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>In closing, the whole fact that public policy is shifting from all of the backlash is kind of heartening in that it shows the public does have a say in the pro

by Permit 13y ago

>In closing, the whole fact that public policy is shifting from all of the backlash is kind of heartening in that it shows the public does have a say in the process I can understand a lot of your comments in this thread, but not this one. The only reason the public has the chance to influence this process is due to leaked information. There is not an official system of checks and balances of which the general public may play a part.

bazillion 13y ago
I'm going to stick my neck out a little and say that the reason for this line is this: I don't believe in the veracity of the leaked documents detailing PRISM. As I'm not in there anymore, this is not a confirmation of anything, just personal belief (speculation). I, for one, have seen one too many shit powerpoints floating around NSANet written by some military E-6 trying to explain some difficult concept to a group of E-5's. What do they do? Generalize and over-simplify. Just because it has classification markings doesn't make it official -- when I emailed friends to say "Hey, you want to get lunch today?", sometimes it was marked as top secret because I forgot to change it. A sysadmin is a job that has little to no understanding of operating concepts, architecture, and program scope. It's someone you go to when you accidentally lock yourself out of your account and need to change your password. It's a Tier-1 technician who sees a green box in a network diagram go red, and start making phone calls to people who are actually capable of a root-cause-analysis (tier-3 technicians). So, a sysadmin swoops up a bunch of powerpoints knowing nothing about the operational details of the programs they seem to be describing, and posts them for people to read and make their own conclusions using only those powerpoints as a source of information. That whole way of starting a public discussion is flawed, because the information contained therein is so utterly questionable to me. Regardless of that, I'm glad that online privacy (which is something I strongly believe in) is finally being publicly discussed, which is why I said that.

by Permit 13y ago

bazillion 13y ago

I'm going to stick my neck out a little and say that the reason for this line is this: I don't believe in the veracity of the leaked documents detailing PRISM. As I'm not in there anymore, this is not a confirmation of anything, just personal belief (speculation). I, for one, have seen one too many shit powerpoints floating around NSANet written by some military E-6 trying to explain some difficult concept to a group of E-5's. What do they do? Generalize and over-simplify. Just because it has classification markings doesn't make it official -- when I emailed friends to say "Hey, you want to get lunch today?", sometimes it was marked as top secret because I forgot to change it. A sysadmin is a job that has little to no understanding of operating concepts, architecture, and program scope. It's someone you go to when you accidentally lock yourself out of your account and need to change your password. It's a Tier-1 technician who sees a green box in a network diagram go red, and start making phone calls to people who are actually capable of a root-cause-analysis (tier-3 technicians). So, a sysadmin swoops up a bunch of powerpoints knowing nothing about the operational details of the programs they seem to be describing, and posts them for people to read and make their own conclusions using only those powerpoints as a source of information. That whole way of starting a public discussion is flawed, because the information contained therein is so utterly questionable to me. Regardless of that, I'm glad that online privacy (which is something I strongly believe in) is finally being publicly discussed, which is why I said that.