Translating President Obama's NSA Reform Promises Into Plain English 171
sandbagger writes "The cynics at the Register have picked apart Barack Obama's NSA reform promises. As to be expected, there's some good, some deliberate vagueness, talk of 'ticking bomb scenarios' and the politician's favourite 'promises to commit to future reforms'. Basically, it's a fig-leaf to kick the can down the road so the next president has to deal with it. He's promising bulk data will go to a third party so the NSA can't see it. Okay, who is this magical third party?" They don't seem to me nearly cynical enough.
Re:Plain enough. (Score:4, Informative)
Bullshit. Potus has WAY more power than you think. He can ask the Justice department to investigate why the judges only rubber stamp, he can use presidential orders to direct departments or how to interpretation the law, he can fire US attorneys, he has his cabinet members he can fire, he could even fire the the head of the CIA/FBI and Homeland security for misconduct by asking the AG to fire them, and so much more powers.
That interpretor's language is not Turing Complete (Score:5, Informative)
What good is a lexical translator if the output doesn't compile? We've been incrementally compiling the language of ++BS (doubleplus bullshit) for quite a while, so let's just run what we've got now and see if there are any obvious errors.
The FBI and NSA have now both been tasked with maintaining "national security": This means maintaining the political, and socio-economic status quo despite the will of the people. [wikipedia.org] It's a fact they have a long history of acting to silence civil rights activism, anti-war activism, and other activist groups. They claimed to stop the practice, but the NSA has now admitted it still entertains the idea of discrediting "radicals", via exposing porn habits, etc. Under the state secret label of "national security" they FBI and NSA won't have to worry about pesky FOIA requests revealing their programs like they did in the past, and can delegate enforcement to the state police agency: DHS. It doesn't matter where the data is stored online, or how encrypted it is, the NSA can and will get at it via exploits. [theatlantic.com], so Obama is free to promise the moon and stars. Not like oversight ever stopped them from blatant constitutional violations before.
Here is a documentary / book presenting facts which can be easily verified in an attempt explain the practice of Disaster Capitalism. [youtube.com] The gist is that through application of social, political and economic shock therapy you can bend the will of the people to your design and siphon a lot of wealth up into the upper echelon of private business. It's also a great way to force the privatization of public resources for corporate benefit. Anyone who objects or holds counter economic views is labelled a "radical extremist" of a "dangerous ideology" and rounded up in prison camps as examples of what happens if you disagree. The bogeyman of Communism or Marxism or Terrorism, etc. is thereby leveraged.
Warning: Cognitive Dissonance Detected.
Assumption of inherent benign governance illogical: More evidence for Null Hypothesis against this stance exists.
This article examines the Pentagon's preparation to implement the round-up of those having "radical ideologies" in the wake of a Disaster Capitalism event, [theguardian.com] (essentially following the predicitons and warnings of the prior linked documentary) and explains how the PRISM system is apparently connected to it.
Error: Expected Event "Future" not found.
Democratic Republic execution model is not consistent with economic ruin and despotism.
So, there we have it. It would be crazy to think anyone could benefit through economic ruin, so everything's probably OK. It seems our government is just run at the behest of rich corporations, and is wearing tinfoil hats in preparation of ensuring our continued acquiescence just in case they're ever able to strip more power from the people than is bearable. However, it's probably nothing to worry about unless they plan to let some "unforseen disaster" happen, like a Stock Market Crash, Pearl Harbour, 9/11, Energy Crisis, etc. or our ability to influence the government via the democratic vote has been hacked. [youtube.com]
TL;DR: Obama's Promises are merely legitimization and fulfilment of The Nightmare Eisenhower Tried to Warn Us About. [youtube.com]