3 ms·

Are you trolling?

by voz_ 7y ago

Are you trolling?

jessaustin 7y ago
I didn't post TFA. What NSA are described as doing in TFA (investigating some "dumb criminal") is clearly outside the mission granted them by statute. Furthermore, they so regularly act in contravention of law that there is a commonly-known phrase that describes this activity: "parallel construction". Furthermore, they are lauded rather than criticized in TFA for this unlawful behavior. Furthermore, they regularly pay "journalists" and "influencers" to publish pro-NSA anti-liberty BS in the media and online. Furthermore, if they had better management in 2000 they might have transferred resources from the Overnight Cross-Country Dumb Criminal Parallel Construction Department to the Prevent Terrorism Department. So yeah, I'm the one trolling. ps: It's also interesting to note that comments like that above start out with four or five upvotes, from honest HN users. Within ten minutes, however, they're downvoted into oblivion. USA-MIC has a strong HN game.
- at-fates-hands 7y ago
  You do realize regardless of resources they had at their disposal, the reason 9/11 happened was because of inter-agency competition and the lack of knowledge sharing between said agencies? This is the primary reason the Department of Homeland Security was created in the first place.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    I'm not nearly as certain as you seem to be, about any of the claims you make here. I remember the debate about creating "Homeland Security". (Starting with the neo-Nazi name...) No one with any management experience, including Bush the Lesser, thought it was a good idea. Organizations that have lost their way due to bureaucratic bullshit are not made more effective by more layers of bureaucratic bullshit. Congress was convinced, however, and W's handlers didn't want to "waste" political capital preventing an obvious disaster. Before this debacle, FEMA had been an effective organization (that incidentally had nothing to do with "security"), largely due to its relative independence from the rest of the executive branch. After this debacle, Hurricane Katrina happened. Everybody agreed to blame the hapless "heck of a job" guy because they hoped we stupid voters would forget when they torpedoed the agency two years before the storm. Why are we supposed to believe that "inter-agency competition" was the cause of 9/11? The guy who did it, ObL, claimed it was in response to USA military presence on the Peninsula. Why don't we blame that? If we don't blame our stupid military decisions, why not blame the intelligence community for not noticing potential consequences of those stupid decisions, a single decade after they didn't predict the most important thing that ever happened with respect to their "mission"? The unsupervised services are just like the military, in this respect: WWII was a long time ago, and they've never once been judged on their performance since that time. (JFK tried to hold them to a standard, but not for long...) All they have to do is spend money, and at that they excel. 9/11 itself helped them spend a great deal more than they ever had before. Anyway, even the goofs at NSA could have figured it out in time, if they hadn't just axed ThinThread in favor of Trailblazer. That was a human lapse in judgment that could have taken place at any bureaucratic level. When they make a similar mistake in the next decade, the interference of "Homeland Security" won't have done a thing to prevent it.
smoyer 7y ago
Please don't feed him/her if the answer is "yes"
chapium 7y ago
I'd say yes. Stirring up mud about issues not remotely related to the context by presenting a false dilemma (that resources were applied to a instead of hindsight worthy b)
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Where NSA is lauded for breaking the law, I will criticize NSA for breaking the law. The way to avoid this criticism is to stop lauding NSA for breaking the law.

Are you trolling?

by voz_ 7y ago

Are you trolling?

I didn't post TFA. What NSA are described as doing in TFA (investigating some "dumb criminal") is clearly outside the mission granted them by statute. Furthermore, they so regularly act in contravention of law that there is a commonly-known phrase that describes this activity: "parallel construction". Furthermore, they are lauded rather than criticized in TFA for this unlawful behavior. Furthermore, they regularly pay "journalists" and "influencers" to publish pro-NSA anti-liberty BS in the media and online. Furthermore, if they had better management in 2000 they might have transferred resources from the Overnight Cross-Country Dumb Criminal Parallel Construction Department to the Prevent Terrorism Department. So yeah, I'm the one trolling. ps: It's also interesting to note that comments like that above start out with four or five upvotes, from honest HN users. Within ten minutes, however, they're downvoted into oblivion. USA-MIC has a strong HN game.

at-fates-hands 7y ago
You do realize regardless of resources they had at their disposal, the reason 9/11 happened was because of inter-agency competition and the lack of knowledge sharing between said agencies? This is the primary reason the Department of Homeland Security was created in the first place.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  I'm not nearly as certain as you seem to be, about any of the claims you make here. I remember the debate about creating "Homeland Security". (Starting with the neo-Nazi name...) No one with any management experience, including Bush the Lesser, thought it was a good idea. Organizations that have lost their way due to bureaucratic bullshit are not made more effective by more layers of bureaucratic bullshit. Congress was convinced, however, and W's handlers didn't want to "waste" political capital preventing an obvious disaster. Before this debacle, FEMA had been an effective organization (that incidentally had nothing to do with "security"), largely due to its relative independence from the rest of the executive branch. After this debacle, Hurricane Katrina happened. Everybody agreed to blame the hapless "heck of a job" guy because they hoped we stupid voters would forget when they torpedoed the agency two years before the storm. Why are we supposed to believe that "inter-agency competition" was the cause of 9/11? The guy who did it, ObL, claimed it was in response to USA military presence on the Peninsula. Why don't we blame that? If we don't blame our stupid military decisions, why not blame the intelligence community for not noticing potential consequences of those stupid decisions, a single decade after they didn't predict the most important thing that ever happened with respect to their "mission"? The unsupervised services are just like the military, in this respect: WWII was a long time ago, and they've never once been judged on their performance since that time. (JFK tried to hold them to a standard, but not for long...) All they have to do is spend money, and at that they excel. 9/11 itself helped them spend a great deal more than they ever had before. Anyway, even the goofs at NSA could have figured it out in time, if they hadn't just axed ThinThread in favor of Trailblazer. That was a human lapse in judgment that could have taken place at any bureaucratic level. When they make a similar mistake in the next decade, the interference of "Homeland Security" won't have done a thing to prevent it.

smoyer 7y ago

Please don't feed him/her if the answer is "yes"

chapium 7y ago

I'd say yes. Stirring up mud about issues not remotely related to the context by presenting a false dilemma (that resources were applied to a instead of hindsight worthy b)

jessaustin 7y ago
Where NSA is lauded for breaking the law, I will criticize NSA for breaking the law. The way to avoid this criticism is to stop lauding NSA for breaking the law.