ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
The NSA gets to go three hops from the target.
For metadata. In the 215 program. Not in other stuff. @SwordOfOccam is talking about the other stuff. Yet again, you actually have to get into the nitty gritty to have a proper complaint, but approximately two seconds after you get into any nitty gritty, it becomes immediately apparent that you don't have any of the facts correct.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
What things did they collect with the tap described in that article?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
If the lizardmen were sufficiently competent.
Whelp.
My bare link shows you're just playing Dory like most people do, forgetting all the past revelations of the sort of stuff the NSA has been doing.
Nope. It literally does not do the thing you said it did. Try. Even try.
Of course nothing came of it, "my elected representatives" are very much in favor of parallel construction.
So you can cite the vote for this?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Well, this is quite nice. I would, however, suggest reposting it on one of the latest threads, so I'm not the only one who gets to enjoy it.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I don't believe the information available to the public would be any different if the NSA was still doing it.
I'm sure that you believe that the information available to the public would be the same even if lizardmen were running the NSA.
Room_641A
Your bare link doesn't do what you think it does. Try again, maybe even try with words.
Then I challenge you to put forward a proposal of rules and systems to accomplish both these items.
No thank you, I'm not a legislator and I'm not playing the game where I propose something and if you can find a loophole I'm implicitly required to agree that the status quo is fine.
Fair enough. But by the very terms of your position, you can't expect me to think that you have a remotely-acceptable alternative, and so I can feel perfectly fine continuing to let my words and position stand. If you want someone to change their mind, you have to try. You have to give at least a reason.
reuters
Oh yes, that one slide from forever ago that literally nothing came out of. I don't recall the details; would have to find that reddit search function again (I lost my bookmark recently). But yeah, there was no there there. Or can you find some there there that actually followed out of it?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Snowden revealed that the NSA was (and I would assume still is) collecting all the call metadata for every phone call in the country.
Correct, except for your parenthetical. The program was ended, after having been the one truly controversial thing Snowden dropped, being reformulated several times by Congress, it was ultimately killed by NSA (probably because the requirements put on it by Congress made it more hassle than it was worth).
And also tapping the internet wholesale domestically, not just overseas or specific persons.
Nope. This is definitely false. Still tinfoil hatter.
I'm fine with the NSA tapping Angela Merkel's phone; that's their job. Collecting every American's email, call record data, etc. is very different. Even if they pinky swear not to query their own database without a good reason.
Then I challenge you to put forward a proposal of rules and systems to accomplish both these items. I think it likely that if you actually spend enough time engaging with the problem, you'll probably come up with something that is to too far off from where we currently are. Like I said in my first comment, you're gonna have to get into the more fringy things, specific methods of collection, specific authorities granted, specific justifications required, etc., even though that is precisely what you won't want to do because it's hard.
parallel construction
Is illegal, and if you happen to have good evidence of it happening, I welcome seeing you bring the case.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I was thinking about and imagining what it would look like if someone like myself just up and started boxing... but in women's leagues. I'm a decently-trained gym-goer, with regular levels of those various male physical advantages, but I've never boxed in my life. How much training would I want to do before competing? ...would I still get thwacked by some women for the first several matches? It's sort of weird and fascinating to think about.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I think what's missing in this analysis is any role for higher-level will.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
This topic gets quite contentious and goes back at least to the Scholastics, with different 'levels' of will involved. Even the mere question of time-dependent tastes/desires gets a lot of hackles up. It doesn't help that different people often have different experiences, and we don't have much of a rigorous framework for objectively probing cognitive states. Some alcoholics do actually report that their habits and discipline have resulted in a 'reactionary' will that does not actually desire to consume alcohol, while others instead continue to struggle with desire and must rely on a second-order will to choose not to consume. Some people who have discovered that they have food intolerances say that they used to love such-and-such a food, and they really struggled with desiring it when they first decided to stop eating it, but later have an experience where they will see such a food and not even have a will to consume it. "Oh, that is a beautiful looking piece of food, masterfully crafted, and I'm sure someone will enjoy it, but I don't want it." A time-dependent example is pretty common; many kids don't like vegetables like broccoli, they have no first-order will whatsoever to consume it and must rely on a second-order will to choose to consume it anyway for other purposes. This may start out being a will to please and not anger parents, or to satisfy a rule that then allows them to consume other foods. This may later develop so that they actually have a first-order will to consume broccoli.
It gets complicated, and most people don't have a consistent sense for how it works. No fault of their own; we have very few tools for proper analysis. So, they tend to default to a handful of heuristics to explain how they think it might work.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
The problem of course, is that there's no way to get from here to there without massive ecological disruption.
Is that true? I'm not sure. It would probably depend on how much higher "somewhat higher" is and how quickly one wants to turn the dial. Rates are probably the single most important thing in many of these conversations, and they're often the things that are most poorly investigated/understood.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Usually, the distinction is to call it "statutory rape", distinguishing two concepts, factual consent and legal consent. That is, "rape" is often used to describe cases where the victim did not factually consent to the sex act, and "statutory rape" captures a range of scenarios where the victim may or may not have factually consented, but in either case, the statute would not have accepted that factual consent as providing legal consent (and thus, it is not actually necessary to even ask/answer the question about factual consent). My sense is that, usually, cases involving children are pretty trivially easy to prosecute as "statutory rape", and it's only when there are significant other factors (usually clear evidence of force/violence) that can be shown, where it is 'promoted' to your category of "aggravated rape". There's often little point, from the standpoint of what is actually prosecuted, to pursuing a 'partially-promoted' case, where they try to show that there was no factual consent, but without sufficient evidence to bump it all the way up to "aggravated". Like, sure, it can help you with the jury to have the victim say that it felt bad and icky and they said they didn't like it and didn't want it, but I don't think it 'bumps the charge up' in a lot of cases.
Thus, I would generally find an unqualified use of "rape" to be rather ambiguous, as well as the slightly-qualified "child rape". It's still not entirely clear which bucket it would fall into.
...of course, if you start asking more pointed questions about whether children can factually consent, why/why not, and why/why not a statutory regime should accept that factual consent, you open a whole box of absolute conceptual mess, which is a historical sore spot for the more Foucauldian-inspired left.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Then there's PRISM. You know it, Edward Snowden saw the NSA's backdoor to all internet communications, got the files to prove it, now he's a Russian citizen. PRISM is still around, it hasn't been reduced. ... The USA FREEDOM Act, the only attempt to limit its reach, moved data holding to the phone carriers
Your facts are wrong here. PRISM was always getting data that was held by the carriers. UPSTREAM was the program where they directly tapped the overseas lines.
They can still surveil whomever FISA says they can.
Right. FISA is the long-standing acceptance that the United States is not going to be the only country in the world without foreign signals intelligence capabilities, and trying to bring a wide variety of methods that have the most risk of impacting US Persons within the purview of statutes passed by the Congress, rather than simply within the Executive power of foreign/military affairs. That is, when you have the Russian ambassador and a bunch of likely FSB stooges operating in the embassy under diplomatic cover, the Constitution says that they are US Persons, but your elected representatives agreed that it is worthwhile to surveil them. Basically nobody disputes this core purpose/use of such power. It's the more fringy things, specific methods of collection, specific authorities granted, specific justifications required, etc., that are the subject of controversy. You have to actually get into some detail to find something actual and particular to complain about, and you have grossly failed to reach that bar.
Your elected representatives agreed that PRISM is still justified enough, and unsurprisingly so. The only really controversial thing Snowden got was the 215 program. 99.9% of what he published was about pretty legal, pretty legitimate, pretty supported-by-your-elected-representatives intelligence programs focused on foreign governments and militaries. If he hadn't gotten lucky with that one, frankly pretty tiny, program, the narrative could have been entirely different, with Snowden being viewed as doing immense damage to a huge number of legitimate programs without any supportable justification at all. That people can't even accurately recall the one little program that he happened to get lucky on is evidence that you've more just fallen for propaganda and vibes rather than a big scary 'COINTELPRO and MHCHAOS in one'.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
It all depends on what you want your 'system' to accomplish. Militaries have reasonably well-defined goals, to "kill people and break stuff". They do a great job at that, and an okay-ish job at managing the logistics to support said goals. Their primary concern in the logistics effort is not actually efficiency; it's resiliency to adversary action. Efficiency is a secondary goal, which can become more of a focus against an adversary that can't suitably contest it (for example, Iraq was unable to significantly contest US logistics to build up theater forces in the run up to either Gulf War). Even then, it's not entirely clear what the measures of efficiency are/were.
If you include the procurement process as part of the entire system, things are even more muddy. Obviously, it doesn't help that any such procurement is also pointedly subject to adversarial pressures (in other words, adversaries are always trying to invest in ways specifically to make your investment worthless), but even not considering the adversarial piece, it's still kind of a mess. One of the best tables I've ever seen was in a document that was doing a retrospective on the air war in Gulf War I. It had a list of 'newfangled' weapons systems in one column, another column with quotes from the manufacturer's documentation about how it was designed to perform (for example, "all-weather, night, ..."), and then a third column detailing how it actually performed. It was pretty eye-opening for why military brass has a love/hate relationship with procurement; they want the shiny new stuff with the fancy capabilities, but they also don't really trust that all that shiny new stuff is actually going to work in practice.
But all of that is a bit of an aside, because fundamentally, what we're looking for out of an economic system rather than a military one is a system that provides the goods/services that general consumers want. One might still question whether that's actually what we want, but that's the typical goal. One example of tensions here is the question of whether what people happen to want actually trades off with some 'higher' goal. In the military space, an example would be, "Yes, we know that people (soldiers) seem to want one thing, but this other thing will definitely, absolutely be better at winning the war," with a simple example being something like the [CONTROVERSY ALERT, but Sagan, why is this still that much of a controversy...] the A-10. It's a thing where there are tons of people who say they want it, but TPTB are basically stepping in and saying, "No. You may want it, but we are really really sure that the way to actually win the damn war is to not give you what you want." But you can already see the fundamental tension here between needing to have a set of TPTB who are capable of making such a determination, free enough of all sorts of shitty political/other influences that result in actually terrible imposed decision-making.
Most free-marketers will say that this tension is even worse for a general economic system, and that we simply have no way of appointing a group of TPTB who can actually make those value judgments for society in a neutral, dispassionate way to optimize some relatively well-defined goal, because there are extreme difficulties in every step of that process. This challenge is considered an unfortunately mostly-unavoidable problem for the military, but a death knell for socialist economics, mostly because we have an alternative that completely avoids that problem. Then, in my mind, it really comes down to how much you personally believe that there actually is one or more very well-defined, very discrete problems in the economic system that admit a public choice-constrained solution to come in and declare, "No. You may want it, but we are really really sure that the way to actually accomplish [insert some description of some hopefully-somewhat-agreed-upon value here] is to do this instead."
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
It has held thus far; maybe it will continue to hold; who can predict? But half the time when I go there, I still have that sinking feeling that they're one little break in modship away from cracking, resulting in there being approximately zero usable spaces left on the internet for rational legal discussion.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Somewhat of a coincidence, but I thought it was funny enough to make me want to share it. I happen to be reading through a book on home inspection, because I just want to know more about maintaining the house, and it's talking about roof inspections. It gives some factors for/against getting up on the roof in different conditions. ...then we get to the section on metal roofs. It says, "Never get up on a metal roof to inspect it: it’s too slippery, even in dry weather." The emphasis was in the original.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
There's always a question of whether a space was actively astroturfed, just became popular with certain types of folks, or was just taken over and shifted to driving out certain types of folks and being more attractive to other types of folks. I'm thinking /r/law, which prior to 2016 was a pretty good, legal-expertise-focused sub that usually didn't take the ridiculous political bait and could be pretty reasonable about what the law actually was, why, etc. It was visibly taken over by Orange Man Bad moderators who openly made it a rule that any comment that could be perceived as "helping Trump" in any way was verboten, regardless of the legal merits. The incredibly rapid descent to becoming /r/politics followed like clockwork.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Why they made the actual choices they made, what was wrong with their training, and what they could have done better is above my pay grade. I just think that if one of the questions is why did they seem to not take a pot of water as a threat at the beginning, but did immediately after she grabbed it, a plausible answer would be that they're almost as dumb as me and just mentally binned it in a completely different bin, just thinking about turning a stove off rather than it being a possible weapon. I could also see myself being able to read someone's face/body language as they pick up a pot like that and immediately think, "Oh shit, I guess that can be a weapon, and they might be wanting to use it."
When I was younger, I worked at a daycare for a bit. I had one troubled kid kind of try to attack me with a pair of scissors. I knew that he caused a variety of problems and that one of my main long-term goals was to try to improve his behavior, since he was one of the biggest trouble spots, but I hadn't really thought that he might actually try to attack me up to that point. The attempt was kinda pathetic, really, but it was also a moment where I very suddenly went from not thinking about him having scissors, because we had scissors and the kids used them for various things, to, "Oh shit, this fucking punk might actually try to stab me with a pair of scissors!" I'm also glad that I didn't have millions of people on the internet scrutinizing my reaction; I think I did okay, but I could definitely imagine hyper-critics going overboard on silly stuff.
I have a slight sense that there's a Schrodinger's Cop problem here. People want cops to stop being overly paranoid about possible threats, especially when they're more hypothetical than real, but when a hypothetical threat becomes a real threat, they want to complain that they weren't paranoid enough about the hypothetical threat before it became a real threat.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
So literally nothing to do with a choice of whether scrutiny in this specific case is "probably best left as a local matter rather than coopted as a national political strategy" or otherwise. Got it.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
the cabin scenario doesn't sound like anything as collectivist as "obligations" to me, but like a trade: you pay your taxes, I don't show up at your cabin to do something about the lack of animal protein in my diet (and passively/actively support a system that will stop others with more hunger for protein than me from organising to do so, reporting them to the authorities rather than cheering them on).
TheMotte truly has a Leviathan-shaped hole. I suppose one could say that the only solution to the state of nature is a particular conception of a governmental authority with particular properties. I don't know if that conception and those properties are things you'd be "willing to trade" for or not.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Going national in such a case could be a rational strategy, if you want the cop to be convicted, since it creates more embarassment for anyone who wants to "protect their own" etc.
This is a fully-general argument for taking literally any case national, no matter how local and how inconsequential to national issues. So long as you "want". Why would you want? For what purpose? What problem are you actually solving by taking it national? You're preemptively getting in front of some hypothetical injustice? Again, there can be hypothetical injustice that you could conceivably be getting in front of in literally any case ever. The system, in general, tolerates some non-zero percentage of actual, not hypothetical, injustice. It is not hard to have exposure either to the day-to-day workings of the system or even just exposure to those who have exposure to the day-to-day workings of the system and know that there is routine actual injustice (though 'routine' in a nation of almost 400M people is still a tiny percentage). Why even bother with hypothetical when you could spend your time on actual?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I'm an adult human with tons of experience around a kitchen. I have no bloody clue how far anyone can throw various quantities of water out of variously-designed pots. To use the ML lingo, it's not a thing in my training set.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
If they thought she was dangerous at the outset, then don't let her get the boiling water.
Did they, though? I haven't watched the video, mostly just skimmed some of the comments here. But I could imagine them not even thinking about her possibly threatening them with a pot of water; who does that?! Instead, just give her a moment to turn the stove off, then she's not worried about it or whatever, and they can continue doing whatever they need to do. It's only after she grabs the pot and appears threatening with it that they might think, "Oh shit, that can be a weapon; what did we get ourselves into?"
What I'm really thinking is that this is something I could totally see myself doing (the not thinking about a pot of boiling water being a potential weapon bit, not various other things). I'm not sure if it would cross my mind until some sort of threatening action was taken with the pot in hand. It's too ingrained in my classification circuits as "just cooking".
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Does charging the cop with first-degree murder count as "stonewalling" and justify going national?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
the demographics which, according to you, "cannot be said"
I mean, that's not really what I said. So, perhaps that's the fundamental misunderstanding that led to my confusion going all the way back to your first comment, which seemed strange to me, as if you really just wanted to jump off from my comment to something else that was different.
How do you know that?
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