US Politics: The Ides of Mueller

[Gertrude]

I get having to use the internet for your job, but that’s not the same as a personal profile that we are talking about. Hobbies are entirely optional. I have internet dependent hobbies too, so I get it, but it is optional.

As for the time/money angle - it can be done, yes even for people with families and jobs. Maybe I have a different perspective as I grew up without internet. My parents still write checks and buy stamps, so it’s possible. It’s not as convenient, obviously, but it’s possible. Lots of people live off the grid because it’s important to them for whatever reason. They draw their lines differently than you and I do.

All I’m saying is that if something is convenient, there’s a price to be payed and people (in general) happily gave up personal information for the convenience and entertainment value of it all and trusted that things are ok because if it was bad, there’d be laws against it, right? I guess that’s the point.

There’s every reason to fight it and try to hold companies and governments accountable for best practices, but the genie has been out of the bottle for a long time now. I don’t see how it can be put back in the bottle without a lot of political will and, frankly, I have about zero hope for that. I honestly think that something a lot more catastrophic than micro-targeting and harvesting will have to happen before enough people find their voices and be loud enough to make officials/companies even think about getting serious about it instead of band-aiding the problem. 

And on a personal note, I don’t know that you weren’t outraged about it before the CA stuff, but your earlier quote about it happening faster than anyone imagined, or ‘what’s to be done about it, really?’ Made me think you were one of the people who might have been surprised at where this all led. And I might be wrong, but your two stances of ‘what’s do be done about it?’ And ‘if people accept this as the new normal, no one will fight for it’ don’t seem to square.

 

 

[Rippounet]

41 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

I get having to use the internet for your job, but that’s not the same as a personal profile that we are talking about. Hobbies are entirely optional. I have internet dependent hobbies too, so I get it, but it is optional.

Yeah, but I addressed that earlier by saying it's the stuff that really matters that is the hardest to protect. I meant everything linked to your job, with a professional profile that includes your home address, your bank details, your social security number... etc.
I don't care that much about the Facebook or the wargaming stuff tbh. Perhaps we aren't exactly talking about the same things here.

41 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

There’s every reason to fight it and try to hold companies and governments accountable for best practices, but the genie has been out of the bottle for a long time now. I don’t see how it can be put back in the bottle without a lot of political will and, frankly, I have about zero hope for that. I honestly think that something a lot more catastrophic than micro-targeting and harvesting will have to happen before enough people find their voices and be loud enough to make officials/companies even think about getting serious about it instead of band-aiding the problem.

Like a foreign power starting to interefere in the political life of our countries?

I don't have much hope either tbh.

41 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

And on a personal note, I don’t know that you weren’t outraged about it before the CA stuff, but your earlier quote about it happening faster than anyone imagined, or ‘what’s to be done about it, really?’ Made me think you were one of the people who might have been surprised at where this all led. And I might be wrong, but your two stances of ‘what’s do be done about it?’ And ‘if people accept this as the new normal, no one will fight for it’ don’t seem to square.

Yeah, I get that it might seem paradoxical. I was writing articles about the Patriot Act fifteen years ago and explaining to people that none of their information was secure, that they had to be careful about digitalisation and all that, and I'm still outraged and appalled by what's happening today.
I think I genuinely didn't see mass profiling being that useful. I remember thinking mostly about individual information at the time, but not about the way it could be compiled and weaponized.
The "what's to be done, anyway" was referring to the fact that it's difficult to protect your digital information. Like, I could use TOR, but that doesn't change the fact that my email account can be hacked. I guess what I was thinking last night was that you can reduce your internet footprint, but you're powerless to protect information that you give away to your employer, your banker or your doctor, because it's up to them to have the right security (which they don't). At the end of the day, I'm more afraid by the fact that banks, doctors and universities have digitalised everything than by what I tell Facebook. In the first case, I was never given a choice and I know their security is rubbish.
Where this is going -I guess- is that even when you know about this stuff, it can, and should, still shock you. Just a few months ago I was lecturing people on NSA and FBI surveillance techniques, discussing stuff like PRISM, Echelon, Carnivore, and FISA warrants and scaring the shit out of everyone in the room. So perhaps on some level I'm more comfortable talking about all that when I don't feel concerned, perhaps I approach it all from a perspective that's way too academic, or perhaps I genuinely believe that we have to fight for the meagre safeguards that we still have by thinking about these issues as we cast a vote for this or that politician.

 

[Ice Queen]

10 hours ago, Ran said:

“Cyberwar” is not “War”. Per the Supreme Court, you need assemblages of people using force. Treason has a nice ring to it, but for extremely good reasons the laws of the country make it very, very specific and with a very high bar.

I can appreciate that although the laws need to catch up with reality. Pretty soon we won't need to send people to war. It will all be done by drones--and computers. IMO a country infiltrating another country's energy grid is a borderline act of war. They could shut down our entire infrastructure and leave us helpless without firing a shot.

Trump telling the Russians on national TV to go ahead and hack Hillary's emails is a national security threat at the very least. Giving the Russians classified information in the Oval Office is treason. Anyone else would be arrested on the spot.

 

[Ran]

6 minutes ago, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

I can appreciate that although the laws need to catch up with reality. Pretty soon we won't need to send people to war. It will all be done by drones--and computers. IMO a country infiltrating another country's energy grid is a borderline act of war. They could shut down our entire infrastructure and leave us helpless without firing a shot.

We have other laws that can be brought to bear. Espionage, for example. But treason really requires open warfare, and for good historical reasons, namely that the framers of the Constitution had witnessed how treason was broadly applied by British monarchs to silence political enemies, and they did not want to repeat this in the United States.

At this point in time, no one in the White House or its campaigns have committed treason, as the U.S. is not at war with Russia (or Turkey for that matter, re: Flynn). I'm fine with this. There's a host of other crimes the scoundrels are likely guilty of, crimes that would put them away for a very long time if it comes to that. (It's also worth noting that no one has been _executed_ for treason since the Civil War; most found guilty of it in relation to WWII had their sentences commuted or were pardoned after a period of time, even; in general, the trend of modern governance has been away from treason as being something given extraordinary weight.)

6 minutes ago, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

Trump telling the Russians on national TV to go ahead and hack Hillary's emails is a national security threat at the very least. Giving the Russians classified information in the Oval Office is treason. Anyone else would be arrested on the spot.

It is not. The President can legally declassify whatever he wants. It was monumentally stupid at best, malevolent at worst, but it was legal.

[Fragile Bird]

I now realize the most prescient science fiction book I’ve ever read (or, at least, in the top 5, some have been very accurate) was Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. I lump the 3 book series together as one.

For those of you unfamiliar with the books, a thousand years of an empire’s history are followed, history that is being subtly manipulated by a group of ‘psycho historians’ who can predict the course of history by studying the minutiae of life and distilling the actions of the masses down to a mathematical formula. Like what Facebook and Cambridge Analytica want to do.

The difference is the manipulation is being done for the benefit of humanity, all humanity. And it’s AI that allows it to happen. A key character is R. Daneel Olivaw (I need to check spelling). The R stands for robot, and who is governed by Asimov’s Three Laws of robotics, to do no harm to humans. Unfortunately the characters of today’s events are under no such restraints.

[GAROVORKIN]

28 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I now realize the most prescient science fiction book I’ve ever read (or, at least, in the top 5, some have been very accurate) was Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. I lump the 3 book series together as one.

For those of you unfamiliar with the books, a thousand years of an empire’s history are followed, history that is being subtly manipulated by a group of ‘psycho historians’ who can predict the course of history by studying the minutiae of life and distilling the actions of the masses down to a mathematical formula. Like what Facebook and Cambridge Analytica want to do.

The difference is the manipulation is being done for the benefit of humanity, all humanity. And it’s AI that allows it to happen. A key character is R. Daneel Olivaw (I need to check spelling). The R stands for robot, and who is governed by Asimov’s Three Laws of robotics, to do no harm to humans. Unfortunately the characters of today’s events are under no such restraints.

I always found the manipulation aspect of Psyho Historians agenda  to be more then a bit troubling.  

[maarsen]

27 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I now realize the most prescient science fiction book I’ve ever read (or, at least, in the top 5, some have been very accurate) was Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. I lump the 3 book series together as one.

For those of you unfamiliar with the books, a thousand years of an empire’s history are followed, history that is being subtly manipulated by a group of ‘psycho historians’ who can predict the course of history by studying the minutiae of life and distilling the actions of the masses down to a mathematical formula. Like what Facebook and Cambridge Analytica want to do.

The difference is the manipulation is being done for the benefit of humanity, all humanity. And it’s AI that allows it to happen. A key character is R. Daneel Olivaw (I need to check spelling). The R stands for robot, and who is governed by Asimov’s Three Laws of robotics, to do no harm to humans. Unfortunately the characters of today’s events are under no such restraints.

Just a quibble but R Daneel Olivaw was not in the original Foundation trilogy. He was introduced in The Caves of Steel, and reintroduced in the prequels to Foundation later on. I so rarely need to find fault with you posts , FB, please excuse this bit of pedantry.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

13 hours ago, Ran said:

“Cyberwar” is not “War”. Per the Supreme Court, you need assemblages of people using force. Treason has a nice ring to it, but for extremely good reasons the laws of the country make it very, very specific and with a very high bar.

That did happen though. You just need to interrupt it through a modern lens.  

12 hours ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

So public servants signing an NDA with their boss (a public servant) seems blatantly unlawful to me.

There are zero arguments I could accept to explain such a thing.

I’ve had to sign NDAs in the past for elected officials I’ve worked for. Thing is they were toothless.  

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

12 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

That did happen though. You just need to interrupt it through a modern lens.  

I’ve had to sign NDAs in the past for elected officials I’ve worked for. Thing is they were toothless.  

I think Ran is right.  Treason is deliberately a very hard case to make.  Trump appears to have committed a number of crimes but I doubt a case for Treason under Art. III would stick.

[Zorral]

5 hours ago, Rippounet said:

No.
I literally cannot do my job without the internet. Most of the admin stuff is done exclusively through the internet ; come to think of it it's probably not even legal but it's a grey area and that's the way it is. And a significant amount of what I do on a daily basis requires the internet as well.
Even my hobbies include many elements that are done exclusively through the internet. Finding a wargaming partner or a tournament is done through the internet exclusively, and I'm into TV shows and comics that can be found on the internet only. Not to mention spending way too much time on internet forums.
Then there's also the matter of the things that are not only "super super convenient" but that would take an insane amount of time, energy, and sometimes money to do offline, making them impossible to do for any standard individual with a job and a family life.
You seem to be forgetting that many of us have jobs and hobbies that depend on the internet. Some of them didn't even exist a couple of decades ago.

There may be full data on individuals right now but it's illegal and there are ways to fight it. But if we start considering these things as the new normal then no one will fight for them anymore. I don't have the time to get involved in that kind of stuff (though come to think of it, I kind of do, actually... ), but the least I can do is support the people who do.

Lastly... How do you know I wasn't outraged before? I'm outraged by various things almost everyday. I like to think it's why I'm good at my job: I'm fighting for what I believe in.

Everything at our university is via online.

At this point it's even being pushed to smart phones only -- which, for many reasons including tracking, have been kept out of our lives all along.  But tickets are now supposed to be via the phone, even increasingly for movies.  Soon the subway will run that way too.  People are forced into these situations where they can be tracked for everything all the time.

And yes, fb did and does push fake news and right wing and rethug stuff because they paid more.  That's one of the scandals revealed last month, that fb, twitter and google do that.  They denied, then were shocked shocked shocked to learn it was so.

[Shryke]

Trump and his cronies and the Republican party as a whole have committed or covered up a ton of treason in the colloquial sense. Whether it matches the legal definition in the US is kind of irrelevant. Mostly because the US legal definition is increadibly tightly defined to the point of uselessness.

Technically I think the charge Mueller is throwing around is "conspiracy to defraud the US" or something like that.

[Fragile Bird]

Trump, it has been pointed out, has today started to use language in his tweets against Mueller that repeat the language of the clauses that give him the authority to fire a special counsel.

[Shryke]

Oh, and looks like another bomb went off in Austin. We've arrived at some sort of bombing campaign it seems. The news is strangely quiet about the whole thing.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

6 minutes ago, Shryke said:

Oh, and looks like another bomb went off in Austin. We've arrived at some sort of bombing campaign it seems. The news is strangely quiet about the whole thing.

That has surprised me too.  Repeated bombings in an American city and almost radio silence about it.

[Fragile Bird]

Must be the charm of the fourth.

I’ve been following this since probably the second bomb since I’ve been watching CNN way too much, and they have been reporting on it.

The problem is there’s been nothing to report. The Austin police have no suspects and no leads. So far all they can do is warn people to report suspicious packages, but now the use of a trip wire to explode this bomb has ratchet things up to another level.

We’re all asking what the hell is going on in Austin.

[TrueMetis]

I was actually about to post about that cause I happened to see news about the most recent one and realized no one had mentioned it. Multiple bombs have gone off in Texas and nothing. What the fuck world are we living in?

[Week]

10 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

What the fuck world are we living in?

One that still doesn't value the lives of black people the same as white people.

Who does everyone think Jake Gyllenhall will play in the movie version? #AustinStrong

/Snark

That said -- I appreciate the world of difference between bombing an event (and the number of casualties - e.g. Boston Marathon), but the silence in response has been deafening until now.

....eta - addendum: Two white men in their early twenties were the victims of the latest bombing -- a tripwire in a different neighborhood than previous bombs. The previous bombs were also addressed (but not mailed) to victims.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I think Ran is right.  Treason is deliberately a very hard case to make.  Trump appears to have committed a number of crimes but I doubt a case for Treason under Art. III would stick.

I was talking more about how cyberwar counts as an act of war. As far as treason charges go, could Trump be charged for shirking his responsibilities to defend the nation if knows Russia attacked us and does nothing?

[Zorral]

Well, they've been all over the papers and the radio (I don't have tv) here, including this recent, different one, which is a trip wire and more sophisticated than the package bombs previously.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

15 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I was talking more about how cyberwar counts as an act of war. As far as treason charges go, could Trump be charged for shirking his responsibilities to defend the nation if knows Russia attacked us and does nothing?

I think he could be impeached and tried for removal from office on those grounds.