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Life is not a Hollywood movie. Hollywood movies, comic books and so on use larger than life figures doing larger than life activities to stop larger than life

Life is not a Hollywood movie. Hollywood movies, comic books and so on use larger than life figures doing larger than life activities to stop larger than life villains. In reality, no one on earth is that competent. The villains are usually not very good (often blowing themselves up alone with their bombs) and the "good guys" are usually not that great either (often corrupt themselves). If the government actually were stopping constant terrorist activity (a) they wouldn't parade obvious entrapment cases as "wins", they'd pick something legit to make us feel safer and (b) someone would talk. One of the contractors, loud mouths, drunks, etc. would eventually leak something. A group as large as NSA wouldn't be able to keep their world-saving completely quiet forever, that's just unrealistic.

sneak 13y ago
> If the government actually were stopping constant terrorist activity (a) they wouldn't parade obvious entrapment cases as "wins", they'd pick something legit to make us feel safer and (b) someone would talk. One of the contractors, loud mouths, drunks, etc. would eventually leak something. A group as large as NSA wouldn't be able to keep their world-saving completely quiet forever, that's just unrealistic. Consider for a moment how long they've kept the fact that THEY HAVE A REALTIME MIRROR OF GOOGLE a near-total secret. Consider the fact that private companies like Apple and Google have been able to keep their source trees secret with far lower penalties for accidental/intentional disclosure and much less attention and fewer resources devoted to OPSEC. Also, I think you are confusing FBI/LEO with NSA/military intelligence. It's the former that does those silly things. NSA never parades anything, ever. It's like STFU is in their DNA. As far as the rest of the military goes: the coolest plane we know that they've built is the SR-71, which was built in... 1964. It's fifty years old. Do you suppose they've sat on their hands since then, with all the advances in materials and computer/avionics technology since? To put the R&D in perspective, it is believed that the NSA's Utah datacenter is built to store a yottabyte of data. The mind reels. Where do you think all that classified budget defense money is GOING, building shit that gets press releases?! Keeping secrets is pretty straightforward, actually, if you're willing to go to the (order of magnitude increase in) trouble and expense. USDoD is.

sneak 13y ago

> If the government actually were stopping constant terrorist activity (a) they wouldn't parade obvious entrapment cases as "wins", they'd pick something legit to make us feel safer and (b) someone would talk. One of the contractors, loud mouths, drunks, etc. would eventually leak something. A group as large as NSA wouldn't be able to keep their world-saving completely quiet forever, that's just unrealistic. Consider for a moment how long they've kept the fact that THEY HAVE A REALTIME MIRROR OF GOOGLE a near-total secret. Consider the fact that private companies like Apple and Google have been able to keep their source trees secret with far lower penalties for accidental/intentional disclosure and much less attention and fewer resources devoted to OPSEC. Also, I think you are confusing FBI/LEO with NSA/military intelligence. It's the former that does those silly things. NSA never parades anything, ever. It's like STFU is in their DNA. As far as the rest of the military goes: the coolest plane we know that they've built is the SR-71, which was built in... 1964. It's fifty years old. Do you suppose they've sat on their hands since then, with all the advances in materials and computer/avionics technology since? To put the R&D in perspective, it is believed that the NSA's Utah datacenter is built to store a yottabyte of data. The mind reels. Where do you think all that classified budget defense money is GOING, building shit that gets press releases?! Keeping secrets is pretty straightforward, actually, if you're willing to go to the (order of magnitude increase in) trouble and expense. USDoD is.