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  1. #331
    Alpha Tarheel rufuspaul's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Nanners
    I think it is funny that the peoples champion of the democratic party aka Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law in the first place.
    How did that go down exactly? Was it a bone he threw to the right in order to get them on his side for something else? Were there enough votes in congress to override a veto?

  2. #332
    pronouns - he/haw Nanners's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by rufuspaul
    How did that go down exactly? Was it a bone he threw to the right in order to get them on his side for something else? Were there enough votes in congress to override a veto?
    IIRC, there were enough votes to override a veto. Also Clinton had just received a political black eye trying to get rid of dont ask dont tell, so that probably factored in to his decision. Basically Clinton was just protecting his own ass when he signed it, still funny though.

  3. #333
       
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    @nanners,
    yea, my POV can be taken as absurdly passive on the face of it. i am often quite naive about that kind of thing, henc3 good for me to get the feedback; ty!

    it sure does sound like you need a strawman, which would strongly suggest why some might wanna take a break right now. but if you manage to personally drive away all those with a dissenting take......... well hmm, you

  4. #334
    pronouns - he/haw Nanners's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by gigantes
    @nanners,
    yea, my POV can be taken as absurdly passive on the face of it. i am often quite naive about that kind of thing, henc3 good for me to get the feedback; ty!

    it sure does sound like you need a strawman, which would strongly suggest why some might wanna take a break right now. but if you manage to personally drive away all those with a dissenting take......... well hmm, you’re a scientist, no? i’m imagining that being both valid and invalid as a methodology for useful results in political arguments. hmm.....

    i think i will go play ping pong for awhile and see if anything interesting happens. later.
    I did use your post as a strawman in some ways, my apologies for being a d1ck like that. I know you are an intelligent and compassionate person and I should have been more careful about misrepresenting your views while trying to illustrate my point. I guess my post was not really a rebuttal to your points as much as it was a response to the mainstream media agenda on NSA spying (an agenda that has been parroted often in earlier pages of this thread.)

    Anyway its not my intention to drive people away. On the other hand, I call things as I see them, and if the "dissenters" are unable to put together a coherent counter argument... well lets just say I will never feel bad about shutting up people who dont know what they are talking about.
    Last edited by Nanners; 06-26-2013 at 05:56 PM.

  5. #335
       
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Nanners
    I did use your post as a strawman in some ways, my apologies for being a d1ck like that. I know you are an intelligent and compassionate person and I should have been more careful about misrepresenting your views while trying to illustrate my point. I guess my post was not really a rebuttal to your points as much as it was a response to the mainstream media agenda on NSA spying (an agenda that has been parroted often in earlier pages of this thread.)

    Anyway its not my intention to drive people away. On the other hand, I call things as I see them, and if the "dissenters" are unable to put together a coherent counter argument... well lets just say I will never feel bad about shutting up people who dont know what they are talking about.
    thx... much appreciated, sir! you are also someone here on ISH who i have a high regard for across the board, so was a bit dismayed to perceive myself as being typecast in a certain way just now.

    the major problem for me is that i tend to look at and examine civilisation in a very different set of ways than most, and it tends to be endlessly frustrating and labyrinthine trying to get the breadth of my opinion across on a variety of matters. for starters, i don't accept the 'healthy functionality' of the way we millions live today as being anything resembling a sustaining reality, especially one that our bodies and minds were evolutionarily designed upon.

    you might say that on one hand i admire advancers of thought like locke, descartes and the heroic democratic shot fired around the world by our kickass (gifted, brave) founding fathers, but as a student of the world and nature i tend to observe that such tremendous ideas are bound to be increasingly at odds with reality... both in theory and in practice.

    for example, i would like to think that i am well-reasoned enough to separate my emotions from a particular issue that greatly galls me, but if you want a particular issue that arouses in me feelings of deep mistrust in our whole system... in our our laws, common rights, our adam smith the scot system of market-driven politics, and civilisation as a whole... i am deeply angry, resentful and mistrustful of how the whole shebang works to handle the GCC problem, to say the least... a 'problem' that we created in the first place, anyway.

    IMO our civilisation is a fraud, and the way that we constructed it in the first place is also a fraud. so when i hear about this NSA thing, i tend to think-- uh, this is news?? i mean, in the age of our ISP's owning our data transactions the way they do, and large corporations (as you mentioned before) like google and yahoo, etc gathering absolutely as much info as possible, and the data hackers doing their thing.... i'm not even sure if PRISM is a good thing or a bad thing. i.e., someone is going to grab our info in a sense, so who do you want it to be?

    understand... these are just thoughts that run through my mind. not trying to say i sell myself as anything more.

    so that's more or less why i previously said that the whole thing is endlessly complicated to evaluate. it's also very frustrating and depressing, honestly.

    IMO in evolutionary-terms we're still very much designed to be tribespeople, and the thing that war consistently teaches us is that we badly need enemies to actively exercise our aggression upon in order to maintain good health. that is, our biochemical package becomes enhanced in all the right ways and we quantifiably become healthier when we have a foe to direct upon. therefore i think it takes very hard work (maybe based on an ideal) for an person to grind past their instincts and try to arrive at a balanced view of a PITA issue, like this.

    again, i don't really know modern US politics, but i did prefer the way this thread operated before... like we were just mates hanging out at a cafe, sipping our drinks, exchanging facts, and trying to take what our buddies said with a grain of salt.

    but i don't know... maybe when the really challenging stuff comes down, so many ppl become angry that there's no chance but that a kevin-nyc has to get driven out of threads like this.

    i would sort of agree in one way, however... if kevin is going to retreat over an issue and does consider that issue to have merit, then it would be better (for me) if he could make his position known a tad better.

    all i know FOR SURE is that i know nothing. :D

  6. #336
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Lots of NSA stuff happened today.

    Dana Priest who has written about National Security stuff for a while and won two Pulitzers for doing it explains how the NSA metadata program works.
    Piercing the confusion around the NSA's phone surveillance program

    The metadata program is not PRISM. The metadata program is known as the 215 order because section 215 of the Patriot Act is the authorization for it.

    The metadata includes "date, time and duration. The metadata also includes a phone’s routing information, telephone calling card numbers and other identifiers internal to each phone. It does not include the content of the calls or the names of the phone subscribers. It does not contain information about the phone’s location."

    The article says that only 22 people are permitted to approve a search of this metadata and it has to be connected to foreign terrorism. Say they catch a guy in Yemen and find a bunch of phone numbers on his laptop. One of these 22 people can approve the search of the database. They are looking to see the numbers on the laptop turn up in recent phone traffic. Once a search is authorized there are only 33 people in the NSA authorized to access this data.

    The analysts’ 215 requests go to one of the 22 people at the NSA who are permitted to approve them — the chief or the deputy chief of the Homeland Security Analysis Center or one of 20 authorized Homeland Security mission coordinators within the Signals Intelligence directorate’s analysis and production directorate.

    Once a request is approved, it is given to one of the Signal Intelligence directorate’s 33 counterterrorism analysts who are authorized to access the U.S. phone metadata collection.

    When one of the analysts attempts to log into the database, the computer verifies whether the analyst has permission to do so. Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who leaked details of the program, would not have had such authority.

    An analyst’s search of the metadata begins with a foreign number: the number the NSA intercept was targeting in Yemen; the number the Saudi intelligence liaison took from the detainee; numbers found in the computer in Afghanistan that show calls to Europe or the United States.

    The analyst then queries the database to see if it contains the number. In 2012, the database was queried 300 times by an NSA analyst.
    Once they have a number they do a bunch of other analysis to see if the number in the database still looks like its worth investigating. Those numbers are turned over to the FBI. 500 numbers were turned over in 2012.

  7. #337
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Edward Snowden's email service got a visit from the government and shut down service rather than comply with it. And they gave very little info why they did this, meaning there's a gag order in place

  8. #338
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread


  9. #339
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    The Justice Department release a 22 page "white paper" on the 215 program with its legal arguments.

    BULK COLLECTION OF TELEPHONY METADATA
    UNDER SECTION 215 OF THE USA PATRIOT ACT

  10. #340
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    And Obama himself had a press conference an among other things, proposed reforms to the FISA court and section 215 of the Patriot Act along the same lines that members of Congress recently pushed.

  11. #341
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by KevinNYC
    And Obama himself had a press conference an among other things, proposed reforms to the FISA court and section 215 of the Patriot Act along the same lines that members of Congress recently pushed.
    Following the press conference, Colorado Democratic Senator Mark Udall, a prominent civil libertarian critic of the administration, said in a statement saying that

  12. #342
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Yesterday, the NY Times reported that there are times when the NSA searches emails and text going into and out of the US. The example given is if the email or text contains the email address of a terrorist suspect.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/us...pagewanted=all

  13. #343
    Rules #2 dont give fk* travelingman's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    XKeyscore, anybody?

    I believe most of the criticism from the (mostly) libertarian voice that is clearly upset over what it considers to be violations of basic rights afforded to U.S. citizens is being projected slightly off course (toward MAINWAY instead of the XKeyscore program). The XKeyscore program seems to be the much more easily manipulated of the two NSA methods of intelligence gathering (it has been proven how easily a search of a U.S. citizen can be conducted using this program and how low the standards are to guarantee that only foreign individuals are searched instead of U.S. citizens). That a search using the XKeyscore program could fairly easily be executed on any U.S. citizen to view their email or online chat contents without any prior authorization should be of fairly large concern to those who decried the MAINWAY program, no?

    and KevinNYC, what is your opinion of Glenn Greenwald?

  14. #344
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Report says Obama couldn't watch Bin Laden raid and played cards instead.


    http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/...id_748413.html

  15. #345
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by travelingman
    XKeyscore, anybody?

    I believe most of the criticism from the (mostly) libertarian voice that is clearly upset over what it considers to be violations of basic rights afforded to U.S. citizens is being projected slightly off course (toward MAINWAY instead of the XKeyscore program). The XKeyscore program seems to be the much more easily manipulated of the two NSA methods of intelligence gathering (it has been proven how easily a search of a U.S. citizen can be conducted using this program and how low the standards are to guarantee that only foreign individuals are searched instead of U.S. citizens). That a search using the XKeyscore program could fairly easily be executed on any U.S. citizen to view their email or online chat contents without any prior authorization should be of fairly large concern to those who decried the MAINWAY program, no?

    and KevinNYC, what is your opinion of Glenn Greenwald?
    Re Greenwald
    Not a fan....just vented in another thread about him. First thing to know about him is he is lawyer turned blogger, not a trained reporter. He's an advocate, think of a lawyer arguing in court, trying to win a case. I used to read him year ago, but stopped.

    I think he consistently misled folks on this story in a few ways. I don't know if he is against all spying in general like Snowden seems to be, but the NSA is foreign intelligence agency, there are pretty strong safeguards in place against targeting Americans.

    He has consistently
    confuse the potential for abuse with widespread and active abuse
    confused the issue regarding foreign/American
    confused what is in metadata vs content.....think of how many people think the NSA read American emails in bulk.
    downplayed all the NSA safeguards including US Law, including 4th ammenment protections on content. See how many paragraphs of alarmist text you need to wade through before he drops the sentence about needing a warrant if the target is an American.

    He's also going to ride this story has hard as he can. He just offered NBC an interview with Snowden for mid 5 figures according to him, 7 figures according to the wife of Snowden's Dad's lawyer. Snowden's Dad thinks Greenwald and Wikileaks are not acting with the best interests of Snowden in mind.

    Also you're doing a technical story about databases and metadata, find someone who knows what FTP is.

    Re: the bolded text, what has been proven about the standards being low? By who? Dana Priest who wrote a book on Top Secret America doesn't think so.
    The analysts’ 215 requests go to one of the 22 people at the NSA who are permitted to approve them — the chief or the deputy chief of the Homeland Security Analysis Center or one of 20 authorized Homeland Security mission coordinators within the Signals Intelligence directorate’s analysis and production directorate.

    Once a request is approved, it is given to one of the Signal Intelligence directorate’s 33 counterterrorism analysts who are authorized to access the U.S. phone metadata collection.

    When one of the analysts attempts to log into the database, the computer verifies whether the analyst has permission to do so. Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who leaked details of the program, would not have had such authority.

    An analyst’s search of the metadata begins with a foreign number: the number the NSA intercept was targeting in Yemen; the number the Saudi intelligence liaison took from the detainee; numbers found in the computer in Afghanistan that show calls to Europe or the United States.

    The analyst then queries the database to see if it contains the number. In 2012, the database was queried 300 times by an NSA analyst
    Also according to Mark Ambinder who also just wrote a book on this stuff, XKEYSCORE is for foreign collection.
    XKEYSCORE: Collection tool for international metadata
    Lots of spy database goodies at that link.
    Last edited by KevinNYC; 08-16-2013 at 02:51 AM.

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