This. Security will be taken a little more seriously, which helps a little. There will be a *little* more oversight and pushback within government, which helps a little. It's not a fix; it's patch. What we're seeing is very similar to the response that small companies tend to make to a major security breach--they plug that particular hole, they tighten security a little bit, and they respond a little bit to public concern. It's a net positive but still not enough considering the risk of abuse of mass surveillance.

We only have evidence that they're abusing it a little bit right now--like for parallel construction, which is flagrantly unconstitutional. The concern, and the time when we'll see people more thoroughly changing their habits, will be when (1) people realize their phone calls are being coded or recorded or listened to (this will freak out EVERYONE on wall street, who make phone calls when they do illegal things), and (2) the government starts publicly using some of the information it collects to charge people, discredit people, or target people for being disappeared and people realize it.

That's how it works in the tyrannical states. We're not there yet, but we've been close in the past (think McCarthy or Hoover and what they could have done with this mass surveillance apparatus). We have a lot of great guys in intelligence and I hope that continues to be the case--but without strong institutional safeguards, that's not enough to count on.

Now our government could use the information more subtly, just to influence events by digging up dirt on key players. That will be much harder to stop and is less likely to change public use of the communications infrastructure.

I mean, do you seriously believe that the NSA doesn't have dirt on every single presidential candidate? They may not be using it out of respect for the integrity of the democratic process or out of knowledge of how bad the blowback could be, but still.

40 kb? So that's like one call to printf("%s",szMars) ...

But by making it available you take some responsibility for the consequences of the reporting.

A bunch of reporters were kidnapped in the middle east around the Iraq conflict until it stopped being news and became less common. Then soldiers were kidnapped (IIRC in the lead-up to the Israel-Lebanon war) and the Press made a big deal about it, so they started kidnapping more soldiers. The Press shares some responsibility for the increase in soldier kidnappings. Not as much as the people who kidnapped the soldiers, but still some, because *without the press they would not have been kidnapped.*

The same thing is true for school shootings after Columbine.

And the same thing is true for 9/11. Right after the 1993 WTC car bombing, the news media began explaining of course the towers didn't come down *because they were designed to withstand the impact of an airplane.* Osama Bin Laden followed western news about his attacks; this suggested to him the idea of flying planes into the towers. Without media coverage and publicizing the fact that the towers were designed to withstand the impact of a plane, we probably would not have had hijacked planes flown into the twin towers.

News is important; coverage of important issues matters. But coverage of *single events*, when done without regard to the consequences, can cost a lot of lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Which is more likely : (1) the best-funded signals intelligence apparatus in the world is lying by choosing their words carefully and, while they likely have *some* limits on how they are allowed to search US-based data, they still keep it or arrange for someone else to in case they have to search it later, or (2) this top secret program is being transparent and 100% non-deceptive?

Remember, they have a history of lying to Congress and the public, of conducting massive surveillance that is warrantless and/or authorized by a minimal number of broad-scope warrants. And they have incentives to do so. And they operate almost entirely without real oversight--their public oversight consists of elected representatives with generally *zero* technical ability.

I believe there are a lot of great guys there, but it doesn't take many bad apples for flagrantly illegal programs to keep going, with all the weight of institutional momentum behind them. Institutional momentum is hard enough to change in *transparent* institutions.

Hey, I hope I'm wrong, and most of the people I've met who've worked for intelligence have been really great people. But then you get people who are just real assholes, or who should never be trusted with important decisions. I remember one guy saying the American people weren't *ready* for the war on terror to be over, so we should keep having it--his whole view of the thing was as an exercise in propaganda that justified all of the government overreach we've seen, and that was okay with him. He was a junior guy, and I've met much better guys who work in the community, so I'm not willing to say he's representative--but it's concerning. It's an entirely understandable perspective intellectually, just morally bankrupt and contrary to values of freedom from a policy standpoint. Get the wrong guys like that at the top, and you're fucked, and there's no outlet for good transparency.

I don't think what Snowden did was okay. But I do think he should have been able to complain at the very least to the Intelligence Committee without fear of reprisal, because otherwise the wrong guys in charge inside the intelligence community and Democracy is fucked.

there's no way they're building the data centers they are just to record metadata. It would be absurd to believe they're not recording the calls or having a third party do it. Or... does "metadata" include, for example, a series of hashes of the call content that lets you reproduce them with 98% accuracy, for example? :) It's just data about the call, after all...

Most of today's games don't have the same design. They're not really presenting you with intellectual puzzles for the most part, so much as advancing to the next level. You aren't having to figure out how not to be eaten by a grue, and even mazes are rare in today's games--things that require real use of thought or memory or other mental ability rather than just reaching for the next reward.

You would think so, but evidently not. If nobody cared, the State Department wouldn't time the release for take-out-the-trash Friday (the day when you get the least news cycle result). Instead, the timing points to an obviously politically motivated timing utterly inappropriate to a theoretically neutral unit of government.

Because it's not legal to contest illegal or erroneous arrests by physically resisting them. It's legal to contest them by pleading not guilty or by negotiating to get the charges dropped. It's also legal to sue the ass of the cop who arrested you.

Are these crazy comments a product of naive machine learning algorithms?

Or code used for illicit communications?

Any ideas?

The Dell Latitude E4300 I am typing this on concurs. And cost around $80 on ebay a year ago.

Because they have other skill-sets or experience you lack, at least if they were properly promoted.

A boss who doesn't know how to do your job but who trusts you when you say what you can or can't do or has an understanding of what you can or can't do can still be your boss in a useful way. If you're running a sports stadium, you don't have to know how to drive the Zamboni or run the concession stand, you have to know how to interface with the people responsible for them, as well as with the owners, etc...

Populism works by incentivizing politicians to do PR stunts drawing attention to issues people care about. This PR Stunt is much more important than 90% of Senate Business anyway.

Were they felonies where you confessed guilt or that were fairly routine? 100K might be a bit inflated, but not necessarily if you were to go all the way to trial... you have civil discovery costs on both sides and over 4000 photos, plus electronics experts on posting, plus the cost of motion practice, plus trial time, plus appeals. It really depends who you get to do the case, but it could certainly go to $30K pretty easily, and $100K under certain circumstances.

That being said, it's likely 5K before settlement.

It's not punishment for the kid. At the most it's punishment for the parent that makes a good parent make the kid see sense.

I got detention once in high school and it was just ridiculous. They didn't make you *do* anything, you just hung out in the Cafeteria for a few minutes and could read or do your work or whatever you wanted. They should have been at least making us mop up or something.

You are aware that perhaps a majority of nonprofits are shams designed to pull money out as salary and the like, right?