The Gaming Den

Every time you mention the NWO, I just see:

Not pictured: Obama

And the POTUS being a secret member of a long-defunct professional wrestling faction is a lot more interesting than the usual "I swear I am bipartisan and not a paid shill, but Obama has signed legislation that lets him target Republican voters for drone strikes" conspiracy theories.

Vnonymous wrote:PhoneLobster, do you think that Edward Snowden is a lying liar who just made up every last one of the documents he leaked?

... really?

Look, I'm a qualified computer scientist, I used to work in the field. Much of the meat of Snowden's accusations/"revelations" were common knowledge within my former profession so many years ago... well, that at the time it was still my current profession.

But... so what? I mean what is your point, yeah there IS a surveillance state thing going on, there are unpleasant overtones of big brother, if you've been following the news for the last three fucking decades you know that "military/police vs citizens" scenarios are one of the big things various slimy western nation governments obsess over whenever their endless 1984 style war against the abstract concept of fear itself hits a brief lull.

But STILL, so fucking what because nothing, NOTHING about the actual reality of police state trends has ANYTHING to do with the conspiracy theory nutters I was talking about.

FEMA is not a fucking gigantic empty concentration camp gulag awaiting the rednecks of America. Obama is NOT going to take their guns. Obama is NOT going to pull a police/military coupe when his term as president runs out.

The five eyes network has been gathering every email and text message ever sent by anyone anywhere and putting it in a bottomless database since pretty much the time that emails and text messages came into existence. Yes, it's real, in it's own way it's a even a big (though old news) deal, but it DOESN'T mean Obama is the antichrist coming for your fucking guns and your rednecks with his Communist UN black helicopter FEMA Nazis and Clinton mafia ninja death squads.

koumei wrote:Every time you mention the NWO, I just see

Why not? I mean, the infamous NWO hiding in plain sight like that, they would totally do that the arrogant FEMA Nazi UN pricks.

You have unmasked them, be prepared for Hillary Clinton to personally attempt to ninja murder you in your sleep any second.

Look, I'm a qualified computer scientist, I used to work in the field. Much of the meat of Snowden's accusations/"revelations" were common knowledge within my former profession so many years ago... well, that at the time it was still my current profession.

I'm starting to see this a bit, and it's always funny to ask for a link. Because fucking everyone was publicly really surprised at the time at just how big it was, even me as a rabid anti-spy nut, and memory is this funny thing which likes to re-write the past to make us feel less gullible.

If the great vacuum of metadata and more was common knowledge, where did anyone ever put that on, say, the entire internet ever? Wayback machine is a thing if it's lost, but it's not that long ago.

wikipedia wrote:Edward Joseph "Ed" Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) to the mainstream media, starting in June 2013.

It's March 2015, so that's less than two years ago, not "oh so many".

Well there was this.

Ess was in college in the early 2000s when the Secret Service showed up at his dorm because of an incident based around Carnivore.

tussock wrote:I'm starting to see this a bit, and it's always funny to ask for a link.

It's hard to provide a link to your university lecturers throwing in an aside on their lectures that if you ever work in anything remotely like encryption or security you will be faced with the trade off of receiving "free" assistance from the NSA at the cost of them leaving back doors laced through everything they touch.

As for finding a link to articles from ten or more years ago about mass data collection and the five eyes network? Yeah it IS funny to ask people to produce links to articles from over a decade ago isn't it. I bet you feel real smart about that.

Maj wrote:Ess was in college in the early 2000s when the Secret Service showed up at his dorm because of an incident based around Carnivore.

Some Secret Service in the early 2000's came to my high school and talked to some students because they made a website saying they'd like to see George W Bush be replaced by a chimpanzee.

Maxus wrote:

Maj wrote:Ess was in college in the early 2000s when the Secret Service showed up at his dorm because of an incident based around Carnivore.

Some Secret Service in the early 2000's came to my high school and talked to some students because they made a website saying they'd like to see George W Bush be replaced by a chimpanzee.

Yeah. He'd sent an eMail with a threat to kill the pres. Ironically, it was in the name of proving that Carnivore didn't actually exist.

Yeh, so five eyes is where they could spy on anyone they wanted whenever they wanted to, and follow that wherever it went, with warrants and shit, which mostly meant no actual warrants and abusing politicians to get more funding to do more spying, judges to get more warrants, and tech companies to get their commercial allies better hardware. That's substantially different to spying on everyone and collating their contact data and movements all the time, for the purpose of murdering folk if they match a certain pattern. I think that's a change, seemed that way to me.

Like, the Microsoft thing with the always-on camera and microphone, that came out just before Snowden's leaks, I could see it would have a backdoor, but I didn't get that they'd just always be piping everyone's basic information to the NSA all day. How many people are in the room, who they are, what sensitive topics have come up. All the time.

Admittedly, that Will Smith movie was a while back, but it was supposed to be fiction with the self-driving cars and ... oh right, the future. Even that said they had to look for him to find him, it wasn't just already collected data.

--

I was informed by lecturers in ~1992 that security meant a permanent air gap between the secure thing and any modems, and not letting anyone in or out with portable media (which these days everything is a modem and handles data, so probably impossible). Because once it's off a secure boxes you could just assume everyone who cared already had it, everywhere in the world. Encryption was always in reach of brute force searches if anyone cared.

But encryption got better and so now they just bypass it.

--

I do vaguely recall carnivore, because it was a joke back in the day to end all your emails and newsposts with bomb the president or similar to give them plentiful false positives. The longer and more mundane the message, the more interesting to have spies read it and try and figure out our secret code. Ah, misbegotten youth.

So, OK, they did keyphrase logging too, of open-text transmissions. Talked to the odd person, wrote reports and got on with life. That's still not spying on everyone all the time, even though their keyphrases could be anything. I guess it's a minor point, just a shift in technology that means they can capture everything, so they do.

Obviously google got pretty creepy, so why not everyone else. Fair enough. Thanks all.

Doing a bit of digging, I suppose it was there if I'd known where to look, just never in the media, so if you know the right people you knew and everyone else was blind.

@PL, I really do mean just the new stuff from Snowden last year. Did it really get reported a decade back and then no one mentioned it for ten years?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_su ... %932013%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_su ... present%29

Says there's a bunch of new stuff out there now. Maybe it's just more detail, implications all made a bit more obvious to poor old me. A bunch of people were publicly surprised though.

tussock wrote:@PL, I really do mean just the new stuff from Snowden last year. Did it really get reported a decade back and then no one mentioned it for ten years?

No. I suspect people have been talking about it continuously for the entire period. I just stopped reading most of it some time over that ten year period since I stopped reading industry news sources that talked about data retention technology and policy.

Hell even despite that your view of the Snowden revelations doesn't even make sense to me just as some person who reads the damn news in any detail. What specifically new things, when Snowden's stuff came out the general consensus among both the tech and the policy experts that to the limited degree I was still paying attention to them largely was "Well, here's a bunch of hard evidence of them doing the things we knew they could do, we told them how to do, they paid us to help them do and which we watched them build the tech, the policy and organizational apparatus explicitly to do!"

As far as I followed it the only real surprises in the Snowden stuff were...

1) Wow, that was kinda easy to get all that stuff hey?
2) They employ how many kinda poorly screened contractors with this kinda access?
3) So they set up the elaborate spy networks with other nations so they could gather and store each others data to bypass and preempt local laws especially in the USA... and then after all that they were too lazy to use it and STILL got caught out a bunch of times directly spying on US citizens and shit?

Oh yeah, and since this spun off me talking about crazy conspiracies...
4) The er, lets say alleged Snowden documents that Iran* is claiming as proof that the USA as is a tool of the Tall White aliens that are secretly manipulating the earth towards total conquest from their hidden dark side of the moon colony.

*may not actually be Iran.

The thing that surprised me in the documents was that they actually went and gathered everyone's data and stuck it in a database. I'd always assumed that they could gather anyone's data at will but didn't gather everyone's data because that was just way the hell too much stuff to actually find anything in rather than because they couldn't.

Nah, it's so easy to store stuff now that they can archive everything and look through it at leisure.

Combined with using federal administrations to dig up and release private information, anyone can be blackmailed over anything they've ever done that left a trace. Even if it wasn't shocking or embarrassing at the time they did it.

People who paid attention already thought that Supreme Court Justices and Senators and the like were being pressured... but now it can happen to any average Joe / Jane Smith if they happen to become of interest.

name_here wrote:I'd always assumed that they could gather anyone's data at will but didn't gather everyone's data because that was just way the hell too much stuff to actually find anything in rather than because they couldn't.

The policy and strategy has always been to gather everything they can and hope the technology catches up so they can use it all.

Long story short, they aren't at Minority Report predictive crime prevention yet (they want to be), and they aren't at perfect levels of surveillance thanks to a super smart AI that can replace the incredibly huge man hours of actual people looking at the data that perfect surveillance would currently require (they want to be). But software has advanced and they get closer to those impossible ideals every year.

And as far as intelligence agencies and policy makers are concerned gathering more data than they can use right now has ALWAYS paid off, even without new tech it's more data they can look at later if they want, AND on top of that improvements in software that lets them search, sort and aggregate that data has as far as they are concerned been progressing pretty nicely.

Though it's worth noting that while "gather all the data!" may well be seen as a success by intelligence agencies and policy makers, there are some indications (from studying large amounts of law enforcement data) that at least with police making these sorts of giant databases available to law enforcement can in fact have some pretty negative outcomes for speed and successfully resolution of investigations.

The Republicans just need to drop the immigration issue and welcome in the millions of conservative latinos, as well as millions of business minded Chinese

PhoneLobster wrote:Though it's worth noting that while "gather all the data!" may well be seen as a success by intelligence agencies and policy makers, there are some indications (from studying large amounts of law enforcement data) that at least with police making these sorts of giant databases available to law enforcement can in fact have some pretty negative outcomes for speed and successfully resolution of investigations.

It's a matter of false positives.

Have a pattern matcher with 99.99% accuracy both ways, use it on the whole world, you'll catch all the terrorists who aren't hiding and also catch hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Nothing is actually anything like that accurate, so you end up spending all your time chasing shadows, or killing them with drone strikes as the case may be.

No matter how many you kill or investigate, you're always faced with roughly the same number of false positives, for all time, and the only terrorists left are those that have beaten the system, who train the new ones. It's the whole reason police are supposed to get a complaint before they begin investigating crimes, or doctors screen only people who are strongly predisposed to illness.

Maxus wrote:

Maj wrote:Ess was in college in the early 2000s when the Secret Service showed up at his dorm because of an incident based around Carnivore.

Some Secret Service in the early 2000's came to my high school and talked to some students because they made a website saying they'd like to see George W Bush be replaced by a chimpanzee.

...now I want to go look at Bush's two terms and see if he acted differently. I'm not sure he wasn't replaced by a very well trained chimpanzee halfway through his presidency.

PhoneLobster the democratic party has "Take guns away from crazy people" as one of their policies. Saying that Obama is going to take their guns is just taking him at his word.

And everyone has known about the NSA spying for decades. But until Snowden released his documents everyone just dismissed those claims as the paranoid rantings of conspiracy nutters. What Snowden was stop people from using that as an excuse. When Bush lied through his teeth everyone believed him. Obama doesn't get to do the same because of what Snowden did.

Vnonymous wrote:PhoneLobster the democratic party has "Take guns away from crazy people" as one of their policies. Saying that Obama is going to take their guns is just taking him at his word.

Zing! I really hope the humor in that was deliberate.

Well, everyone figured the FBI was watching their emails and shit for decades, I mean, I remember joking about that shit in middle school. Now, the fact that we were right doesn't mean we knew about it. I mean, you can find jokes from 90s sitcoms about "being on a government list" for stuff like getting the porn channel and cartoon network, but that doesn't mean sitcom writers knew the NSA was compiling information on people, just that government spying was assumed to be happening.

Vnonymous wrote:PhoneLobster the democratic party has "Take guns away from crazy people" as one of their policies. Saying that Obama is going to take their guns is just taking him at his word.

Are you really going to take failed incredibly minor gun reform as your evidence for doubling down on defending the conspiracy theory that...

"Obama will stage a military coupe in 2016 so he can remain president for life, take all the guns using black UN helicopters, and lock the red necks up in FEMA concentration camps, at the behest of his secret NWO masters who are a bunch of communist UN Illuminati"

You are making some incredibly flimsy connections from material that is flat out NOT what you seem to be defending, I want a straight out commitment from you, you keep telling me I'm wrong to dismiss this crazy conspiracy, so... does that mean you ACTUALLY believe the whole FEMA NWO bullshit? Really? Come on, man up and give us an answer here, it looks like it might be really... fun.

PhoneLobster wrote:

Vnonymous wrote:PhoneLobster the democratic party has "Take guns away from crazy people" as one of their policies. Saying that Obama is going to take their guns is just taking him at his word.

Are you really going to take failed incredibly minor gun reform as your evidence for doubling down on defending the conspiracy theory that...

"Obama will stage a military coupe in 2016 so he can remain president for life, take all the guns using black UN helicopters, and lock the red necks up in FEMA concentration camps, at the behest of his secret NWO masters who are a bunch of communist UN Illuminati"

You are making some incredibly flimsy connections from material that is flat out NOT what you seem to be defending, I want a straight out commitment from you, you keep telling me I'm wrong to dismiss this crazy conspiracy, so... does that mean you ACTUALLY believe the whole FEMA NWO bullshit? Really? Come on, man up and give us an answer here, it looks like it might be really... fun.

"The government is going to attempt to confiscate firearms" is a belief that I'm entirely comfortable with defending. You don't have to believe in FEMA camps and the NWO to believe that the party of gun control is going to support gun control. http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/democr ... ontrol.htm I mean, the guns that these people are talking about are almost certainly assault weapons (and I'd wager more than a few were purchased at gun shows). Obama is trying to take their guns. Obama ran on a platform of "I will try to take these people's guns away." and has said he'd try to do it.

As for what I believe, although I wouldn't use the word NWO, I think that there is a a concerted effort to weaken national sovereignty in order to allow a small, private elite to have far greater control over the world. Things like the various trade agreements which weaken national sovereignty and grant a small corporate elite the power to sue entire nations in kangaroo courts staffed by people who work for them is absolutely a part of that. The NSA/FIVEEYES surveillance system and the massive amount of corporate espionage that they perform is another part of it. Obviously these massive powerblocs aren't monolithic and fight amongst themselves, but they most definitely work for their own advantage against that of the majority of people. Hell, even the BBC takes this as an established fact.

As for the "Obama coup". I happen to read conspiracy nutters as well, and from what I can tell they don't believe that Obama will be declaring himself emperor and instituting the fourth reich (although maybe we're reading different conspiracy nutters). They believe, and I agree with them, that Obama himself is largely powerless and will be discarded by the machine that put him in power the moment he stops serving their interests. There is such a thing as the deep state, and it doesn't give a shit about how the people vote. No matter which party makes it into power there will continue to be no prosecutions of financial criminals, increased flows of money to corrupt defense contractors, more war, more surveillance and so on. How many people, do you think, voted for Obama with the expectation that he'd make more of the NSA spying legal, reduce government transparency, rapidly increase the amount of espionage charges against whistleblowers and attempt to start a war in Syria? He ran on a platform of openness and transparency, claiming that he'd turn back the surveillance state - and in power he's been the exact opposite. The military industrial complex has a massive, massive vested interest in making sure that the US gets involved in more and more wars, and they don't even bother hiding their encouragement for war-mongering. Julian Assange is still trapped in an embassy with a 24/7 police guard, and Edward Snowden stands no chance of receiving a fair trial in the USA of today.

Both major political parties in the USA are hopelessly compromised. The system used in the USA greatly encourages the forming of monolithic voting blocs, and the funding requirements for a nation wide political campaign necessitate that any attempt to seriously change things will never succeed. The democrats will never act against their biggest donators (like Goldman Sachs et al), and the republicans will never act against their biggest donators (like Goldman Sachs et al). Some of the US' big problems, like paying for a global military empire and surveillance state, simply cannot be fixed by the democratic system as it is now. Whether or not this entire affair will continue into an actual, full-on police state is really too hard to predict. The NSA and various other governmental bodies will continue to attempt to increase their own levels of power and funding, but they're already seeing some (so far ineffectual) pushback. I have no doubt that the conspiracy nightmare world with death-camps and reaper drones for police is something that several powerful people want, but I don't believe they'll actually be able to implement it.

Vnonymous, what the actual fuck are you doing? It is difficult to get into an argument with PhoneLobster and come out the bigger asshat, and yet here you are.

First off, you are not responding to anything anyone is saying. Someone said one of your trigger words and now you're ranting about whatever the hell it is you wanted to rant about and trying to make it fit into the conversation in much the same way one would hammer a square into a circle. I get it. You really, really, really wanted to have this conversation. Could you please stop pretending you were in anyway prompted? You can seriously just say whatever the fuck you want for any reason you want at any time you want.

PL gave very a very specific description of a very specific group of nutjobs who believe very specific things that are extremely fucking crazy and the only actual thing you've said about them in your gigantic ranting tirades is (and I am quoting you): "As for the "Obama coup". I happen to read conspiracy nutters as well, and from what I can tell they don't believe that Obama will be declaring himself emperor and instituting the fourth reich (although maybe we're reading different conspiracy nutters)." Meanwhile if you google "Obama coup" you will seriously find on the first page multiple results of people talking about whether or not Obama is plotting a coup to overthrow the government. Hm.

Secondly, shove your centrist bullshit up your ass. You're not being wise and cynical when you say things like this: "The democrats will never act against their biggest donators (like Goldman Sachs et al), and the republicans will never act against their biggest donators (like Goldman Sachs et al)." You're just being offensively and stubbornly uninformed. No one is particularly happy with the Democrats, and the party has its share of corrupt shitstains and reprehensible assholes. But there is really no excuse other than willful ignorance in the name of "enlightened pessimism" to not be aware that the Democratic party manages to get elected a bunch of people with policy stances that genuinely piss off the elite, like substantial opposition to the TPP and supporting net neutrality (read any fucking news lately?) or higher taxes on the wealthy and stricter banking regulations.

Democrats are increasingly kept afloat by unions, small donors, and a handful of major industries who are fair weather friends at best. Republicans get the lion's share of corporate money, and that lion's share is getting larger and larger all the time. Even Hollywood and pharma are slowly turning red because the Democrats aren't big enough whores. FPTP voting is bullshit and neither party does a good job of representing its constituency, but hinting at this "two sides of the same coin" bullshit just makes you an asshole who says things because they're grimderp instead of because they're true. And the situation is plenty fucking depressing; you don't have to pretend things are any more dystopian than they actually are for them to be really fucking dystopian.

DSMatticus wrote:Vnonymous, what the actual fuck are you doing? It is difficult to get into an argument with PhoneLobster and come out the bigger asshat, and yet here you are.

First off, you are not responding to anything anyone is saying.

I posted that because PhoneLobster's implication that discovering what I believed would have been fun.

Do you think that it would have been better if I just said "No." and that was that?

Vnonymous wrote:"The government is going to attempt to confiscate firearms" is a belief that I'm entirely comfortable with defending. You don't have to believe in FEMA camps and the NWO to believe that the party of gun control is going to support gun control.

Well, so to be clear you are vehemently disagreeing with me except agreeing that I'm entirely right about the vast majority of this stuff. Oh and a bunch of other crazy rant because you are unable to actual engage with anything I actually said without looking stupid*.

And then on the narrow point of believing Obama is coming for all your guns, on THAT point only you insist on disagreeing and, stupidly enough, in a way that is massively wrong.

Because here is the thing, Obama has tried some incredibly minor gun control, on the back of a populist backlash and the biggest grass roots support in years as the toll of countless needless killings racks up. Killings that might be avoided with the simplest, most minor gun control that is NOTHING like the "Obama will take all our guns!" panic I described and which you apparently ascribe to.

BUT IT FAILED. And if you know anything about US politics, that shouldn't have surprised you and you should know that while at least minor gun control reform is a much needed inevitability it is also something that is in no way happening any time soon.

It sure as hell won't happen in Obama's remaining time in office.

Obama is definitely NOT coming for your fucking guns.

Lets just wait like, a year, to objectively and undeniably prove that what with Obama no longer being in the position of, according to you, grand gun stealer in chief.

Oh, and lets also just pretend we didn't notice that your entire conflation of Democratic party unrequited desire for minor sensible Gun Control as a move towards a totalitarian oppressive state rendering it's citizens helpless is also really deeply stupid, incorrect, and actually puts you a great deal more of the way into swallowing pretty much all bar the brand name of the NWO conspiracy hook line and sinker than you are trying to pretend.


*or rather even more stupid

I'm not aware of any proposal to confiscate firearms from anyone credible in American politics, even in left wing of the Democrats. There are proposals to make it harder to sell guns, but none to kick down people's doors and steal their heirlooms.