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US Politics: The Ides of Mueller


Paladin of Ice

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3 hours ago, Ran said:

It's not treason per the laws of the United States. Treason is making war on the U.S, or "adhering to its enemies". However, "enemies" is defined in law as fairly narrow: nations that have declared war on the U.S. or are involved in open warfare against it. We are not at war with Russia by any conventional sense of the word, no more than we are at war with China.

It's certainly disloyal, but it's not treason.

I don't know about that. Russia has certainly declared cyberwar against us.

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10 minutes ago, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

I don't know about that. Russia has certainly declared cyberwar against us.

Ever since I watched the first season of The Americans I've been curious as to who way back in the chain financed that thing.  It was always disturbing to see characters who were part of the Big Scheme to take down the US be regarded as sympathetic figures because it was all about family -- just like we are -- while wait, what about killing and subversion and all the rest?

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@Protecting oneself, I downloaded a VPN but half the time I forget to use it. Ive never joined FB because of a healthy skeptism over the whole Big Brother vibe it gives me. I realize of course that puts me in an extreme minority nowadays. Basically ive resisted FB so long now its like a badge of honor to stay a non participant at this point lol.

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No, what CA did and Facebook’s practices allowed is not right. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t foreseeable. Any private entity that has a database of customer profiles will sell it. Or the government can request it. Or it can be hacked. So no, just using Facebook doesn’t mean you deserve to be a victim. However, being on Facebook, liking/disliking everything that comes across your feed and feeding it details about your house, your car, your family, your health problems, your job, your excellent breakfast, etc wasn’t the wisest of choices people could have made.

I know this sounds a bit harsh, and it’s not my intention to insult or offend anyone (knowing it probably will). I’m just a little confused at the outrage that this could be allowed to happen when it seems like it was inevitable. Not necessarily on this board, per se, but in general. I’ve seen more people react strongly about this than other security breaches like Equifax, etc. I think it’s probably because it feels like it’s more of a betrayal because it’s so personal. Companies never have our best interest in mind and it’s naive to think so. I don’t think it was a sudden thing - people have been selling phone numbers and email lists forever now. Facebook is that on steroids and always has been.

And yes, I use FB too. It’s convenient to keep up to date with our large group of close friends. I post in the private board we have and that’s it. I wish we could agree on another medium, but it always migrates back to FB because of the convenience factor. So yeah, I’m part of the problem too, but I try to limit my footprint. I don’t think anyone is saying don’t use the internet, you just have to be realistic about the possible repercussions and make the decision about where you draw the line. This was always a probable outcome.

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7 minutes ago, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

I don't know about that. Russia has certainly declared cyberwar against us.

“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.

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2 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

I don’t think anyone is saying don’t use the internet, you just have to be realistic about the possible repercussions and make the decision about where you draw the line. This was always a probable outcome.

But you can't draw a line. Not when the internet is necessary to access information quickly, pay your taxes, order tons of stuff (from train tickets to rare automobile parts), exchange with colleagues and communicate with friends and family. We live in a digital age. You can limit your footprint in some ways, but unless you go full paranoid and use obscure software and crypted communications, what's most important about you is what's hardest to protect. If anything, the Facebook case isn't worrying per se because social media is relatively optional, it's worrying because of what it foretells. If it's Facebook today, it'll be the complete data on individuals within a decade. Used not just for commercial purposes (we already knew about that) but for political ones, with everythin that entails.
That's why the outrage is justified. Not so much because it's surprising, but because we want to see some kind of protections, as illusory as they may be, while there's still a chance. Otherwise we're just accepting the fact that privacy is dead and we live in the twisted brainchild of 1984 and Brave New World. We are, of course, in many ways. But that's no reason to accept it. These people need to be prosecuted and condemned, else the message it sends is that every single individual right one can think of is but a joke.

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2 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

One could only imagine the amount of liability Trump would rack up were he held to the libel standard Maltaran is describing? With his history of lying tweets, the penalties for all that libel would exceed his net worth.

The UK also has an electoral law that election results can be annulled if the candidates who was elected lied about their opponent during the campaign. I think Trump is probably glad the US don't have that law.

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2 minutes 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.

Workin' for Cadet Bone Spurs ain't rocket science.

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1 hour ago, Nasty LongRider said:

I was about to post the same thing!

13 minutes 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.

The reaction from this discovery seems to be incredulity. Nobody seems in any way convinced that they'd hold in court. There is apparently a $10,000,000 fine for breaching the NDAs, which are payable to the Federal Government. That excessive amount also seems disproportionate to the action of speaking about their time in government.

From what I've read, even Fox News' "experts" think this won't hold up in any court. At least, not any court that hasn't been "fixed" by Lord Drumpf's magical, wise and majestic power.

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42 minutes ago, Nasty LongRider said:

Workin' for Cadet Bone Spurs ain't rocket science.

I just want you to know that I appreciate this joke. There's not an ounce of fat on that joke, it's fucking perfect.

28 minutes ago, Yukle said:

I was about to post the same thing!

The reaction from this discovery seems to be incredulity. Nobody seems in any way convinced that they'd hold in court. There is apparently a $10,000,000 fine for breaching the NDAs, which are payable to the Federal Government. That excessive amount also seems disproportionate to the action of speaking about their time in government.

From what I've read, even Fox News' "experts" think this won't hold up in any court. At least, not any court that hasn't been "fixed" by Lord Drumpf's magical, wise and majestic power.

There's just no way. Not even the worst of the worst could spin this. You swear to the CONSTITUTION not the fucking Great Leader.

I feel like this is the thing that should destroy his presidency.

I've said that before though.

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Something I heard the night of the Pennsylvania election that I don't think anyone posted about: there are only 6 millennials in Congress. The commentator on CNN did not know if that included Lamb or if Lamb would be the 7th.

That rather surprised me - I thought there were more ambitious young people who ran for Congress.

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27 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Something I heard the night of the Pennsylvania election that I don't think anyone posted about: there are only 6 millennials in Congress. The commentator on CNN did not know if that included Lamb or if Lamb would be the 7th.

That rather surprised me - I thought there were more ambitious young people who ran for Congress.

Well, before even beginning to speculate on why this is - and quite a few explanations obviously and immediately spring to mind - I'd like to know what the average number of MCs 35 and under are over the past, say, 40 years.  My prior is it wouldn't be that much, a mean of 15-20 at most.  

Also, after the latest round of Trump tweet-vomiting and GOP rhetorical pushback on the Sunday morning talk shows, Ty Cobb claimed once again Trump isn't considering firing Mueller:

Quote

"In response to media speculation and related questions being posed to the Administration, the White House yet again confirms that the President is not considering or discussing the firing of the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller," Cobb said in a statement to the White House press pool.

 

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Such tightly controlled votes raise the question of why authoritarians rig the system to ensure not just victory, but overwhelming victory—with vote totals of more than 80 or 90 percent in some cases. Aren’t Putin and Sisi sufficiently popular to win on their own merits?

In fact, elections can be unpredictable affairs. Overly confident rulers have often been surprised by voters who opt for democracy rather than authoritarian continuity. Thus the jarring losses for Pinochet in Chile and the ruling communist party in Poland during the 1980s. Today’s authoritarians are well versed in the history of open elections in such settings, and are determined to avoid a similar fate. Even victory at 60 percent can provoke questions about the strongman’s staying power, encouraging rivals from his own camp to mount a challenge

 

.

A Month of Potemkin Elections

Rulers in Moscow, Cairo, and Baku are eager to show their strength, but afraid to put it to a real test.

https://freedomhouse.org/blog/month-potemkin-elections


 

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Early returns showed him with more than 70 percent of the vote. But St. Petersburg had one of poorest turnouts in the country. The local intelligentsia here brushed away the thought, confident in their political apathy, feeling irritated even by the word “election,” as by some useless waste of time. Most people The Daily Beast interviewed were either planning to spoil their ballot or not vote at all.


 

Here’s What Putin’s Hometown Really Thinks of Him on Election Day
The young thug, the ambitious KGB agent, the factotum of a corrupt post-Soviet mayor—nobody in ‘Piter’ doubted the Putin they knew would be reelected. But they’re not fooled.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/as-putins-reelection-looms-his-hometown-of-st-petersburg-remembers-him-only-too-well?ref=home
 

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3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

But you can't draw a line. Not when the internet is necessary to access information quickly, pay your taxes, order tons of stuff (from train tickets to rare automobile parts), exchange with colleagues and communicate with friends and family. We live in a digital age.

<snip>

If it's Facebook today, it'll be the complete data on individuals within a decade. Used not just for commercial purposes (we already knew about that) but for political ones, with everythin that entails.


That's why the outrage is justified. Not so much because it's surprising, but because we want to see some kind of protections, as illusory as they may be, while there's still a chance. Otherwise we're just accepting the fact that privacy is dead and we live in the twisted brainchild of 1984 and Brave New World. We are, of course, in many ways. But that's no reason to accept it.

My father hasn’t really stepped up to the digital age. He has an email address and an iPad and no social media accounts. Yeah, even that is exposing himself to risk, but he manages to pay his bills and taxes and order plane tickets and talk to friends just fine without doing it online. We don’t have to do any of that, we just want to because it’s super super convenient.

And what makes you think there isn’t full data on individuals right now? You’re kidding yourself if you think there isn’t and that it has any real protection. Who’s going to protect it? Companies who can make a buck off it? The government, run by people who don’t understand tech and couldn’t agree on a solution even if they did? Government is too slow to keep up with the pace of the evolution of technology. You said yourself any protection is illusory. My opinion is that privacy is dead for all practical intents and purposes and has been for a while.

I didn’t say you shouldn’t be outraged. I said no one should be surprised, and if you’re only now getting outraged, then you are surprised. To me this news elicited an eye roll because of course bad actors acted badly and there’s almost zero hope that anything meaningful will be done about it, as much as I would like to see it.

There would have to be a serious restructuring of how government regulates private data collection worldwide for anything close to meaningful to happen. And I don’t even know if There’s anything that could be done to effectively shield people.

I don’t know if the government really would want to anyway. If a private company collects data more efficiently than they do at their own cost, and if the gov. can basically access it at will, then realistically, what’s their motivation to stop this kind of collection from happening in the first place? And if this kind of collection exists, it’s always going to be vulnerable. That’s how I see it.

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On the other hand, when I signed up for Facebook in college  it had like eight text box entries where one could post text based list, favorite book, movie etc. posting pictures was at best a lugubrious process, which one only did to prove one was technologically capable of such sorcery.

at the time, it was pretty much a college dating tool to discover if someone in your circle was straight or gay, single or available. In a pre Facebook day, it wasn’t uncommon to ask a classmate or friend if they knew of a third classmate or friend was single or not. Post Facebook, I can’t ever remember engaging in such conversations, they went extinct, and if you weren’t on Facebook, you might as well be extinct. ;) 

that said, I was aware of privacy concerns from the start, I refused to post phone numbers, email or even put in my birthday info, I thought that’s what protecting my privacy was, putting down that back to the future was a favorite movie and “a song of ice and fire “ as a favorite book, that sort of banal performance of identity didn’t strike me the same way as something to be terribly concerned about. I think I avoided mentioning politics for a long while, but that inevitably pulled me in too.

which makes me wonder, are the algorithms Facebook does always getting political posts to the seen prominently in the newsfeed because that is legit approximation of what the algorithms are supposed to do in giving you the most popular items, or is Facebook designing algorithms to heavily weight political posts to be seen more and more often because they want to harvest user political data because political info is the highest dollar info they sell?

Is Facebook manipulating the experience to increase your engagement with political posts because that then makes you a more valuable commodity to harvest?

for instance, I have never commented on, liked or otherwise interacted with one of my cousins Facebook posts, political or otherwise, all I ever did was accept his friend request years ago and then basically ignore him. But nonetheless I persistently get shown his political posts all the time over and over, they’re nasty conservative nonsense, some repostings, some just his own stream of consciousness of hate, but Facebook really wants me to see all of them instead of cute pictures of his kids or something banal.

(I do remember almost quitting Facebook when the newsfeed was invented , but didn’t. It certainly increased my usage from a once a week skim through friends profiles for updates, to a daily thing, but I never thought about how my dopamine was being manipulated by the newsfeed to make me more hooked, it certainly worked though. )

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4 hours ago, Gertrude said:

My father hasn’t really stepped up to the digital age. He has an email address and an iPad and no social media accounts. Yeah, even that is exposing himself to risk, but he manages to pay his bills and taxes and order plane tickets and talk to friends just fine without doing it online. We don’t have to do any of that, we just want to because it’s super super convenient.

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.

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