How Well Does It Work?
I think Michael Levi's critique of Jonathan Farley's op-ed denigrating the efficacy of what we take the NSA data mining operation to be is a little misframed. The question "does it work?" is a bit misleading. Unless they're feeding the data into a computer program that just doesn't function (which I suppose is possible) it's obviously going to "work" in the sense that it will provide some information that's somewhat useful. The relevant issue is how much information and how useful? I went into some of this back in December last time we were worried about data mining, but it still seems to me that it doesn't make sense to apply statistical analysis to a huge set of people -- roughly 200 million -- when you're looking for a tiny number of terrorists.
The problem is that when you're searching for a rare condition, like being a terrorist, even a very precise statistical tool is going to overwhelmingly give you false positives. Ordinarily, when people are doing statistical analyses they take 95 percent confidence to constitute a statistically meaningful result. But there are 200 million people in the NSA pool and only a handful of terrorists. How many? Let's be generous and say there are 200 al-Qaeda sleeper agents in the USA. Then you apply a 95 percent accurate statistical filter to 200 million people. What you're going to wind up with are 10 terrorists labeled non-terrorists, 190 terrorists labeled terrorists, and a whopping 10 million non-terrorists labeled terrorists.
That's a process that works. You've reduced the size of your search pool by an order of magnitude. The program "works." But what does it really accomplish?
In practice, nothing. The NSA can't hand the FBI the names of 10 million Americans and ask them to investigate -- that would be a silly waste of time.
Now what you can do is that if in addition to your secret, illegal, oversight-free call records database you're also running a secret, illegal, oversight-free wiretapping operation is start listening to the content of everyone in the 10 million group's conversations. Obviously, the manpower's not going to exist to actually listen to all that, but maybe you have another data-mining algorithm that can run on the content. Say this one is also 95 percent accurate. That means 10 more terrorists will get away. And 7.5 million innocent people will be off the hook. But you're still left with a pool of 2.5 million innocent people and only 180 terrorists left under suspicion.
What you would do with that information just isn't clear to me. There's still not enough manpower to do serious investigations into all those people. And it would be insanely abusive anyway to subject such a huge group to invasive investigations when over 99.9 percent of them are totally innocent. Trying to compile a list of "people with Arab-sounding names" would be about as effective as these two computer algorithms.
But it's actually much worse than that. Whatever algorithm the NSA is using, they have no way to figure out what its error rate is. On top of that, they have no idea how many terrorists they're looking for. 200 is almost certainly a giant overestimate. You run the program, and you really don't know what you have. All you can know for sure is that even if it's really, really accurate the people it fingers as likely terrorists are overwhelmingly not terrorists.
As I say, that doesn't mean it "doesn't work." It works fine. The algorithm is accurate -- you're just not sure how accurate. You've narrowed your search pool -- you just don't know how much you narrowed it. But it remains very unclear what you're supposed to do with your results. It seems that most actions you could take would be a waste of time compared to alternative uses of manpower.
Contrast this with the potential utility of a phone records database for snuffing out leakers. You read an Adam Nagourney article that quotes an unnamed Republican member of congress talking shit about the administration. People in the White House probably have Nagourney's phone number. So you punch that into the database and see which numbers have spoken to Nagourney's. Then you need to check and see if any are the numbers of Republican members of congress. Maybe he spoke to more than one for the story, but still your data's going to be pretty good. You've got three or four dudes, one of whom is the anonymous shit-talker. Unlike knowing that you have 180 terrorists in a pool of 2.5 million innocent citizens, knowing that you have one anonymous shit-talker among two or three innocent congressmen is very useful. You can take action to further investigate. Or you can put it in your back pocket and wait for the next outbreak of anonymous shit-talking. If any of the three or four congressmen show up in the next pool, you probably have your guy.
That is a program that works.
Another thing this could be really useful for would be if there's someone you don't like, or want to blackmail, and you want to try and see if he has a mistress.
In a lot of ways, that's the most troubling aspect of this. You have a program that would be much more effective for abusive uses than it would be for its ostensible purpose. The people ultimately in charge of the program have a well-earned repuation for dishonesty and a well-earned reputation for hardball politics. They've gone out of their way to make sure that the program operates in total secrecy and is subject to no meaningful oversight. Why on earth would you want a program like that?
If the Bush administration isn't abusing that kind of tool, then you'd pretty much have to conclude that they're dumb. It would be very useful if abused, and there's nobody to stop them from abusing it.
That's precisely my point.
We need to start calling these people liars about their stated reasons for doing this because the stated reasons are bullshit.
You can't possibly detect enough terrorist activity to justify the cost and effort, let alone the privacy implications.
Therefore the reasons are elsewhere - whether it is tracking journalists, or anti-war protesters, or their own rightwing freakshows - or even if it's just because they want "the power" that comes with access to that much information, it's irrelevant.
The problem is they will then hide behind "national security" - "Well, we could prove it works, but then we'd have to kill you..."
So we're not going to win this argument either because they're still in charge and can do whatever they want.
At least until some Democratic Senator or two get their balls to drop again and stand up and demand investigations requiring the NSA to PROVE what they're doing and how and why and how effective it actually is.
As I always say, email me when this happens...
May 16, 2006 11:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
"In a lot of ways, that's the most troubling aspect of this. You have a program that would be much more effective for abusive uses than it would be for its ostensible purpose."
Isn't that true of just about any government function dealing with law enforcement, investigation, or regulation?
_______________________
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May 17, 2006 3:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Another point: it may not matter whether the program works.
Consider the bureaucratic dynamic. We are in a War on Terrorism. NSA has to show that it is going the extra mile to fight this war. How does it do this? It dreams up new, expensive, labor-intensive programs that are "outside the box". These programs get funded by bureaucrats and politicians that are also under a lot of pressure to show that they are serious about the GWOT.
Net net: a program, any program, is much better than no program.
May 17, 2006 3:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
You seem to not be making a good faith effort to determine if this program could be useful.
Say you come by the phone number of a terrorist, maybe overseas. You look in your database, and find everybody in the US who dialed it. Maybe this includes a few wrong numbers, but it won't be 99 44/100ths percent wrong numbers.
You then look for the people who called the person who called that number. And the people who called those people. And, maybe even the people who called THOSE people. Now you've got a list of maybe 20-30 thousand people. You now analyze the data to look for clustering; Groups of people who tend to call each other. You come up with twenty different clusters. A bit of gumshoe work shows that ten of those clusters are bowling teams that got sucked in because one of their members liked the same pizza joint as one of your second generation callers. You eliminate them from consideration, maybe even flag them to be discounted in the future.
But, wait, here's this cluster over here that includes several people making calls to countries on the terrorist watch list. So you start closely checking on THOSE people, and add the numbers they'd dialed into those countries to your original list of suspect numbers.
THAT is how it can work, and it's not nearly as dubious as you want to make out.
Of course, warrantless searches based on less than probable cause work fairly often, too, so it's not like this resolves any constitutional issues. But it does underscore that the NSA aren't utter morons for thinking this data would help them.
May 17, 2006 4:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
On the contrary, plenty of investigative techniques have very little potential for abuse. Police can use drug-sniffing dogs that will only "alert" to cocaine, with very high accuracy (see Illinois v. Caballes). Police can use chemical tests that only reveal whether a substance does or does not contain cocaine (see US v. Jacobsen). Of course, these could be used to harass people, but the techniques themselves can't really do harm to law-abiding citizens.
Even with more conventional techniques, the ratio of usefulness to potential for abuse is far greater than the one Matt identifies in the NSA data mining program. Remember, Matt sees very little usefulness at all. It's uncontroversial that searches pursuant to valid warrants, are quite useful. Yes, they can be abused, but it would be hard to do so for crass political purposes, thanks to the safeguards in place.
May 17, 2006 5:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
I just want to say that Brett has done an excellent job explaining what's going on. (So I guess we actually agree on some things :)) Pattern-based data mining can be *incredibly* useful. (For example, when my credit card was cloned a year ago, they froze my account within an hour of the first fraudulent transaction.)
The problem is that this wiretapping program *has been imposed secretly*, with *no* Congressional oversight. I am strongly opposed to this because it vastly increases the chances for the program to be misused.
May 17, 2006 5:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ditto Brett. All Matt has done in this post is multiply 5/100 times 200 million to come up with his 10 million false positives. That's downright silly.
May 17, 2006 6:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Say you come by the phone number of a terrorist, maybe overseas."
Okay--if *that* is your scenario, then what happens next is very simple: you go to a FISA court, get a warrant, and tap the next people in the chain. When some of them pay off, you repeat the cycle.
But all that supposes that you *started* with a hard lead, a solid clue: the kind of thing that we usually call "probable cause" (and as we know, the FISA courts were extremely generous on what they would take as probable cause).
MY addressed the greater efficacy of this method, i.e. the method of starting with a solid lead, in his comments about pursuing journalists, and agreed that it can work.
That's an entirely different method and scenario than what's at issue in the use of data-mining *as a way to scare up new leads*.
That is what MY is addressing--the attempt to get new leads purely from patterns. That is what Bush is trying to keep from the scrutiny of the FISA courts (because they would probably slap him hard, and he flinches easy). And that is also what we know the FBI complained about as useless, i.e. giving them an unworkably large number of possible leads.
So, yeah, say you come by the number of a terrorist overseas. Then you are talking about something which has nothing to do with the subject of MY's post.
May 17, 2006 7:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Tad is right. Matt's scenario is far more relevant than Brett's, because if they have a good lead they could obviously get a FISA warrant, so there's no need for the illegal program.
May 17, 2006 7:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
slemieux is right: Tad is right: Matt is right. The actual NSA program, as I understand it, resembles Matt's example more than it resembles Brett's. Brett's example could be dealt with through more usual channels.
May 17, 2006 7:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nah dude. If you have to literally get a warrant to tap every person, that's too slow. Suppose there are 1000 people in the network you're interested in. They're not all terrorists, maybe 100 are potential terrorists. That requires at least hundreds of warrants, eh? Whereas if you just had a database sitting there, you could press a few buttons, find the most telltale patterns (looking at all the data at once) and zero in on them to begin with.
As Brett mentioned, clustering seems likely to help here. If there's a circle of 10 people who are always calling each other, and 2 of them are suspected terrorists, you want to find out why they're all calling each other. You could just tap every single person that the 2 people call (suppose that amounts to about 50 people), but the point is, you may believe that these 10 people are more suspicious because they're all linked to each other as well as to the original 2.
The idea that old-fashioned gumshoe work is just as fast as gumshoe work abetted by global prior knowledge of who's calling who seems preposterous to me.
And of course, I'm not saying anything about whether I think this program is a good thing. This is just about effectiveness.
May 17, 2006 8:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
If the program is as you and Matt describe, then you're right--it's totally ridiculous. But it seems there's a bit of speculation involved. Can anyone point me to a credible source who actually has specific details?
Either way, I think the major problem with this program is that it was instituted without any judicial or legislative oversight. Debating whether it's effective or not is beside the point.
May 17, 2006 8:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Your second round is off by 5x -- a 95% accuracy rate against 10,000,000 people would yield 500,000 false positives.
May 17, 2006 8:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course meither Matthew nor Brett nor anyone else here knows what the program does. Accordingly every single assertion that Matthew makes in this post is complete nonsense.
For example, Matthew states that "Whatever algorithm the NSA is using, they have no way to figure out what its error rate is." Utter, utter nonsense. Matthew have no idea what tools the NSA has to figure out what the error rate is. For him to blithely state that they "have no way" to figure it out, which is a statement based on no evidence whatsoever, just points out his complete ignorance of the subject.
Moreover, his silly example based on numbers he takes completely from thin air. He writes: "Ordinarily, when people are doing statistical analyses they take 95 percent confidence to constitute a statistically meaningful result." Um, "[o]rdinarily" for what? For social science research? What does that have to do with anything related to fighting terrorists? Zippo.
Finally, the stupidest part of Matthew's post is his assertion that: "You run the program, and you really don't know what you have. All you can know for sure is that even if it's really, really accurate the people it fingers as likely terrorists are overwhelmingly not terrorists."
Matthew - that's the case with ALL POLICE WORK. There's a crime, and the police interview people - even if the police are really, really accurate in their interviews, most of the people they interview will not be the criminal. Duh. So you whenever you get the "results" from the data sifting, you know exactly what you've got: people who are of interest for further investigation. That's the same as virtually every investigation ever conducted by law enforcement. You start with a large group of people, and you use various investigative tools to focus on people who are of greater interest. Which is exactly what is happening here. Matthew's implication that the program is unhelpful because it can't identify terrorists by itself is simply dumb.
May 17, 2006 9:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Okay--if *that* is your scenario, then what happens next is very simple: you go to a FISA court, get a warrant, and tap the next people in the chain.
Bzzt. Sorry. You don't have probable cause. No warrant. Try again.
May 17, 2006 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Al: police work is properly done by... law enforcement agencies. NSA is a foreign intelligence agency run by the Department of Defense.
Police work is regulated by an extensive body of laws and courts. These laws and courts don't have a national security exception.
Police work is subject to discovery proceedings.
Who the hell knows what NSA is doing? All I know is that if it wants to do police work, then NSA employees should be deputized, and in this work NSA should not be permitted to classify the procedures.
Come to think of it, I wonder what the classification guide would say about working with our phone records? No sources and methods involved, and it isn't foreign intelligence.
May 17, 2006 10:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's true that we don't know everything the program does. Matt is simply pointing out that the part we do know about doesn't seem to make much sense. If we refused to debate all programs with some secret aspects, deliberation would be greatly impeded.
I also dispute the claim that "that's the case with ALL POLICE WORK." I'm just guessing that in some police work, the police are able to narrow down the initial list of suspects to fewer than 2.5 million. I mean, imagine that the government built a highway so poorly that 99% of drivers crashed and died on any given day. If Matt criticized the road's construction, I can't imagine that you would write, "Sure, it isn't riskless to drive on this highway, but that's the case with ALL ROADS EVERYWHERE." Which I guess is just to say, quantitative differences can matter, especially when we're talking about costs and benefits.
May 17, 2006 10:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
I largely agree. However, when you write: "I'm just guessing that in some police work, the police are able to narrow down the initial list of suspects to fewer than 2.5 million", you are making the same mistake that I pointed out that Matthew made above.
The 2.5 million number is pulled from thin air, and no relevance to anything. I could just as well pull out a number: 250. Well, can the FBI check 250 suspected terrorists through normal police measures? Yup. And if the NSA program is accurate enough such that there is a greater probability that such group of 250 suspects than a similar group of 250 suspects compiled by other means, then the program would be worthwhile.
But, as I said above, neither Matthew nor I have any way of knowing whether the correct number is 2.5 million or 250, and neither Matthew nor I have any way of knowing whether the people in that group are more likely to be terrorists than people in a similarly sized group compiled by alternate means.
Which is just a long way of saying that Matthew's post is bunk.
May 17, 2006 11:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Counterterror is both law enforcement and foreign intelligence work. Which is why both aspects are coordinated by the new bureaucracy advocated by the 9/11 Commission and now headed by Negroponte. Didn't you know that the NSA coordinates with FBI?
May 17, 2006 11:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
It has been a number of years since college, Texas AM Computer Science, but it occurs to me that statistical analysis algorithms are not what the would be running against this type of data set. They may run these types of algorithms against the result set they get from the data mining algorithms; to check there likely hood of the returned data set containing data of interest but not for the actual mining of the data.
The heuristics of pattern matching and pathing algorithms would seem more appropriate, for data mining based on my understanding of the data being searched. Pathing algorithms are especially appropriate given a starting phone number.
Then again as all the Telco companies involved now deny that the gave the information to the NSA perhaps it is just a ploy to isolate a leeker or a disinformation campaign to get someone to react.
May 17, 2006 1:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
The thing about the NSA programming that is really depressing me is that there is a bigger controversy in the background that no big blogger has touched so far. Rep. Sensenbrenner has pushed for an extremely totalitarian data retention bill, and given his position, I can see it getting a lot of weight and naturally the support of the Bush Administration. If this bill gets passed, we're f$%^ed on privacy. Totally 110% pwn3d by Uncle Sam online. It'll make the NSA issue look like NOTHING.
I have a post here that describes in mild technical detail just how much simply HTTP proxy logging could get on an average American (let alone full blown packet sniffing/analysis). Cato has a quick, but good write up here as well written by Radley Balko.
Sorry, I'm just trying to do my part to get people actually talking about what looks to be a far worse abuse of civil liberties in the making.
May 17, 2006 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not one for the government snooping into all my personal doings. But does anyone else find it disturbing that so many in our nation are so paranoid of possible outcomes like blackmailing?
I mean the idea of a democrat in the whitehouse with those powers of eavesdroping (ohh wait! Clinton did have such!) gives me "da jiblies" but what is even more disturbing is how much of our populace freaks out at the potential of blackmail. I'm not one that thinks such is a light thing or an acceptable thing, but the fact that so many people seem to feel a deep and abiding reason to freak out at the mere possibility of someone finding something in their doings that would enable a would be blackmailer is rather disturbing. No one's perfect, of course, but any person genuinely trying to be ethical would not freak out to the degree and extreem that so many are at the prospect of electronic surveilance, even if you're just talking about and accepting those forms and instances admited thus far by the White House.
Is anyone else freaked out by the thought of a society with a consciounce so loaded up with issues that they freak out to the degree seen thus far?
Again I'm all for maintaining constitutional rights and a proper view of civil liberties but I can't help but be scared to death that so many are scared to death at the possibility of someone seeing some of their communications or habits with regard to research at libraries or conversations on the internet and finding items sufficient to be real levers of blackmail.
May 17, 2006 2:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Can anyone point me to a credible source who actually has specific details?"
That's the point I made - "We could prove it works, but then we'd have to kill you..."
They hide behind "national security".
It's that simple. All the bozos telling us it's no big deal simply are clueless because they don't know how it's actually working either. And they don't care how it works, because they're too busy bending over for "Big Brother" in the name of some nebulous "terrorism" fear.
Oh, gee, I forgot - "9/11 changed EVERYTHING!"
Yeah, it changed whether this country has even a smidgeon of civil rights left, as well as whether this country has even five people willing to stand up for freedom.
May 17, 2006 3:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
And an equally long way of saying your post is bunk.
The bottom line is that no matter what the figures, the odds of data mining pulling out MORE false positives - significantly more than manpower would allow to follow up on - than correct hits are far higher than not.
The fact that we can't pinpoint those figures from the outside is irrelevant.
What is relevant is the national security state is CLAIMING this stuff works without ANY oversight or evidence.
Meanwhile, as Matt correctly points out, it will work much better for people they CAN target than the people they don't know about, i.e., dissidents, journalists, political opposition, etc., rather than terrorists.
Which is a shorter way of saying your post is bunk.
May 17, 2006 3:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's just amazing how many people even on a supposedly "progressive" site are willing to just bend over for "Big Brother" based on flimsy excuses.
Gutless punks, the lot. The Founders would be turning in their graves.
To quote Dracula from "Blade Trinity" - "Look how far you've fallen. You're nothing but shadows of your former selves."
Of course, only about thirty percent of the Colonists were in favor of revolution, either. So maybe not.
May 17, 2006 3:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Again I'm all for maintaining constitutional rights and a proper view of civil liberties"
No, you're not, or you wouldn't raise such a flimsy issue.
You simply have no clue about the depth of the issue here.
You should be concerned about how many Senators and Congressmen are subject to blackmail by the NSA, not how many citizens are. Given the corruption scandals plaguing the Senate right now, I'd say there is good reason for that concern.
May 17, 2006 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your exagerations at the end are rather amusing. All the issues you take with the nature of the thing could have been made against Abraham Lincoln's administration with the implimentation of martial law, etc. that he carried out in the course of the civil war.
If your civil liberties are so lacking then can you tell me how it is that you're still permited to post on a forum open to virtualy the whole world? And that without being carried off to some form of confinement?
Do you see all those who take scientists, those who claim to know the prime cause and needed course in light of global warming, to be "too busy bending over for "Enviromentalism" in the name of some nebulous "ecological catastrophy" fear?
Just would like to see how consistant you are in this facad of super-skepticism/cynicism.
May 17, 2006 4:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
The cumulative ethical integrity of our society is a "flimsy issue"?
Scarier than I thought!
I guess if cumulative ethical integrity of a society is a "flimsy issue" and not at all related to the maintence of freedoms and a free society then I would be a bit out of it. Though in my view it's your capacity to discern varying degrees of relevancy and profundity that is lacking.
Now you've utterly lost me. You see everything those people do is eventualy accessable to the general public. Yes such things could happen in the short term, but if democracy works, and they do those things, and those things run contrary to the will of a general populace that is generaly more ethical than not then the corruption will soon be uncovered, stoped, and, generaly gotten rid of. As Lincoln said-- You can fool some of the people all of the time or you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. If the ethical and moral fabric of our nation remains sufficient then democracy will systematicaly, time and again, cleanse itself. Now granted if your belief is that the majority of people are inherently the lowest of scumbags then I can understand much of your position. But, while not perfect, I generaly see a system striving for a semblance of democracy regularly weeding out and exposing problems that may occure in terms of manipulation and usurpation of power.
May 17, 2006 4:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Unless the lead was time sensative to the degree in which a FISA warrant (which can take at times more than a week) could not be obtained in sufficient time to stop an attack.
But let's not bother those who think the current situation is the result of evil incarnate with inconvenient facts.
May 17, 2006 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
But isn't there a three-day back window on a FISA warrant? That means that the lead could be followed immediately -- as long as the warrant was processed within the next three days.
PSA: There is now a Users' Help Forum.
May 17, 2006 6:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
So we're suppose to have the executive branch just guessing that within three days the court will agree with them?
There's an issue with these warrants and their issuing that goes even beyond even time constraints and guessing as to whether or not a court will approve it after the fact. You have the issue of appealing the decision of those that normaly are in the position to grant or deny the request. I mean if you're working in surveilance, and keeping things down low is a priority to remain in a realm in which intellegence can be gathered without the party being observed discovering such so they can change their tactics, then you're kind of limited in an appeals process. If there's some piece of information that the whitehouse and the FISA court disagrees on, as to it's vitality--or whatever--then what course of appeal and recourse does the whitehouse have? They can't very well go trumpeting it to ever more and more people because aside from the fact that leaks become ever more possible you also run the same chronological problem of it taking ever more time the more cycles and people to which the whole scenario must be presented. I mean let's face it, on the scales and time gaps we're addressing the chronological margin of error is about as critical as it can get. In other law cases several months is plenty expeditious. But the chance to catch a lead that could eventualy lead you to stoping an attack is among the most fleeting of anomalies.
So that's my issue. No one wants to trust the system or the people that chose it. It's like we all want an instant recall button on every election choice. There comes a point where, whether or not we all trust the government to do the best for us, we have to accept that the system, which is powered by the majority of the populace, already made the decision to trust this man for four years barring some blatant and demonstrable proof that he has actually commited high crimes and misdemeanors. People will claim such but untill they can demonstrably show that he's done such then they're going to have to work out these issues through the paradigm set up.
I'm not saying the surveilance laws are anywhere near perfect. But I have a hard times seeing anyone proposing better ones that remain sufficiently potent to justify their existence. And the fact that these same measures have been used by several previous administrations without issue rather lends the issue an aire of selective criticism with a bent far closer to personal vendeta than anything truely siding on a search for justice or the assurance of civil liberties or constitutional rights.
May 17, 2006 10:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Most of my criticism WERE leveled at Lincoln, including Gore Vidal's branding him a dictator.
Comparing the late 1800's with the 21st Century and the relative power of the central government is disingenuous at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.
My opinion on global warming is very simple - it's irrelevant because technology will eliminate the issue - or eliminate humans - before it becomes a serious threat to the advancement of technology. Global warming is an issue for chimpanzees, not Transhumans. Stop being chimpanzees, you might realize that.
May 18, 2006 4:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your rant is, as usual, more troll-like than substantive.
For the benefit of other readers, since you won't comprehend anything I say, I lay it out:
1) Raising the issue of the reaction to spying as a problem of the morality of the population is a "flimsy issue" because it is an obvious attempt to turn the basic issue of spying on its head and justify it based on the alleged failings of the population. It's a debating tactic, nothing more.
2) The presumption that everything a Congressman does is eventually available to the public is peurile at best. The Republican bribery scandals went on for YEARS with negative effects on this country. Yet you couldn't care less - your only concern is why somebody in the private sector might not want his every action scrutinized by the state.
3) Again, your concept of the United States always "weeding out abuses of power" is simply not supported by the history of expansion of state power over the last two hundred years. It's ignorance in the extreme to not be able to discern the steady erosion of civil liberties -and it's dishonest in the extreme to ignore the current ruthless expansion of state power and justify it with the notion that Americans are so "guilty" of "something" that that is the only reason they oppose it.
I guess the trolls on this site are getting sophisticated - they manufacture pointless and irrelevant arguments that sound superficially plausible but completely ignore the central issue under discussion in order to bait idiots like me into responding.
Buzz off.
May 18, 2006 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ahh... so now I'm curious, do you think what he accomplished in freeing the slaves (at least starting the process), could have been done by a less asertive leader? If so, how? If not, do you feel 'dictatorial powers,' as you seem to see them, are ever justifiable?
Not a terribly wide difference between those two extremities in your claim. I, however, find your thought that comparisons in terms of relative power in the central government as being so inconclusive or dissimilar, especialy when we are speaking of the same governmental tradition and order, is that which is truly dishonest. What else is there to compare it to? Do you really think politics and governmental dynamics in that day was so disimilar to what we have today? I'm curious as to what you find to be so dishonest about the comparison. I mean if you feel it is at some level inherently dishonest then you should be able to elaborate how and why the situations are so different.
As to your transhuman delusions, I pity your end, for under such a goal, or self-perception, you will only find emptiness and a fleeting humanity.
May 19, 2006 10:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Curious as to what your transhuman delusion has you thinking you'll transform into, and to what end. A trans-troll?
Seems transhumanity isn't anyless condescending than much of humanity.
My initial post was not in anyway intentioned to justify the government impeding our rights. I mean if you want to get into jumping to conclusions like so then I can just say that you're trying to deflect away the relevancy of the populaces morality because of the vested interest you have as a self-proclaiming "transhuman" to utterly sever ties with anything held to the measurement of morality.
I never said "everything" that they ever did would be available to the public. But all that's relevant would eventualy be brought to light, unless you believe in conspiracy theories that demand far more faith than any dogmatic allegiance to the Bible ever could. You want to talk "peurile" then I wouldn't suggest a view of history that has you asserting massive swaths of never uncovered coniving that's been kept secret despite the implicit fact of your claims to very significant numbers of participating conspirators.
Is a requisit of being a "transhumanist" to hold that there's massive, and ever on going, yet never revealed--and never to be revealed, conspiracy?
Dogmas abound among even those who dream of a Godless, otherly "human" future.
Yet, counter to your claims of my 'juvenile' hold that things would come to light, it came to light. Certainly it did damage, just as any misdoing would do. But I'm vindicated even on this point. As individuals have evidence revealed they either get removed or inflict enough on their constituencies or peers so as to be driven out of office. It's pretty much a given that at least some portion of a government of our size will be less than outstanding. But as I said, as we continue the process, and if the majority of the populace is sufficiently moral (yes that 'flimsy' point) those aberations will remain aberations and will be subjected to either elimination or some form of justice. But if most in our society are immoral than the whole system will colapse regardless any program or renovation to government you can design.
For being "transhuman" you sure make alot of human foibles. I certainly do care about more than the reason for peoples insecurity. And I never stated that I think it's right to have every action scrutinized by the state. I think very few actions need to be scrutinized by the state. You seem to try and paint me as being some "Big Brother" Orwellian apologist simply because I don't join you in the delusion of a government having the potency to maintain order and solvency while being utterly issolated from the communication paths of it's citizens in media that can cross borders into other nations or into the criminal.
Certainly it is. In the last two hundred years we've seen our civil liberties consistantly improving and expanding, and doing all this under the power of the institution set up by the founding fathers of this nation and the general populace that's lived under such. Woman's sufferage, emancipation of slavery, access to knowledge, improved health and mobility. I mean the very capacity to even think that 'transhumanity' is a plausible future is born of the fact that our society, under the paradigm set up, has gradualy increased our freedoms and capacities as individuals. How on earth you are inable to see this rather befudles one. But then I'm just an incompetent "chimp" in the eyes of 'Mr. Transcendental' "human".
AMEN!!!
The fact that you are so unable to do such accurately demonstrates your extreme ignorance! Or perhapse you can point out in what specific ways you've become less "free" or have "lost