Mathematicians Push Back Against the NSA 233
First time accepted submitter Parseval (3632761) writes "The NSA and GCHQ need mathematicians in order to function — they are some of the biggest employers of mathematicians in the world. This New Scientist article by a mathematician describes some of the math behind mass surveillance, and calls on other mathematicians to refuse to cooperate with the NSA/GCHQ while they continue to surveil the entire population. From the article: 'Mathematicians seldom face ethical questions. We enjoy the feeling that what we do is separate from the everyday world. As the number theorist G. H. Hardy wrote in 1940: "I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world." That idea is now untenable. Mathematics clearly has practical applications that are highly relevant to the modern world, not least internet encryption.'"
Watch this (Score:3)
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Thanks for the tip! I might actually watch that some time. Also, let me throw this [imdb.com] back at you.
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Thanks for the tip! I might actually watch that some time. Also, let me throw this back at you.
Don't forget this title [imdb.com].
Fight your own battles (Score:5, Insightful)
This trend of demanding that STEM workers should refuse to work on ethical grounds is very disturbing, and very misguided.
It is, in fact, a complete passing of the buck. Politically-capable voters are refusing to get off their asses and use their political power to reign in these government agencies, and are instead demanding that STEM workers sacrifice their jobs, potentially ruining their careers, in an completely ineffective effort to stop government evil.
If you have an axe to grind, the only morally-correct thing to do is to grind it yourself. It is slothful and cruel to demand that other people should make a sacrifice in order to champion your noble cause for you.
Furthermore, it should be outright obvious now that the advancement of scientific (including mathematical) knowledge will not be curtailed. If you don't research it, someone else will. That someone else may be one of your enemies. Demanding a halting of progress will only result on our country being left behind in the technology race. It is tactically ridiculous.
If you want the government evil to stop, get up, demonstrate, vote, and lobby. Those are the tools you have. If you are unwilling to use them, you have no business demanding that others do it for you, especially not in a stupid way that requires great sacrifice and is guaranteed to fail.
Re:Fight your own battles (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone else might do it instead, but that's no excuse for doing it yourself. You're still helping government thugs commit acts of evil, which is inexcusable.
Yes, we should be tackling the issue in multiple ways, but that doesn't mean people are excused for 'just doing their jobs.'
+1 (Score:5, Insightful)
History is full of tragedies facilitated by people "just doing their job".
Source: I'm from Germany.
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And even for the unwilling, there's very little moral determination that can't be diluted with sufficient money.
Re:Fight your own battles (Score:5, Insightful)
It is, in fact, a complete passing of the buck.
Not really, this is a mathematician calling on other mathematicians to actually think twice before they accept that lucrative summer job at NSA. Other than that, your reply is utter bullshit. If we can't factor in the ethics of the work we do, the assholes down at NSA have already won. It is exactly your kind of mentality that keeps those wheels spinning - just a drop in the ocean, nothing to see here, more along citizen - if I don't do this, someone else will.
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In Starship Troopers by Heinlein, the non-intelligent bugs, when stressed, bred a "brain bug", and lo! The stressor magically went away, and the brain bug died.
In The Mote in God's Eye, the Moties had a genius engineer caste...who was completely silent and didn't interfere with the controlling political caste.
We have our Congress and we have our president. These are functionally idiots with precisely one skill: the ability to convince you they are your friend. i.e., as studied by psychologists, the abili
Re:Fight your own battles (Score:5, Informative)
/sighs.
Not this again.
The Bugs in Heinlein's Starship Troopers were NOT unintelligent. Not were "Brain Bugs" a product of stress - they were the boss bugs all the time. ,
Note that you're probably thinking of the movie (again), and that what you're describing wasn't even part of the movie.
In Mote In God's Eye, the Engineer subspecies (not caste) were NOT completely silent, they just didn't talk well. They also did NOT "not interfere with the controlling political caste", since the "political caste" (which wasn't a caste, it was a subspecies) was actually a hybrid (read: mule) of the Ruler subspecies and the Engineer subspecies.
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I can't talk for the NSA, but certainly jobs for GCHQ are far from lucrative. £40k a year to live in a part of the country where nothing ever happens and where there's nothing to do? The max they pay for developers, mathematicians, and architects alike is £46k at the top end. There are exceptions for the best of the best, but even then why bother pratting around fighting their red tape for a higher salary when you can just go into private sector in a more interesting part of the coun
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Ok, I wrote lucrative in the context of the article, which states that some of the mathematicians do their work for NSA during the summer. To me that meant more money while they're sitting on their sofa anyways - I'll accept your correction though.
It doesn't matter for the bigger picture; The article spends a good deal of time getting the point across, that it needs to become socially unacceptable to accept these kinds of gigs, whether you do it for money, glory or patriotism should amount to the same in th
Re:Fight your own battles (Score:5, Insightful)
It is on the other hand completely legitimate to condemn the jack-booted thug for crushing your neck under his heal - after all every individual bears absolute personal responsibility for their actions. Should we condemn any less the mathematician sitting in an office somewhere who is responsible for determining where the jack-booted thugs should be targeted?
Certainly the electorate needs to get off their collective asses and change things, but at present there is no effective mechanism for them to do so. The election system has been gamed to the point that it's virtually impossible to wrest control from the two-faced party currently in control, short of a major grass-roots campaign to toss the bastards out, and such campaigns inevitably need leaders and organization to give them focus, which the NSA is quite likely doing their best to disrupt (we have documented evidence that the intelligence organizations have been infiltrating and undermining potentially powerful citizen groups since at least the McCarthy era, do you really think anything has changed?)
I would truly love to hear any ideas you have as to how we can realistically disrupt the current system nonviolently - I have a couple, such as a direct democracy party being implemented within the context of the existing political structure (with elected representatives legally bound to obey the will of their constituency on individual issues), but I just don't see a way to get such system off the ground before the established power structure changes the rules to make it impossible.
Re:Fight your own battles (Score:4, Insightful)
Certainly the electorate needs to get off their collective asses and change things, but at present there is no effective mechanism for them to do so. The election system has been gamed to the point that it's virtually impossible to wrest control from the two-faced party currently in control, short of a major grass-roots campaign to toss the bastards out, and such campaigns inevitably need leaders and organization to give them focus, which the NSA is quite likely doing their best to disrupt (we have documented evidence that the intelligence organizations have been infiltrating and undermining potentially powerful citizen groups since at least the McCarthy era, do you really think anything has changed?)
America is an Oligarchy [talkingpointsmemo.com] interview with the paper's Author. Another analysis [zerohedge.com] which I would recommend skimming over.
What is most incredible to me is that the data under scrutiny in the study was from 1981-2002. One can only imagine how much worse things have gotten since the 2008 financial crisis. The study found that even when 80% of the population favored a particular public policy change, it was only instituted 43% of the time . We saw this first hand with the bankster bailout in 2008, when Americans across the board were opposed to it, but Congress passed TARP anyway (although they had to vote twice).
Unless you get the "elites" involved you're doomed.
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And if the thugs are working for the elites?
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I quite agree, I was just being snarky.
So, knowing that the elites are hardly a unified front, and are engaged in struggles for dominance amongst each other, how do we convince enough of them that allying with us will allow them to get a leg up on their peers? The only way that springs to mind is to stage mass uprisings with the backing of powerful factions. That seems to be what has usually done the job in the past. Collaborate with Faction A to help them gain ascendancy over Factions B and C, in exchan
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Revolutions tend to start among people who are at least technically part of the upper class, although it varies whether they are in the uber-wealthy 0.01% or in the broader group of people who simply have much better than average access to good educations, health care, and communications tech. Witness the positions of Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Paine and Franklin in the US revolutionary war, or who actually made out better by the time the War of the Roses actually ended (hint, it wasn't the people who
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I strongly agree with most of your post, but direct democratic governance is an invitation to manipulate the uninformed voter. Left to a direct democratic vote, we'd have dozens of added fatuous amendments, like outlawing flag burning, embracing christianity over other religions, and requiring onerous voter ID enforcement.
A preferable alternative might be to ask registered voters to take a knowledge test that apportions a greater/lesser weight to their vote in proportion to their score. That way the infor
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A preferable alternative might be to ask registered voters to take a knowledge test that apportions a greater/lesser weight to their vote in proportion to their score.
I'm not sure what test we could give that wouldn't be biased out the ass, or would later be manipulated by elites.
A somewhat better solution would be to have a constitution exactly like we do now, and not just mindlessly accept everything the majority wants. The majority should not have absolute power, but their power should be constrained by a constitution that protects individual liberties. The people certainly could have more say than they do now, though.
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>A thorny problem. But almost any change would be an improvement over today's status quo.
That's certainly my own feeling. And for all the theoretically good reasons to oppose a direct democracy, I can't think of any examples where such a thing has ever been actually attempted on a large scale, much less devolved into the horror story that's always trotted out against it.
My own thought is that if it was established as a *Party*, rather than as a national policy, then it could be tested and set aside if t
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That always seems like a good idea, but every time it's been tried in the United States, it's basically been a tool for minority voter suppression.
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Knowledge tests of any sort are always gamed for political outcomes. The White Australia Policy of the freakin' 1970s was enforced principally through administering language tests to would be immigrants. Not english language tests mind you - pretty much whichever language we knew you didn't know.
The same crap has showed up again in the ridiculous citizenship tests we've now got. The first draft and implementation includes a bunch of random sporting facts about cricket. It's been improved since then (so I've
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You lost me when you misused "jackboot" for rhetorical effect. I assume the remainder of your vocabulary is just as tenuous, and your message just as misapplied.
There are at least two statements at odds with current psychological understanding in your post. I normally do not respond to replies, and I think it best to continue that practice. So good luck.
Either you will learn doubt, or you will continue sounding like an idiot. For the record, in general, I am on your side of the argument. I just wish someone
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Ah, a denigration without possibility of rebuttal by or education of the target. Am I supposed to be impressed by your ability to make useless, empty comments?
Do please inform me of my supposed failings that I might learn from them, or correct your own misunderstanding. Pompous statements of your own self-restraint on the other hand serve no purpose whatsoever.
Re:Fight your own battles (Score:4, Insightful)
"Somebody is doing something bad with science. Quick, stop all science!" -- You.
This is more like, "Stop working at an organization that you know is violating the fundamental liberties of the American people, as well as violating the highest law of the land." People working at the NSA need to quit, and the people need to rise up and put a stop to this nonsense.
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You think that everything the NSA does is evil?
No, I think that the NSA does some very evil shit. Guess which matters more in a free country? The fact that this government organization is violating our rights and the *highest law of the land*. Everything good they do is irrelevant when you consider the fact that we're supposed to be the land of the free. Everyone working in that organization must quit until they stop violating our freedoms.
That those possessed of a moral conscience would fail to act on it unless someone on the Internet says they should?
I didn't say that anywhere. I'm simply stating the truth; nothing more.
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1) Sure, but faced with the reality of an apathetic populace, how does an individual work towards change? I can run for political office, but without the backing of an existing political party or a large grass-roots campaign I have no chance. And I'm probably going to have to be a pretty major idealist or unrealistic loony to continue the struggle in the face of overwhelming odds. Either way I'm going to have a really hard time appealing to enough voters to have a chance, especially when the established
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Every useful technology can be abused. The man who invented the knife is not responsible for stabbings, nor is the man who built the individual knife used. The man who invented a means of recording the actions of corrupt police is not responsible when the police use those same cameras to spy on the population. And so on.
Oversimplification. It's fuzzier than that. If I turn up at your knife store covered in blood, and ask not that you dial 911 but instead for Your stabbiest knife please, my good man, you'd be right to be suspicious, and it wouldn't be unreasonable to place some of the blame on you if you sold me a knife and I went on to do harm with it.
You're right that lots of technologies can be abused, but it's not the case that every technology which can be used for evil must also have a 'legitimate' use as well.
Some it
einstein, sakharov, sagan, nobel, (Score:2, Informative)
lots of actual, you know, STEM luminaries, found ethics to be one of the most important things they worked on.
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If you have an axe to grind, the only morally-correct thing to do is to grind it yourself. It is slothful and cruel to demand that other people should make a sacrifice in order to champion your noble cause for you.
Are we talking about an apathetic voter-base, or not?
If yes, they're not demanding that anyone else grind their axe. They probably aren't even aware of the axe.
If no, we have a genuine disagreement.
No-one is saying I'm too lazy to vote, but I hope engineers refuse to become cogs of the military/industrial/prison/media machine.
Re: Fight your own battles (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop fighting the NSA's battles (Score:2, Insightful)
People taking the impact of their actions seriously is "a complete passing of the buck"?
You refer to the article as "demanding" multiple times, even though any idiot who reads it themselves and assesses its tone will see that it is simply a man attempting to call his peers to action. See statements like "Not everyone will agree, but it reminds us that we have both individual choices and collective power" - acknowledgment of differences of opinion without condecension, reaffirmation of choice...yep, all the
Mathematicians Have Always Had To Consider Ethics (Score:3, Insightful)
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No so. Throughout most of history, mathematicians did not have the luxury of pandering to nationalism, militarism, pacifism or other temporal concerns. The numbers of mathematicians were so low that from the very earliest days mathematics was an international scholarly activity.
While it is true that mathematics was employed by engineers and others in many applied fields, mathematics itself has never been subject to restriction or exclusion on the basis of its applications. The applications themselves perhap
Re:Mathematicians Have Always Had To Consider Ethi (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just mathematicians working for the NSA who are at fault; at this point, anyone working there is knowingly helping evil prevail. Anyone who doesn't quit is a scumbag.
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...anyone working there is knowingly helping evil prevail.
So, you think that anyone attempting to protect citizens of the US and its allies is engaged in "evil"?
It is as I suspected then.
Tell me, what do you think about the following item? Is it the NSA and FBI engaged in evildoing? Or are they stopping evildoing?
NSA helped foil terror plot in Belgium, documents, officials say [cnn.com]
Re:Mathematicians Have Always Had To Consider Ethi (Score:4, Insightful)
So, you think that anyone attempting to protect citizens of the US and its allies is engaged in "evil"?
I think infringing upon people's rights in an effort to protect them is evil.
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You don't have a right to confidential communications with the enemy in wartime. You don't have a right to make war on the US. You seem to have an expansive view of "people's rights" that is supported by the law or Constitution. And yet you don't seem to object to Americans being killed, totally depriving them of their rights.
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You don't have a right to confidential communications with the enemy in wartime.
Even if I were to agree with that, the government does not have the power to spy on everything just to see if someone is doing something illegal. Etc.
And yet you don't seem to object to Americans being killed, totally depriving them of their rights.
I expect the government to be better than criminals or terrorists. When the government is infringing upon people's rights, for whatever reason, it becomes the bad guy; that shouldn't happen in any country. It's a much worse scenario than terrorists or criminals killing people, as the government that's supposed to care about our rights no longer recognizes them
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If you think the NSA is evil, you have no fucking clue about its adversaries.
False dichotomy.
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Sure, people say their programs are unconstitutional. However, by our system, the people don't get to make those decisions, its the judges.
Actually, it is the people, as the judges are no more right than anyone else. Let me quote Thomas Jefferson for you:
"You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is “boni judicis est ampliare
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Even if the NSA was actually stopping terrorist plots, the end would not justify the means. Given the size and scope of their operations, any plots which they might have foiled are literally negligible considerations. The NSA is now a domestic surveillance apparatus and nothing more.
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The NSA is now a domestic surveillance apparatus and nothing more.
North Korea, Iran, al Qaida, China, and Russia will be relieved to hear that.
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Let's give the government the benefit of the doubt and assume that those 50 attacks were in a single year.
Let's also assume that each attach would have been as successful as the attacks of 9/1
Re: Mathematicians Have Always Had To Consider Eth (Score:3)
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I assume you didn't bother to read any of that since it was from a court in Belgium. The thing that is made up here is the claim that "the NSA threw away the Constitution." Since they are still subject to the control of the President, Congress, and the courts, that doesn't seem to be true.
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It's not just mathematicians working for the NSA who are at fault; at this point, anyone working there is knowingly helping evil prevail. Anyone who doesn't quit is a scumbag.
If there was no risk of becoming homeless and starving, people would have a lot more choice in the matter...
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Between helping the NSA violate almost everyone's fundamental liberties and the highest law of the god damn land, it's quite selfish and immoral to choose to help them, job or no job.
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Rembrandt was considered a revolutionary modern painter in his days. Just compare the paintings before him, and after - a huge difference. He drastically changed the ways in which paintings were composed.
Now, Picasso could paint just as well as Rembrandt, except he chose to paint non-realistic paintings. I find him a great artist. Just as Eduard Munch, btw, whose "Scream" expresses a lot of feelings that would be nearly impossible to express using photorealistic paintings. Majakovsky's "Cloud in trousers"
Re:Mathematicians Have Always Had To Consider Ethi (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you know how many "old masters" there were in any given century? The answer is: roughly the same as the number of "masters" in the 20th century, per capita. The only reason you're saying this is that most of the crap from the Renaissance has been culled and forgotten. For every Caravaggio, there are a dozen or more painters that you've never heard of whose work nobody preserved, or it languishes in a vault, or sits on the wall next to the Caravaggio where nobody gives it a second look, because there's a Caravaggio right next to it.
On the other hand, it's true that if you look at the stuff in a modern art gallery, much of it is not recognisable as art to someone who has not studied art. If you look at the stuff going down a catwalk in Milan, much of it is not recognisable as clothes to someone not immersed in the world of fashion. If you listen to the stuff in the 21st century classical section of your favourite music outlet, much of it is not recognisable as music if you have no grounding in 20th century classical music. Pop over to Terry Tao's blog, and much of it is not recognisable as maths from the point of view of somebody who has not studied maths beyond the high school level. Hell, programs in Haskell or Agda are not recognisable as "programs" if your education and career consists of doing CRM systems in C# or Java.
Do you know why this is the case? Because this the nature of innovation. This is how we get great new things. People must try a lot of new ideas, and most of them must fail utterly. History and failing memory culls the crap for us, and we end up with both a lot of good old stuff, and a sense of nostalgia which increasingly diverges from reality-as-it-was.
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If you look at the stuff going down a catwalk in Milan,
With you so far.
...much of it is not recognisable as clothes to someone not immersed in the world of fashion.
Nooooooooo. Only on /. is it normal to be focused entirely on the clothes coming down a catwalk!
Mathmatics is the single most important field (Score:4, Interesting)
Encryption, the cornerstone of secure internet, is based on heavy math, and mathmatical relations.
Heck, all computers algorythms are math, and math is needed to optimize them.
statistics is what advertisers use to target ads, given access to people's personal information can draw mathematical relationships between habbits and demographics, and between demographics and desires, and strengths and weaknesses.
Politicians use the same sort of advertising model to construct campaigns, and law enforcement/military, to target dissedents.
Re:Mathmatics is the single most important field (Score:4, Interesting)
statistics is what advertisers use to target ads, given access to people's personal information can draw mathematical relationships between habbits and demographics, and between demographics and desires, and strengths and weaknesses.
In fact, statistics is the one branch of mathematics that basically everyone in higher education comes across. Much to the chagrin of non-technical majors the world over. Which is too bad, because with zero intuition it is a really hard subject.
But yes, mathematics touches on basically everything we do in IT, and I for one welcome this call for a debate about how ethical questions come into play for e.g. cryptographers.
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I'll half agree with that, math and materials science is behind everythiing an engineering driven society does.
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Math and material science were only invented to accomplish engineering tasks.
Instead of engineering being called an applied science, science should be called theoretical engineering.
Engineering is behind math and science.
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Mathmatics is the single most important field
Philosphopy is the the father of all knowledge.
Did you know Pythagoras was a philospher ?
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Bah, philosophy is just applied psychology.
Bah, psychology is just applied biology.
Bah, biology is just applied chemistry.
Bah, chemistry is just applied physics.
Bah, physics is just applied mathematics.
Bah, mathematics is just applied philosophy.
NSA College Campus Recruiters (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok so I was there to be antagonistic, but even five years ago the lower level guys knew what was going.
College students can step up and stop joining there ranks. Here in North Carolina, my alma mator is suckling the teat and getting in bed further with them via a 60 million dollar data analytics lab [newsobserver.com]. There was some student protest in the form of people writing "Fuck the NSA" in chalk on buildings, but other than that, big U's are happy to cozy up closer to the feds.
I ended up going into the private sector and look back thankful that I didn't join their ranks.
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The NSA is just a tool, an instrument. Its b
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Everybody knew since the 1980's with a few books and magazine 'hints' and the massive placement of non Soviet related domestic hardware.
You also had the mid 1970's Church Committee on the NSA and CIA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org] A lot of people recall the CIA aspect but few recall the more legally sealed NSA side.
So people entering the telco, crypto, math fields knew what was been placed, as
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And they do a lot of really evil stuff there too, which is more important in a free country. If they don't want the supposedly good things they do to be tossed into the garbage with the bad, then they have only themselves to blame.
Re:NSA College Campus Recruiters (Score:5, Insightful)
Telling me of other acts of spying will not convince me that freedom is worthless, which is what you want me to believe. Freedom and principles are simply more important than security. You belong in North Korea.
That's the message I want to send, regardless of how wrong you are in comparing every act of spying to what the NSA is doing.
Re:NSA College Campus Recruiters (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh no, no, no! I am not trying to convince you that "freedom is worthless," but rather am pointing out that you have no useful idea about how your freedom was gained, maintained, and what is needed in the future to ensure it.
If we need to infringe upon our freedoms to freedoms in order to 'preserve' them or even gain them, then I'd rather go down fighting. We're supposed to be 'the land of the free and the home of the brave,' not the land of the utterly worthless cowards. Cowards like you, who worship the government and pretend to want a small government at the exact same time. It's a fucking eyesore.
If you are confusing what goes on in North Korea with what goes on in the US you are badly uninformed indeed.
Your goal seems to be to make the US like North Korea. I merely suggested that you move there instead, since it's a quicker way to get what you want.
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If we need to infringe upon our freedoms to freedoms in order to 'preserve' them or even gain them, then I'd rather go down fighting.
It is a simple fact that Benjamin Franklin opened other people's mail for intelligence and propaganda purposes during the Revolutionary War. General Washington ran a spy ring that engaged in spying on other colonists. That is how you gained your freedoms. They were maintained by similar means since then. Don't like that? You reject having your freedoms handed to you by such means? You would "rather go down fighting"? You can't change history unless you invent a time machine. My suggestion then is ge
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It is a simple fact that Benjamin Franklin opened other people's mail for intelligence and propaganda purposes during the Revolutionary War. General Washington ran a spy ring that engaged in spying on other colonists.
"Telling me of other acts of spying will not convince me that freedom is worthless"
Or, to put it another way, "X did it too, so it's okay!" is not going to convince me of *shit*.
You can't change history unless you invent a time machine.
Nor do I need to. You seem to be putting forth this illogical argument that, "Person X in the past did Y, and because they did Y, you have freedoms today. Therefore, we should continue to do Y." I don't buy it. If such a situation occurred in the future, principled people would object to it.
I do not look at the founding fathers as p
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If we need to infringe upon our freedoms to freedoms in order to 'preserve' them or even gain them, then I'd rather go down fighting.
Fascinating concepts... tell me, how do you rationalize your stance with the fact the U.S. was founded by stealing the land from the previous occupants? Are you willing to declare the experiment over and return all lands that were seized by force (i.e. all of them) back to the Native Americans?
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Fascinating concepts... tell me, how do you rationalize your stance with the fact the U.S. was founded by stealing the land from the previous occupants?
I don't. How does the other fool who actually *is* justifying the violation of people's rights rationalize it? Why not ask him? Stealing land was the wrong way to go about it, but then, few countries could say that no one other than them owned the land at some point in the past.
Are you willing to declare the experiment over and return all lands that were seized by force (i.e. all of them) back to the Native Americans?
No, because those people are long since dead. I've never been fond of the "You oppose X, but X was used to do good things, so you must give up the good things that X brought about."-type logic, because it's completely irrational. If
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Oh no, no, no! I am not trying to convince you that "freedom is worthless," but rather am pointing out that you have no useful idea about how your freedom was gained, maintained, and what is needed in the future to ensure it. Your little crack about "North Korea" is only further demonstration of that. In fact that might even suggest that you don't really understand your freedoms, let alone the Constitution.
If you are confusing what goes on in North Korea with what goes on in the US you are badly uninformed indeed.
Those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither. You are obviously one of those.
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Those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.
You are apparently trying to quote one of America's founding fathers, and doing it badly. Lets look at the actual quote.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin
It seems that in misquoting Franklin you omitted some important qualifiers. Were you just reckless, or are you one of those?
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It's called paraphrasing, and it's a common form. By condoning the current NSA you are in fact giving up essential liberty in exchange for a little temporary safety. I'm glad that you can recognize a founding father quote. It's a shame you don't adhere to its ruminations.
The full inclusion of all qualifiers does not strengthen your argument. Try again with a valid rebuttal.
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You were being sloppy in your quoting just as you are in your history and thinking. Your claim about giving up essential liberty is false.
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Actually, I don't like Franklin's version. I like yours better. Franklin's version seems to say that it would be okay to sacrifice freedom if the safety gained is not temporary (among other things), which is something I reject.
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The U.S. Constitution is great like that, legal over all the color of law and extra domestic spying paragraphs.
Yes thats been found in open courts. http://www.freedomwatchusa.org... [freedomwatchusa.org]
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If all your neighbors in the suburbs threw up privacy fences, you'd have a much more immediate and felt loss of freedom than if the NSA indexes your mail at some point after your provider has already done it and exchanged your message with unknown third parties en route to its destination.
Fuck you, you authoritarian piece of trash. Millions upon millions of people were abused and/or outright killed by corrupt governments throughout history, and now you're trying to tell me that it's perfectly okay if a government made up of imperfect humans is given access to tons of communications data? What do you think they are, perfect beings who can do no wrong and make no mistakes? You're a god damn fool who's completely ignorant of history.
You people are worthless, and you'll never convince me that th
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Firstly, the "don't worry about civil liberties because
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Do you really see no difference between spying on foreign enemies and domestic warrantless spying on one's own citizens?
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Spying on the enemy.
If you declare the citizens your enemy, you have no business being in power.
And I would take a principled defeat over a compromised victory. So, if spying on citizens is the same as spying on enemy troops, I support ending the streak. If Soviets are US citizens, I support ending the streak. If citizens are members of al Qaeda, in statistical numbers to support widespread surveillance, fuck it the streak needs broken.
If the only sigint defense we have is knowing all the metadata we can ab
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The 4th Amendment is important, but so is Article II and the rest of the Constitution. And all of it should be interpreted properly. Many people don't do that.
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The TSA, the NSA's mass surveillance, free speech zones, stop-and-frisk, DUI checkpoints, mass public surveillance, unfettered border searches, constitution-free zones, gun control laws, copyright, patents, anti-free speech laws, protest permits, the general erosion of the 4th amendment, etc. all show that the US government is pretty evil right now. Now, you mention Nazi Germany and such, which was in the past. Shall we bring up some past events, too? Japanese internment camps, women's rights, slavery, and
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You know, they actually do a lot of really important stuff there.
Like sabotaging communications protocols to compromise everyone's security.
Information is often more important than weapons (Score:2)
If you look at US navy documentaries about the battle of midway, The US was totally out gunned in terms of naval ships. We cracked the Japanese code. We knew where they were and where they were going. We were able to defeate a numerically superior force accordingly. The same also held with the skys over Brittian. Radar provided the information needed to intercept a much larger airforce. The work of the code breakers that told the British where the submarines were, etc, helped win the war. It can be argue
Re:Information is often more important than weapon (Score:5, Insightful)
The NSA is an important component in understanding the world around us.
Nobody complains about good old fashion spying... Such as hiring a PI to follow a suspect around.
The invasion of privacy conducted at the hands of the NSA is so extensive that it makes whatever records Stasi was making look like childs play.
It's the unprecedented scale that is the big problem.... Then there is the legality of industrial espionage in a civilized world, etc... And the fact that you normally don't conduct criminal activities within the territory of your allies.
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>NSA is important
Before the Bush administration, the NSA mostly had two basic roles: 1. To help with information, computing, and communications security and 2. To spy on foreign nationals and foreign governments. After 9/11 their mission was changed, to assume that the entire US population was the enemy.
Alan Turing is long dead.
Fuck off.
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BMO
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After 9/11 their mission was changed, to assume that the entire US population was the enemy.
There are enemies that hide among the US population. The US population is not the enemy.
Fuck off.
You had a fairly reasonable post till that.
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RADAR seems to be pretty irrelevant to this discussion. As for the rest of it, that's all intercepting military communications during wartime. It doesn't fit the current situation.
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http://www.wired.com/2007/10/n... [wired.com]
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I think you may have replied to the wrong post. I was discussing the differences between wartime monitoring of military communications and peacetime (for a given value of peacetime, of course, since the US seems to basically be eternally at war) domestic surveillance).
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Just the digital age makes it more instant and wider for less cost.
Been less at peace sems to offer more expansion and dreamy retroactive legal cover.
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Maybe your understanding of "evil" is confused?
Obligitory scene from Good Will Hunting (Score:3)
Why Shouldn't I Work for the NSA? (Good Will Hunting) [youtube.com]
Not smart ethical people's problem (Score:2)
The call for smart, ethical people to ban themselves from working at the NSA is not the solution. The NSA will simply hire instead smart, unethical people or smart, naive people. We should encourage smart, ethical people to work in all branches of the government and report any illegal/immoral things the government is doing. And then the public needs to kick the criminals/immoral government agents out of office.
Or we can pretend that a few people refusing to work for them will solve all our problems, no need
Re:Not smart ethical people's problem (Score:4, Insightful)
no need for anyone else to do anything.
No one is suggesting that we not do anything else. These people just need to refuse to take part in immoral activities, even if you think it's 'useless'. Principles matter.
Good math is applied math (Score:2)
'Mathematicians seldom face ethical questions. We enjoy the feeling that what we do is separate from the everyday world.
Actually this is a recent affectation. Historically mathematicians very much enjoyed the interaction of mathematics with the real world, e.g. Archimedes, Isaac Newton, Fibonacci, Euler, Gauss, Hilbert, Poincare, Pascal, Bernoulli, Cartan, von Neumann, Turing, Dirichlet.
More recently we have Stephen Smale, Terry Tao and Tim Gowers all three mathematicians of the first order who have dabbled in various applications.
My job interview with the NSA didn't go well at al (Score:5, Interesting)
Headline mathematics fail (Score:2)
Mathematicians Push Back ...
"Mathematicians" implies > 1
This is an opinion piece by one person.
What about doctors? (Score:2)
What about doctors, who perform/take part in:
Unlike mathematicians, who are subject only to the secular laws, doctors are governed by medical boards and other certification bodies with professional ethics — a term sufficiently vague to drive a truck through — being among requirements.
If a non-profit CEO can be illegally [slashdot.org] fired [slashdot.org] over a $1000 donation to a cause, should not doctors participating in activities, that enough noisy people find objectionable, be perman
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>manufactured meat substitutes aren't good.
You haven't tried "Ambrosia Plus" from Triplanetary Foods yet.
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BMO
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Or like the chemists, who designed tear gas, only to have the riot police use it against them when they demonstrated against the Vietnam war.
Your own creation turning against you. It's a rather old cliché but unfortunately, people insist on repeating it.
But the politicians change their minds... (Score:3)
Every politician in power to fix the NSA ends up silenced or in support of them. Why is that?? How do they convince them to change their positions? Can it simply be they all are lying before they get into a position of power?