U.S. Politics - knowing me knowing you, a-haaa

[TerraPrime]

Yup. Moar pls kthnx.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Tormund,

Too many people take a "meh" attitude to government.

[Tormund Ukrainesbane]

Tormund,

Too many people take a "meh" attitude to government.

I take a meh attitude toward government. They clearly neither desire nor are capable of resenting my interests. I can't resist them in a meaningful way, so I don't participate in any of their process that I'm not forced to, and I ignore their edicts as much as I am able.

[Shryke]

Inigima:

I want some of what you're smoking. See: http://www.techdirt....authority.shtml

That doesn't support your point at all. They do not have that authority. There is no program to do this.

and

http://www.slate.com...re_program.html

Right frmo that article:

Not only that, Hayden went further. He revealed that the XKEYSCORE was “a tool that's been developed over the years, and lord knows we were trying to develop similar tools when I was at the National Security Agency.” The XKEYSCORE system, Hayden said, allows analysts to enter a “straight-forward question” into a computer and sift through the “oceans of data” that have been collected as part of foreign intelligence gathering efforts.

It's a foreign intelligence gather program. One that does suck up domestic data too because there's no way to gather data from the internet without doing that. There's no equivalent to phone lines here. It's more like mail. If you want to intercept all of someone's mail at the post office, you basically have to look over every letters to/from addresses.

Indeed, the article directly referenes this fact in the quote you used:

the NSA’s system of sifting data from the backbone of international Internet networks likely sometimes involves gobbling up information on Americans’ communications and online activity—whether it is done wittingly or not.

The question of what they do with that data or whether they should be donig international spying or whatever are things you can question or be upset about or whatever, but they are not relevant to the original point which was the question "Does the US operate a domestic surveillance program?". And the answer afaik is "No, they don't. They operate a foreign surveillance program."

[lokisnow]

We bury social welfare in the IRS because it's effective and hard to get rid of and the optics don't look like redistribution.

Call it the TAX CREDIT and most people will be for it, call it the Poor People Have Babies Check and most people will be against it. Also structuring things as tax credits probably means it doesn't count as taxable income. (though that's just a guess).

otoh, embedding this in the IRS backfires by getting us to the 47% mythology.

In a sense you could say that all the complexity of the tax code is armor to prevent easy repeal of something like the EITC.

I'd also say we have tax code complexity in order to ennable the possibility that people can cheat. If the system were SIMPLE, then no one could cheat and where is the fun in that?

It's like Red light Cameras. If every intersection with a traffic light had a camera and a ticket was administered every time someone violated the red light rules you would have PERFECT enforcement of the red light rules, because no one would ever get away with running a red light, you'd always be ticketed. But while Perfect enforcement would save lives by reducing traffic accidents, no one wants to save those lives because perfect enforcement loses money. If no one runs a red light, no tickets are administered and the system just passively becomes a large overhead cost whose only social benefit is saving lives. Well we can't have that, instead of saving lives through perfect enforcement we say, how can we maximize revenue with this technology, and so you have very sporadic and ineffective installation meant to trap rule breakers and profit off them. Note, we could probably do the same thing on interstates, have speed gun camera set ups that would note cars entry and exit and times and issue a speeding ticket if you traveled 120 miles in 60 minutes--but where's the fun in that!

Complexity ennables cheating because people on the whole LIKE having a system they feel like they can cheat. Just like people like having a freeway system where they can occasionally (or repeatedly) speed.

At this point, I think we can do away with any pretense that Republicans are concerned about budgetary matters and we can safely assume they're trying to just punish poor people.

Of Course they all, being poor is EVIDENCE of [fillintheblank]. so they ought be punished for being poor because the being poor part proves they should be punished.

[DanteGabriel]

Responding to Scot from the previous thread:

Oh, it does have the power. The more important question, in my opinion is whether it should have that power. I believe it should not without strict public constraints and clear boundaries on when the power may be used.

Well, that's what I'm saying, and probably my fault for using the ambiguous word "power." I mean, if the government has the ability to conduct this surveillance, it'll do it. Laws notwithstanding.

[Shryke]

Interesting information on the embassy closings:

http://www.thedailyb...ked-alerts.html

The crucial intercept that prompted the U.S. government to close embassies in 22 countries was a conference call between al Qaeda’s senior leaders and representatives of several of the group’s affiliates throughout the region.

The intercept provided the U.S. intelligence community with a rare glimpse into how al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, manages a global organization that includes affiliates in Africa, the Middle East, and southwest and southeast Asia.

Several news outlets reported Monday on an intercepted communication last week between Zawahiri and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of al Qaeda’s affiliate based in Yemen. But The Daily Beast has learned that the discussion between the two al Qaeda leaders happened in a conference call that included the leaders or representatives of the top leadership of al Qaeda and its affiliates calling in from different locations, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence. All told, said one U.S. intelligence official, more than 20 al Qaeda operatives were on the call.

To be sure, the CIA had been tracking the threat posed by Wuhayshi for months. An earlier communication between Zawahiri and Wuhayshi delivered through a courier was picked up last month, according to three U.S. intelligence officials. But the conference call provided a new sense of urgency for the U.S. government, the sources said.

Al Qaeda leaders had assumed the conference calls, which give Zawahiri the ability to manage his organization from a remote location, were secure. But leaks about the original intercepts have likely exposed the operation that allowed the U.S. intelligence community to listen in on the al Qaeda board meetings.

Also during the meeting, the various al Qaeda leaders discussed in vague terms plans for a pending attack and mentioned that a team or teams were already in place for such an attack. For some leading members of Congress, the revelation that al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan is actively managing and directing the operations of several affiliates directly refutes the Obama administration’s repeated assertion that the leadership of the core of the group has been decimated by American drone strikes and special operations forces while the affiliate groups have been strengthened.

[Inigima]

Inigima:

That doesn't support your point at all. They do not have that authority. There is no program to do this.

Au contraire, mon chat. That's the whole point of the article, in three parts:

1. When queried about whether the NSA had the ability to do it, they dodged the question by answering, in the negative, whether they had the authority to do it.

2. I and others infer from this that they do have the ability, just not the legal authority. I don't think you're disputing this point.

3. Given the past behavior of the NSA, it is reasonable to believe that, despite not having the authority, they abuse the ability and do so anyway.

Right frmo that article:

It's a foreign intelligence gather program. One that does suck up domestic data too because there's no way to gather data from the internet without doing that. There's no equivalent to phone lines here. It's more like mail. If you want to intercept all of someone's mail at the post office, you basically have to look over every letters to/from addresses.

Indeed, the article directly referenes this fact in the quote you used:

The question of what they do with that data or whether they should be donig international spying or whatever are things you can question or be upset about or whatever, but they are not relevant to the original point which was the question "Does the US operate a domestic surveillance program?". And the answer afaik is "No, they don't. They operate a foreign surveillance program."

If they operate a nominally "foreign" surveillance program that also unavoidably hoovers up domestic communications, I am disinclined to believe that the rat bastards don't use that domestic information. In fact, we know they do:

Adding to a summer dominated by revelations of unsettling government behavior, Reuters today released an exclusive report detailing the workings of a previously secret federal unit that covered up its use of national security information to investigate American citizens. The Special Operations Division is part of the Drug Enforcement Administration, but cooperates with agencies like the NSA, FBI, CIA and IRS, which provide the DEA division with phone and internet records (which number more than 1 billion) as well as intelligence from foreign and domestic informants.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/08/05/a_secret_federal_agency_used_national_security_intelligence_to_prosecute.html

Explain to me again how this isn't a domestic surveillance program.

[Gertrude]

We bury social welfare in the IRS because it's effective and hard to get rid of and the optics don't look like redistribution.

Call it the TAX CREDIT and most people will be for it, call it the Poor People Have Babies Check and most people will be against it. Also structuring things as tax credits probably means it doesn't count as taxable income. (though that's just a guess).

Valid points. So it's PR essentially. I can live with that, actually. To me, the more public discussion, the better. We all know about the child credit, mortgage credit, business expenses, etc. I am also sure there are a metric TON of things I have no idea exists and I am sure I would object to. I'd love to have this discussion. Also, I'm thinking it would make it easier to see where the money is and who is benefiting.

eta: and as for hard to get rid of - well, that's kind of an upside of my idea (to me). Sure, vote them in for a term of 10, 20 years, whatever, but eventually, it has to get looked at and evaluated again. If it just stays embedded, then we don't have a chance to streamline and it just clogs the arteries.

[TrackerNeil]

An ABBA-themed politics thread! I've waited so long for you!

[Shryke]

Au contraire, mon chat. That's the whole point of the article, in three parts:

1. When queried about whether the NSA had the ability to do it, they dodged the question by answering, in the negative, whether they had the authority to do it.

2. I and others infer from this that they do have the ability, just not the legal authority. I don't think you're disputing this point.

3. Given the past behavior of the NSA, it is reasonable to believe that, despite not having the authority, they abuse the ability and do so anyway.

That's the point YOU are trying to make but it's not one supported by what you linked /That they have the ability is irrelevant to the question you brought up. They don't have the authority. The program Obama denies does not exist by this very quote.

That they have the ability is not evidence that they use it or abuse it. The existence of wiretaps means the police have the ability to tap anyone's phone. They don't, however, have the authority and no one would claim that the police listen to everyone's phone calls based merely on the ability to do so.

If they operate a nominally "foreign" surveillance program that also unavoidably hoovers up domestic communications, I am disinclined to believe that the rat bastards don't use that domestic information. In fact, we know they do:

http://www.slate.com..._prosecute.html

Explain to me again how this isn't a domestic surveillance program.

Because it's targeted at foreigners and designed towards that end. It unavoidably involves some domestic communication as well.

A domestic spying program, by any reasonable definition, would be both targeted at domestic communication and involve looking at a great deal of/most/all domestic communication. Instead what we seem to have here is a foreign communications spying program that sometimes grabs domestic communication as part of it's operations.

We also already knew they gave the information to other agencies because it was in the guidelines we saw at least a month ago. If the NSA, in their surveillance of foreign communication, comes across evidence of domestic crime, they pass it along. And why shouldn't they?

Quite simply, if there was a domestic spying program, you'd think it would be doing alot more domestic spying.

[Inigima]

I believe it is. Snowden has said as much, so it's about whether you believe him, but the NSA seems to have more or less corroborated.

I find it a little hard to accept your credulity towards an organization that's lied nonstop about this, including to Congress. You really believe that they aren't doing it just because they say they aren't? They've lost any trust they might have had in my book. I am slightly confused about why Congress is just accepting being lied to by an organization they're supposed to oversee.

[Tormund Ukrainesbane]

You wonder why Congress isn't being harder on the guys who listen to everyone's phone calls and read all their emails?

[thistlepong]

I may not be following Shryke and Inigma properly, but I'm pretty sure folks said that was okay in another thread.

My understanding is that all traffic is collected and nobody cares about you or me or any individual until, um, someone does.

At that point your data's available with a few keystrokes, and nominally a warrant. Once it's retrieved, the retrieving agency, whether it's the NSA or the county sheriff, can store and use it. In the case of the DEA they openly admit doing so as an integral institutional practice.

Arguing whether there's a Domestic Surveillance Program when there's a program effectively, in two senses, surveilling domestic communications seems kinda weird.

(Tormund, I lol'd)

[karaddin]

The tone of that quote about AQ which Shryke posted sounds like a description of a corporate board con call, it's a little surreal.

[Inigima]

Henry Blodget on why companies need to pay employees better;

One of the big reasons the U.S. economy is so lousy is that big American companies are hoarding cash and "maximizing profits" instead of investing in their people and future projects.

This behavior is contributing to record income inequality in the country and starving the primary engine of U.S. economic growth — the vast American middle class — of purchasing power. (See charts below).

If average Americans don't get paid living wages, they can't spend much money buying products and services. And when average Americans can't buy products and services, the companies that sell products and services to average Americans can't grow. So the profit obsession of America's big companies is, ironically, hurting their ability to accelerate revenue growth.

http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-need-to-pay-people-more-2013-8

[Shryke]

I believe it is. Snowden has said as much, so it's about whether you believe him, but the NSA seems to have more or less corroborated.

I find it a little hard to accept your credulity towards an organization that's lied nonstop about this, including to Congress. You really believe that they aren't doing it just because they say they aren't? They've lost any trust they might have had in my book. I am slightly confused about why Congress is just accepting being lied to by an organization they're supposed to oversee.

Snowden says alot of things. What Snowden can prove and what he's really talking about when he says shit are the real question.

The NSA nor anyone has shown evidence of a domestic spying program. I believe they aren't doing it because there's no evidence they are and ample evidence that what has come out is consistent with what both the US government's agencies and the leakers have shown.

They do sweep up some american domestic communication as part of their efforts to monitor foreign communication though, but that is far from the same thing as a domestic spying program.

I may not be following Shryke and Inigma properly, but I'm pretty sure folks said that was okay in another thread.

My understanding is that all traffic is collected and nobody cares about you or me or any individual until, um, someone does.

At that point your data's available with a few keystrokes, and nominally a warrant. Once it's retrieved, the retrieving agency, whether it's the NSA or the county sheriff, can store and use it. In the case of the DEA they openly admit doing so as an integral institutional practice.

Arguing whether there's a Domestic Surveillance Program when there's a program effectively, in two senses, surveilling domestic communications seems kinda weird.

No, that's not quite accurate. From what we know of the program, they collect basically everything going through the internet pipes they have tapped but they can't store it all, let alone read it all. So they sort it and store what they consider pertinent data. It seems to basically filter through a series of databases each storing the data longer and longer as it's deemed more and more important.

From the Guardian article:

The XKeyscore system is continuously collecting so much internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time. Content remains on the system for only three to five days, while metadata is stored for 30 days. One document explains: "At some sites, the amount of data we receive per day (20+ terabytes) can only be stored for as little as 24 hours."

To solve this problem, the NSA has created a multi-tiered system that allows analysts to store "interesting" content in other databases, such as one named Pinwale which can store material for up to five years.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data

The only way you can run any program of this sort is to basically sweep everything up and then discard most of it after identifying the important parts. It's too much data/second and there's no real other way to pull specific people's data out of it.

[Merentha]

No, that's not quite accurate. From what we know of the program, they collect basically everything going through the internet pipes they have tapped but they can't store it all, let alone read it all. So they sort it and store what they consider pertinent data. It seems to basically filter through a series of databases each storing the data longer and longer as it's deemed more and more important.

From the Guardian article:

http://www.theguardi...ram-online-data

The only way you can run any program of this sort is to basically sweep everything up and then discard most of it after identifying the important parts. It's too much data/second and there's no real other way to pull specific people's data out of it.

Uh, Shryke? If your defense of the X-Keyscore program is that you can only store it for 3-5 days, you might want to consider that A) that's a shitton of data they're collecting on people when you and others had kept insisting it was just metadata guys, honest! and B) well...read below.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.

[...]

Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10²⁴ bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

Actually, just read the whole thing, but the tldr summary is "even when they say they can't store all that data now, they're building a giant fuckoff storage facility designed to store fucking everything".

[Inigima]

Uh, Shryke? If your defense of the X-Keyscore program is that you can only store it for 3-5 days, you might want to consider that A) that's a shitton of data they're collecting on people when you and others had kept insisting it was just metadata guys, honest! and B) well...read below.

Seriously. Talk about goalpost shifting.

[awesome possum]

The NSA nor anyone has shown evidence of a domestic spying program. I believe they aren't doing it because there's no evidence they are and ample evidence that what has come out is consistent with what both the US government's agencies and the leakers have shown.

They do sweep up some american domestic communication as part of their efforts to monitor foreign communication though, but that is far from the same thing as a domestic spying program.

I feel you're getting stuck on semantics here. You even admit that there is domestic spying but are arguing simply because of the use of the word program. Who cares if there's a specific program when pretty clear evidence exists that there is domestic spying?