. The first skill you will need in most of the jobs you might get after college is learning. You should have had a lot of practice if you approached college right, which most don't. You're right that *what* you learned in school does not and cannot prepare you for joining the workforce, but *practicing the act of learning* a wide range of skills and thought processes can prepare you very well.

I tell people if you want to be a professional, college is professional learning on training wheels. If the thought of learning as much as all the learning you did in college every couple of years until you die is not appealing, consider a non-technical non-professional career. Because you're going to suck at it otherwise.

When people stop using "lowest common denominator" to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means, I'll reconsider "begs the question."

Also, the begs the question website is trying to preserve the meaning of an idiom: idioms have special meanings beyond the literal meaning of the words. Which means if they were as strict linguistically then as the begs the question website is trying to be now, "begs the question" wouldn't mean what they want it to mean either.

Which begs the question: who are the BA, Hannibal, and Murdock of the leaks.

The difference is the modulating mechanics appear different: the Wifi system described is an ambient backscatter system while the NSA catalog describes the system as a retroreflector: retroreflectors are designed to reflect signals back to the sender with minimal scattering: inducing a modulation on the return wave creates an information signal. Backscatters work by absorbing or reflecting incident signals; the absorption of the signals generates a distinguishing pattern from the reflective signal taking advantage of the power level of the scattered signal.

Because the modulating systems are different, the wifi backscatter system can be designed to use far less power than the retroreflector system, which appears to use far more power (not just "a little less" and not even 2000x less, but a million times less or better).

The theory is not the same, the idea is not the same; they only appear so from the 20,000 foot view of "dey both do stuff with radio waves." It is not even remotely the same as saying a 5mcd LED is the same invention as a 10,000mcd LED. Although a backscatter system and a retroreflector both use radio waves, they don't even do the same things to those radio waves. Its more like the difference between a 5mcd LED and a toaster.

The "only" difference is a substantial difference. First, they do not need a high-powered signal illuminator to energize them. That's significant because that's the entire point of the invention: that it can self-power without a dedicated power source. The NSA systems (at least the published ones so far) use (relatively) powerful illuminators to energize and operate the reflectors. Second, by designing devices that can use the extremely small energy harvested by Wifi backscatter *and* use the same backscatter signals to modulate their transmissions, they could operate in areas that already have sufficient radio energy without significant extra investment.

To say the system being discussed is like the NSA system, just "over Wifi" is like saying the LED is like a candle, except "over silicon" and thus not novel enough for patent protection. The only original light source was the ignition of the first star in the cosmos. But that's not the hurdle required for patent protection.

That in itself is a highly dangerous position to take. The notion that people don't do bad things, even extremely bad things, by choice, but always because of an "illness" that can be "cured" it justifies attempting to "cure" people of being whatever society considers bad. I believe that's how the Reavers were created.

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.