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Interesting. I would argue that government officials can be reliable, efficient, conscientious, when they are properly incentivized. Instead, there are various
by kiba 7y ago
Interesting. I would argue that government officials can be reliable, efficient, conscientious, when they are properly incentivized. Instead, there are various pathologies that infect various organs or agencies at various time, often at time seemly mutually exclusive but they coexist nonetheless.
The government isn't given the trust needed to regulate or otherwise do its job efficiently. See various civil engineering projects, explosive cost growth whenever contractors compete for bids. People justify that as evidence that governments as inherently inefficient.
Government is abusing civil liberties through spying on everyday Americans. Relatively nobody cares.
The government is being corrupt, privileging senators' pet projects or program over the good of the nation. See the Senate Launch System. Nobody cares except space nerds. At the same time, NASA also supported the various effort to commercialize space, which is a major win.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago> Relatively nobody cares. If nobody cared, the only illegal domestic data collection program in the Snowden docs wouldn't have been shut down. It has been. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsas-bulk-collection-of-americans-phone-records-ends-sunday/2015/11/27/75dc62e2-9546-11e5-a2d6-f57908580b1f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsas-... If nobody cared, Google wouldn't have encrypted its cross-datacenter traffic. It has. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-of-email-security.html?m=1 https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-of...
- resters 7y agoHow do you know?
- lern_too_spel 7y agoI posted links. If you don't think Google has encrypted its cross-datacenter traffic, you can try to access it yourself. If you don't think the NSA has stopped collecting all phone metadata, why would there be records of the NSA collecting a subset of metadata afterward?
- jessaustin 7y agoEvery corrupt organization keeps two sets of books.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoThere remains no evidence that the NSA is deliberately flouting the law. If there were, Snowden would have leaked that instead of lists of hacked Chinese computer systems.
- jessaustin 7y agoI don't understand the timeline you're implying. Snowden did blow the whistle on this program, in 2013. Your link was from 2015, and now it's 2019, if I'm not mistaken. Snowden has lost the access he had before his whistleblowing. It will take another whistleblower to reveal the scale of current unsupervised malfeasance.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoYou're not following the point. The point was that people did care about the leaks and took appropriate action. Secondarily, you're not understanding the leaked documents. The leaked documents showed that the NSA believed that the phone metadata program was legal. Once there is a court ruling that it is illegal, its lawyers cannot justify the program. Thirdly, your phrase "another whistleblower" shows that you do not know what a whistleblower is. Leaking thousands of programs where just one of them happens to be illegal but not obviously so (to the point where Snowden was far more interested in PRISM, an obviously legal program) is not whistleblowing.
- jessaustin 7y agoAs discussed in the podcast, not even a few of the people at NSA believed anything of the sort. WaPo hasn't taken down this gem yet: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/27/lawyers-said-bush-couldnt-spy-on-americans-he-did-it-anyway/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/27/lawye... As detailed there, it took 18 months of lobbying and browbeating the secret court (in which DoJ faces no opposing counsel) in order to jury-rig a fig leaf for the ongoing destruction of personal liberties. I'm made my peace with the fact that the authoritarians to whose whims we are subject will occasionally overstep their bounds in public. When they do so, the public may protest and eventually conditions might improve somewhat. When the unsupervised services harm us, their putative employers, we have no recourse. Also I have to say I'm just loving the concerted effort ITT to redefine the term "whistleblower". You guys make a great team!
- dnautics 7y ago> I would argue that government officials can be reliable, efficient, conscientious, when they are properly incentivized. What do you propose as the magical "proper" incentivisation?
- kiba 7y agoWhy do you think I presume to know a 'magical' one-size fit all solutions?