Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Woods on Monday April 28 2014, @07:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the john-nash-would-not-be-proud dept.

If you thought you were protecting your country, you may justifiably feel betrayed.

For the past 10 months, a major international scandal has engulfed some of the world's largest employers of mathematicians. These organizations stand accused of law-breaking on an industrial scale and are now the object of widespread outrage. How has the mathematics community responded? Largely by ignoring it.

Those employers-the U.S. National Security Agency and the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters-have been systematically monitoring as much of our lives as they can, including our emails, texts, phone and Skype calls, web browsing, bank transactions, and location data. They have tapped Internet trunk cables, bugged charities and political leaders, conducted economic espionage, hacked cloud servers, and disrupted lawful activist groups, all under the banner of national security. The goal, to quote former NSA director Keith Alexander, is to "collect all the signals, all the time."

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by dmc on Tuesday April 29 2014, @12:01AM

    by dmc (188) on Tuesday April 29 2014, @12:01AM (#37448)

    Not sure I've seen anything ANYWHERE about "massive government corruption."

    Well... it is sort of all in the realm paranoia and nuance. I.e. one can look at the history of slavery and then imagine it is hard to call current government "corruption" "massive" in the balance of history. Does one call the institution of slavery "corruption" because the supreme court justices interpreting parts of the constitution today as being valid for people regardless of skin-color?

    I truly hope that the arc of history bends toward justice, and future SCOTUS rulings interpret the constitution as meaning that recent instances of torture were instances of "massive government corruption" due to the nature of how, even those who aren't tortured, suffer damages from the lack of enforcement of anti-torture inalienable human rights laws.

    In general the lawlessness of the U.S. government in recent times seems to have really snowballed from the point at which the government first lied about torture for years, then continued to cover it up instead of transparently allowing the victims (all of us) to have due process of law, right to representation, right to confront our accusers, etc, etc. Have you heard about the Guantanomo Bay detention facility that for years has been colloquially reported on as a "legal black hole". When there are such naked legal singularities floating around in our political space, the very fabric of democracy suffers. Even if I have not personally been persecuted, the fact that the government persecutes others boxes me in. It removes various avenues of free choices that I might otherwise have made were I not in fear that the government might one day take it's justification for holding itself to be above and unnaccountable to the law to cover some aspect of my rights that, again, I hope some future SCOTUS rules that I had every right to take free of government persecution.

    I know I know, you aren't even reading this far, but if you want less lofty talk, and more specific examples- (After watching HBO's documentary "ghosts of abu ghraib", and Bill Moyer's excellent PBS documentary from the 80's titled "the secret government, the constitution in crisis)-

    check out this Snowden leaked document about the PRISM project.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jp g [wikipedia.org]

    Personally I would call hack attacks that were 100% illegal under U.S. code against Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Youtube, Skype, AOL, and Apple spanning many years to be "massive government corruption". These programs violated the privacy of the users of those services, and have now also damaged those companies reputations (though rightfully so as even if there was no complicity, there was by definition a great deal of network-security incompetance).

    Or how about this story-

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp /2013/06/11/james-clapper-nsa-and-the-l-word/ [washingtonpost.com]

    I consider the fact that the NSA not only broke the law, but lied about it under oath, and remains that far above the law to be "massive government corruption".

    Now yes, I also happen to believe that these spying programs were also used for truly vast economic espionage. I also believe Google and most search engines do the same thing. I.e. I strongly suspect that many of these services have, through criminal intent, or technical incompetence, allowed the intellectual property of countless of their users to be absconded. I know you'll think I'm paranoid, but I do believe that Google and Microsoft are capable, and very likely to have stolen good ideas from their users that thought that their search terms or email contents could not be harvested in that way. I'm sure it's also a gray line where some of those ideas were so brilliant, one can imagine a borderline ethical defense that the NSA snoops felt they needed to abscond the ideas in the name of national security. But at the same time I'm sure the practice spilled out to outright indefensible massive government corruption. I believe constitutionally there is some concept about how if your government needs your cow bad enough, they can just take it from you, but they have to give you proper compensation. I strongly suspect that if we had the kind of system of justice idealized by our constitution, and everyone could truly know the secret ways they had been spied on, and how that information had been used, that the government would be massively liable for it's corruption. But we don't live in such a world. It's a dog eat dog world where the titans of silicon valley treated the engineers as serfs that they could own. These titans are not nice people. It's a brutal world out there. There are lots of organized criminal groups exploiting all the angles, all the time. Go back to Snowden's June 6th 2013 interview that started it all. Ask yourself if- absent massive government corruption- the history since then makes sense. Or ask yourself if the history since then makes more sense, in the presence of massive government corruption. Ask yourself if artistic history of the nation makes sense absent massive government corruption. Or if the popular movies we see make more sense in the presence of massive government corruption.

    Maybe I'm paranoid. Maybe time will tell. Or maybe, there is a different kind of explanation for the cultural context that led to, for instance, this piece of web-art that I made earlier this year-

    http://cloudsession.com/dmc/stuff/gallery/fb2k14fi jaw/ [cloudsession.com]

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3