The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit integrates with email and other Internet communication providers to implement wiretaps for accounts they have a court order for. They present the company with a court order, and the company forwards the account's data to the FBI (often via FTP, according to a New York Times article at the time). PRISM is simply a data integration project between the NSA and the FBI for ingesting data for accounts under a Section 702 order (for specific accounts belonging to non-citizens outside the US whose communications are of national security interest).
Ok, but nothing in that leaked slide says anything about a court order or disproves much of anything about PRISM. I'm not saying you are wrong, in fact I sincerely hope you are 100% correct, but all that slide says to me is that the "FBI DITU" got the data somehow, and forwarded it to CIA, NSA, and the rest of the FBI. Additionally, lets be honest, a single image of a slide posted on imgur is a lot more "trust me bro" than it is proof.
Snowden and Greenwald interpreted DITU as being a box in these companies' networks with access to everything because they were too stupid to look up what it meant. That slide was the basis of their entire claim. If Snowden's claim isn't "trust me bro," nothing is. Instead, the companies said they didn't do any integration with the NSA (they hadn't, only with the FBI), and they didn't give access to every account's data (they didn't, only with a court order or Section 702 order for a specific account's data).
The NYT got the story right on day one because unlike The Guardian, their editorial standards require asking someone who knows something about what was going on. In this case, they asked workers at the companies. Subsequently, every single mainstream news agency got the reporting correct except for Greenwald, who continued to argue against tech industry workers correcting him on Twitter.
So, I read those links and it seems to me your basis for calling Snowden a "tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout" with "high school dropout reading skills", is that he misunderstood that slide to mean that the US gov had direct access to servers at those companies, when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request. Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
> when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request
Still got it wrong. The 4th Amendment allows the US to wiretap its citizens or people in the US only with a court order like a warrant. We give the government this power so that it can effectively prosecute crimes. People who are noncitizens outside the US have no such protections, but US companies aren't going to allow the government to search all of their data willy-nilly, nor will the courts allow it. Instead, they must give Section 702 orders for each of those foreign accounts with national security interest. The government then gets those accounts' data to search themselves.
> Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
Also incorrect. I'm saying that this program breaks no laws. If you would like to protect the data of non-citizens living outside the US beyond the current protections, you should propose such a law. In the meantime, we should recognize that Snowden's claims about what the government did were completely incongruous with reality.
The reason this matters is that if Snowden's claims were true, it would mean the law doesn't matter. People who believe that would be willing to tear down a democracy in order to clean it up. The law does matter, and the government abides by it. We don't need to give power to charlatans like Trump.
You’re showing a lack of empathy for the instance of yourself that is experiencing all that pain. Simply forgetting it doesn’t make it right to not have empathy for the version of yourself that went through all the pain and suffering.
Yes, I am! Why isn't that fine? Not "right", you say.
Bear in mind that the "version of me" is me, and cognitively is in agreement that this is fine. Instinctively I would very much not think it was fine while undergoing the pain, but I'd also think I was wrong about that at the same time. I don't suppose I'd be all stoic about it like Giles Corey*, but it's the cognitive side of me that has the valid opinion and eventually the executive function.
I guess this might be a matter of subjective disagreement, but I'm personally opposed to all forms of consensual human suffering and death. I'd be fine with wrestling being banned, a law mandating contact sports amend rules to become non-contact, ban MAID (voluntary/consensual human euthanasia), ban anything that involves violence or harm done to any human being, including consenting adults consenting to violent acts performed on them. But that's just my opinion, and others are free to disagree with me on that. Although I will add that if I had legislative power I would not have an issue enacting such bans into law, even if people may say it taking away "rights"; to which I'd respond that certain rights like free speech are essential to a functioning free society, but certain other rights have no moral basis for being a right. The U.S. Congress (and various U.S. states) over the years progressively banned dueling. And notably, dueling was a consensual activity between two consenting adults, one that sadly took the life of Alexander Hamilton, amongst many others.
This didn't explain what's wrong with the suffering. Death, sure, you're throwing your life away, it's a waste, so some authoritarian could decide on your behalf that you're not allowed to, and that would be reasonable, if heavy-handed. But in the above scenario I don't die, my purpose is maintained, the world benefits, I benefit, but a meaningless thing called "pain" is part of the plan. (I changed the name away from "suffering", because that suggests meaningfulness.) You believe pain is inherently harmful, but how does that make sense? Or can I persuade you that it doesn't count as harm?
I’m hoping that at some point we’d be able to have free range cows that are only hormonally forced to make milk. And no calves need to be born (or killed).
You can keep the calf with the mother half of the time at the cost of some milk and the benefit of less vet costs for the calf, at least. Some very few places do that. They say the cows are much less stressed once they realize the calf will be back by morning after milking.
This is on the dot. The entirety of their argument can be summed up as “I don’t want to give a shit about my neighbor”. And, “I don’t want to care for the hungry”. Or, “I don’t want to share medical costs with my neighbors”. Basically, “I don’t want to share anything”.
uncomfortably close to the nail. American society is depressingly based on being able to point and laugh at somebody worse off than you. Never take a chance that a change that's good for everybdoy might place the person you laughed at yesterday above you.
I'm healthier than my neighbors. I carry 4-6 gallons of water a mile every couple of days on foot. I don't own a car either, I ride a bicycle. If my neighbors and I share medical costs, I'm definitely losing a lot there. My neighbors are obese. 40% of Americans are obese. 80% are overweight. Americans are not healthy in general. They don't even try. How is forcing me to participate in their healthcare a freedom?
The American healthcare system is fundamentally broken on top of this. How is forcing me to pay into a system that is broken and a system I won't use, how is that freedom? Americans spend more money than any other country only to recieve worse outcomes. You can walk into an American hospital, tell them you have just returned from west Africa where there is an Ebola outbreak, and tell the nurse you have Ebola symptoms, and that nurse will send you home with a perscription for antibiotics that don't work against viral infections at all. And then you die. I'm citing a real example that actually happened.
Given the state of American healthcare, I wouldn't go to an American hospital even if near death. I'd try to get myself to a hospital in some other country before going to an American one.
Wide spread obesity is a much a medical problem as a corruption problem.
"One of the most significant challenges in combating the rise of sugary drink consumption in Latin America is the lack of stringent regulations on advertising and the availability of these products. While some countries have introduced taxes on sugary beverages and implemented labeling regulations, these measures are often met with strong opposition from the beverage industry. The industry’s lobbying efforts have been effective in delaying or diluting such policies, leaving many children vulnerable to the adverse health effects of excessive sugar consumption."
It seems normal for the target of forced resource extraction to not even view it as sharing, or see it in a positive light. Helping your neighbor when in need is one thing, being coerced into funding whatever some distant bureaucrat wants is another.
Americans also want to be able to use the roads for free, eat food and drink water that "somebody" has inspected to make sure it won't kill them, and have fire, police, and EMS show up quickly if they have an emergency.
It’s kind of amazing and horrifying at the same time that a democratic country like the U.S. is doing all these shenanigans like blocking clean zero carbon energy, while a communist authoritarian country is massively moving towards clean energy.
Based on what our media and our education system teaches us, one would have assumed that common sense and sound logic would prevail in a democracy, but rather what we see is insane nonsense, paranoia, and misinformation (including about vaccines) prevail in the U.S., to the point of burning piles of money (including the 1.2B in this case) just to satisfy a childish and bully like need to spite and trigger the progressive side (like talking about causing more pollution with the goal of “owning the libs” or triggering “delicious liberal tears”). And we’re talking about massive negative externalities with increased pollution. This kind of childish bully behavior is as though you had a neighbor who cared about not littering in public and the streets being clean, and you just threw garbage on the streets to upset her. A ridiculous level of immaturity, truly.
Meanwhile, we have totalitarian dictatorships (like the Emirates which has heavily moved toward zero carbon electricity sources like solar and nuclear) behaving far more logically, rationally, and soundly with a view towards the long-term rather than the short-term.
I work in renewables in the US. The current picture is actually a lot more positive than people believe. But good news are usually boring at not good for click bait, so they aren’t covered by the media. There’s a lot of work on solar energy currently and the forecast is VERY good. We do have some issues like grid connectivity and shifting policies but the market economics are working extremely well. The fact is solar is too cheap and, unlike wind, very easy to deploy, so it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you will eventually support it. Texas for example, the conservative oil and gas hub of the US, is already outpacing California in total capacity additions because 1) they have tons of land and 2) no BS, quick local permits. So if you are a solar builder, you go to Texas not California. And yes, Texas is still pro fossil fuels, but the laws of supply and demand will continue favoring solar so that’s where the money will flow to.
> fact is solar is too cheap and, unlike wind, very easy to deploy, so it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you will eventually support it
this is my point, too
renewables, especially solar, just have gotten very competitive to a point they will gain ground even if not subsidized
and I believe we will see (and in some niches have already seen) this happening for electric cars, too. They are plain simple just better technology which for now is still in the earlier stages.
How much relevance wind will have we have to see, it's less advantages then solar and less easy to deploy. It's pretty good in some very windy northern (i.e. also less solar efficient) places and often iff it's extremely windy it's not extremely sunny and if extremely sunny it's often not extremely windy. This makes them complement each other quite nicely. So I still see a future for it even outside of the more northern regions.
California has only four really good wind sites, and they already have wind farms on them. The real US wind belt is from the Texas panhandle northward to Canada. Look at a wind map of the US.[1]
Grid-scale battery storage just keeps getting installed at an increasing rate.[1]
9.7 gigawatt-hours installed in Q1 2026.[2]
It's not very visible. It's just shipping containers laid out on cement pads. It doesn't take up that much space. It can be placed anywhere there's good access to transmission lines. It's profitable if you can buy cheap solar power in the daytime and sell it at night. It's safe now that it uses lithium-iron phosphate batteries.
88 days to the midterm elections. Trump will still be in office for a while longer, but with less power to make trouble.
all the US needs is Australia like pricing and combine it with individual energy independence branding + clean long term financing like mortgage and there is no better place in the world to harness the urban sprawl and single family homes for rooftop solar. This assumes utilities and their business models can be quietly upended which is probably the biggest bottleneck
I do perfectly believe that there's a lot of progress in renewables and am happy about it. I also think of how much farther we would have come if it wasn't in spite of 40-50 years of obstruction by governments to satisfy coporate entities stuck in the old world.
> Meanwhile, we have totalitarian dictatorships (like the Emirates which has heavily moved toward zero carbon electricity sources like solar and nuclear) behaving far more logically, rationally, and soundly with a view towards the long-term rather than the short-term.
The difference you’re spotting is the leaders of those nations have some remaining incentive to care about the wealth and wellbeing of the country they’re leading beyond the expiration date of a 4 or 8 year term.
For better and for worse, they have that, the US doesn’t.
It's been a common saying for a long time that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government and a tyrannical dictatorship the worst. Democracy exists primarily to avoid the latter, not that it's better than the former.
Neither China nor the UAE can be said to have a purely benevolent dictatorship but it's not purely tyrannical either. So not surprisingly they're better than democracies in some aspects and worse in others.
The sweet spot is representative democracy with a tendency of socialism, to mildly distribute welath and assure social coherence. A voting system which results in a division of force, representing the voters will.
The current US administration calls such things comunism.
The thing we have called "democracy" for the past three hundred or so years is basically just shadow government by whoever has the deepest pockets to influence public opinion with propaganda and pay politicians to do what they want. The politicians get blamed and cycled out while everything continues as before.
this way of thinking, is not very useful and can be pretty harmful,
just because something is imperfect doesn't mean it's fully broken. Just because
people have always manipulated democracy doesn't mean it "basically just shadow government".
And sure, the US is a very bad case, _especially_ in recent years. But also let's not forgot that for most of it's history just one of the countless scandals of Trump would have been enough to highly risk impeachment for a president and be equal to political suicide. I.e. there has been quite a bit of limits on corruption and influences from behind the scene. It's just that the US went and broke itself. And yes a two party system was never truly democratic, it's still better then a one party system nor the same as a full shadow government.
Which brings us to another point, there never was "the" shadow government, just many different people which had way to much influence behind the scene in not so democratic ways. A shadow government implies some form of organization/structure which actually governs and then puppets in front, but that was never really the case in the US AFIK. Even today it isn't as a lot of the escalating corruption is just pretty much out in the open by the governing people, instead of in any shadow, by people not in a official position.
Money is deep on both "sides". It didn't help Harris to have the most either. But you can't deny that some political steerage toward donor agendas occurs.
Nobody with cursory knowledge of the US voting system would though.
Edit: to the downvotes, our system doesn't care about popular vote, and neither do the most democratic/left left leaning states, who don't care to use proportional voting.
Its because democracies werent and arent really democracies.
But that aside. Corruption is rampant, the oil sector has politians in their pocket for a long long time and since the cold war, a counter narrative doesnt really put any weight in the scale. The billionaires arent afraid anymore.
I do think authoritarianism on its own is bad. I want the freedom to criticize my government, and I want the freedom to run for elections or to advocate for changes I want to see. I think democracy and logical long-term thinking shouldn't be mutually exclusive. I feel democracy and sensible behavior are two not connected things.
You can have idiotic authoritarian governments that ruin the economy. China and Vietnam were exceptions among communist countries, who switched to a form of market economy, when they saw that central planning was poverty-inducing and nigh impossible to do.
The problems we're seeing in democracies might lie with the level of disinformation for electioneering purposes that is permitted under free speech today.
As an atheist I wouldn't survive in Texas for 15 seconds lol. I think I'll stick to my little Euro socialist country where politicians don't swear on a bible.
That communist country is sitting on a year’s worth of oil reserves, and rolls out a ton of coal for when they run out of oil. Makes you wonder why… almost looks like they know they’re going to be under complete sanctions sometime soon!
That communist country also likes the current war in Iran. They get all that oil cheap for their reserves stockpile.
I found the post insightful and interesting. I'm not sure it was written with AI assistance, but even if it was, I don't see that as a reason to dismiss it. For what it's worth, I spend hours everyday reading AI output and summaries.
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