Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1988 Editor's Choice: 19
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@jojo++
[Read the article: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]From the Narus website:
Narus is headquartered in Mountain View, CA (USA) with offices throughout North America, EMEA (France, Germany, U.K.), Asia (Japan and Korea), and Brazil. Core product development is done in Mountain View with additional development facilities in Bangalore, India.
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@jojo++
[Read the article: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It was founded by an Israeli, Ori Cohen, but he was here when he founded it, he was working for VDONet. He was originally in the video streaming business, then went to internet billing, then made THE BIG TRANSFORMATION to security after September 11, four years after founding the company.
It's possible that it was originally an Israeli venture, but he seems rather Silicon Valley video-on-demand connected, an extremely common profile for a "homeland security company" because they all know how to process big data streams. Not that any country doing surveillance on us for our government would surprise me. It's a lucrative field, and you can always pretend your product is for helping the content providers look for copyright violations or something.
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@veteran novice
[Read the article: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For instance, if the government is doing key word data analysis on a wide net search of domestic electronic communications, what key words do you put in to filter all of that data with?
You don't use key words. Except to get entry points, for which you don't really care how accurate they are. Besides, for each event (there were thousands of terrorist events just last year), you can get a few entry points that are probably higher quality. You pick up a computer from a raid in Pakistan, and you do analysis on language use patterns, you run semantic searches from the phrases there, you follow names. What you are looking for is entry points for link analysis. Where you go from there is to look at patterns and metapatterns. You filter the news media, you use people that repeat stories. You filter plane tickets, you start link graphs. You look at usage patterns of banks and services, you add people who have similar usage patterns. You look at known clusters, watch for their patterns to change. You draw belief graphs, you update them. You throw info into the system, see how it changes.
Who said anything about key words? Key words are sooo...Google.
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Especially...
[Read the article: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...if the target isn't limited to terrorists.
You're right, your point is still intact, although if the search was really for foreign terrorists, and only terrorists, the NSA still has better seeds.
Personally, I think it's the Vanunu principle: When Vanunu spilled the beans on the Israeli nuclear project, the project had been so undercover, and so unconstrained, that over time the goal morphed, and once combined with a striving to surpass, had eventually produced a bomb with no use: It was so big that using it on any of Israel's enemies would have caused fallout on Israel itself.
This project has been so secretive and so unconstrained that it probably is no longer in any way constrained to use on real enemies anymore.
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I have sent the following...
[Read the article: What will be done about James Comey's revelations?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...letter to my congressman:
Dear Representative .....,
I am writing to you in the aftermath of the revelations in the Senate hearing the day before yesterday about the conduct of our Attorney General and of our President and Vice-President. While it is very disturbing that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card engaged in the behavior that James B. Comey related, it is more disturbing that they were dispatched by the President to engage in that behavior, that the upshot was that the President authorized continuing with a program the Justice Department had found to be not legal, and that the advice the President received in these matters was from Vice President Cheney and his counsel David Addington.
These acts were criminal, some of the crimes involve were felonies, and the complicity of the President and Vice-President is quite evident. I must therefore, as an American, as one of the "We the People" in whose good name this government ultimately serves, ask for you to call for and support impeachment and prosecution of the Attorney General, the Vice-President, and the President of the United States.
I realize that the whole subject of investigation of the President and of impeachment was given a tarnished reputation by the prosecution of Bill Clinton on spurious and frivolous charges -- an affair is rightly disciplined by a spouse, not a country. I realize that the noise machine will inevitably and immediately characterize such action as partisan politics.
But the time has come when good men must stand on principle, and the principle at stake here is that no one is above the law. And when one has broken the law and abused the authority granted to him by the people of this country, then a man, even if he is president, must be held accountable for his misdemeanors. These men have broken the law. The duty of the House of Representatives to act as a grand jury and impeach them is clear. If you must appoint a special prosecutor first to collect facts, so be it. But the American public needs to see that its mandate is not abused by those in whom we have entrusted the highest authority.
Thank you for all that you do,
Who knows, maybe they will do what's necessary.
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@Karen M
[Read the article: What will be done about James Comey's revelations?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wednesday, May 23: Responding to reports that iPods interfere with pacemakers, Apple will introduce a new mini device called the iPacemaker.
A whole new meaning to the expression "She played my heartstrings like a well strung bow."
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Not at all
[Read the article: Dems abstain from abstinence-only funding]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What cracks me up about these programs is how weirdly ambitious they were.
These people believe that lack of abstinence and chastity and out of wedlock sex and children are the root of all social problems related to poverty. David Brooks has gone on about this for years. So... ambitious? They are showing us dumb liberals how to cure social problems. It's just a coincidence that this lets them off the hook for little things -- like massive economic inequality.