HN user
Snowden has not, in fact, revealed the existence of a global system to capture the digital communications of everyone on the planet. Try again.
Also, I'd still like to hear the explanation of how Snowden exposed his NSA co-workers torturing people. I had not heard that one.
Please show me where Snowden has exposed his coworkers torturing other human beings.
Please show me where Snowden has exposed his coworkers building a totalitarian surveillance infrastructure. Justify describing it as 'totalitarian'.
And for calling me a Nazi, go fuck yourself.
"just"? The BLA was shooting people and blowing up buildings, no scare quotes needed, they actually did that. That is why the police were after them: they were breaking the law in a serious way. How confused do you have to be to say that they should not have been investigated for these crimes because they were doing something else also?
I'm still waiting on Snowden to provide evidence of the NSA breaking the 4th amendment and illegally spying on the American people. For all the panic and the republication of old stories about the NSA, it is Snowden who has provided absolutely zero evidence.
What we do have is that Snowden copied a large cache of thousands of sensitive documents and gave them to who-knows-who. Suddenly countries that position themselves as enemies of the US are very happy to help him out, and he is happy to accept their assistance. In between, there was a public relations campaign to call him a "whistleblower" even though that is not what he did. The documents provided as supporting evidence do not say what Glenn Greenwald's reports say they do, while the journalists who have reported on these programs before are all facepalming at how wrong Greenwald's reporting has been.
So yes, it looks like the entire thing is a hoax and Snowden is a spy. YHBT by Glenn Greenwald and whoever else was involved. YHL. HAND.
Thank you for adding nothing to the discussion.
Because he is starting at China, one superpower that is an antagonist of the US; taking the first leg of his trip to Russia, another superpower that is an antagonist of the US; and traveling through one to three countries (Cuba, Ecuador, and/or Venezuela depending on the the report) that style themselves as enemies of the US. His travel itinerary is strong evidence that he was a spy for a foreign power this whole time.
Incidentally, every one of the countries on the list plays the Great Game as aggressively as the US does, and spies on and oppresses its people more aggressively than the US. These are not places where someone with an interest in peace or human rights can seek refuge.
The entire Snowden hoax is a media event, a PR campaign to cover up the fact that he spied on the US for foreign powers. It's the most effective case of spin and damage control that I've ever seen.
Assata Shakur? The terrorist? Of course she did not "find a safe haven here in the U.S." while she and her Black Liberation Army were shooting people and blowing up buildings. The police were trying to put her in jail.
Someone could, but the explanation is secret. Ironic, isn't it?
Regarding the idea that someone would have leaked something, WorldNetDaily seems to get a lot of leaks from the CIA. This raises several questions about any of these stories starting with how fake is it, what kind of person would leak to WND, and are they trying to plant a story or suppress one?
They are already effecting change; seeing this on the front page has made me have much less respect for the Hacker News community. How can so many people be so stupid, and on HN of all places?
What outrageous actions? What outrageous policies? What long-festering problem? You haven't said a damn thing, just as Snowden has yet to expose any wrongdoing on the part of the NSA. He has said that the NSA is spying on everybody, but all of the evidence he has presented has shown nothing of the kind and in fact shows that procedures to protect our privacy and 4th amendment rights are in place and being followed.
AJAX and REST sure are evil. The fact that 229 people have upvoted this is certainly proof that web-based UIs are something that we as hackers ought to oppose.
We are all aware that PRISM has been exposed to be nothing more than a user interface to information provided by companies that receive a search warrant after the request has gone through courts and lawyers, right? Surely 229 users of Hacker News cannot be that uninformed about PRISM, after so many front-page articles on the subject giving so many opportunities to hash out the details of what it is and is not, that they imagine it to be something nefarious?
As long as we're playing at labels, I am a socialist and you are a goddamned idiot. There is no such thing as a corporatist. You're just using it as a nasty word to accuse your debate opponents of malicious intentions.
Back to the point: people freely give their personal data to Facebook. Facebook now knows that information and can publish it, sell it, whatever. The people have no expectation of privacy which would be necessary for a 4th Amendment defense. Anybody can go to Facebook and just ask for the data, government agents included. It is Facebook's choice to give it away, set a price, or refuse.
What we need is a court ruling that people who click through these things have no intention to be bound by the contract, and therefore aren't.
Is the community jumping the shark, or is Hacker News under a denial-of-service attack? It's hard to tell.
The civil police force.
"If you knew this was happening"...
Define "this".
For the last few days, these huge comment threads have been completely empty of information. People are complaining about "NSA spying" or simply "this" and calling it unconstitutional without defining what these actions were and why they are unconstitutional. In the absence of detail, people are substituting their own worst fears. For the most part, that is also the case in the linked articles.
So far, by my understanding, we have:
1. A court order for Verizon to create a database of phone transaction metadata and make it accessible to the NSA. We don't know what (if any) procedures are in place for controlling access to the data.
2. A non-technical document claiming that the NSA has direct access to "the servers" and is getting information from several companies. News reports imply that this refers to internal company servers. The companies named unanimously deny that this is the case. We don't know the details of what information the NSA is collecting or how they are collecting it; specifically, we do not know and cannot say that they are failing to follow the 4th Amendment and other legal procedures.
3. Something called PRISM exists. People are fearmongering about PRISM being some horrible unconstitutional crime when nobody knows what it is (my guess: it's just a UI for collecting reports from the companies that they send enough information requests to for them to use a standard data format).
None of this justifies the current panic, the uprating of spammy slogans, and the top-rated comment in a 300-point thread saying this is just as bad as Hitler.
I submitted a better link yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5859658
It is "better", in that:
1. It goes to the original source, not a blog post giving a five-line summary of another blog post.
2. It is relevant to the acts of which the NSA was recently accused (specifically, the collection of Verizon metadata) and not about some other vague undefined activity that the NSA has already been forced to stop doing.
3. It discusses in detail the Constitutional issues involved and the history of related court rulings.
4. It is the actual US Supreme Court ruling on the subject.
I disagree, but I gave you an upvote because your mindless rhetoric is as equally valuable and informative to this conversation as the other mindless rhetoric posts that do nothing more than agree with TFA and yet have not been marked down as far as your post.
So you are taking the position that Unit 61398 of the 2nd Bureau of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff Department’s (GSD) 3rd Department has no relation to the state of China. Please elucidate.
The alleged spying project is led by a Scottish American and organized by guys named Randall and Paul Jacobson, using software from an Indian company owned by Boeing and an Israeli company headquartered in Massachussetts. Of all the different people involved in this, we are only supposed to care about the Jews. Singling out the Jews for hate is racism, especially given how minimal their alleged involvement is.
The evidence for this alleged act of Israel spying on the US is that an Israeli company developed software that was purchased and used by the government and phone companies. That's all. We don't even know what the software is named or what it does other than a vague description of it logging and copying network data; it could be a frontend to wireshark or netcat. Consider, how does Hacker News react when any other startup develops useful cutting-edge network management software and gets a big government deal? Now see how we react when an Israeli company does the exact same thing? This is a hate-the-Jews thread.
If he gets banned, the conversation is indeed over so his point stands, eh?
A funny thing about this "tone troll" business is that PZ bans people for asking for more civility in discussions, and he banned Thunderf00t for being incivil. Go figure.
Reread it yourself. He does in fact uphold forcefulness ("confidence", "command", "outmaneuver", not "feeble") and rhetoric ("inner strength", "emotion") as superior to logical thought ("predictable", "rigid"). It's like he just discovered that street-level debates don't follow Oxford rules, that some people cannot be persuaded by logic, and that other people can be persuaded by illogical means, so he denounces the use of logic and stands by the illogical means as the path to deducing correctness. He views rhetoric as persuasiveness as correctness. His examples all reinforce this analysis.
And let's consider that "inner strength". It is not the actual strength of the argument since that is what the logic-users would see and support. If the argument had outer strength, the baloney detectors would not have called it out in the first place. This "inner strength" is a feeling he gets from the argument. It is an emotional uplift. It is irrelevant to the actual strength of the argument.
When the baloney detectors are correct, they very well ought to be assertive, stubborn, and convinced of their own correctness. Why should they accept their opponent's views as fact after they have proved it insufficiently justified or logically false?
And yes, conversations can be multifaceted. I'm sorry to have to inform you that serious logical flaws and mistakes of fact in one facet of a multifaceted conversation do in fact invalidate that one facet of the conversation.
And please refrain from the insults, although it was nice to learn that I am both young and old at the same time, and also a racist.
This is wrong on so many levels that it's difficult to keep track of them all. Let's start with the introduction:
<blockquote>Why did people who deployed these [critical thinking] terms always look so rigid, so predictable, so feeble? Why did people who avoided them look so confident in comparison, so much more in command of their resources, so much more mature? Their arguments seemed to possess an inner strength; the baloney detectors, by contrast, only had strength in numbers.</blockquote>
Translation: Some people never shut up after they have been proven wrong, <em>and the author values this assertiveness over whether their arguments are logically sound</em>. He concludes that the most assertive arguer is automatically <em>correct</em>. He calls for the total abandonment of logic and reason and to respect force and effect in their stead.
His justification is the presumption that any person would quit an argument after being proved wrong; this is a false premise, as evidenced by the existence of liars, fanatics, and human choice. He applies this false premise to the whole of reason in order to condemn it; this is a strawman argument, a form of false premise, as reason has never presumed that its methods would lead to this result, but holds that its methods enable a witness to more accurately judge whose arguments are more likely to be correct. From there he reaches the conclusion that critical analysis is worthless. In an irony, he is himself attempting to use critical analysis to debunk critical analysis itself, but his foundation is so rotten that his argument is easily shown to be unjustified.
Next the author tries to declare certain forms of arguments as being off-limits to critical analysis, like emotional appeals. An emotional appeal is irrelevant to whether the stated facts are likely to be true or false. The dismissal of an argument for its emotional appeal is shorthand for saying that the argument has not justified its claims, but is trying to trick witnesses into believing its claims by appealing to their emotions instead of reason. If an argument truly has nothing behind it other than its appeal to emotion, then its dismissal as an appeal to the emotions is fully justified. He also applies the same protection to the Rush Limbaugh defense of people saying their lies, initially presented as serious factual claims, were meant to be taken as "comedy" when disproven, or as "irony, hyperbole, understatement, whimsy, counterfactual conjecture, or any other of the wonders of figurative language that defy semantic nit-picking". Contrary to having "nothing to contribute", "semantic nit-picking" tears these turns of phrase apart and exposes the argument being made.
Next he says that the correct identification of a logical error does not imply incorrectness of the argument. No comment is needed.
Finally, we get to the root cause. The author has constructed this framework of deliberate mental incompetence to justify supporting Rebecca Watson's claim that <strong>all Atheist men are sexist</strong>, with the implication being that Atheist men are sexist to such a degree that all of them are rapists-in-waiting. A supporting argument is laid out in a similar manner to the classic form, simplified as such:
Thesis: All Atheist men are sexist. 1. Z is an atheist man. 2. Z is not sexist. (Points 1 and 2 are repeated for a dozen more Zs)
It takes the complete abandonment of logic to conclude, as the author does, that the thesis is upheld and indeed strengthened by these arguments. As we have seen, the complete abandonment of logic is the author's goal. He wants you to believe that you should stop thinking logically because he writes so strongly and forcefully for it.
This one actually has techie relevance, but I hear what you're saying. The political links and their duplicates and their duplicates are drowning out the technology posts, even on /classic.
An expert would know the ecma spec inside and out, know what javascript does differently from similar procedural languages, know how to approach performance and memory management issues, know common practical development patterns, know the DOM and the new HTML5 APIs, know the differences in the implemented capabilities of commonly used browsers, and have studied (or helped write) one of the open-source implementations.
Here is a free clue for you: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1253796
And some notes on his influence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qutbism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%27alim_fi_al-Tariq
They do indeed "hate us for our freedoms" and the mind-numbingly ignorant position is to deny it.
Yes. Fascism and capitalism were separate in Italy, Germany, and Franco's Spain.
"The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others" - Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism. http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/Mus...
Fascism calls for state control and direction of the economy, which ultimately means Fascist Party control of the same because Fascism denies the legitimacy of any other party to ever govern the state. Capitalism calls for few to no state controls over economic activity so as to allow all businesses to operate with minimal interference.
Germany followed Italy's lead in state direction of the economy and notoriously seized the assets of Jews and sent them to "work" camps in the name of increasing the productivity of their labour. Franco banned international trade and watched his economy crash for a decade.