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This should be science fiction... "You are being watched. The Government has a secret system...a machine that spies on you every hour of every day....designed the machine to catch acts of terror, but it sees everything.".
In this particular case, the program is through the National Security Agency, is called PRISM, and has been collecting wholesale all the data that passes through the servers of several major on-line services, including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
A man named Edward Snowden gave The Guardian and the Washington Post information in the form of PowerPoint training slides that alerted the country to the existence of a program called PRISM, that allows the NSA to collect and store the wholesale set of communications passing through various Internet companies, including Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. While he is currently out of the country, asylum requests may take quite some time for him to receive.
And, as always, those who advocate for more spying on people claim that the programs do good. Even if their claims that surveillance programs work are contradicted by published documents. Even in the non-illegal realms, with sufficient data stores, it only takes metadata to find any one particular individual who is a person of interest.
In this particular presidential climate, it comes as no surprise that previous leakers of classified data in the vital public interest are fairly certain they would be heavily prosecuted if they did what they did today, rather than before. And those in prison will tell you all about the culture of prisons that want any excuse they can get to treat the prisoners as less than human. But before any prosecution begins, investigations should commence on whether or not the NSA program is legal, whether it staying secret is legal, and whether any of these things should be allowed to stay both secret and legal. And they should release the transcripts of the case involving PFC Manning, so tha twe can see what the government is arguing with regard to the other classified information case.
It's not just the Democrats, though - Republicans in Wisconsin have shut down an investigative journalism program from the universities, making it less likely that the state will turn out people who wil investigate things like governmental shenanigans.
In Wisconsin, this is bad, because...among other things, Governor Scott Walker would like to become the second Governor Ultrasound. Without journalism, people might buy the line that the Republicans are totally not focusing on restricting women's choice.
The worst part? All that money spent spying illegaly on US citizens could be used to shore up the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, that provides food for children. That is, if they aren't lawmakers opposed to lowering the cost of food because it means that more people might buy food. (To their benefit, some lawmakers are going to attempt to live on the food stamp budget to protest the cuts.) Some of those lawmakers will, of course, cry foul when the consequences of their own stupidity hits their district.
(Actually, we could probably cut the salaries of most collegiate sport coaches and funnel that cash into SNAP, too, since those coaches tend to be the highest-paid persons in the state.)
Elsewhere in the world, the Turkish government arrested protesters using Twitter to coordinate anti-government demonstrations. And private company spyware being sold to other governments means the Turkish government can spy on Americans they consider dissidents.
Take a look at this - Iran attempted to make being publicly cross-dressed a punishment. Kurdish men, instead, took it as the beginning of a movement. And thus, you have a lot of pictures of people dressed in traditional, beautiful, costumes that are supposedly for the opposite gender. Awesome. In Sweden, after the train company banned the wearing of shorts as unprofessional, men started wearing skirts instead.
A new coronavirus, cousin to the one that caused SARS, has virologists worldwide concerned.
Domestically, Ms. Smith mistakes a play about consent and sex to be a play about what is sexy to college students, and then talks about how there is no eros anymore, because the hook-up culture allows us to gratify body pleasure without the mind having to get involved. And thus, we're supposed to make sex sexier by not talking about sex so explicitly. Except for the part where talking about sex explicitly is an important part of consent and can, in fact, be very sexy.
People who oppose teenagers having the right tools to have healthy sexuality are often willing to sacrifice their children to authoritarian religion. And their biblical justifications on the matter are probably, at best, cherry-picking the verses they like. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the kids of same sex parents continue to keep turning out fine, no matter how much conservative politicians want you to believe otherwise. (Oh. And it's always more complicated than you think.)
They could, instead, attempt to say that men are just unable to control themselves and their hormones, but saying, as Senator Chambliss does, that hormones are responsible for sexual assaults in the military makes a strong case thet young men shoud't be allowed to fight in the military, because those dangerous hormones get mixed with lethal weapons.
Of course, it might not just be young men. State Department memos reveal that there were several investigations into the security services for diplomats and the Secretary of State engaging in partying, drug usage, and engaging and pimping sex workers.
And all of this creates a culture where a jury will acquit a man who confessed to murder, because his defense was that he was trying to recover money he paid to someone so that she would sleep with him. And apparently, the law in Texas allows for someone to kill someone else to "recover stolen property". That's not necessarily even a fringe case - lots of men are pressuring, threatening, or abusing their partners and/or sabotaging their birth control methods in an attempt to get them pregnant.
That is, when they don't have one major party insisting that the policies of at least 100 years ago are the correct policies to be avocating for today, and wondering why they might not appeal to women and minorities. (The factually untrue statements about the incidence of rape and pregnancy aren't helping.)
Elsewhere in the United States, An actress who initially claimed her husband sent ricin-tainted letters to President Obama and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been arrested on suspicion of being the ricin letter-sender herself.
An Ohio police officer was cleared of wrongdoing after he shot a litter of feral kittens in front of severa children, having assured the children the kittens would be going to heaven.
In Kansas, A Wal-Mart security guard called police on a white [orig. black] man after a customer believed he had kidnapped the three young interracial [orig. white] women with him. Y'know, his daughters.
In Nevada, Governor Sandoval vetoed a wildly popular bill that would have required background checks for everyone wanting to purchase a gun anywhere in the state. Because background check laws don't deter criminals and are an unacceptable burden on private citizens, apparently.
And in Florida, a man shot himself in the leg while bowling when the bowling ball struck the pistol in his pants.
Senator Rubio says he won't support any immigration reform that would allow same-sex partners to claim spousal status for purposes of immigration.
Last out - Guantanamo Bay prison will remain open, as the House of Representatives once again reaffirms their complete and utter petrification of people who the military believes are not a threat to the United States.
In technology, marrying someone you met on-line has the same satisfaction rate as marrying someone in person. Which makes sense - most people marry because they have shared interests and click really well together. That's generally what sustains a marriage, instead of just physical attributes.
Password-cracking is now ridiculously easy, thanks to rainbow tables, optimized cracking agorithms and programs. Which suggests that your last refuge might be in remarkably unique passwords. That are not composed of components involving things that can be found in rainbow tables. And that aren't then limited or compromised by the website you're making the password for. Which suggests that the ony reason we all aren't perpetually hacked is that we're not interesting enough to most hackers.
The Pirate Bay checks their logs and finds a strong suggestion that a copyright troll is responsible for uploading videos they then send extortion letters to the associated IP addreesses of downloaders. Which, if I do recall, violates the DMCA like whoa. Maybe someone should sue them based on TPB logs and see how well they handle the possibility of large amounts of damages.
A poll says we see the good and the evil in 3D printing - we want people to be able to have them, but we don't like the idea of people being able to print guns with them. Which makes sense - we want people to be able to use their tech, but only if it means they're not doing things that could make it easy for them to kill us. 3D printing is going in a few directions, but not aways the ones that people are most interested.
The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that human genes cannot be patented, which is consistent with the rules and laws regarding patents. Just that the patent office has been swamped and not staffed by experts who could have aready ruled such.
Is the continued lack of research into cannabis as a medical substance a case of censorship? Well, with the legalization measures in two states and the continued Schedule I status of cannabis...it could just be people wanting not to have the government raid their labs.
The Nacy no longer requires ALLCAPS for all official communications.
Last out, comedic beats in an interview with the cast of The Big Bang Theory. And a fully-funded Kickstarter that will put a miniature TARDIS into orbit.
And a truck-moose collision that didn't kill anything, but shut down a road and lit up the night sky...because the truck had fireworks.
Oh, an did we mention that Social Security no logner requires trans* people to have gender reassignment surgery to change their gender in the system?
In this particular case, the program is through the National Security Agency, is called PRISM, and has been collecting wholesale all the data that passes through the servers of several major on-line services, including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
A man named Edward Snowden gave The Guardian and the Washington Post information in the form of PowerPoint training slides that alerted the country to the existence of a program called PRISM, that allows the NSA to collect and store the wholesale set of communications passing through various Internet companies, including Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. While he is currently out of the country, asylum requests may take quite some time for him to receive.
And, as always, those who advocate for more spying on people claim that the programs do good. Even if their claims that surveillance programs work are contradicted by published documents. Even in the non-illegal realms, with sufficient data stores, it only takes metadata to find any one particular individual who is a person of interest.
In this particular presidential climate, it comes as no surprise that previous leakers of classified data in the vital public interest are fairly certain they would be heavily prosecuted if they did what they did today, rather than before. And those in prison will tell you all about the culture of prisons that want any excuse they can get to treat the prisoners as less than human. But before any prosecution begins, investigations should commence on whether or not the NSA program is legal, whether it staying secret is legal, and whether any of these things should be allowed to stay both secret and legal. And they should release the transcripts of the case involving PFC Manning, so tha twe can see what the government is arguing with regard to the other classified information case.
It's not just the Democrats, though - Republicans in Wisconsin have shut down an investigative journalism program from the universities, making it less likely that the state will turn out people who wil investigate things like governmental shenanigans.
In Wisconsin, this is bad, because...among other things, Governor Scott Walker would like to become the second Governor Ultrasound. Without journalism, people might buy the line that the Republicans are totally not focusing on restricting women's choice.
The worst part? All that money spent spying illegaly on US citizens could be used to shore up the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, that provides food for children. That is, if they aren't lawmakers opposed to lowering the cost of food because it means that more people might buy food. (To their benefit, some lawmakers are going to attempt to live on the food stamp budget to protest the cuts.) Some of those lawmakers will, of course, cry foul when the consequences of their own stupidity hits their district.
(Actually, we could probably cut the salaries of most collegiate sport coaches and funnel that cash into SNAP, too, since those coaches tend to be the highest-paid persons in the state.)
Elsewhere in the world, the Turkish government arrested protesters using Twitter to coordinate anti-government demonstrations. And private company spyware being sold to other governments means the Turkish government can spy on Americans they consider dissidents.
Take a look at this - Iran attempted to make being publicly cross-dressed a punishment. Kurdish men, instead, took it as the beginning of a movement. And thus, you have a lot of pictures of people dressed in traditional, beautiful, costumes that are supposedly for the opposite gender. Awesome. In Sweden, after the train company banned the wearing of shorts as unprofessional, men started wearing skirts instead.
A new coronavirus, cousin to the one that caused SARS, has virologists worldwide concerned.
Domestically, Ms. Smith mistakes a play about consent and sex to be a play about what is sexy to college students, and then talks about how there is no eros anymore, because the hook-up culture allows us to gratify body pleasure without the mind having to get involved. And thus, we're supposed to make sex sexier by not talking about sex so explicitly. Except for the part where talking about sex explicitly is an important part of consent and can, in fact, be very sexy.
People who oppose teenagers having the right tools to have healthy sexuality are often willing to sacrifice their children to authoritarian religion. And their biblical justifications on the matter are probably, at best, cherry-picking the verses they like. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the kids of same sex parents continue to keep turning out fine, no matter how much conservative politicians want you to believe otherwise. (Oh. And it's always more complicated than you think.)
They could, instead, attempt to say that men are just unable to control themselves and their hormones, but saying, as Senator Chambliss does, that hormones are responsible for sexual assaults in the military makes a strong case thet young men shoud't be allowed to fight in the military, because those dangerous hormones get mixed with lethal weapons.
Of course, it might not just be young men. State Department memos reveal that there were several investigations into the security services for diplomats and the Secretary of State engaging in partying, drug usage, and engaging and pimping sex workers.
And all of this creates a culture where a jury will acquit a man who confessed to murder, because his defense was that he was trying to recover money he paid to someone so that she would sleep with him. And apparently, the law in Texas allows for someone to kill someone else to "recover stolen property". That's not necessarily even a fringe case - lots of men are pressuring, threatening, or abusing their partners and/or sabotaging their birth control methods in an attempt to get them pregnant.
That is, when they don't have one major party insisting that the policies of at least 100 years ago are the correct policies to be avocating for today, and wondering why they might not appeal to women and minorities. (The factually untrue statements about the incidence of rape and pregnancy aren't helping.)
Elsewhere in the United States, An actress who initially claimed her husband sent ricin-tainted letters to President Obama and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been arrested on suspicion of being the ricin letter-sender herself.
An Ohio police officer was cleared of wrongdoing after he shot a litter of feral kittens in front of severa children, having assured the children the kittens would be going to heaven.
In Kansas, A Wal-Mart security guard called police on a white [orig. black] man after a customer believed he had kidnapped the three young interracial [orig. white] women with him. Y'know, his daughters.
In Nevada, Governor Sandoval vetoed a wildly popular bill that would have required background checks for everyone wanting to purchase a gun anywhere in the state. Because background check laws don't deter criminals and are an unacceptable burden on private citizens, apparently.
And in Florida, a man shot himself in the leg while bowling when the bowling ball struck the pistol in his pants.
Senator Rubio says he won't support any immigration reform that would allow same-sex partners to claim spousal status for purposes of immigration.
Last out - Guantanamo Bay prison will remain open, as the House of Representatives once again reaffirms their complete and utter petrification of people who the military believes are not a threat to the United States.
In technology, marrying someone you met on-line has the same satisfaction rate as marrying someone in person. Which makes sense - most people marry because they have shared interests and click really well together. That's generally what sustains a marriage, instead of just physical attributes.
Password-cracking is now ridiculously easy, thanks to rainbow tables, optimized cracking agorithms and programs. Which suggests that your last refuge might be in remarkably unique passwords. That are not composed of components involving things that can be found in rainbow tables. And that aren't then limited or compromised by the website you're making the password for. Which suggests that the ony reason we all aren't perpetually hacked is that we're not interesting enough to most hackers.
The Pirate Bay checks their logs and finds a strong suggestion that a copyright troll is responsible for uploading videos they then send extortion letters to the associated IP addreesses of downloaders. Which, if I do recall, violates the DMCA like whoa. Maybe someone should sue them based on TPB logs and see how well they handle the possibility of large amounts of damages.
A poll says we see the good and the evil in 3D printing - we want people to be able to have them, but we don't like the idea of people being able to print guns with them. Which makes sense - we want people to be able to use their tech, but only if it means they're not doing things that could make it easy for them to kill us. 3D printing is going in a few directions, but not aways the ones that people are most interested.
The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that human genes cannot be patented, which is consistent with the rules and laws regarding patents. Just that the patent office has been swamped and not staffed by experts who could have aready ruled such.
Is the continued lack of research into cannabis as a medical substance a case of censorship? Well, with the legalization measures in two states and the continued Schedule I status of cannabis...it could just be people wanting not to have the government raid their labs.
The Nacy no longer requires ALLCAPS for all official communications.
Last out, comedic beats in an interview with the cast of The Big Bang Theory. And a fully-funded Kickstarter that will put a miniature TARDIS into orbit.
And a truck-moose collision that didn't kill anything, but shut down a road and lit up the night sky...because the truck had fireworks.
Oh, an did we mention that Social Security no logner requires trans* people to have gender reassignment surgery to change their gender in the system?
