Letters to the Editor
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Allegro, ma non troppo
L.W.M., I was trying to give certain of our interlocutors a little cape, but there's no room for Manolete when the picadores are so hell-bent with their f'ing spears. Please, comrade, we don't gotta kill 'em, just tease 'em a little, then teach 'em how to dance.
If we can convince 'em that they'll never be able to follow the sword, we won't actually have to use it. All these tiresome bulls, properly and thoroughly bewildered, can be led peacefully back to the cows without ever denying the customers a moment of the entertainment they've paid so dearly for. (And not entirely coincidentally, Glenn's China shop won't have to be pieced back together every blessed day.)
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We contributed to Sen. Dodd's campaign, too
My husband and I contributed, too. Unlike corporate donors, $25 is a sacrifice for us, but we wanted to do something more tangible than just thank him.
I truly feel hopeless about the de facto plutocracy in my country. My husband is a New Zealand citizen, and if it weren't for my children, we would be gone.
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Keys to the castle.
PGP is cracked.
Obviously, DES is well known to be cracked.
RSA - cracked, even with "military" (ha!) sized keys.
DSA - cracked.
There is no legally available form of encryption in existence that is not readable to the NSA. If you were to use an uncrackable form of encryption you would find yourself in jail very fast.
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The Lawless Surveillance State
President Kennedy was the last genuine American patriot President and if this great man was able to speak to us today, as a Nation I'm certain he would stop this legislation. In fact this legislation would not exist.
Remember all of our great American heroes, from Soldiers to Presidents and all of us in between. Please don't give the telecommunications industry amnesty for what they have participated in, illegally spying on innocent Americans. Let us not forget when the government spies on her people as a nation, freedom is lost.
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I just snarfed all over my screen
As I've said elsewhere, it's very easy to point fingers when all the facts are in. -Shooter242
*slowly clapping* bra-vo, the slow horse finally crosses the finishing line (my apologies to stewie griffin).
Thanks for the laugh. Now go play in traffic,
feliz homo-sapiens-sapiens!
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CAUSES: Neocons, 9/11, Patriotism, and "Weak on Terror". SOLUTION: A New Narrative.
Why is all this going down?
1. The neocons were organised and got into powerful positions in the government.
2. 9/11 provided a great opportunity for them.
3. Americans are brainwashed with unquestioning patriotism from a young age, so after 9/11, everyone rallied together unquestioningly.
4. The Democrats rightly supported the idea of rooting out terrorism, but they failed to counter the argument that going against the government was being "weak on terror".
The solution is for someone with charisma or money or power to articulate a new narrative: "The danger is exaggerated, and it is not worth sacrificing our liberties and laws and the constitution just to protect yourself against an unlikely terrorist attack. Besides, improved policing, intelligence, diplomacy, etc will do a better job in the long-term than giving the president excessive power."
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Regarding encryption
As far as I know, the method consisting of using the same book and substituting words or letter by numbers referring to page/line etc., never the same ones of course, has not and indeed cannot be cracked, unless you know which book the parties are using.
It is cumbersome and has to be done by hand as opposed to using fancy computer algorithms so I suppose its use will never be widespread. As far as I know the Voynich Ms remains undecyphered too.
I never had anything to write that was so confidential that I felt I had to encode it, but if I did, I would use that substitution method.
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Not just a river in Egypt
Like every other country, America has had its shining moments: its Constitution, its role in WWII, its space program, etc.
But from slavery to its annexation of Hawaii and California, its treatment of Native Americans, its massacres in the Philippines, and its role in various coups from Iran to Guatemala to Chile to Venezuela, its record is far from spotless.
I'm not entirely convinced that what's happening now is worse than what Joe McCarthy did during the 50s.
The core problem is that we are taught to believe a myth, and the scoundrels who rule us (who are no fools) use that myth to manipulate the people. The average Russian wasn't fooled by his Communist rulers' lies the way our media and our people are constantly deceived by our own rulers.
If there is a silver lining to the times we live in, it's that the forthcoming upheaval or collapse may well take down the myth and force the majority of Americans to reevaluate their lives, their politics, their country, their shared myths.
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First they came for the terrorists, and I did nothing. Then they came for the "ordinary" citizens ...
Each of the Senators in favor of immunity for telecoms (or against it but with insufficient fervor to get up and actually do something to stop it) has his or her own reasons for being so. To give them the benefit of the doubt, let's assume that they possess some intelligence - the power to connect facts, to assume premises, and to find where the premises and the facts lead - and let's further assume that they actually believe that the loss of freedom and privacy promoted by widespread, warrantless, criminal spying is justified by some gain in counter-terrorism. Let each such Senator argue that point and present facts to support that proposition, as any high school debater would. The Senate is a debate club, is it not?
But even if such an argument - that actual (not presumed) gain in safety justifies the loss of privacy and freedom - is effectively made, that still doesn't explain how nominally intelligent people could not be aware of the many historical precedents of such blanket (or seemingly so) surveillance. How could these nominally intelligent people not think that the next target, if it is not already a target, is their own communications? If the Executive believes (without any real reason other than partisanship and power-grabbing) that it is a danger to the United States that more members of the nominal opposition party be elected to the Legislative branch, and the Executive has the power to spy on his or her opposition via the telecoms, and the telecoms have no incentive not to go along with the spying, then why in the world wouldn't such spying take place? So it is inevitable that the spying on "ordinary" citizens will lead to spying on legislators, if, again, it hasn't already. In fact, consider how the spying's target was initially said to be terrorists, or as we now find out, targets of the War on Drugs. Then it turned out that the real target was "ordinary" citizens in the first case and people making calls to Latin America in the second.
At the point when spying on "ordinary" citizens morphs into spying on legislators and would-be legislators, when the Executive can spy on his/her opposition (or indeed, members of his or her own party) with impunity, with no accountability, and presumably use the information gathered for his or her own partisan ends, can any of the nominally intelligent Senators now not standing up against this travesty of immunity, retroactive immunity no less, say that they voted in favor of protecting democracy and upholding the Constitution? Of course not.
So at least one of the initial premises, the granting of benefit of the doubt about such Senators' motives, and the assumption that their intelligence is more than nominal, must be flawed.