Where are the users that come in to say "I disagree with this, but consider it's validity because.."
I would love to hear a thoughtful argument for how hiding the source of an investigation, including evidence used, is just under the letter of the law. Followed up with how 'overreaches' are bound to happen but are acceptable as long as results are shown(but evidence is not).
Well, I suppose the defence would be some argument that the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine doesn't apply, because there's nothing illegal about the NSA sharing information with other agencies, and there's no obligation to share every piece of evidence in an investigation. The prosecution is required to share all exculpatory evidence with the defence, but this wouldn't be exculpatory. There is an obligation to provide probable cause in order to justify each search, seizure, warrant, arrest, etc. but this obligation was met - that would be the purpose of the parallel construction. Cases were tried based on probable cause that was shared, and so that probable cause must have been sufficient. The investigators simply did not disclose ALL the probable cause they had, (because some of it was secret).
There will be some contention over whether investigators lied or simply didn't share all evidence. This will probably lead to some slippery wordplay. For example, in the case of a "random" traffic stop that was actually targeting an individual, the word "random" could be stretched to mean "without reason" - meaning that by saying it was a "random" traffic stop, investigators were really just not giving a reason for the stop. Since no reason is required for a random traffic stop (under this new definition), that's all fine.
Perhaps the real problem here isn't that the NSA was sharing information, but that it is easy to find probable cause when properly motivated.
Good try, but these won't wash. It's hard to argue against it because the facts seem quite clear and straightforward.
1. If the origin of the investigation is revealed to be illegal, the entire investigation is thrown into question
and the resulting evidence could be suppressed.
2. Random traffic stops are illegal. There must be a reason for every stop.
They are not supposed to know, the government is attempting to cover up it's crimes again[1] until it can work out immunity and monetary compensation for the actors involved[2].
Edit: To the user below, this is various arms of the government passing around information amongst it's branches to avoid accountability and exposure as much as possible. Rather monolithic.
Government is not monolithic in the sense that (at least in the US) its sheer size and complexity prevents all the actors involved from correlating their actions and ideologies into a single conspiratorial entity like swallows in flight. Not even in regards to tyranny and violence.
Large and complex systems can coordinate in a decentralised way to form a monolithic entity. Local interactions can lead to global convergence. Swallows in flight is a good example - each swallow only pays attention to the others nearby, yet the whole flock is coordinated. I'm not saying that is how it is in the US government. However, the closer the agencies work together, the more monolithic the government is likely to be (otherwise they wouldn't be able to cooperate).
It's not so much that I'm popular as that I've had this conversation numerous times before, and I sometimes get lazy about laying out my arguments over again, like now. In brief, I direct you to the second graph at this link as an explanation of why I link Reagan's name with prohibition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...
I didn't mention Nixon because for all his rhetoric his policies were pretty pragmatic, and he considered drug abuse at least partly a public health issue (as evidenced by his decisions). Reagan ran as a straight-up moralist and while I agree he'd probably be appalled at the militarization of police and abuses of power like this 'parallel construction' the DEA has been engaging in, this doesn't seem to have filtered through to his supporters. On the one hand he's portrayed as a selfless individual of almost god-like sagacity (I know this because I have ended up on the mailing lists of various conservative organizations, and this time of year I am the perplexed recipient of various Reagan calendars and suchlike), on the other he's almost invariably invoked in political debates in order to terminate discussion rather than broaden it.
Then why do so many people connected to government commit crimes with impunity while those with little to no connection to government get reamed by the legal system?
I think you're making a number of false or at least weakly proven assumptions here.
- That a majority of people connected with government commit crimes (unless your belief is that government is by definition a criminal enterprise, I don't think this assertion makes sense.)
- That a majority of criminals with government connections never face a penalty (the number of perp walks I've seen for mayors, senators, congressmen, etc would seem to suggest that while, yes, money and politics do go a long way in terms of abrogating justice, that sort of phenomenon isn't exclusive to politics nor is it universal.)
- That some malice of forethought exists within the legal system in regards to disproportionately punishing civilians, presumably because the judiciary is also part of the same conspiracy of corruption. I believe the unjustness of the court system has more to do with economics and race than it does whether someone is connected to politics, although certainly the politics of appearing tough on crime have an effect.
The argument that the government be 'monolithic' requires it to be both efficient and non-adversarial, neither is true. It also requires almost everyone to be amoral sociopaths, perfectly willing to go along with even the darkest and most depraved violations of civil liberties. To me, it's a step below invoking the Illuminati, it's wanting order in a system which is fundamentally chaotic for the sake of some grand narrative of good versus evil.
- The argument that the government be 'monolithic' requires it to be both efficient and non-adversarial, neither is true.
I don't think this is what everyone is worried about. It's not that the entire US government is conspiring against us. It's more that each agency has evolved ideologies and practises that, when taken as a whole, form an oppressive machine. No-one designed that machine, and no-one group controls it. It simply is a function of the increased cooperation of individual agencies who each have their own set of norms and values that fail to align with the true interests of the populous. The US government is becoming more monolithic because of a systemic problem - that is, increased incentives for agencies to cooperate and share information.
- It also requires almost everyone to be amoral sociopaths, perfectly willing to go along with even the darkest and most depraved violations of civil liberties.
This argument assumes that the people who work in the US government have the same social norms and values as the rest of the population. It seems more likely to me that each agency forms its own little closed society, that has drifted away from mainstream society due to the unique freedoms and pressures that agency experiences. The "Blue Code of Silence" is an example of this within the police. Few people are amoral sociopaths, but the vast majority of people will accept the values and norms of their peers without question.
Prisons are privatized, helped managed by the likes of SAIC[1]. FBI databases get shared amongst all the alphabet boys, including local law enforcement and private entities[2].
SAIC fills the monitoring center fused with fusion center niche with their "Domain Awareness Center[3]" being built in Oakland California. DEA uses the NSA who pulls data from all the various private/government/corporate/infiltrated databases to forge investigation paths, aka "intel laundering[4]".
FBI assists in private digital forensics centers[5] run by Snowden's Booz Allen Hamilton which help all levels of law enforcement in things like intellectual and copyright prosecutions[6].
Endgame Systems uses illegal exploits and data harvested from botnets against whoever for a cool million or so at the whim of the NSA/others[7] while hackers come under further prosecution and filtering for their esoteric deeds[8].
All the while SAIC[9] managed drones continue to spread across the US[10] and elsewhere.
Monolithic by choice, the whole lot.
I would honestly appreciate those affiliated with ATT, Comcast, Blue Coat, Endgame, Booz, Hunton & Williams and others to halt their profiteering endeavors. This of course should apply to all functionaries of the various arms of the world's governments that are complying in exchange for their salary as well.
The reason the "DAC" is being built in Oakland is because Diane Feinstein is the biggest war monger out there. How can she even run on a Democrat ticket surprises me.
"The remotely operated MQ-9 Reapers have already been flying over a large swath of northern New York since October 2011. The Federal Aviation Administration has recently expanded that air space further south to include some of Central New York's most densely populated regions."
Is there anyone from this area around? Thanks to Parastoo[1] and Kingcope[2] I have gained some interest in how drones communicate(C/Ku Band) and who they operate with (SAIC[3]).
For those interested in partially decoding drone communications, particularly around where they are known to be operated in the US, it may be worthwhile to look into a setup like this[4]. It is a cheap $20usd-ish rtl-sdr tuner paired with a still cheaper 'Avenger' PLL LNB, allowing the operator to tune the cheap usb dongle into Ku band, which drones use out non-line of sight communications.
[4] 'Crossband QSO, receiving EB5EA at 10GHz and transmitting EA5KGD on 432MHz. With SDR RTL2832U E4000 ("ezcap" stick) and PLL LNB ("Avenger" PLL321S-2), Digital KU Band Single LNBF' http://youtu.be/Sdmo-FtHtGU
All parties involved with be granted immunity, possibly retroactive, even though no wrong doing was found[2].
More payments to data providers will be given[3], not considered bribes. This is after issuing them said (retro)active immunity from attempts at legal recourse.
I don't think it's an issue of faith. The US Government keeps demonstrating, in an overwhelming fashion, that it can't keep itself in check. Hardly a day is going by at this point where some new scandal or abuse isn't crawling out of DC on just privacy alone.
Short, recent list: TSA abuses; IRS abuses; Benghazi; Iraq & Afghanistan; droning; right to assassinate; NDAA; SOPA; PIPA; fiscal discipline (complete lack thereof); constant military intervention across the middle east, helping to put theocrats in power; supplying Al Qaeda with money and arms; hyper scale NSA abuses spanning all electronic forms of communication; indefinite detention; enhanced interrogation; fast & furious; arresting people for freedom of speech issues (eg recent federal terrorism cases against several young people for what they said online); abuse of the espionage act, using it to attack leaks and whistleblowing. And on, and on and on it goes.
And how can it not be a sham? Since the DEA is part of the DOJ, we're going to have the DOJ investigating itself. Does anyone really think that the cooperation between the DEA and the NSA wasn't approved at the very highest levels, by Holder and probably Obama? Wouldn't it make more sense to have the DOJ investigated by a bipartisan Congressional committee, or to appoint a special prosecutor who isn't being employed by the very people he'd be investigating?
I would wager JBIG2 is the problem when Xerox couldn't implement it properly.
"Normal" is an overly aggressive compression setting? Is that an overly aggressive setting for the end-user or for Xerox to be implementing in their hardware marketed to law firms?
Well, it doesn't go all the way, at least in this implementation (contrary to Xerox's statement, we've been told compression is not standardized), to actually recognize the symbols it finds. If it did, it would presumably make many fewer of these errors, maybe almost none since when it's uncertain it could just go with the original.
Well sure, but then why don't we just call it "lossy GZIP"? OCR is a pretty specific subset, and produces characters - this does not produce computer-readable characters, therefore not OCR.
What are you on about? What does it produce if not computer-readable characters? Computer illegible characters? Are you saying it cannot read from the dictionary it creates? Or from the characters it is later optically recognizing off that dictionary?
Again from the JBIG2 wiki[1]:
"Textual regions are compressed as follows: the foreground pixels in the regions are grouped into symbols. A dictionary of symbols is then created and encoded.."
It seems not only is JBIG2 being deployed as OCR by Xerox for whatever reason, its implementation in this case is an absolute failure.
edit: by the definition you seem to be going on, any facial recognition is also OCR, since you could consider a face a 'glyph' (edit: 'symbol'). The only 'text' thing here that I can see is that it is intended to be used on text, which lends some optimizations, nothing that it's actually text-based in any way.
If you make a font out of faces and use them as repeated glyphs then yes it's OCR. If you're not using identical symbols over and over than I don't think you have a sane definition of 'glyph'.
Say that the scanner internally splits the scan into regions of 10x10 pixels that it saves in memory. If another region differs on less than (say) 10% of the pixels it is assumed that the two zones are identical and the first one is used in the second place too. The regions have no semantic meaning.
The only thing that's missing is a mapping from 'symbol #28' into 'ascii #63'. Internally it's storing instances of symbols plus font data for those symbols.
Also, something to think about: an EBCDIC document accidentally printed as ASCII/8859-1 would have equally zero semantic meaning when fed into an OCR program. But I don't think anyone would argue it wasn't OCR.
A font doesn't need to be anything more than a series of bitmaps. And then each character location on the image, ignoring errors, references one of these bitmaps. That's how documents with embedded bitmap fonts generally work.
That mapping isn't a very big thing. Sometimes text-based PDFs don't even have it, and you don't notice unless you try to copy out and get the wrong letters.
"Textual regions are compressed as follows: the foreground pixels in the regions are grouped into symbols. A dictionary of symbols is then created and encoded, typically also using context-dependent arithmetic coding, and the regions are encoded by describing which symbols appear where."
Then from the OCR wiki[2].
"Matrix matching involves comparing an image to a stored glyph on a pixel-by-pixel basis; it is also known as "pattern matching" or "pattern recognition"."
Furrow your brow and smash the down-vote arrow all you wish. It won't stop JBIG2 from doing much of what people consider OCR as doing today. Recognizing characters, just JBIG2 adds in making it's own dictionary which opened the path to this topic today.
Most users will not have ready access to the article contents therefore will be commenting mostly on the title itself. This sways the discussion towards the shallow end.
Even if most users had subscriptions, it shouldn't be linked to. The other day I was thinking the same thing about The Sun. It got a high placement on Google's search results, yet had no content to display, I hope search engines drop it from their results as it's currently useless.
Someone in a previous thread about ex-NSA Russell Tice asked "Say what you like about Snowden, but at least some of his claims have been backed up by evidence. What have these guys got? Why not name names?"
I responded with:
A stay in a penitentiary helped managed by SAIC[1].
Digitally stalked due to dissent by for-profit "Domain Awareness Centers" run by SAIC[2].
Persistent targeting, one way or another, by drones managed by SAIC[3].
Now after this, I can add "Hunting and exposing swaths of users as to pursue/prosecute/rendition/drone a few via disseminating exploits used against those that dare encrypt their traffic[4]".
I must yet again point to a company like Endgame Systems[1] as being a likely contractor for this service rendered for the FBI.
Some of Endgame's products used by the likes of the NSA:
"There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year. The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million."
Exploiting an unknowable amount of users of a service as to hunt them. Using illegally harvested data from botnets, while others get hunted and prosecuted for coding them.
This tiered society where the legally immune can profit off acts that get others jailed. The market manipulation that comes with bribing companies for data access, the government giving less regulatory oversight to companies it has secret 'deals' with.
For the sake of society, economy, basic morality. It must end.
"Exploiting an unknowable amount of users of a service as to hunt them. Using illegally harvested data from botnets, while others get hunted and prosecuted for coding them.
This tiered society where the legally immune can profit off acts that get others jailed."
Not that I disagree with this sentiment, but how is this different from the fact the government is "legally immune" from using/possessing weapons and firearms that the average person can't possess or use?
It's more like the government hiring non-government forces that can then legally possess arms that other "non-affiliated" people (i.e. civilians) can't, and being given legal immunity for killing random people, some of which might turn out to be criminals. I.e. Batman, with a bit less moral compass.
