Full Details of My Attempted Entrapment For Teaching Polygraph Countermeasures 465
George Maschke writes "In May of this year, I was the target of an attempted entrapment, evidently in connection with material support for terrorism. Marisa Taylor of McClatchy reported briefly on this in August. I've now published a full public accounting, including the raw source of the e-mails received and the IP addresses involved. Comments from Slashdot readers more technically savvy than I are welcome."
Don't teach, and certainly don't learn ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're living in the 40s, that means avoid learning about integration.
In the 90s? avoid learning about marriage equality.
Living in 2013? Don't learn about avoiding government interrogation.
Living in 2015? Don't even THINK about avoiding surveillance.
tacit admission (Score:5, Insightful)
either Polygraphs are bullshit or these charges should be dropped...
by setting up the sting and charging the guys for what they did, they government is admitting that it is possible to fool the polygraph
if it is possible to fool the polygraph it leaves no doubt that the polygraph is not scientific or useful
by proving these men guilty, the prosecution simultaneously proves that the lie detector is a farce and negates the logical need for the entire charade in the first place
a good lawyer could get a not guilty verdict IMHO
The US of A (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We need a workers government (Score:2, Insightful)
there are many many things we can learn from the ideologies that are as relevant as ever
Such as killing a hundred million people should be bad?
Of course rethuglicans and conservatards will whine but with any luck their days are numbered and stuck in the 20th century
Who's the conservative? The person trying to create an adventurous 21th century economic system or the person still fighting 19th century problems that went away a century ago?
Re:We need a workers government (Score:0, Insightful)
"adventurous 21th century economic system"
What a scummy way to say "fuck minorities and the poor"
Re:We need a workers government (Score:4, Insightful)
Killing hundred million people was not a part of ideologies. You should learn to distinguish between interfaces and implementations.
How do you plan to elminate private property without murdering the millions who want to keep theirs?
Communism can only be imposed by force and mass murder, because it's so completely incompatible with human nature.
Re: what about (Score:3, Insightful)
In the end, only the leftovers, the seemingly superfluous, tedious people, involved in regulations, law enforcement and taxing, the people Dent and Prefect met, survive, and are able to found a new civilisation on Earth, while the Randian Golgafrincham dies out due to an infection.
Re:The US of A (Score:5, Insightful)
What really kicks me in the ass is that all of our legislators and nearly every adult in the US remembers a time when we measured ourselves by what we are not and what we will not and do not do. Now we are doing it. People are STILL saying "we live in a free country."
Re:Ha ha ha (Score:2, Insightful)
What a joke you are. Marx is more relevant than ever.
True. And also it's true that five Marxes beat one Marx any day of the week.
Re:We need a workers government (Score:5, Insightful)
so far, there have been no implementations of the Communist ideology *without* suppression of free people to the extreme of mass murdering the dissenters.
Re:what about (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes you think you're in any way relevant just because you amass money?
If you're looking for someone with a misplaced feeling of entitlement, look for a mirror.
Re:We need a workers government (Score:4, Insightful)
Get with the times. Don't you know that if you're poor it's your own damn fault? And if you don't have bread, why not eat cake?
Re:Dousing rods (Score:5, Insightful)
Dowsing rods do sorta work. They work by giving the user 'permission' to acknowledge their gut feeling that comes from minute observations they aren't consciously aware of.
However, this was a scam since a few cents worth of bailing wire can do that and this clown was charging 'thousands' and adding worthless fake circuitry.
Re:Don't teach, and certainly don't learn ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Were you around in the nineties? That was when Clinton used CALEA to force telecoms to build the exact infrastructure that was exploited after 9/11 by Bush, and later Obama."
The lesson is clear: even if the current administration pushes something through while promising not to abuse it, that has absolutely no bearing on whether someone else will, later.
Re:tacit admission (Score:5, Insightful)
Just ask Edward Snowden.
Re:We need a workers government (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't teach, and certainly don't learn ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, you sound like one of those politicians who, upon taking the oath of office, puts both hands on the Constitution and swears to uphold the Bible.
Re:Don't teach, and certainly don't learn ... (Score:2, Insightful)
No, the Clipper ran headlong into two major design problems, due to its closed source design and for which the cryptography expert Dorothy Denning set back her own career by decades of reputation because she got involved in the mess.
1) It violated a stack of MIT owned patents. Of course, since it was developed in secret, the MIT professor had to *deduce* the patent violations from the very few publicly available details. Look up "Silvio Micali" from MIT for details on the mess.
2) The "LEAF" checksum, the "Law Enforcement Agency Field" designed to make sure you didn't use private encryption keys, was way too short. Any user could basically forge a checksum that would be privately held by them only, and not kept in the chip manufacturer's escrow vault. That "vault" was about as safe as the vault of "Trusted Computing" escrowed keys that Microsoft is now trying to pawn off as useful for security: in other words, it has *no* protection against abuse by insiders at Microsoft or by governments.
Re: what about (Score:5, Insightful)
My standard answer on Atlas Shrugged is the end of Douglas Adams' second Hitchhiker novel (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe), where Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect meet the people from Golgafrincham. Those people are the leftovers when the elite on Golgafrincham turned their planet into an Randian paradise, with the econonomical elite ruling without bounds, and an army of slave like serfs are working for them.
In the end, only the leftovers, the seemingly superfluous, tedious people, involved in regulations, law enforcement and taxing, the people Dent and Prefect met, survive, and are able to found a new civilisation on Earth, while the Randian Golgafrincham dies out due to an infection.
Just remember one thing about Atlas Shrugged: As mentioned in the preface, it's not about men as they are, it's men as they should be. We don't have any morality and ethics in business or government: In other words, instead of a Midas Mulligan we have a Jamie Dimon, instead of a John Galt we have John Boehner, instead of a Hugh Akston we have Twitter....
Re: what about (Score:5, Insightful)
And the big railroad barons of the second half of the 19th century never would have been that big without the U.S. government financing and pre-planning the big railroad tracks and protecting the building sites with the cavalry. So much for Ayn Rand's preposition of Atlas Shrugged. The archetypes of Dagny Taggart were free-riding on government subsidaries.
Re:Don't teach, and certainly don't learn ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, if they're both consenting adults, why the fuck not?
Really, what difference could it possibly make to you if they did or didn't? Is your life affected in any possible way?
Re:Don't teach, and certainly don't learn ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Incest is unethical because of the risk of inbreeding; a marriage between siblings with no biological children hurts nobody.
With the same argument you could forbid sexual intercourse between a male and a female, where the sum of their ages is above 80 years. The risk of trisomia-21 is quite high in this constellation. Higher than the risk of birth defects due to inbreeding.
The risk of inbreeding was much higher in tribal societies, because they were on the verge of inbreeding anyway because of their small numbers. Today, our parents were choosing each other literally between millions of potential candidates. The genetic diversity between two New Yorkian siblings is often larger than that of two random members of one of the remaining native tribes - the siblings share 25% of their genetic code, native tribes often 40% and more.
Re: what about (Score:5, Insightful)
The romance of the creator having to deal with the political realities. In our own minds, we are all Mozart, Tesla, and John Galt. :)
Re: what about (Score:5, Insightful)
You make a useful point - through most of US, if not global, history, there has been the thread of the creative, explorer, or pioneer who probably has support from investors, governments, other parties, etc. Columbus is perhaps an archetypical example - he spent something like 10 years trying to get various monarchs (Portugal, Spain, England, maybe even Italy) to fund his expedition to go West to find the East. (He was rejected several times by Isabella and Ferdinand because their advisers pointed out that his estimate of the diameter of the Earth was about 1/2 what the experts thought - they were in fact correct!) More recently, the American pioneers, and the American railroads, depended on government land grants.
Nevertheless there is a difference. All of your examples fit the mold of people who, given or finding an advantage, ran with it and created something new, or had a dream and put together the resources to make it happen. Without Columbus, Spain would not have become such a major economic and political power - it had just essentially given up rights to most of Africa and the South Atlantic to the Portuguese after a military defeat. In fact, Ferdinand and Isabella were acting as VCs, with the expectation that they would never see Columbus again, but their situation was bad enough that it was worth trying this low-cost fling. It worked out pretty well (except arguably for the folks who lived here already...)
Lots of other people had fathers who taught mathematics; lots of people have had all the right tools but never did anything with them. Heck, I'm a pretty good example - back in 1981 I came up with the idea of 3D printing (I worked in a group that built flatbed printers), and I even assembled some of the components I needed to build a prototype. But I never carried through with it. Maybe that was partly luck, and/or going a different direction, or whatever - but the fact remains that I could have created the 3D printing market 30 years ago.
IMHO Obama's assertion that "you didn't build that" was IMHO a combination of economic illiteracy, stupidity, socialist idealism, and political "big lie" technique. Sure, every "great man" has a variety of supports that made it possible. But that does not counter the principle. Taken to its extreme, you can say that Columbus was no more important than the guy who baked his breakfast the morning he left Palos de la Frontera.
Re:We need a workers government (Score:5, Insightful)
Except under capitalism minorities and the poor are more empowered than ever.
In America even the poor have cell phones and cars. What communist country can say the same thing? Access to food is so trivial here, yet in those places they'd be lucky if they have more than one meal in a given day.
We the people (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly a 14yo's opinions on comparative politics are about as insightful and original as a 14yo's opinions on birth control, it's mostly second hand knowledge that (like the Marxist slogan above) often bears little resemblance to the real world. However you do seem to have worked out that the "free market" is actually a set of rules that form a trading system for "we the people" (eg: property law), not some magical hand righting wrongs, just a different set of rules to what we use. The system we use says that the "free" in "free market" means anyone can participate in that market, what's not so clear is whether anyone is free NOT to participate. The alcohol market is a trivial example of a non-free market since some sections of the population are prohibited from buying it, and the rest are prohibited from selling it to them.
Don't believe everything people tell you about Marx, Rand, Orwell, et al, go and read what they have to say. There's also a metric shitload of stuff on youtube from modern writers such as Hitchens, Vidal, Pinker, Feynman, Sagan, et al. I particularly like Pinker's latest stuff about the decline of violence over the last 1000yrs and I personally think the "Stanford prison experiments" will be seen as one of (if not The) most important insight into human nature to come out of the 20th century.
Don't let "being wrong" stop you from thinking, the more angles you look at, the more picture's the kaleidoscope of the real world shows you. - refer to sig.
Re:We need a workers government (Score:4, Insightful)
Granted, there haven't been any examples of far-right countries that have done spectacularly better on that front, either. The US has the world's highest incarceration rate [wikipedia.org]; we've become quite good at allowing dissent "in theory" while rounding up dissenters from the system on globally unprecedented scales, to create a permanent gulag class (often used as forced labor for the profits of the private prison industry).
It's an interesting dichotomy: the US has some of the world's best free speech protections "in theory," but the stranglehold of megacorporate interests over, e.g., all widespread media outlets assures that speech representing the interests of the working class is entirely lacking in the "public discourse" of the nation. When people try to speak more effectively proportional to their numbers rather than their wealth, e.g. Occupy protests, they are gassed and beaten and rounded up into jails (typically for the maximum time they can be held for "processing" without charges), and the corporate media does its job of letting multimillionaire white males explain to us why those dirty hippies deserved what they got.
Re: what about (Score:5, Insightful)
Just remember one thing about Atlas Shrugged: As mentioned in the preface, it's not about men as they are, it's men as they should be.
Interesting -- seems like under the premise "men as they should be", everything from pure socialism to pure laissez-faire, or from pure anarchy to pure autarchy, would work. Any system works if the actors are perfectly informed and benevolent.
Re: what about (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO Obama's assertion that "you didn't build that" was IMHO a combination of economic illiteracy, stupidity, socialist idealism, and political "big lie" technique.
You make a rational, reasoned argument, then sign off with that straw man? I'm guessing you're not even taking it out of context like the GOP tried to.
The "you didn't build that" was *directly* related to the infrastructure of an entire society that enables advancement, and the idea that you contribute back to that society, in the form of jobs (like Apple doesn't), or taxes (like Apple doesn't).
I'm not saying Obama didn't fail miserably to express the sentiment clearly, but there's no "great man" that doesn't owe anything to anyone.
Re:We need a workers government (Score:3, Insightful)
In Cuba, even the poor have access to free medical care good enough to ensure that average life expectancy about equal to the longevity of people in the USA. And infant mortality is slightly lower than in the US. Not everyone has a car --- it's a small poor country --- but with ride sharing and buses it's possible to get around. I would gladly trade my cell phone for that.
Re:We need a workers government (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, sheep generally have trivial access to abundant food and cows even have computerized milking machines, with laser range-finders and all sorts of entertaining, stress-reducing and comforting gadgets. And your point is?
Re:Two things to remember about polygraphs: (Score:5, Insightful)
You might as well claim that states allow the reading of chicken entrails as evidence in court under Daubert, which would, of course, be utter nonsense. Daubert just says that it is up to the judge to determine whether evidence is admissible. In fact, that's not even what Daubert actually decided; Congress adopted the Federal Rules of Evidence which gave judges this power, and Daubert just ruled that they superseded the stricter prior Frye standard, so the court didn't even rule whether this was a good idea, but simply whether Congressional rules override common law.
Polygraph tests, of course, should be inadmissible in court and should be forbidden as part of police work. This is the job of Obama and Congress. Obama should have pushed regulations against their use in any part of the federal government, and Congress should outlaw them. The fact that Obama instead chooses to persecute people tells you where he actually stands on the issue of scientific evidence.
Re: what about (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. An American who doesn't like the tax rules in America would find it trivially easy to migrate to another country with different rules. You can't credibly choose to abide in a country, create a company in that country and use the infrastructure of that country then claim it is theft when you are asked to pay the taxes that they require.
There is an idea, the name of which I cannot recall now, based on just this. If you asked a rich person, a poor person, a white person, a woman or a catholic to write the rules, laws and taxes then what you'd end up with would probably be something that suits them better than it suits other demographics. If you asked someone to write the rules without knowing who they would be (obviously a thought experiment) then they'd want to ensure that the disabled, people from impoverished families etc were assisted (in case they ended up being in that group) and would be happy to risk sacrificing some income if they turned out to be from a well connected, wealthy family with a high chance of earning a large income.