skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I just can't seem to bring myself to care if the NSA is reading my email

Most of us will skate through our entire lives and never need to care about this. The problem is, some small minority of us will need to care, indeed, it will be of life and death importance. Through your innocent lack of caring, you are enabling the persecution of the small subset of people who this will actually impact. Many of those people will be innocent, incidental bystanders who just happen to get caught up by the system. But some those people will be crucially important figures - the Assanges, the Nelson Mandela's, and so on. People who actually change history.

So my question to you is, how do we convince you, as a prototypical "young person", to care about something that has no immediate impact on you but might be crucially important to you or someone other than you many years from now? Do you have the capacity to do that at all? How do we invoke it?
That's absolute nonsense by any meaningful definition of the word.
people are primarily concerned with economic issues

That's true, and I'd venture that it's nearly always true, with the main exception being when people feel unsafe and security becomes #1.

However, public opinion alone doesn't drive policy. There is also elite opinion. Elite opinion may shift on this, and if it does then there will be policy changes, though perhaps not profound ones.
And how you plan to achieve that? Short of overthrowing US government, I don't see how it is possible to not have Manning, who violated a ton of US laws and already pled guilty for some of those violations, not going to jail. The law is not American Idol, so ending a lot of SMSes to some paid number is not going to work. Neither liking some page on Facebook would. Any other ideas?
The average person in the world would probably be well served by a system providing a basic income, with the opportunity to reproduce at a replacement rate and enjoy stability and security. We've got enough "wealth and technology" to institute such a system, I believe. Others may disagree that we're there yet.

Those of us that are self-motivated to learn and create could still drive "progress" forward and perhaps be afforded more freedom in pursuing those goals, rather than being stifled by the artificial retardation instituted by the control freaks currently in charge. I don't really know what we'd do with them though, maybe designate an island where they can act out their primitive ape instincts and vie for control of each other.
http://www.cookingissues.com/2012/07/04/how-to-become-a-seaf...
What's politically expedient is taking advantage of embarrassments to an opposing party's administration. I disagree with you that this is action since it achieves nothing and wouldn't even achieve anything if it passed. It's the legislative equivalent of a photo op.
How would you say the truth? What you would want to have US government say?
Reminds me of the film Equilibrium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film)
very imposing building!
> But there's another aspect: politically and culturally the US is two nations under one roof. That division seems to grow wider and more bitter with each passing day. Nothing seems sacred in these scorched earth partisan battles to the point where the belief has set in that the ends justify the means.

The partisanship though is largely manufactured. The financial sector and a few others have bought off both parties. The Occupy Wall St and Tea Party groups have more in common than they do with the established parties. The people are remarkably united as to the huge issues but we are distracted by issues like SSM and abortion so the financial sector can take it all.
But he makes some good points, especially about the heavy use of the word "volunteer" and also "give", all which imply Yahoo! isn't freely giving access to the NSA. Yahoo! never said that they were disallowing NSA lawful requests for bulk data, which is the topic of concern.

(Of course Yahoo! isn't volunteering information, that is not concern at all, if the NSA demands then its not volunteering information)

The issue is that all the PR from Facebook, Google and Yahoo! are using very specific non-broad language to say they are not doing a very certain thing, a thing that is not the concern. The concern is about lawful access to all servers and not one piece of PR said this was not happening.

(In the current definition everything the NSA is doing would be considered lawful as the Government post 9/11 is able to use its various provisions to allow for a whole manner of things that we might disagree with, but we are not writing the law, they are.)
Bradley Manning == Smedley Butler
It took thousands of years of human civilisation before we got relatively benign governments. Power structures are not inherently benign; they must constantly be pressured to prevent malignant people using them to leverage their actions.

A non-authoritarian government is an historical anomaly. It's a ball balanced on top of a hill, pushed there by the deaths of millions, and kept there by the vigilance of those who care.

Please start caring.
"...The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 15 m) and contains several racks of equipment, including a Narus STA 6400, a device designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds.

Author James Bamford raises the suspicion question of an Israeli backdoor to the Israeli Narus in The Shadow Factory 2008.
Eat any food every day and it will get old. I live in Texas and we eat Mexican/Tex-Mex so often it gets old also, and its fucking delicious.

This article is interesting as far as showing the history of why it was reviled in early times, but I think the same could be said of anything else...
Thanks for the link correction.

The Federal Aviation Administration's "PRISM" is obviously not the one discussed now in public, and not the one ending in the reports to the president. I invite everybody once again to read the Post and Guardian, they obviously have so much material and try to post only as much as to make the public aware of the legal aspects of the system: the blanket special court orders, allowing companies not to do anything, not even track what is being requested, the orders valid for months and practically automatically renewed. It is "legal."
I know it's only movies and TV but these were still interesting to watch on all things data retention and surveillance state and are related to the topic:

The Listening - 2006 (specifically on Echelon)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427461/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlVK906Xzr8

The Conversation (1974)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrhRsZ56b4g

The Lives of Others (2006)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others

Spying on the Home Front (PBS, 2007)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/

The Enemy Within (PBS, 2006)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/

The Wire, Season 1 (HBO, 2002)
Brazil (1985)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
I wonder if that would be possible today with people being so connected. You can't disappear Americans without people noticing.
What is your point about the Tea Party groups and 501(c)4? In my opinion, that is just another loophole that needs to be closed, same as religious organization tax exemption.
He said it, or at least the original thought (or variation of the words) was his, according to the sources on Wikiquote http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Quotes
I wouldn't rule it out. According to the reports from early this year, China appears to be very interested in finding sources and dissidents, which is why US journalists have been hacked.
Great article from HuffingtonPost about why this is a false choice. Please read it. It might change your mind if you're thinking the trade-off may be worth it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-van-buren/a-childs-guide...
You make the mistake of believing there is any actual threat behind the voiced justifications for their actions.

How would I say the truth?

The world is a beautiful and amazing place full of divinely creative and wonderful humans. We all need to work together toward a singular goal: evolving our civilization and exploring the truths of existence and the universe. We should see that we are a singular species on this planet that has evolved to a level of intelligence that allows us to explore the wider universe around us and gaining understanding and ultimately wisdom of this universe, existence and ourselves should be our cohesive, singular goal.
> Nationalism is one of these archaic concepts that should have no place in modern society.

Why, exactly? Without nationalism how can there be any tradition of local governance? And without that how can local culture survive? Or is your point hat local culture shouldn't survive and that the Hopi child should be governed by the same cultural norms as the Swedish?
Anytime an article starts with 'analyzing' like this, it seems to, more often than not, mean that what follows will be a complete guess based on preconceived notions the author has about the subject in question. The author inevitably seems to just read into it however he wants to reinforce whatever his beliefs already are.
Unfortunately you're asking the wrong guy, because I wouldn't.

I'd instead turn my formidable wealth towards "grow me a new liver tech" while waiting it out on dialysis. Shitty for me maybe, but I'm a big believer in egalite, as the French put it. I could then probably turn around and roll-out the new liver tech at an affordable cost for everyone and recoup my R&D, if I had survived long enough.
> The Occupy Wall St and Tea Party groups have more in common than they do with the established parties.

That maybe true objectively, but either camp would swear up and down and fight tooth and nail against any such comparisons. And propaganda is a science of perceptions. If people on either side believe they are on two different sides and the other side is evil then mission is accomplished.

Chomsky I believe made this point and used an example of how sports are a proxy or an instance of such mentality. The sports fans of opposing teams hate each other with passion but it turns out they have more in common between themselves than they have in common with the players they are rooting for. Players probably all like to gather in expensive country clubs and talk about yachts and sports cars they are planning on buying.
> There have been several PGP-like products with decent UIs and good mail integration, none has enjoyed mass-market success.

iMessage comes to mind. It is the most popular realtime messaging system in the world behind SMS, and is end-to-end encrypted with per-device keys.

Of course, it's centralized, as is the key management, so Apple can subvert it at the behest of the government. Crypto isn't always 100% of the answer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:SER_marcus_de...
Do you really know cloud computing? Watch this first
But doesn't that essentially reduce culture to a disease as well? I mean traditional indigenous peoples do things to their children in the process of making them adults that we would find to be heinous crimes. For example the Hopi ritually beat 7-9 year olds before revealing that everything they have been taught about religion is a well-cared for lie (something which is critical, adult Hopis say, in understanding Hopi religion). The Sambia require adolescent boys to fellate their tribal elders (you are what you eat so consuming manliness makes you a man). So forth.

If you assert that nationality doesn't matter, then we should be doing everything we can to impose our culture on everyone else just because we think we know best. We need not understand the value that these practices provide for these populations. We can look to our culture to define human rights and everyone else must comply.

Humanism is nothing but concealed nationalism.
How you would learn from mistakes made by somebody deep inside Army operations and help prevent them in the future? I can see where investigation is needed to aid the Army to do better, but publishing this has nothing to do with preventing such mistakes in the future, since the public has no control and no input on Army operations in any case.
New PRISM slide promotes directly collecting data from servers
It's surreal to watch all of this old stuff get drudged up here and elsewhere.

I almost wish I watched mainstream news to see how much of this depth is covered or if it's just PRISM and not anything about how bullshit FISA warrants are or how crazy insane National Security Letters are (and how many hundreds of thousands of them are issued)... OR that they regularly wiretap the internet.

Between:

- this (which we've known about)

- the new leaked slide that indicates they do massively, widely wiretap fiber

- PRISM (which I suspect were simply the dates that the companies brought up infrastructure to be able to quickly and easily comply with FISA warrants. Which means "direct access" is true, but it also means that "we were forced to make it easy to give the government what they want as soon as they need it")

They basically have real time access to HTTP data (and HTTPS if a CA is compromised or controlled by them [is it really even that crazy of a theory at this stage]). They also can get organized, categorized access to my data with a FISA warrant (please, read up, they are as rubber-stamp as they're referenced in these articles).

Sigh.
Obama on PRISM [video]
Certainly not, but as a practical matter apathy in politics amounts to passive consent.
One of the things that's probably in PRISM is a list of people who are currently suspected of being Chinese agents. That's very important information if you're China.

China's also known for doing indirect attacks, where they try to compromise one system in order to get clues on how to compromise another. Having access to PRISM, depending on how it's implemented, would potentially open up access to all sorts of information collected by American tech companies. Heck, if they had access to social-graph data, they could determine who is friends with a lot of employees of the targeted company, and that would be a likely person to try to mine for trade secrets.
If your intelligence and evidence is so piss poor that you don't know something is a wedding, then you have no right to drop bombs on it.

"I am a macho cowboy who shoots first and questions later." is not an acceptable excuse.
Hey guys, there are these terrorists that live over there, it's somewhere in the middle east, but it's not really important where. They hate us, for some reason. Probably religious reasons. You know, the extremists, not to say that religion is bad or anything, just people who take it way too far. Well anyway, they trained up people, hijacked some planes, and flew them into 2 US buildings killing thousands on September 11, 2001.

These guys are bad guys. Clearly. They're our enemies. They attacked us once, already, and it's pretty safe to assume they want to attack us more. They want to kill you and me. They hate us. They're here, right now, and are planning the next attack. Maybe at your local mall, on that day you head there to check out some new arrivals and grab some grub at the food court. Have you thought about that? Your mall could totally be bombed by one of these guys at any time. Or the train you take to work. Or the bus that's pulling up next to you while you walk through the streets. BOOM. Any time. Anywhere. You're seriously screwed. You're in so much danger.

But we want to catch these guys before they blow you up. To do that, though, we need to see all information, all the time. These guys communicate over Facebook, they search how to blow up your mall on Google, they use e-mail just like you. They also call each other on your phone network. We need to nail these fuckers. So we're going to just listen to everything. Just in case. It's not you, it's them. We need to catch them.

--

When did we stop classifying scaring citizens into forfeiting constitutional rights as terrorism? Our government scares me significantly more than anyone I've ever seen at an airport, even the crazy ones. It scares me more than the thought of traveling to the middle east and wearing an "IM AN AMERICAN" t-shirt. And you want to call THEM the terrorists?

I'd be more afraid of being blown up by a drone strike while in the middle east than being shot by some radical islamic extremist who's been taught to hate us.

The forfeit of constitutional rights is unjustifiable.
Well good for you, but this doesn't address my point. My point is that your decision would make you a saint. Making the other decision would make you a non-saint rather than an asshole.

Incidentally, you really need to let go of the kidney/dialysis thing. There is no equivalent of dialysis for liver disease. If your liver stops working they cannot hook you up to a machine, you either get a liver transplant in a day or two or you die.
The fourth amendment, and Map v. Ohio; upholding civic duties are the end of the deal that civilians are to be responsible for, ceding tyrannous behavior that is disallowed by legislation is the government's. Obviously barring the fact that the Constitution seems to just be a long-standing joke to the government, or so it seems as of late. Also, to be clear I'm not defending the point of whom you responded, I'm just outlining the support for it.
From the declaration of independence:

> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

All men. Rights endowed by their creator - not the government. The way I read that, regardless of government or location of their birth, the basic rights enumerated in the constitution are the birthright of every single human.

My favorite way to battle the stupid bullshit neocon xenophobia is to leverage their own anti-state agenda (which, to be fair, I generally agree with) against them, by pointing out that the false dichotomy of us/them is based upon them labeling someone as "American"/"foreign", which is in turn based upon whether or not they are born within or without an imaginary line drawn by the state.

PS: inb4 "but slaves are people too"
I can understand such of a distinction. I think people who are truly secure about appreciation of their own nation and culture will expect others of other cultures and nations to be the same. People hate others because they hate themselves.

I am reminded of German nationalist (pre- and during WWI) Guido von List who said, essentially that German heritage was immensely valuable and all Germans should all appreciate it, but the same applied to other heritage of other countries and groups as well.
Sounds like we'd all need a broader term than prosecution in addition to clearly defining an actual threat. All documented by the same personalities who are often tasked with finding holes in such statutes.
> Chomsky I believe made this point and used an example of how sports are a proxy or an instance of such mentality.

Yep. But Chomsky's points go further, in that this is a way of ensuring that any arguments over policy are remarkably narrow. This also makes the cultural variations remarkably narrow. We really have two nations, rural and urban, but this division strikes perhaps deeper within the Republican Party itself than it does so between higher levels of the two parties.
Please contribute reliable sources of government surveillance to this hackpad
It has been replaced entirely

[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/inside-f...
Nowhere. I'm just throwing out my own opinion, same as you are. I don't regard this as a zero-sum conversation in which only one of us can be right, but at the same I am also a bit skeptical about the emotional appeal of your argument (from solidarity) because that sentiment is rarely consistent enough to be relied upon.
Ask HN: Are losing article flagging abilities permanent?
Just giving a fair warning to anyone that would want to flag all the repetitive stories of the past couple of days. If you do so more than a few times, you're likely to lose your ability to flag stories entirely. I just found that out the hard way myself. Does not matter if you're also up-voting unrelated stories at the same time, it will still take away your ability. I don't know if it's permanent or not, but hopefully it isn't.

Flag with caution everyone :)
Imagine someone saying this on the news! At some important press conference... People would be very, very confused.
Yes. I lost mine a long, long time ago.
I see how it makes sense for the Army to say exactly that. I wonder why nobody thought about it before. If only the US Army would think about how wonderful people are, there would be no need for anyone to defend oneself anymore. Really, somebody should tell them.
The purpose of all bureaucracies eventually becomes the furtherance of the bureaucracy itself. It's like a rule of nature: regardless of their stated purposes, the actual purpose of an organization eventually becomes the growth and survival of the organization. Organizations that do not follow this rule do not survive.

The incentives of private companies tend to be fairly transparent, and they can be replaced (not necessarily easily) when no longer aligned with the welfare of the public. The incentives of the government are not nearly so transparent, and there is no escaping them. That makes many people quite wary of the government.

(That said, yes, more transparency would make me much more inclined to trust them.)
Three theories why it's taking so long:

1) They are being responsible and trying to redact stuff that could get people killed or seriously damage US interests

2) They don't have a smoking gun, and are afraid to release the rest, since it's much ado about nothing.

3) Variation of #2, except Greenwald is trying to forge some slides, editing the content to back up his original story. Just a few words changed in a PPT could make all the difference.

#1 Doesn't wash with me, because I don't think Greenwald cares about protecting US interests. He may care about being arrested by the US government, or having to live in a foreign embassy if he releases something that would enrage the spooks.

#2 Seems plausible. Let's say the full PRISM slide set is just as vague as the 5 slides shown so far and doesn't actually talk about technical implementation at the premises on participants. Then the whole affair becomes somewhat embarrassing given the bombastic overreaction. Leading to fears that they would be temped to hack the PRISM slides.

Lets hope #3 is barred because WashingtonPost has a separate copy.
This is also what I sort of assume. All of these tech companies like facebook, and google, probably got so many requests for info from the feds that at a certain point, it must have somehow made sense to switch it up and just give them an automated web form somewhere. (direct access to servers..) The telcos have probably had these since way back.. Eventually, there would be quite a few of these web forms, so some 'top' coders put together a system for the feds to query all of the forms at once with one request. Paint on a GUI and call it PRISM. It was nice to hear that Yahoo! still sorts out their fed requests by hand.
Where did the mistake happen along the chain of intel and of command

Let's start here:

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/200601011_fbi_un...
Right, but they are obviously still maintaining their unsolicited proposal effort. The "Guidance for the Preparation and Submission of Unsolicited Proposals" linked to on the page was updated in April 2013.

http://www.nsa.gov/business/_files/unsolicited_proposals_gui...