This kind of thing makes me think the Snowden disclosures actually emboldened the NSA in some ways. Their nightmare scenario occurred, and nothing happened. Nobody even got fired or "resigned". The public's tepid reaction has brought our nightmare scenario to life - we taught secretive government agencies that they can now do anything they want without fear of public backlash. These kinds of requests can now dramatically increase, with neither judges, politicians, or the NSA itself living in fear of anyone.
I don't, but then anything is possible. They could have invented Snowden in response to a credible threat from someone else that was planning to leak this or other even more sensitive materials. Anybody making similar disclosures today would have a tough time getting any attention because the Snowden story drew so little public outrage.
Zimmerman perhaps. We're still not out of that story yet so it may grow bigger with protests, etc., but it's still a US centric story. Deen even more so,
Snowden has gotten a lot more international coverage.
To back that up from across the pond: the PRISM/Snowden story has been major news in the UK. Zimmerman was headline news, but only for a day or two, and I don't know who Paula Deen is.
You're right, it is a sweeping generalization. It'd be better to say that most of the mainstream media serves as the government mouthpiece. A few key outlets continue to serve the vital role of breaking important stories such as this one.
When they regurgitate the content of a government press release or briefing without challenging both its basic premises and noteworthy claims, which they all do every single day, many times a day, the popular news media perfectly inhabits the role of "government mouthpiece". This includes the many instances of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other press-release ping-pong between the two allegedly opposed narratives provided by our two allegedly opposed political parties.
The media didn't break anything. Snowden gave them the story, which they have mostly ignored in favor of hit pieces against him as a traitor and a coward.
Unfortunately I believe @northernmonkey and all OP's are talking about the "average American" and maybe the "average human". After all, in the US anyway, aren't we-the-people the government? That would make the MSM a mouthpiece for... the average American. I believe that is more or less true as sad as it is.
Aware and concerned tech-heads are trying to protect a drunken fool (the public) from a hungry bear (whoever it is that actually runs the intelligence networks). Either one is dangerous enough on its own, trying to save one from the other is like trying to settle a domestic dispute... not sure it can happen.
> Aware and concerned tech-heads are trying to protect a drunken fool (the public) from a hungry bear (whoever it is that actually runs the intelligence networks).
Sorry, I miscommunicated. I was saying that the person you responded to was being an idiot by calling the general public drunken fools (true or not) and that it's a bad thing to lower to that level of discourse by retaliating in such a content-free manner because you won't change anybody's mind that way. I.e. your position is good, but it's only through expressing ourselves well that we can have an influence on others.
Of course if it was just to feel good about calling out idiocy then it's not necessary to put in much effort countering it.
heh... missed this rabbit trail. Forgive me for the offense. s/Drunken fool/uncaringly ignorant/. @all, Thanks for the correction whether harsh or gentle, I don't mind. If its called for, tone is less relevant.
You apparently missed the fact that the Obama administration had a full scale Democratic congressional revolt on its hands yesterday - a majority of congressional Dems voted to defund the NSA collection of bulk call records under FISA - the White House was seriously afraid the Amash Ammendment would pass - it only failed narrowly - 217 to 205. So in objective terms, the response has been far worse than the administration expected. And this policy tussle isn't over yet.
i think the issue is: 10% of the people are informed enough to realize what's going, and yes, some of them are acting. the majority of Americans don't know what's going on, and many of them don't care, which is sad.
True and true. If I am not mistaken, What we've witnessed from James Clapper and General Alexander, it is legal for representatives from our federal surveillance agencies
to openly lie in a Congressional oversight hearing.
This of course, if fact, is insane, and will only lead into extralegal catastrophe. Learn to read and reread `Clapperspeak'. When you look for it and know a little context, we see how entrenched and truthfully revealing it is:
"And Ye Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Make You Free"
- John 8:32, and the entrances of NSA, Fort Meade, Maryland, and the CIA HQ, Langley, VA
"Arbeit macht frei"
-Auschwitz, and the entrances of other Nazi slave labor camps during World War II
I think many of us in the United States saw this coming when the current administration stated they would not be addressing the previous administration's law breaking.
The law is now "in your face" optional, depending on how much money and/or power is involved. Power has always had undue influence, it is just flagrant now.
From what I read, this is fairly common among many countries, so I take it as part of the "human condition."
I don't know what would have to happen for you to consider the response substantial. Would citizens need to be forming militias and actively marching in the streets? That's just not how people react anymore.
Tens of thousands of people called their congresspeople on a day's notice to express their support for the Amash Amendement. That amendment lost by only 12 votes. A large majority of people polled think that the NSA dragnet is infringing on privacy rights. I think that's pretty good for a notoriously apathetic populace. This issue is far from over.
Tens of thousands caring out of a population of 350 million is 0.03% of the population. That's kinda tepid. But should Paula Deen have been fired from Food Network? Crisis of epic proportions!
You might want to consume different sources of news media. The only times I've heard the name "Paula Deen" was in conversation with my parents and grandparents. I'm sure her travails (whatever they are or were) amount to a crisis for some people, but you don't have to pay attention to those people.
That may have been true for whichever couple of days the talking heads devoted to the unfortunate Ms. Dean, but it simply isn't borne out over the long haul. If you look really hard, I doubt you can find a single piece about Dean that was produced today, while most outlets have several about Snowden.
You can't find a piece about Paula Deen today because the attention has shifted to Prince George. Which, by the way, is exactly the point: While there are people who care about Snowden, NSA, etc., they are not currently any kind of substantial part of the public. We all ignore that at our peril.
The fact that Snowden may be a larger-than-normal individual news story doesn't change the fact that the story doesn't capture public attention in the face of the multitudes of other news stories continually cropping up and then going away again.
Prince Who? Look, I'm an American. We fought several wars to confirm that we don't have to give a flying fuck about King George III or any of his syphilitic inbred descendants.
Oh. Your parents and grandparents aren't Americans, then?
Look, if you hang with the hipsters who "consume" better media, then sure, you won't have any clue what the vast majority of the public cares about. It's not surveillance. It's whatever mass opiate has been focus-grouped out for the week.
In the meantime, though, that mass opiate is mainlined into every public space in the land on countless television monitors in essentially every place where a person has to spend more than 30 seconds. They've got no time to think about the future - they've got to be outraged about this week's 15-minute hate, or admire this week's baby, or fear this week's terrorist.
You may simply not visit those downscale places. Good on you. But Washington really doesn't care, except to the extent that you earn more money they can extract or possibly build more centralized data processing services they can mine.
Not even 500 people made it out to support the July 4 protest of the NSA, in a country where tens of thousands of people will turn out to oppose gay marriage.
Depending on what polls you read, a majority of Americans think the NSA policy is acceptable: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/most-americans-suppor.... ("Overall, 56 percent of Americans consider the NSA’s accessing of telephone call records of millions of Americans through secret court orders 'acceptable,' while 41 percent call the practice 'unacceptable.')
The real news here is that Congress reacted more strongly than the public!
Maybe that's because they know how this power can and will be used against them. What's the likelihood of this blackmail power being used against an ordinary citizen? Very low (why bother?). Against a congressman? Well...
A few tens of k's is remarkable. There's a fallacy of thinking "people aren't doing anything about it, therefore they don't care".
In fact, people don't "do something" because they estimate, rightly or wrongly, that they can't do anything that would make a difference. Millions worldwide protested the current US wars when they were getting started, but they went ahead on schedule. What, exactly, can citizens do to effectively influence their government anymore? If people perceive that rule of law is gone, the rational reaction is to "lie low" and hope to get thru these times unnoticed. Those still contacting congress may be old enough to remember a different USA and naive enough to not realize it is gone.
What you say is true, but misses an important consideration: yesterday, only tinfoil hats believed they couldn't trust third-party companies with their privacy. Today, everyone knows that the only way to have privacy is to handle it personally, from their local computer.
The whole PRISM scheme worked because people supposed the government respected their privacy. Now that it's been proven false, I expect people to use local encryption schemes, were third parties can't give a key they don't have. I expect people to become careful about which certification authority signed their SSL key, and to use self-signed certificates whenever practical. Targeted spying will remain possible, but indiscriminate surveillance PRISM-style would become impractical.
Unless they know how to crack TLS, but we have no reason to believe this as of today.
> Today, everyone knows that the only way to have privacy is to handle it personally, from their local computer.
I agree with you, but I think you have far too much faith in ordinary Americans. I invented some widely used anti-phishing technology, and I can tell you that spending a few months analyzing actual incidents where otherwise intelligent people did ridiculously unsafe things on the Internet will give you a new perspective on the tech savvy of the general population. Unless we (the tech community) make strong security both transparent to the user and enabled by default, the feds will be seeing everything they do. Sadly, most of them seem OK with that.
That's the great thing about software, especially Free software - all it takes is a handful of us to make systems where strong security is transparent and enabled by default and it will proliferate to all the regular people.
OK, I should have written "everyone that matters"; the point is to have a critical mass of expensive-to-eavesdrop communications, so that the NSA cannot routinely exploit much more than teenager gossips traded through Facebook.
Moreover, even if only the 10% best informed people use PRISM-proof communications, it's a safe bet that NSA's alleged targets (whatever the current definition of "terrorist" might be) are among them, so the argument that they're doing that to catch "terrorists" doesn't hold water anymore.
I believe the tech community is concerned about this, because it threatens the robustness of Internet. Today, nobody in the business can pretend with a straight face that top-level certification authorities are trustworthy; so I expect the next generation of security protocols, the successors of the (transparent and enabled by default) SSL, to treat governments as opponents.
I also believe that companies will change their security patterns, e.g. stop trusting American third parties such as Microsoft if they have competitors with political connections in Washington.
Self signed certificates throw up all kinds of nasty "you're taking lots of risks" in browsers (if they're allowed at all). I would not expect that they will be more broadly used than before, particularly since installing a self-signed certificate locally is very hard to do for the average person.
And looping back to the tin-foil hatters, many of us have called into question why all browsers have, over time, decreased their support for self-signed certificates. There are modes wherein Firefox will not even offer the "proceed anyway" option [1]. Conspiracy theories abound, but the browsers' marginalization of self-signed certificates has always struck me as devious.
Yes, please do alert users that self-signed certificates are potentially sourced by nefarious organizations. But in most cases, they are used by small companies and individuals to simply encrypted content from trusted servers. So allow them to be permanently trusted.
Perhaps we will see an increase in interest in web-of-trust alternatives?
I don't see it follows. If anything, self-signed certs just make it easier for the NSA (or anyone else) to capture your traffic. Organizations should probably set up their own CA instead.
That's what we meant. IIRC you can't even use a self-signed certificate directly for authentication: you have to create your own self-signed root CA, then use it to sign you authentication certificate.
The point is, if what you do interest the US government, it can compel Verisign and the likes to betray your trust, so you shouldn't trust them. And what emerges progressively is that the threshold beyond which you're deemed "interesting" by US administrations is way lower than long believed.
If you're a company doing international business, you want to secure your strategic communications with your own root CA, not with that of a company who can't say no to the government.
Even on your local computer, it's probably a good idea to avoid operating systems that may be compromised by default. Also be careful about installing extra software, including browser plug-ins and addons. I am preaching to the converted though.
> it's probably a good idea to avoid operating systems that may be compromised by default.
It is if you're targeted. But then, if the US government is after you, you're already screwed anyway.
The point is to impede generalized surveillance of everyone without probable cause. Even if MS-Windows and OSX are bugged, which is almost certain, the NSA can't siphon all your data through your routers inconspicuously. It can only grab selected data from the computers of high-value targets, at a considerable cost, which is fine.
It's not about preventing states from surveilling legitimate suspects, it's about forcing them to respect the privacy of average joes, and limiting their control on the Internet as a whole.
It's unfortunate but not surprising how little coverage this whole thing has had. I think as tech savvy individuals we need to do a better job of informing people of these events. The media won't care unless people care.
Like with everything else than maybe virus outbreak, most changes takes time to affect entire community, economy or a country. Rome wasn't built in a day, so the Rome Empire didn't collapse in a day neither.
Take me as an example. I am 8 years in US, married to US citizen. Green Card holder now and couple years ago our plan was for me to become a US Citizen and us to raise our kids on US soil. Not anymore.
With all the outcoming gov scandals, with government forcing you to vaccine your kids, with you or your children going to jail for drawing a gun, for swat team breaking into your house because you are selling raw milk, for all this growing nonsense and my personal disgust with president that calls death of 4 us officials in Bengazi a "phony scandal", I am genuinely sick and disgusted of this to my deeper core. And here comes important part: so you say to me in response: if you don't like it, move out! And you are damn right!
We made this decision recently and right now my wife is learning my native language while I am shifting more towards doing more remote programming gigs. Surprisingly after I moved here from the country of communism, now it seems safer and more sane back in Europe than here! Europe has its problems of course, but honestly I believe Europe will deteriorate much slower than US. Here everything is on fast forward and yes examples like Manning or Snowden revelations and lack of echo makes it hard to believe anything will change for better in the future.
I believe I am not the only one who draw this conclusion lately. I also think that many smart people coming to this country to live "american dream" are also smart enough to realize the economical situation become so unstable that its better to "wait and see" back home.
Thanks for your perspective. I wonder which hot-button you pushed that caused the downvotes? My suspicion would be vaccination, but I'm not ruling out the gun-illustration (the word "drawing" is ambiguous in this case) or Bengazi...
Indeed, the downvotes seem bizarre to me. This response just looks like somebody sharing their experience in the matter in a coherent way. It could also be someone who doesn't want attention drawn away from their post.
Anyhow, I'm in Canada right now, and am in the next few years probably looking to change careers. I have good contacts with several top-tier tech companies in the US, and also with the auto industry and big oil. I've never really had much of a desire to live in the US, but now more than ever I'm finding myself looking to other potentially less lucrative positions just because of my distaste, much like the post above.
It really doesn't feel like a good time to be living in the US as a foreigner with an engineering degree, a very foreign sounding name and very liberal views. :-/
With all the outcoming gov scandals, with government forcing you to vaccine your kids...
All other points aside for a moment: the government should force each and every parent to vaccinate their children. Herd immunity is a key factor in protecting most of the population from many awful diseases, and herd immunity is only effective if the vast majority are vaccinated. There's no credible evidence that vaccination causes autism or any other malady.
Yes vaccination is NOT a billion dollar business, vaccines do not kill people, and its perfectly logic you need to get shots against other peoples diseases BUT at the same time those who don't become a danger to you, yes.
I know you are probably far too far down that rabbit hole to hear me, but herd immunity is vital for those who do not have the option of getting vaccinated.
> I could go on and on here like the vaccines business is create problem & offer solution infinite loop
Except that we know the backstory to this particular chicken/egg problem, and we know that in this case vaccines came last, after the problem they were meant to solve (and, substantially speaking, have solved).
America's longest-serving President was crippled no less than 100 years ago by a disease which vaccination can now prevent, and you're blaming Big Pharma for that???
1st off, the last link you have there is a brilliant example of a failure to use Bayesian reasoning.
> its perfectly logic you need to get shots against other peoples diseases BUT at the same time those who don't become a danger to you
You don't understand herd immunity. It amplifies a weak individual immune boost (say, a 40% effictive vaccine) into a dramatic effect on the actual number of people who get sick.
Here's how it works: consider the average number of new people an infected person will infect (call this number k). If k>1 (1.01 even), the disease very likely explodes across the face of the earth and turns into an epidemic or pandemic. If k<1 (.99 even), it fizzles and only a few get sick (do a stochastic simulation if you must). Point is, we care a lot about making k<1 by any means possible.
Vaccines are hard to make and not very effective in the sense that there is only maybe a 40% chance they will stop you from getting sick if others around you are sick. But that 40% success rate dramatically effects k so long as everyone gets vaccinated: if k<1.6 pre-vaccination, our hypothetical vaccine turns a pandemic into a fizzle.
If you're one of the assholes who spoil the whole thing by not getting vaccinated, your peers have every right to get angry with you. I wish you could be collectively sued for your effect on an outbreak, but I'll settle for a bit of government incentive.
> vaccines do not kill people
The FDA and EMA are dramatically overcautious when it comes to this kind of thing (they minimize the number of lives lost to drugs and vaccines even at the expense of not minimizing total lives lost). If you think otherwise, safety and efficacy studies are public. Start with primary sources, avoid hokey nonsense like what you posted. The FDA site is a mess but google can usually find specific studies with filetype:pdf.
> the vaccines business is create problem & offer solution
Pretty sure it's evolution (of bacteria and viruses) creating the problem, not drug companies. Or do you not believe in evolution either?
I wasn't clear in my first post. I am not against major vaccines, the problem is that today by age 8 you have many more shoot than those you had only 20 years ago. I fail to believe life on Earth change soo much that we all need so many more shots to survive.
Like with any other business, pharma sees opportunity to oversell and creates tons of unnecessarily shots that your local CSV loves to advertise. I also personally know an example of an older man who got a shot and 2 weeks later got sick exactly on something he was getting shot against. It doesnt make sense.
I'm not a doctor, but having had small kids in the US and in New Zealand I noticed a marked difference in the number of jabs that are recommended. I don't know the reasons for this but the idea that it may be correlated with a larger impact of business incentives in insurance-company US versus single payer NZ doesn't seem wildly implausible to me.
> today by age 8 you have many more shoot than those you had only 20 years ago
There are two factors at play. One is evolution: there's a new flu every year (bacteria and virii can meaningfully evolve in less than a year, even). The other is that we are finding ways to vaccinate against more and more diseases. The diseases always existed, but your odds of catching them were higher then than they are now even if you don't vaccinate yourself because of herd immunity. There are still plenty of diseases we don't know how to vaccinate against, so expect the trend to continue.
> pharma sees opportunity to oversell
Yeah, and the US system is particularly vulnerable to those pressures. There are still protections: you couldn't get a placebo approved, even a well designed one. But single-payer systems are much better at focusing on efficacy. The other side to that is the US gets drugs first and sometimes exclusively. Just because a vaccine falls below the threshold of what the EU is willing to pay doesn't mean it won't save hundreds or thousands of lives in the US. We pay twice as much for health care and this is one of the (very) few extra privileges we enjoy as a result. Best take advantage of it :)
> older man who got a shot and 2 weeks later got sick exactly on something he was getting shot against
I still don't think you grok herd immunity. Vaccines do very little to protect the individual. If you would have gotten sick before the vaccine, you would probably still get sick after the vaccine. But if everyone gets vaccinated, the disease dies away.
It's like a nuclear bomb. Below critical mass, it's just moderately radioactive. Above critical mass, you get a huge explosion. Vaccines keep a disease from getting to critical mass. They don't stop individuals from getting sick very well (they don't stop the radioactivity) but they reduce it just enough to prevent pandemics (nulear explosions).
Even if we are 100% clear that there is no evidence that vaccination causes any malady, government mandates requiring that the government chooses what things should be injected into every single citizen crosses a very important line of freedom of action for me. Just like the argument that you may not agree with someone but will defend their rights to say it. I may not agree with an anti-vaccination person but I would defend to the end every persons right to liberty (that is choice) in regards to government mandates as to invasive procedures, pills, or injections. We have to think of the future implications of precedents like that.
The problem is it is not about your freedom and safety. It's about the freedom and safety of others. Herd-Immunity is essential for protecting those who can't be vacinated because of allergies or age. By refusing vaccinating you aren't just giving up your ability to be protected from these life-threatening diseases, you're also endangering others. The government has these laws for the same reason we have laws against drunk driving. You have the right to endanger yourself however you want; however, you have zero right to endanger another human.
Your position would be more clearly stated if you said that the problem is weighing freedom against safety. There I agree with you. It is not my freedom from government mandated medical injections or procedures the needs to be weighed against safety for the herd but rather the importance of freedom of choice generally weighed against safety for all. Also, the government does not have these laws. This is a line leglislaters have not crossed, and good thing too, given the importance of setting good precedents around medical ethics in a fast advancing field.
You can call it boldness, but at this point I'm not sure how you'd distinguish it from an extinction burst[1], or "getting while the getting's still good."
reply