Letters to the Editor
prunes
Published Letters: 784
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@shooter242
[Read the article: The fun and excitement of civilization wars (fought from afar)]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Well WT, it seems that you have tied yourself up into a tidy little box. If anything sympathetic to your views, said by a conservative, is automatically a lie... conservatives can NEVER say anything sympathetic to your views. Tsk.
Perhaps we should rename BDS to CDS.... Conservative Derangement Syndrome.
OTOH Since liberals are neither sensitive nor particularly bright, it could take a while for a positive posibility to sink in. Or not.
Mark Steyn is no more "conservative" than Goebbels or any other racist, death-loving authoritarian. He wants federal solutions (usually violent) to every problem he cares about, and blows all other issues off with uneducated appeals to "conservative economics", which he doesn't understand.
Keep telling me how the most expansionary, politically radical, big-spending administration in history is "conservative" in any meaningful sense. Tell me in what way Steyn is "conservative". Keep telling me how you yourself are "conservative".
I'll believe it when I see some evidence.
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@shooter242
[Read the article: The fun and excitement of civilization wars (fought from afar)]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think it's pretty funny to see you become a close-minded liberal.
You have a lame sense of humor, my neighbor.
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Shakers
[Read the article: The fun and excitement of civilization wars (fought from afar)]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hey shaker-fans, google 'shaker gift drawings' sometime, there is some incredible folk art from their community.
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@Paul Dirks
[Read the article: The courts and Congress affirmatively conceal and protect lawbreaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]while the explanations we have been given concerning the NSA program may make it seem reasonable, the fact remains that lying and destroying evidence is second nature to these people and we therefore have no reason to trust a single word we have been told.
I know what you're saying (and I know you aren't making this mistake) but I want to point out that the explanations we have been given re: NSA wiretapping are not reasonable at all, if one has some relevant math and computer engineering knowledge:
We have been told that the warrantless wiretapping system only records point-to-point call data between Americans, and that this is all.
1) The Narus units actually being employed are the most advanced packet filtering/manipulation devices I know of. They are for serious, nation-scale data scanning and would not be required if there was no content analysis going on.
2) Any system that records point-to-point call data is going to be useless for finding a terrorist cell. The needle in the haystack analogy is apt, except you're looking for characteristic configurations of needles (which you have no examples of) in an exponentially larger haystack, and instead of hay, it's a stack of needles. Such a system would be useful for profiling of political groups.
3) Any "dragnet"-style system is inherently woefully inefficient at data mining for specific instances, it is a fundamental theorem of data processing and information theory that throwing more arbitrary data at a system will decrease it's performance, not increase it. A targetted, traditional intelligence program is inherently better suited for the ostensible goal of this program.
4) We still don't have but a few Arabic translators, but are blowing all this money on this system. I guess they're not looking for people who speak Arabic in this war on Muslim fanaticism.
5) The system was either already in place or about to be put into action long before 9-11 and the GW(B)OT. The assertion that it is designed to prevent another 9-11 is false on its face.
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Afterthought:
[Read the article: The courts and Congress affirmatively conceal and protect lawbreaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Put it this way:
Do you think Google would be effective at finding a specific page you wanted if it couldn't do page content analysis? Pretend that Google is looking ONLY at hyperlinks (this is analogous to point-to-point call data), would it be able to find my specific comment here ONLY by examining which other pages on the net link to this one?
No, obviously not. It seems very unlikely that individual pages would naturally have inbound-link structure that would let us identify them by that structure alone. It seems even more unlikely that we could find pages of a particular type we were interested in (say, "terrorist pages") solely by generalizing from URL hyperlink data as found in the wild. The call data situation is even less structured, as there are no "sites" that naturally organize their own data. Certainly if a site wanted to be hidden from link-analysis, they could alter their own link profile (call data profile) by making links that don't match such a profile, and by linking to their own site from other, non-flagged nodes.
Since the goal of the wiretapping project does not match the algorithm described to meet it (and I don't think they're completely ignorant), I have to conclude that they are monitoring something more than point-to-point data.
They are monitoring content, I am sure.
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Good grief
[Read the article: The courts and Congress affirmatively conceal and protect lawbreaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why does "existentially predicated" lawbreaking that is purported by the perpetrators themselves to be a nation-wide operation have to prove standing?
Wiretapping itself is already a federal telecommunications crime, not "wiretapping with demonstrable tangible harm" or something.
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@shooter242
[Read the article: The courts and Congress affirmatively conceal and protect lawbreaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Quite so. I would only add that it's going to be difficult to be outraged about information gathering and examination, when it is now a part of daily life.
True, but in the EU they have regulations on private collection of personal data we don't have here. At the same time it also sorta seems that we have better protections against the government's abuse of privacy than they do.
No reason we can't eventually have both kinds. There's clearly a demand for it in the American public, even if you keep trying to convince us all otherwise.
We are now in numerous databases, with or without permission, and are examined regularly.
No, certain data which can be potentially correlated with me is in those databases. The specific information certain to be in the government's database is prohibited by federal law because they did not acquire it legally. There are laws which regulate the collection of data for private companies also, which they also must abide by, such as medical or credit information.
IRS computers being the most visible example.
Instead of 'most visible', maybe you should have used the words 'stupid and irrelevant'. That's a completely, completely, completely different situation!
shooter242: "no it's not coz they got like our persinil dataz and stuff in there..."