So, you’ve stumbled onto my humble little blog. Perhaps you are a Millenial wondering why most of your friends aren’t fully employed. Or wondering why ObamaKare is being shoved down your throat. Or why your generation is on the hook for a national debt that stands at $17 $18 Trillion and counting. Maybe you are scratching your head wondering why your President thinks Global Warming the weather is more worrisome than Islamic Terror. And perhaps you’ve started to become aware there might be something the corrupt and biased lame stream media isn’t telling you. The answer, to these and other existential questions, is ... the Left - specifically, the modern American Progressive. Think of this site as a portal to a richer understanding of this answer, a portal purposely designed with a consciously cock-eyed bent to keep it entertaining. Because the First Amendment is forever and the Internet never forgets. (Plus you better figure out FICA isn't the name of a Swedish bikini model, before she eats your entire paycheck.)

How to use the portal? You could dive into my archive*. I was most active here 2010-2012, but that matters not. How many times do I need to demonstrate the central point? To wit, the political / ideological Left is a menace to the constitutional republic and must be resisted lest the American experiment in liberty devolve into socialist dystopia. If it's the more pointed hand-to-hand combat of the comment board that whets your appetite, click the 'My Disqus Comments' widget. I continue to visit that world from time to time as a light diversion. Or you could browse through my blog roll. It's a very representative collection of center-right blogs, though hardly exhaustive. I can't do the political / ideology thing 24x7, and you probably can't either. Leave that to the hysterical, talking point chanting, mob agitating, race baiting, election stealing, gaia worshiping, straw man torching, Islamic Terrorist appeasing, organized Left (aka OFA, MSNBC, UAW, SEIU, Think Progress, Media Matters, most of legacy media, the politically correct faculty lounge, anybody who belonged to Journolist, anybody connected to Occupy Wall Street, anything funded by George Soros or Tom Steyer, their paid Internet trolls, and the rest of the usual Team Leftie suspects).


*Re-posting encouraged. No need to ask for permission. Just follow the commonly accepted convention of acknowledging this site as original source with a link back. That way, you leave the asking for forgiveness to me.

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Tuesday, June 11, 2013

PRISM and Phone Records - The 'Orwell' is In the Lazy Approach to Data Collection


First, let's dispense with one necessary opinion statement. Edward Snowden has committed crimes and just might be a Chinese agent. As each day passes with him living under Chinese forebearance and implied protection, our God-given capacity for reason and deduction lead us closer toward concluding the latter.

==

Now on to the great constitutional debate his actions as an actor on the human stage have sparked.

At a macro level, the discipline known as "data mining" has two basic architectural components. There are the analytical capabilities, and the databases that are made available to those capabilities. This division of computational labor is where the much ballyhooed tension between "security" in the fight against Mohammed's Murder Monkey Cult From Hell and the Fourth Amendment lies, IMHO.

The most advanced analytical capabilities are useless if not connected to useful data ("garbage in, garbage out"). The most comprehensive databases are nothing but simmering potential, lacking serviceable analytical capabilities. Such databases can in fact be simmering pots of potential abuse for any tyrant in control of serviceable analytical capabilities.

This is why the singular aspect of both the PRISM program and the phone records warrant Judge Roger Vinson gave to BHO and His Gang of Corrupt Progressives I find most vexing is: both programs apparently seek to collect the Database of Everything without prior cause. It is, in fact, a lazy approach to using the available technology to strike an appropriate balance between security and liberty.

Yeah, sure, an administration I don't trust can parade an endless conga line of insider toadies before the media's cameras to assure me the Database of Everything is only accessed when legal and ethical. Somehow, something inside of me cannot believe this when it's already in the open they have used the IRS database to unethically and illegally harass political opponents.

So, I say to my government and to its "intelligence community" - don't be lazy. Put in the effort necessary to do your job protecting the American people the way the Founders intended you to do it. Stop collecting the Database of Everything just to make your job easier, because you are simultaneously creating Big Brother's infrastructure right before our very eyes. What you are doing today in fact only needs one more ingredient for Orwell's vision to be completed - the emergence of Big Brother himself. Assure us you will be disciplined enough to get specific warrants on specific targets first, then apply your impressive data collection capabilities, then apply your impressive analytical capabilities, on a case by case basis. In that order every time. And the memo to Congress is this: fix the Patriot Act so the FISA court cannot approve anymore Databases of Everything.

d(^_^)b
http:\\libertyatstake.blogspot.com
"Because Less Gub'ment Means More Liberty"

Update 1:40 pm

fyi - Databases of Everything can also be huge national security liabilities in the age of cyber warfare, especially if adversaries are able to turn system administrators into agents. Just a little thing for the "security at any price" crowd to think about.

Update 6/13/13

Based on today's available information I'm with this guy. Prism is still basically a policy problem (in the way I stated above), not yet an Obama abuse scandal in and of itself (so far and not in the way the IRS scandal is), and Snowden is likely just a cyber space spy. And, yeah, Glenn Beck crosses over into pure paranoia a lot, too.

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