Posts by Bernard M. Orwell 1177 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2010
Good points, well made, gets an upvote from me Matt.
I'd not heard of Perry Fellwock, so you're quite right there and the fact that Snowdon has an exclusive deal with only one news outlet might well be suspect.
I'm not sure I'd call it anymore evidential that some of the posts that disagree with you, but its enough to make me raise an eyebrow and go and do some more research.
"Instead, Snowjob chose to make money off his treachery by selling his info via Greenwald and Poitras (and now no doubt through his "friendship" with Dickileaks). Snowjob did not do the only thing he could, he did the thing that guaranteed him fame, noteriety, and a cheque or three."
And where is YOUR proof, Matt Bleaty? Can you even come up to your own standards?
No.
Additional...
" ...between May 24, 2006 and February 17, 2009, the NSA was monitoring 17,835 phone accounts, barely 2,000 of which had "reasonable articulable suspicion" of wrongdoing – a requirement for such surveillance to be legal."
Yeah, thats not someone saying it was (potentially) illegal at all, is it? Not meeting the requirements for something to be legal isn't the same as something being done that is illegal. Takes a special kind of weasel to make that fine distinction.
"During a judicial review of the program, the NSA said that the problems stemmed from the fact that the information-gathering infrastructure was so complex that "there was no single person with a complete understanding of the FISA system architecture."
Look! They need you MB! It's your duty as a Patriot to explain it to them as clearly as you have to us.
Ah good, you're back! Nice to see you again. I need a reminder from time to time that I am the sane one and that real insanity can be found lurking here in the guise of Matt Brainlack.
Love the denial of reality line as it's clearly you thats screaming the denials not us. Open your eyes, troll-boy and take a long look at how the unfolding events concur with our angles and not with yours. Swallow some of that self-aggrandisement and wasted pride for a change as more of us might take you more seriously then.
In answer to your point, however, I don't think I actually used the word "illegal" either so perhaps some reading comprehension tuition would be appropriate for you rather than for me. Not the first time you've failed to actually read what I've actually posted, is it?
Now, let's see, what was it you said in our original discussion? Ah yes, here it is...
" So, if the panels of judges, and there were plenty of them over the years (forty federal judges), passed all the other warrants, could it be the surveillance requested was justified? Gosh, no way, right? LOL! So we can now all plainly see it is not only a narrow and targeted program, but that forty different judges (yeah, please do pretend they are all Republicans) thought the warrants were LEGALLY justified in all but eleven cases. And those cases got rejected."
Seems you were entirely wrong. Suprise, suprise. Again, not the first time you have spouted opinion as fact. I suggest you spend some time doing some proper research instead of relying on the Daily Mail and Fox News to fuel your foaming. Do enjoy your Tea-Party.
TTFN old chap.
You and I had a debate over a previous article wherein I criticised the FISA courts for their rampant, unaccountable pursuit of unlawful surveillance actions taken against US citizens. You defended them despite the evidence I presented, saying that they were wholly legal and justified in their actions and activities.
The POTUS has himself now appeared to have taken a similar stance to my arguments and has directed these clandestine powers to reveal themselves and their activities to the US electorate. As a result it has become even clearer that they have been entirely in the wrong and acting unlawfully all this time, as I, and others, postulated originally.
I'd be interested in your response.
Yeah, you're right, but this....
"In the meantime, given that BT is in a unique position to use this kind of alerting mechanism, I would be interested in the views of Reg readers on things the BT customer experience team should think about as it further considers what’s appropriate in this area. "
....surely amounts to "Unleash the Hounds!"
Gentlemen, I think you should all be aware that "allowing the gaze to slip" is technically Illegal in the UK. In fact, it counts as sexual harrassment and is considered by our Dear Home Secretary to be just as bad as physical and emotional abuse!
Behold, the stupidity and bias of the law in all its splendor:
http://www.safeworkers.co.uk/sexualharassmentwork.html
"Non-verbal [Sexual Harrassment] - Looking or staring at a person’s body."
Note well that it's not merely prolonged staring that counts but merely looking. Avert your gaze from all wimmin immediately or lose your job! Contemporary law demands that we change our natural behaviour, developed over hundreds of thousands of years today. Right now. In a single generation.
"She's put up hours long rants about men and how all single men are rapists and yadda yadda yadda"
Do you have a link to those rants?
As an occasional visitor to /b/ I can tell you that their "community" very rarely does things without cause. A frequent trope there is "We are not your private army", meaning they have to be convinced, en masse, of the 'value' of taking action against a target. For every simple trolling, you will find threads hunting down and exposing people who have offended their collective sensibilities or what passes for group morality there. They are the assholes of the internet and they freely admit that, but those same assholes have hunted down abusers, perverts, animal cruelty cases, criminals and extremists of all stripes and exposed them for all to see.
For /b/ to act without some sort of catalyst is very, very rare indeed.
On a final note - those of you conflating 4Chan as being nothing but /b/, and /b/ anonymity being the same thing as the Anonymous "organisation" should really step back from the debate because you are clueless as to how this particular form of counter-culture is actually shaped. Please hand in your interweb license.
{and that was a troll, QED}.
"So you actually think it would be a smart idea to impede the hunt for potential terrorists? Please do try and explain your hip'n'trendy humour to the families of the victims of 9/11, the London Tube bombings, the Madrid train bombings, etc., etc."
All of these events occurred after the establishment of the surveillance systems we are discussing.
In each of these cases it can be shown that the intelligence services of the countries affected were, at least to some degree, partially aware of the perpetrators and the potential risk that they may have been planning such crimes. Perhaps you would care to explain to the families how the systems paid for by their taxes, maintained by their caring governments and its agencies and used to monitor the victims (amongst the rest of us) of such attacks were NOT protected by this amazing, complex and powerful IT/Interception system?
I will cheerfully explain to the collateral victims of these terrible attacks why the measures being implemented and proposed will not prevent future attacks if you can explain to them why it didn't prevent previous attacks.
Dunno. Maybe you should ask France. After all it was their troops that woin that particular war, wasn't it? We should have some way of celebrating their liberation of your nation, some kind of memorial thing? Oh...like "Freedom Fries"...yeah, that'd do it!
I doubt it's going to be used to just cut people off at the drop of a hat; that kind of kneejerk action is measurably detrimental to the companies reputation and reputation management is a big issue these days to most soulless corps. Imagine the furore the first time some OAPs power is cut off by an automated smart-meter in the middle of winter? The Daily Fail would have a field day about "evil robot technology is killing our old soldiers!"
IMO, there is a far more unpleasant possibility. As we all know, oil/coal reserves are low and we are reliant, to a degree, on overseas supplies to keep our electricity up and running. You may have noticed that there have been "scares" lately, where UK national reserves of power have dipped below critical thresholds, resulting in headlines that suggest the UK has been "mere hours from brownouts/blackouts".
If you were a government facing the possibility of the UK running out of power, even temporarily, would you not want a system to allow you to control rationing of power in the future?
Say hello to smart-metering!
Here you go then MB....
"It is also rare for FISA warrant requests to be turned down by the court. During the 25 years from 1979 to 2004, 18,742 warrants were granted, while just four were rejected. Fewer than 200 requests had to be modified before being accepted, almost all of them in 2003 and 2004. The four rejected requests were all from 2003, and all four were partially granted after being submitted for reconsideration by the government. Of the requests that had to be modified, few if any were before the year 2000. During the next eight years, from 2004 to 2012, there were over 15,100 additional warrants granted, with an additional seven being rejected. In all, over the entire 33-year period, the FISA court has granted 33,942 warrants, with only 11 denials – a rejection rate of 0.03% of the total request."
Wow! Yeah! they turned down LOTS didn't they? Ah, wait, no....well perhaps they made sure lots were CHANGED before they approved them? Ah wait...no...not that either....
Oh, and you need a citation.... Again, this is from the SAME article you initially quoted your argument from. You know, the one where you said people should do some reading and independant research? Yeah....
Citation: ^ (subscription required) Evan, Perez (June 9, 2013). "Secret Court's Oversight Gets Scrutiny". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved June 20, 2013.
I think that settles it matty boy.
I wasn't so much declaring victory as predicting your response. I think I won that one.
Now, I am going to ignore you sidestepping the very, very many points, with supporting citations that I made in response to your various excellently researched arguments and proceed with the only valid one you left me; wherein you call the 11 judges "independant"...
....they're not. Of the 11, 10 are republicans, appointed by an unelected republican senior. That's about as far from independant as you can get.
(PS, so you don't feel the need to decry me as a democrat, I'm not an Obama fan either.)
You do realise, of course, that I am sat here waiting for him to come back with cheap name-calling, more trollish nonsense and a little more selective copypasta than usual.
I'm assuming he will remain true to form; or perhaps, it occurs to me, that if he cannot tackle the items *I* copypasta'd from his own source, he will attack *this* post instead?!
Meta-Trolling; because I'm worth it.
It appears that the FISC court is also known as the FISA court, and has been since 1978 when it was created, so the distinction you have made in calling it solely the FISC court is incorrect.
Also, whilst mr. Greenwald may not be a legal expert, let's listen to the findings of the 2003 Senate Judiciary Committee Interim Report on FBI Oversight in the 107th Congress by the Senate Judiciary Committee: FISA Implementation Failures, who most certainly do know the law, and reported;
"The secrecy of individual FISA cases is certainly necessary, but this secrecy has been extended to the most basic legal and procedural aspects of the FISA, which should not be secret. This unnecessary secrecy contributed to the deficiencies that have hamstrung the implementation of the FISA. Much more information, including all unclassified opinions and operating rules of the FISA Court and Court of Review, should be made public and/or provided to the Congress."
Or to former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice who called it a "kangaroo court with a rubber stamp"
Furthermore, On May 17, 2002, the court rebuffed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, releasing an opinion that alleged that FBI and Justice Department officials had "supplied erroneous information to the court in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps, including one signed by then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh." Whether this rebuke is related to the court starting to require modification of significantly more requests in 2003 is unknown.
On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration had been conducting surveillance against U.S. citizens without the knowledge of the court since 2002. On December 20, 2005, Judge James Robertson resigned his position with the court, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance.
Elizabeth Gotein, a co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, has criticized the court as being too compromised to be an impartial tribunal that oversees the work of the NSA and other U.S. intelligence activities. Since the court meets in secret, hears only the arguments of the government prior to deciding a case and its rulings cannot be appealed or even reviewed by the public, she has argued that: "Like any other group that meets in secret behind closed doors with only one constituency appearing before them, they're subject to capture and bias."
A related bias of the court results from what critics such as Julian Sanchez, a scholar at the Cato Institute, have described as the near certainty of the polarization or group think of the judges of the court. Since all of the judges are appointed by the same person (the Chief Justice of the United States), nearly all currently serving judges are of the same political party (the Republican Party), hear no opposing testimony and feel no pressure from colleagues or the public to moderate their rulings, group polarization is almost a certainty. "There's the real possibility that these judges become more extreme over time, even when they had only a mild bias to begin with," Sanchez said.
Or, how about a quote from someone who was actually ON the FISC? James Robertson – a former judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who, in 2004, ruled against the Bush administration in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case, and also served on the FISC for three years between 2002 and 2005 – said he was "frankly stunned" by the newspaper reports that court rulings had created a new body of law broadening the ability of the NSA to use its surveillance programs to target not only terrorists but suspects in cases involving espionage, cyberattacks and weapons of mass destruction.
I think it's safe to call those persons quoted experts, and it is therefore reasonable to entertain their criticisms.
All of these points come from the same Wikipedia article as the one you have quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court
But... Turing is dead. The people who investigated him are dead. The people who wrote and implemented those laws are dead. Everyone involved is (probably) dead.
Are we REALLY going to dig up corpses and try them under the laws of today (metaphorically speaking, that is)?
Are we going to dig up Henry VIII and try him for murder and polygamy? Will *I* be dug up in a couple of centuries from now and tried for posting freely on a public forum without state approval ('cos that is going to be a crime one day , surely!)
Just how far is our "retrospective" law going to carry on extending?
laws are created by lobbyists, not by elected representatives. Lobbyists represent capital enterprise mostly, not social groupings.
Law is not created with the good of the people in mind, only the good of profit and capital gain. If you believe that law is still just in that light then you probably also believe that profit is the single measure of good.
I believe elsewise.
This is often the "patriots" argument, and, if you look back over certain posts in this very thread (and many others by the same shills), you will see it used quite liberally throughout; the concept that what is legal is the same as what is right, just or moral.
Legal is not necessarily an indication of Right.
Don't feed the troll, his only arguments rely on simple minded ad hominem attacks. There is no point attempting a sensible, reasoned debate with one who lacks manners or reason, even when he's a well-spoken shill.
And yes, I know my criticism may be construed as an ad hominem itself; got to love the irony eh?
....up to now, the Powers-That-Be have been going to some lengths to tell us that the snooping is all fine because they are only capturing the meta-data, and *not* the content; but then we get this...
"The audio portions of these sessions have been processed correctly all along, but without the accompanying video. Now, analysts will have the complete 'picture'," it says.
Audio and Video? well thats clearly content and not meta-data, isn't it? More lies?
Do you mean the one's invented by Altec UEC and PACE? Amstrad did indeed operate as a distributor for those in the UK (model 1 and 2 only, if I remember rightly), but I'm pretty certain they didn't invent them and are not the sole distributor for them. In fact, Sky got so many complaints about the Amstrad version of the Sky+ boxes that they bought Amstrad out in 2007 in order to address the issues, after only ONE year of doing business with him
There's no doubt that Mr. Sugars' various companies have released many, many products, but invented nothing of significance and never had a successful brand of their own. This is yet another of his cynical, nasty, mealy-minded plans to squeeze short term cash out of "punters".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sugar
I call cobblers on your credentials. No student of Philosophy would resort to such simplistic Ad Hominem attacks twice in a row.
Also, they would see the fundamental error in an "Appeal to Authority" argument wherein one might simply say "read more and you too will be wise like me, but only if you read the same books and end up with the same conclusions as me otherwise you are not wise."
Horizons are never so narrow except when bounded by received wisdom.
Murder isn't illegal if the state provides you with the weapons and a uniform and points you at the brown people over there. It's like killing zombies; guilt free murder for everyone!
Therefore expect games like "GTA" and "Watchdogs" to be hit with massive criticism whilst CoD and MW games are held up as paragons of technology and design.
...and once you finish your term of elected service, we will put you in court, on trial, for all that you have done. If you've been a good PM, and broken no laws, told no lies and achieved what you promised (ie, not in breach of contract, no acts of treason etc) then well done....
....if not...well....
Worth noting, it's not priced at £2.99 it's priced at $2.99, which means, if it was even available to stream in the UK, it would cost £1.92. Now I wonder what the odds are that it'd be sold at, say, £1.99 an episode in the UK or would it be sold for £2.99 after all making it considerably more expensive in the UK? In fact, I'd not be suprised to see it a "premium viewing" price of as much as £3.99 or even £4.99 if some streaming services are to be the benchmark....
If they do put it out at £1.99 an episode in a nice 1080p, steady, ad-free stream, available within no more than 24hrs of original US broadcast then they can sign me up right now. Happy Days!
Until then, I can get it by....other means.
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