ak4g

That was then. Try and find a post-Cold-War instance of the US deciding to usurp free and fair elections for our own economic or security purposes. We weren't doing it for the fun of it, and in a unipolar world order, we don't do it at all.

>Scientists have long claimed that our ability with numbers is indeed biologically evolved – that we can count because counting was a useful thing for our brains to be able to do.

I would like some citations for this. This is the first I've heard of this, and I previously have assumed that it was universally accepted that this was not the case.

This article makes similar claims at multiple points, without corroboration. "researchers have concluded", "researchers often assume", "researchers have argued", for arguments that I have never heard made.

Strictly staying within US law is not the only thing that the US intelligence apparatus tries to do. There are also agreements not to monitor the citizens of "Five-Eyes" citizens in those countries without due process; even if not illegal, it would violate the intelligence-sharing agreements we have with those nations and would be highly improper due to the damage to national security that risking those intelligence-sharing agreements would entail.

That being said, this story is incredibly thin.

>It aimed to explain why Dotcom and others charged in the FBI's Megaupload investigation were spied on for two months longer than previously admitted.

There's no reason this would even be improper, if the FBI had gone through due process in the US, which it appears they had. This story appears to be entirely Kim Dotcom's lawyer trying to politicize his case in order to fight a lawful extradition.

I don't even think that's particularly controversial. The concentration of tech startups in SF has been devastating for the city, and has distorted every aspect of early-stage tech startups for years. And frankly, YC bears a rather large proportion of the blame for this.

Can you clarify what you mean? How are we not left with determinism at a fundamental level?

(And if it starts with a Q, then at most one can say is that it's possible that it's not deterministic. It's perfectly compatible with determinism, just not (AIUI) (and IANATP) currently known whether or not it is the case.)

Assange is not a US citizen.

That's just not true. The first credible reporting on the existence of the investigation came from CNN, 10 days prior to Comey's testimony in March.

On one hand, yes, our political divisions no doubt make that kind of information warfare campaign tempting.

On the other hand, it's already pissed us off something fierce, and I think the narrative in the mid-term future will ultimately be one where would-be adversaries decide they don't want to be the next poor soul to be made an example of.

I find myself self-censoring on topics like this, not because of what I (don't) fear is being done by authorities, but because I can't help but to note that we're not, in fact, living in some Orwellian dystopia, and that seemingly the surveillance that is being done is promulgating a safe and stable society, but not toeing the sky-is-falling line doesn't do much for those numbers by my username.

Meanwhile, there are places that are living in a dystopia, and the single most important goal of the powers that be in those places is undermining the rule of law. So I can't help but be skeptical of stories like this.

We have a society where we can air discussions about topics like this, and where criminals can be kept out of the public sphere, and these are good things. There. And hey, tonight at least, for once, I won't go to a throwaway to say so.

My siblings in this thread need to learn about the reforms that were done post-Watergate. The rule of law governs everyone, especially law enforcement, in the USA. If you don't believe that, why do you think lawmakers bother with getting laws passed to allow surveillance in the first place?

You can't have it both ways. Either LEO follow the letter of the law and we're not in some 1984 scenario (because there are, in fact, substantial protections for privacy under the law), or they do not, and we're left with this mystery of why things like the USA PATRIOT Act exist, which now needs to be explained.

If this was illegal surveillance, then obviously it wasn't within the scope of what's allowed by said anti-terror laws.

This doesn't add up for me yet, because I don't understand what the supposed motive is. Do the police have much interest in journalists accounts? I mean really, what's the thinking here? Are London police ignoring murders of journalists? The UK is hardly an autocracy.

Frankly we should wait to see what the IPCC says. This could easily be entirely fabricated, the only corroboration was information that would be accessible to cybercriminals, not anything that implicates law enforcement specifically.

Why?

Per the article in the Guardian, the Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating the claims.

I'll note that the corroboration was passwords of politically active people, which frankly doesn't do anything to implicate law enforcement. This may well simply be yet another "whistleblower" attempting to sow distrust of any authorities who are not beholden to their own influence.

>blindly trusting "the data"

This phrase is not coherent.

Doing something blindly would literally be to do something without data.