The NSA Is Viewed Favorably By Most Young People 307
cstacy writes: A poll by the Pew Research Center suggests that Snowden's revelations have not much changed the public's favorable view of the NSA. Younger people (under 30) tend to view the NSA favorably, compared to those 65 and older. 61% of people aged 18-29 viewed the NSA favorably, while 30% viewed the NSA unfavorably and 9% had no opinion. 55% of people aged 30-49 viewed the NSA favorably. At the 65+ age bracket, only 40% of people viewed the NSA favorably.
In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, Satan is viewed positively by those who have never heard of him...
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
I heard of him and I still think he's nothing but the PR department of his alleged adversary.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, it's much easier to get good press once you construct a bogeyman to blame for your less popular actions. Just look at the old testament - there is no adversary, and God is a great and terrible being whose attention you're probably better off avoiding entirely.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
Just look at the old testament - there is no adversary
Have you actually ever bothered to read the bible?
The Hebrew scriptures ("Old Testament") deals mostly with God's dealings with ancient Israel (See Genesis 17:7, 8 and Exodus 19:3-6) and of the lineage that would lead to the promised seed first mentioned at Genesis 3:15 (See also Genesis 22:15-18; Galatians 3:16 and Matthew 1:1-17), however several times throughout the Hebrew scriptures the entity known as Satanas throughout the Greek scriptures ("New Testament") is certain present in the Hebrew scriptures (The word Satan itself is Hebrew). One particular example that comes to mind is Job 1:6-9 which mentions Satan several times. Given that all scripture is inspired (2nd Timothy 3:16) it is noteworthy that Revelation 12:9; in the Greek scriptures, points back to Genesis 3:1; in the Hebrew scriptures, identifying the original serpent in the Garden of Eden as Satan.
I could go on with more examples but I'm just making the case that God's chief adversary, Satan the Devil, is indeed present in the Hebrew scriptures.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Have you actually ever bothered to read the bible?
Did you really just ask if he'd RTFB...in the land of never RTFA? :)
The sheeple factor (Score:5, Insightful)
Sheeples will like something when they are told by someone that that something is good
Most of the younger generations have been brought up without any struggle - everything has been provided for, from physical things such as housing, food, schooling to virtual things like voting rights, it's all there
Unlike generation of yore who had to fight the system in order to get something - the young uns don't need to
They are content, and content people can easily turned into sheeples
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Who is whose advertising department? I read the book of Job, and it just isn't clear to me. So I read Isaiah, and I'm still not sure. Is one of the two main demons supposed to be a lesser evil?
Anyhow, regarding the NSA, whenever you're demonizing a group of people and just assuming that others must have a negative view of them, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Nobody even bothers trying to make the case that some sin they committed is so bad that it is worse than the work they do (protecting f
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Seriously, a survey about the NSA, seriously, really seriously, you guys have become just so silly. So was it a digital survey by any chance, were the results collected and collated upon a digital device, where those results put up on digital media, I mean after all we are talking the NSA here. When it comes to black hats these people have gone so far off the reservation, that they have become a gravitational singularity with regard to the truth, a black hole from which the light of truth never escapes. So
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to think that I can actually estimate the NSA's obligation and motivation. Mostly because they are mine, if only in a different area and a different part of this planet. I, too, am concerned with security. I'm responsible for the security of quite important and valuable assets that, if threatened or even harmed, could have a serious negative impact on various parts of the economy and maybe lives, depending on how important some people take their belongings.
I'm not responsible for the security of a country, but of a large enough corporation that maybe this allows me to speak in perspective here.
And there is one thing that is imperative when it comes to security: Your efforts must not threaten your own assets. When protecting my assets costs more than they are worth, the security is not even just useless, it's worse than useless. Because you just wasted more than what an incident could have costed.
Likewise, you cannot protect your assets by throwing them away. Of course you can avoid them being stolen by discarding them, but that doesn't accomplish anything either.
And the NSA is doing just that. What's it worth to defend the USA against terrorist attacks if those attacks would do less damage than the protection? What is it worth to defend the "American way of life" if that very way of life with its liberties and freedoms is discarded in favor of a security theater?
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they meant NASA?
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Interesting)
The poll isn't very surprising given its consistency with previous polls, but that doesn't change the fact that the attitudes of Americans don't seem to be very internally consistent or easily explainable. Either American people are just strangely illogical or there's some subtle issue with the polling method (or both?). The big question mark this survey leaves hanging is why trust in government is at an all time low (along with falling trust in most institutions), yet iterating specific parts of the government yields mostly favourable views. This is such an odd result that the very first sentence in the poll writeup says:
Yes, indeed. The public does A even though B. How strange.
The way the poll works means there's little information that can be used to explain this. Perhaps the 8 departments they chose to ask people about aren't the reason people distrust government. Perhaps their distrust falls exclusively on Congress, or on the judicial branch. We can't tell from this result alone.
Another possibility is that the wording of the poll - although superficially neutral - does trigger bias. The question was "do you trust the government in Washington always or most of the time?". People might be distinguishing between "the government in Washington" and "other bits of the government", e.g. the NSA is not actually in the city of Washington whereas Congress is. Ditto for various other departments and especially the military which does a great job of spreading itself around the country.
My final thought is that people might be more naturally inclined to take out their dissatisfaction on Congress than on the executive branch, because getting mad at Congress feels like it might achieve something due to voting, whereas getting mad at the NSA is about as useful as getting mad at a brick wall. They answer to no one and can't be controlled, so it's a lot more comfortable if you can convince yourself they're on your side rather than not.
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Simpson's Paradox
Re: In other news... (Score:2)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
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On the one hand I sympathize with everything you say. On the other hand, so what? Why does everyone need to do something that will keep their name around for the ages -- maybe it's enough that they don't cause active harm. Not every person is going to be a Turing, a Vonnegut, or a Michelangelo making works that will endure for the ages. It isn't possible, and besides, on a long enough time scale, even the great works will mean nothing at all. I don't think it is wrong to say that even the Einsteins of
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It sucks to not make the cut for people, but that's no reason to stop encouraging them to be better than they are. I say, let's push everyone to their limits and let's collect a harvest of talented, hard working individuals in all types of endeavours, who can compete with the geniuses of the past on absolu
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
My take: "Those who have never seen anything different happy with status quo".
Demographic: 18-29. That means that they were between 5 and 16 when 9/11 happened. These kids grew up with "ZOMG!!! 3VIL TERRORIZTS!!!!!"
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Indeed. Next week, your Jewish German grandparents are more sceptical of state surveillance than your Christian American grandparents.
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The 65 and older generation were Vietnam era draft bait. Knowing the government could pull your 18 year old ass out to die in the jungles of Southeast Asia tends to color your perception a bit.
People here like to mock the boomer generation, but having 50,000 of your cohort die in that war does give you a different prospective on things.
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Alternate alternate subject line: "Young people unsurprised system is rigged against them", or "Young people decline to yell at clouds"
Re:ignorant posters continue posting (Score:3)
The question was, literally,
Self-selection Bias (Score:2)
The problem is that they interviewed a self-selected group of security-unaware idiots.
Only idiots, and old people who don't know any better, answer telephone surveys from perfect strangers anymore.
These days, it's either marketing people using the excuse of a survey to speak to you, and reselling that information they gather from you to others, or it's "You're windows PC is infected" social engineering scammers, or identity theft criminals trying to get personal identifiable information from you. You don't
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Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home
And people were dumb enough to give their youngest the phone? Sounds like pedophiles now have a new prospecting technique.
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my guess is that the NSA ha.... {carrier interrupt.... flagged term detected...refrence auto replace library S:\NSA\project pawn everything\standard response1.txt} "is really just so awesome, all kids like it, totally rad like {auto field\ insert up to date NSA authorized popular rap music singer}! .{\resume native post}
and that's probably why the results look that way.
Re: In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, grass is green, and the sky is blue. An opinion poll, Pew or otherwise, being shitty and unreliable is the case more often than not.
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How do you tell God and Devil apart?
http://dwindlinginunbelief.blo... [blogspot.de]
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
How do you tell God and Devil apart? http://dwindlinginunbelief.blo... [blogspot.de]
Simple - God wants his followers ignorant (do not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), the Devil wants you to know everything - because then you'll *know* that God wants his followers ignorant. It's true - the Devil is in the details :-)
If you knew the NSA was reading your response (Score:5, Insightful)
...and you do, because they're reading everything... how would YOU respond?
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oh-oh oh oh oh-oh-oh
Can't touch this!
I think the reason is a misunderstanding (Score:5, Funny)
What they meant is that they like casual sex. "No Strings Attached", usually abbreviated "nsa", is, at least according to wikipedia, "an expression for casual sex often used in personal ads."
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What they meant is that they like casual sex. "No Strings Attached", usually abbreviated "nsa", is, at least according to wikipedia, "an expression for casual sex often used in personal ads."
Well given that the NSA is fucking the country over with NSA like behaviors, then confusing the NSA with NSA is appropriate.
The end result of too much NSA NSA is that other countries look at businesses in the USA and say "eeewe .. I'm not going to bed with you now .. look at all that NSA history you have".
Not my findings (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not my findings (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would not put it that way. I'd say we have strong evidence that opinion polling can easily result in confusing or apparently contradictory results. The first sentence of the linked blog post has an air of mild surprise about it, and not surprisingly - when polled, 75% of Americans disagree that their government is trustworthy all or most of the time, yet they view most departments favourably? That mak
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Who cares about "America as a whole?"
People who do and read surveys.
I am more interested in the people I actually interact with daily, and who share a local economy with me.
That doesn't surprise me, Mr Coward.
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Surely you're not suggesting that there might be some correlation between people willing to answer questions on a potentially sensitive subject from a complete stranger and people who might be less concerned about government spying? That's just crazy talk!
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Are your findings the results of a properly-controlled survey, or are they the results of talking among your technologist peers and subject to confirmation bias?
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Better yet, how would you even broach the subject to a stranger without really sounding super creepy?
"Thanks for the coffee, barista person. Now, can I ask you how you feel about a three letter agency?"
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This is because the crowd you hang out with is not representative of mainstream America. These polls are important because they show what the majority of Americans think about things, and those people are who vote for our leaders. Your little peer group does not have sole power to choose our governmental leaders.
What this shows can be argued different ways. Are young people these days generally more conservative than older people? (seems unlikely) Or is it because they're aligned with the Democratic Pa
they know they're watching (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:they know they're watching (Score:4, Insightful)
This.
It's like when you're doing those paid online surveys and one about music comes up and they ask, "Have you ever pirated music / downloaded illegally / &c.?"
If I haven't, I'll say "no". If I have, I'll say "no".
Rule number 1: You do not say anything to incriminate you.
Rule number 2: See rule number 1.
Put another way, if a policeman thinks you're giving attitude and you say, "Do you have a problem with the police?" what you don't say is...
The NSA fear campaign has worked. I know loads of people who have anti-authoritarian spirit who take great care about where they say things, and try to clean up any record of what they've said. They're not out to cause harm, and many of them have regular jobs, but they are worried about how they'll be judged now (by more authoritarian employers / if they were to become the subject of investigation / whatever) and how they'll be judged in the future (by everyone, when computers are powerful enough to trawl through every item of data anyone has ever published).
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Ah... the old "the .0000000001% of the population I know behave like x, therefore x is representative of the whole population" fallacy.
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I know someone with a similar attitude to authority who insulted the french custom officials who had performed a random traffic stop looking for drugs as he was coming back from a weekend in Amsterdam. The douaniers called in a few colleagues and pretty much dismantled the car, leaving him with a bunch of parts. The Douanes is under no obligation to render your vehicle in working order.
I feel no sympathy for the idiot...
Don't ascribe to shrewdness... (Score:2)
...that which can be explained by pandering.
Mainly by Slashdot.
From TFA.
Favorability ratings for the National Security Agency (NSA) have changed little since the fall of 2013
Except...
Back then unfavorable/favorable/don't know ratio was 35/54/11.
Now it is 37/51/12.
With a +/- 2.9 percentage points error, sample-wise. Or +/- 4.1 form-wise.
Going all the way up to +/- 8.8 for "Form 1" republicans.
Which tells us that in those year and a half, unfavorable/favorable ratio has shifted towards unfavorable.
And it may be up to 5 percentage points. That's 1 in 20.
Also, comparison of data shows that U/F ratio has slipped [people-press.org]
Wrong question means wrong answer. (Score:3, Insightful)
They should have asked this way: "NSA is reading your WhatsApp, your phone calls and your mobile photos and making a copy of them. With that, it's building a database to determine if you *might* be criminal and make you disappear. What do you think of NSA?"
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But that's push polling. They asked a very neutral question to find out a real answer. That's more valuable. Even more valuable is maintaining a reputation of being a reliable source of numbers. Fucking that up means no one cares about your results.
You are free to conduct your own fake study where your real intent is to bias people, if that's your goal. But that was not the goal here.
Turn off your computer and go play in the dirt, and think about what you've done.
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Your poll would "find out" what people SHOULD think.
The poll in the article found out what people DO think.
IRS (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it that those folks hate the IRS or our tax structure?
I can understand conservative's (Tea Party types) dislike - it was pretty damning the selective enforcement of tax laws against conservative organizations, but the rest? Do they know the difference or are they using the IRS as the goat for our byzantine tax structure?
It's like how comments get mod'ed down not because of their value but because the mod disagrees with it.
And as far as the EPA is concerned, everything that I have seen that they have done has protected my health. Or as I like to explain to my fellow peons, if Big Corp poisons you, you can maybe sue, but good luck suing to get your life back.
A billion dollars doesn't compensate me for the loss of life and limb.
When I see this horseshit of a kidney is worth so many hundreds of thousands of dollars, I just shake my head in the stupidity of it all. My kidneys are priceless to me. All the money in the World won't compensate me for the 4x a week dialysis, loss of health and loss of physical ability.
Human health comes first, our environment, and corporate profits come last.
I think our system is totally ass-backwards. When a business can say that their business will be harmed if people's health is considered and get precedence, I think WTF is wrong with you people?!
Re:IRS (Score:5, Informative)
I can understand conservative's (Tea Party types) dislike - it was pretty damning the selective enforcement of tax laws against conservative organizations
Wrong. This is one of the most widely debunked myths in modern politics. The IRS was investigating a wide range of new 501(c)(4) organizations that cropped up following the formation of the tea-party movement. 501(c)(4) organizations are tax-exempt nonprofits, and as such they are obligated to avoid being used for political purposes. Political organizations are supposed to be taxed. So of course, like any responsible agency should, the IRS took time to carefully examine the sudden influx of obvious right-wing political organizations seeking tax-exempt status. Even so, not a single one of those organizations was ever denied 501(c)(4) status.
At the same time, the IRS was giving similar scrutiny toward more liberal leaning organizations. They went through the same process as the rightwinger political organizations, but unlike the rightwingers, the IRS decided to go ahead and deny status to a number of seemingly-liberal organizations. Of course, this didn't particularly matter to the rightwing media when the story broke. They proceeded to lie, scream incoherently and flood the airwaves with manufactured outrage. It was part of the ongoing effort by the right to paint themselves as victims, and they still won't shut up about it no matter how often it's been debunked. As we've seen again and again, if the evidence for wrongdoing never surfaces, the right will just turn a non-scandal into a conspiracy theory. See: Benghazi, Obama's birth certificates, etc.
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Wrong. This is one of the most widely debunked myths in modern politics.
Then why did the IRS pretend to lose emails? Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Somehow, the tapes with evidence linking Nixon to Watergate were never found, either. A pity, that.
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The IRS lost emails, they didn't pretend. They had an official retention policy that had since expired, and the only records would have been on individual hard drives.
Yes yes, I know they had an explanation, one that you believe.
Could be (Score:3)
They just understand that there is no such thing as privacy on a party line like the internet. So if it wasn't the NSA it would be someone else. At least the NSA isn't inserting their adds in their data stream the way companies like Comcast does
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... [arstechnica.com]
Could be facile nonsense (Score:2)
All email, social media, banking and consumer purchases take place over SSL connections, and have for a long time. So the "party line" stuff is a non-starter.
Who. Who else has the budget AND the physical proximity to the bulk of the fiber (which runs through the US) to do a "full take" of what people do online.
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why don't we just drop encryption altogether.
Go up to your browser's address bar right click on the little globe/security info widget for the site.
This site does not supply identity information
Your connection to this website is not encrypted
What do you mean "DROP" ?
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If it's not a party line, then why does end-to-end encryption exist, oh yes, it's because you clearly haven't thought out what you just said.
Well lets first fix what you said so it says what you actually wanted it to say. If I am mistaken and what you wrote is what you meant well there is no need to reply because it's gibberish.
If it's a party line, then why does end-to-end encryption exist,
Now what you are saying is that it is not a party line because it's possible to encrypt communication on it ?
Well first it being a party line or not being a party line has nothing to do with encryption.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
There is a good definition of how old style party lines work. In the internet case every
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No, they insert their propaganda in online comment sections and in news stories that get posted to Slashdot instead...
LOL what a horrendous waste of time. People don't come to Slashdot to learn.
It can't be that simple. (Score:2)
How much based on who controls the White House? (Score:5, Insightful)
How much of this is a reflection of "I trust the government, if my guy is in charge. I don't trust the government if the other guy is in charge."
The Patriot Act is probably a great example of this. How many people flipped positions on whether the Patriot Act was a good thing or a bad thing when Bush left office and Obama became president?
From what I can see, consistency of thought and philosophy seems rather rare in American politics. Too many people are partisan whores who always agree with their party and always disagree with the other party.
Re:How much based on who controls the White House? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly it, in my opinion. Democrat voters are idiots who will back anything their Dear Leader Obama does, even when it was something they were bitching about during Bush's reign.
And Republican voters are just as stupid. They're now bitching about things that they were perfectly OK with when Bush was doing them, but now that Obama is doing them, they're up in arms.
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You're a fucking idiot.
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Who's the fucking idiot? Bush doubled the debt and dramatically increased the number of signing statements attached to bills, yet Republicans only had a problem with either when Obama came into office.
And the Democrats, who spent most of Bush's presidency hating on the Patriot Act, couldn't be bothered get out of bed when Obama singed domestic military detention without trial into law with the NDAA.
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Nope, you've proven you're a typical moronic American who thinks there's a difference between the "blue team" and the "red team".
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57.5% of eligible voters turned out for the 2012 US elections....
Completely off topic, but everyone keeps saying how bad it is that so few people actually vote. When I go to Wal-Mart and look around, I'm glad so few people vote. I think a case can be made that too many ignorant and/or stupid people vote.
Yes, we have to protect their right to vote, but I'm pretty sure it's stupid to be encouraging them.
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The question is who is not voting. If it is only the stupid or non-informed not voting and all the actual voters are very informed, well great. Unluckily it seems that it is mostly the uninformed Wal-mart types that are voting with the informed people having given up as obviously it doesn't matter if you vote, red team or blue team, we're fucked.
This is actually one of the ways to push authoritarianism while pretending to be free, discourage informed people from voting. See sig
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No citation, just something that crossed my mind along with how the political ads seem targeted. Here (Canada) the political ads seem to be totally targeted at people who have no memory and no understanding of basic economics as well as a really simplified view point on various other topics.
They've also changed the rules to make it very hard for young people to even vote
So the poor have no say in their own governance? (Score:2)
Nevermind all the "smart" people behind great human endeavors like WWI, austerity, or the invasion of Iraq. Nevermind the circular that the poor should surrender their voting rights to elitists, when they are poor because of elitist policies to begin with.
If you're a neofeudalist, sure. Why don't you repeal the 20th Century and go back to only white male property
Education (Score:2)
Personally ... (Score:2)
We need good stories for them too (Score:3)
Why something is looking bad, wrong, negative, harmful or just plain dangerous? We know stories that we can match in a similar pattern that ends well or bad for the ones we could indentify with. We could not even identify a trend, a pattern or a situation if we don't have a name or a story behind that pattern. How much of those new generations read/watched 1984, brave new world, or countless movies, books and other kind of stories where the kind of acts that do the NSA ends badly for most?
Also, the bias supporting directly or indirectly latests government policies is obviously very present in newer movies, and almost a coincidence in older movies. Watch "The last mimzy" or "Predestination", based on great science fiction stories, get rotten to the core by that kind of modification. And superhero movies are having somewhat present that something is rotten in the higher level of government and corporations, and they get caught, and stopped, so the ones remaining in the real life must be the good ones, no?
With older generations is hard to subvert the stories they had all their lives, but with newer ones, with old stories losing visibility, is a somewhat easy task. From there to history rewritting there is a short path, and from there on we will always had been in war against Eastasia.
I don't blame them (Score:2)
Sanity (Score:2)
Apparently, sanity *is* statistical...
I mean... why not? (Score:3)
We don't have to endorse the privacy-violating things the NSA is up to in order to actually have a good opinion of THE WHOLE AGENCY. The NSA isn't just "a few oversteps that Snowden reveals piecemeal". The bulk of what they do is absolutely invaluable. A world with no NSA would be a worse one.
Spying on Americans not about finding terrorist (Score:4, Insightful)
And the politicians using double and triple speak know terrorist can do the same making any communication looking like common conversation..
The Spying and lying through the main stream media is just a manipulation feedback loop of the Peoples employees of government manipulating the employers (the people) among the many other things the Employees of the people are doing against the Declaration of Independence. i.e. stealing the retirement funds of the employers (the people) funded by the employers (social security), illegally arming the police with military equipment (and having the employers. the people pay twice for the same equipment claimed to be "surplus") while trying to suppress the employers arms (anti-gun efforts) and more . Its time the people apply their rights and do their duty and instruct those working in the peoples business of government, how the funding (taxes) they are supplying is to be used.
Its simple to do, a form to allow the taxpayers, the funders of government, to say how their taxes are to be used and included in the tax returns for the tax processors to allocate the funds according to the taxpayers instructions. Also needed is teh government transparency information, what the government wants funding for so the people can each decided to fund or not. If the government doesn't say, they don't get.
If there is a problem with allocation then funds are placed in a credit union account till government supplies verified receipts in accord to teh allocated funds, for reimbursement.
There is no need to spy on the employers, as the employers will set the budgets and this way the representatives will actually know what to do to represent the people. And the People will become participants rather than subjects.
This is a republic, not a democracy but democracy is only to be a supplement of the republic. However two universities (Princeton being one of them) have technically determined the government is functioning as an Oligarchy. Now read the Declaration of Independence for the instructions the founders wrote for what the people are to do about this distortion and abuse of bad business of letting the peoples employees run the funding of the peoples business of government bank account.,
Well they are used to facebook. (Score:2)
Seems reasonable to me.
Facebook: If you click here, for playing farmville and getting up-to date advertisements around the world and hearing which of your friends prepares pizza right now, you give us all your data. We will sell it or not, as we see fit, ask you about it or not, as we see fit, change the rules at any time, as we see fit, and if you dont disagree immeduatly, we will make an effort to protect our interest by just giving you enough privacy not to run away.
NSA: To stop terrorists killing you al
We all live in echo chambers (Score:2)
I expect than anyone looking at the complete article, with all of the various tables and breakdowns will find at least one item that shocks them. In my case, two examples:
- 45% of Americans view the IRS positively, vs. 48% negatively. To me, this is shocking, because I know that the IRS is a power unto itself. If someone in the IRS decides they want to nail you, you are nailed. Appeal to a court? Sure, but only a court run by the IRS. They can empty your bank accounts, repossess your house, all without any
Most germans loved Hitler (Score:2)
Vietnam war (Score:5, Interesting)
My father is distrustful towards the government even though he is liberal and not a tea party guy who hates them based on idealogical grounds.
The government forced his friends in highschool to be killed in Vietnam against their will. He had a baby and went to school and they ripped his family apart and sent him to fight in a war he didn't believe in based on lies by Henry Kissenger, LBJ, and Nixon.
To this day he keeps a photocopy of his discharge papers from the military. He said enjoy what you have because what you have can be taken from you by the second!
So ... NSA spying, making up lies with the Iraq war with weapons of mass destruction, and this intrusion etc. To my Dad this is scary stuff complete with a mass with the younger generation reading this who can be fooled by propaganda easier.
In the 1950s he was spoonfed propaganda too about those evil scary communistis hiding under the bed. Younger folks do not understand these concepts or have lived in fear of "What if they draft me next?"
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> Younger folks do not understand these concepts or have lived in fear of "What if they draft me next?"
More importantly, mothers have not lived in fear of "what if they draft my son next." That is why the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were the two longest wars in American history. We need to bring back the draft so that the personal fear of consequences for war-mongering is something every parent has to live with, not just the parents of those for whom the military is an employer of last resort.
I write thi
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You know, a basic tenet of liberal democracies is distrust in goverment - that's why we have all these checks and balances, the need for transparency, etc. So I would expect each every liberal to distrust the goverment.
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Oh yeah, the old "Back in MY day....!" argument. Excellent way to explain away everything with one centuries-old ridiculous premise.
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The "my days" thing might be valid. Young people have grown up in a world where surveillance is expected, and thus it doesn't rub them wrong so much older people like myself. To put this in another context, racism for example, I would say that for the most part, generational characteristics don't change, they die with their members. Today, most people would be shocked and outraged to see a drinking fountain with a "Whites Only" sign over it, but in 1950, it would be common. The difference between now an
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Here's another one still: people who grew up sharing everything publicly on the Internet already take steps to conceal their true identity from anyone they don't want to share with.
Most of the generation before me use their real names on Facebook. I'm struggling to think of anyone of the generation after me who does.
In fact, I'm struggling to think of many who actually use ID-tied sites like Facebook at all, or at least not for extended periods. Multiple accounts, shifting rapidly from one platform to the n
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Most of the generation before me use their real names on Facebook. I'm struggling to think of anyone of the generation after me who does. In fact, I'm struggling to think of many who actually use ID-tied sites like Facebook at all,
Your sample is definitely not representative.
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You're right, it's not representative; I carefully phrased it as a statement of personal experience rather than a general claim for precisely that reason.
It is suggestive of a generational change in attitude, though.
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It's only suggestive of anything if you believe that your non-representative sample belies your words & is representative.
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Which news? You mean cable news? Cable sucks period, it's an old business model carried over from the 80's/90's that badly needs to die a painful death and is in the process of doing exactly that.
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Nowadays younger people - Internet generation - is less interested in news than older people. Or they just care less.
If by news you mean privacy, then yes, ignorantly so.
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You mean the atmosphere before the new atmosphere of fear?
That would be the old atmosphere of fear. You remember it, right? The Cold War? Mutually Assured Destruction?
I'm sorry, but the new atmosphere of fear is fuckall compared to the existential threat of imminent nuclear annihilation.
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Re:I am not sure what the hoopla is about (Score:5, Insightful)
The question then is what will this data be used for if it is not usable/used for its intended purpose? I can think of nothing good, and this is the reason for those rights in the first place. To prevent tyranny.
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Even the author of the patriot act opposes it. It's time to let it go.
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Obviously because they would have been bragging [thedailybeast.com] about it. The national insecurity state constantly releases top secret info for PR purposes when it would be calling for another 30 year sentence for a whisteblower if he were to publish the same information.
So, yeah, if mass warrantless wiretapping had actually been used to prevent an actual attack, you would have actually heard about it.
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"the data collection hasn't seemed to stop any terrorist attack at all": And you know this how?
Because when the Senate brought the leaders of the NSA into a classified session to ask them about it, the NSA was unable to provide a single example?
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More seriously: no data has been released to indicate that their surveillance tactics are useful. If they want to convince me, as a voter, to continue supporting those tactics, then they need to convince me.
They have other options, of course; if they can convince enough of the other 300 million people, then my single vote against them doesn't matter. It only matters when joined by many who
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That oath is to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic!
What the fuck do you think a "domestic enemy of the Constitution" looks like? Look for the suits with an American flag lapel pins. That's where they hide.
So you think people who sometimes wear suits are evil, and people who wear lapel flags sometimes are evil. Would it surprise you to learn that the person who posted the article exactly matches your description?