Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Nick McBride,
The link you posted is dated 2 January 2012 and doesn’t appear to be related to Greenwald’s recent activities.
Have you got better evidence that he used a rape metaphor over the weekend?
Very cheap shot.
My mistake, absolutely, and I had corrected it before I saw your comment. It was being discussed so widely yesterday I assumed it was new and didn't clock the date. It was still pretty vile.
But I'm still perplexed by The Guardian's help us build a profile of Glenn Greenwald exercise.
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It's no reflection on the action Snowden decided to take, but Farhad Manjoo has a point:
Edward Snowden sounds like a thoughtful, patriotic young man, and I’m sure glad he blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance programs. But the more I learned about him this afternoon, the angrier I became. Wait, him? The NSA trusted its most sensitive documents to this guy? And now, after it has just proven itself so inept at handling its own information, the agency still wants us to believe that it can securely hold on to all of our data? Oy vey!
According to the Guardian, Snowden is a 29-year-old high school dropout who trained for the Army Special Forces before an injury forced him to leave the military. His IT credentials are apparently limited to a few “computer” classes he took at a community college in order to get his high school equivalency degree—courses that he did not complete. His first job at the NSA was as a security guard. Then, amazingly, he moved up the ranks of the United States’ national security infrastructure: The CIA gave him a job in IT security. He was given diplomatic cover in Geneva. He was hired by Booz Allen Hamilton, the government contractor, which paid him $200,000 a year to work on the NSA’s computer systems.
Let’s note what Snowden is not: He isn’t a seasoned FBI or CIA investigator. He isn’t a State Department analyst. He’s not an attorney with a specialty in national security or privacy law.
Instead, he’s the IT guy, and not a very accomplished, experienced one at that. If Snowden had sent his résumé to any of the tech companies that are providing data to the NSA’s PRISM program, I doubt he’d have even gotten an interview. Yes, he could be a computing savant anyway—many well-known techies dropped out of school. But he was given access way beyond what even a supergeek should have gotten.
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Notes & Queries: Paul, in reply to diversitynz,
So, really, flawed help is a lot better than no help.
LOL. Nice one Ben. You’ve described, in 11 words, the entire disability support ethos in NZ.
I don’t think that’s what Ben was saying. He also said:
Every little moral conundrum pushes people a little further away.
And I think there’s something in that.
What David describes are incidents from a 14-year relationship. It is, as you say, a “blurry space”. He has written before with similar frankness about himself.
I saw David last week and talked about it with him. The conference calls – orchestrated by the unmanageable ADHD friend whose name we can guess – were mostly, he said, as much a source of entertainment and contact for Paul as anyone else, and many of them became extended conversations. At other times, David was there and intervened.
It’s okay to ask whether David should have intervened more strongly when it came to sex. But was that his job? Should he have overruled Paul’s apparent consent? Should Paul’s impairment have precluded sexual contact? Would involving the police against his wishes be right? Would it traumatise him? If David had rigorously observed boundaries with respect to Outline, would Paul’s life have been better or worse?
As you note, some of the praise for the post has come from people with direct, family experience of disability – Ben and I included. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I think I responded strongly to the theme of agency and license. I’ve recently had to deal with a situation where some people – the last people you’d expect – robbed my older son of agency and it really pissed me off. I worry about my sons being isolated and living unnecessarily limited lives. I responded to the theme of license – the freedom to be wild, even if that implies risk. The rest of us get to do that. And the ability to be in the world, even if it is in strange ways.
David didn’t write that post to provoke, or even to trigger discussion, although it’s clearly done both. Most people have liked it, and not for prurient or voyeuristic reasons. They feel they’ve been presented with a life they’d never considered, been made to think about things they hadn’t before. As one person said to me “I don’t want to read anything else today. I just want to think about that post.” I’m not saying any of the points you make are wrong – it’s not that simple. But I think we’re going to have to disagree on this one.
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WaPo reporter Bart Gellman's side of the story is quite interesting. Snowden's communications asserted a strong moral and intellectual basis for his actions.
Otoh, Glenn Greenwald is now blowing up on Twitter and saying:
Bart Gellman's claims about Snowden's interactions with me - when, how and why - are all false.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to BenWilson,
Also, ironically, I was eventually replaced by a large group of people who sort the spam by hand, in an outsourced situation, writing hand rules to block the latest trick. It worked better. Turns out that it’s easier to get a super high block rate by having approximately as many people blocking spam as are writing it, which turns out to be remarkably few people for most of it.
Holy shit that's interesting.
Just laying my own credentials on the table to be having a conversation about statistical data mining of internet information. I’m not the world’s foremost expert, but I do have an idea what I’m talking about.
Not doubting it for a second. But I did have the impression that the LAPD data project is showing results. It helps guide patrols on where to patrol, so it's a helping decide where your by-hand policing is done.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Angus Robertson,
On a lighter note Obama has just completed a summit with Xi Jinping where the American complained loudly about an on-going violation of cyber security.
I ran out of time to work in a Huawei mention.
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The DOJ says it is in “the initial stages of an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by an individual with authorized access.”
Which appears to say that he had authorised access to what he has leaked.
Booz Allen has acknowledged that Snowden was their guy, but says he worked in the Hawaii NSA office for less than three months. There is a suggestion in that story that the Feds were on to him before the story broke -- tipped off, perhaps, by the Washington Post?
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Stupid technocrats. Next thing they’ll be promising computers predicting crimes before they happen
Ah. I was just about to mention the LAPD project.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to slarty,
I have observed these to include requiring a staff member to keep a matter from their superiors. So don’t be too harsh on firms that may well try not to be evil. It could be that their security staff (often recruited from the public sector) may simply not have told anyone.
I hadn't thought of that.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Part B isn’t going to be a small task easily managed by few people, think collating the equivalent of the NZ census every what? Day, hour, minute… on a continual real time basis.
It's possible that the bigger private data-houses are doing some of the feds' chewing for them. This data-mining project at Google Research was actually tested by its authors on a global terrorism dataset.
There are gaps in this story that could have been closed by its source and its puzzling that they haven’t been.
It is more likely he doesn’t know.
I do wonder. A series of Powerpoint slides doesn't necessarily indicate proximity to the control room. But who knows? There are many unanswered questions here.