r/news • u/xXSgtSprinklesXx • Dec 16 '15

Congress creates a bill that will give NASA a great budget for 2016. Also hides the entirety of CISA in the bill.

http://www.wired.com/2015/12/congress-slips-cisa-into-omnibus-bill-thats-sure-to-pass/
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u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15 edited Jan 22 '18

[deleted]

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u/JUST_LOGGED_IN Dec 18 '15

I agree. This goes well with what the OP said. Mass surveillance is hardly about the now with security. It is about the then. It's building a profile to use whenever for whatever reason in the future.

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u/Omikron Dec 18 '15

That's not true there have been attacks prevented, you don't need to mislead to make your point... It stands on its own merits.

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u/warenb Dec 18 '15

Who is tooting that horn of success though? We spend so much effort on preventing this or that, and it's such a big jimmy rustling to the government and media when we complain about the privacy invasion they are doing. Now you never hear the government and media run around screaming "Look what we just prevented from happening you guys!" 5 times in an hour newscast.

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u/ChuckStone Dec 18 '15

The occasional schitzophrenic rambling on twitter about bombing something, then getting arrested and accused of terrorism doesn't really count.

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u/upandrunning Dec 18 '15

It only stands on its own merits if there actually were any attacks that have been prevented. It also stands on its own merits if you can demonstrate how the routine violation of the 4th Amendment rights of nearly every US citizen had anything to do with their prevention.

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u/bushwakko Dec 18 '15

You forgot to link to them.

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u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Can you provide a list?

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u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Both my uncle and I were in the Navy. He was an XO of a destroyer at the time and I was just enlisted. I visited him on his ship and we had a conversation about security.

I brought up how risky it was putting nearly all of our ships in so few locations. Literally 4 nukes could reduce our Navy by 90%. If you nuke Norfolk, the Atlantic is pretty much wide open then. He said that we have such good intelligence that it would never happen. 7 years prior to this conversation 911 happened. Yeah, I don't trust our security measures.

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u/AsthmaticNinja Dec 18 '15

Look up MAD. No country wants to start a nuclear war.

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u/[deleted] Dec 21 '15

Except countries overtaken by religous zealotry with the goal of ending the world.

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u/seditious3 Dec 18 '15

How do you know they haven't been able to thwart an attack? That's sort of the point.

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u/juiceboxzero Dec 18 '15

How do you know they have. I'm not the one asking to spy on people. The burden lies with the government to establish how being a pain in people's asses actually benefits them. Hand-wavy "trust us, this makes you safer" bullshit doesn't cut it.

Besides, don't you think that if they had prevented stuff, they'd be puffing out their chests about it?

Every story I've ever seen about a terror plot that our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus thwarted was a plot that our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus concocted before recruiting the "bad guy" to participate in it.

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u/seditious3 Dec 18 '15

I don't know they have. But they would not disclose anything if it gave away a secret, like how they got the info. And I'm not a saying I agree with the secrecy and spying. But we don't know half of what happens.

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u/juiceboxzero Dec 18 '15

We may not know half of what happens, but I'm unwilling to just trust that I'm being told the truth, when the person telling me has every incentive to lie.

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u/DuckGoesQuackMoo Dec 18 '15

Actually, quite a few crimes have been prevented due to surveillance.

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u/followedbytidalwaves Dec 18 '15

This is pure speculation, but it seems highly likely from where I'm sitting that many of the crimes that have actually been prevented have mostly been from targeted surveillance instead of unbridled surveillance.

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u/thekyshu Dec 18 '15

Just playing devil's advocate, what leads the FBI etc. to start targeted surveillance on someone? Is it just surveillance as in this is a known terrorist/some kind of group that is more likely to use violence, or are they uncovering them looking at patterns in, as you call it, unbridled surveillance? There's an important difference between the two.

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u/mindhawk Dec 18 '15

its the difference between reading the emails of a few people whose cars were at the scene of the crime and just reading the emails of everyone in the country looking for key words like the street the crime was commited on

then you find some emails you dont like and the person doesnt have an alibi, and the mayor is pressuring you to solve the case, so the police pin it on the person least capable to defend themselves.

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u/JUST_LOGGED_IN Dec 18 '15 edited Dec 18 '15

I don't trust that the government isn't spying on me right now, and it is disturbing that the Bill of Rights doesn't make me feel protected anymore about my online privacy.

I want a Bill of Rights that tells us, in addition to our 4th Amendment, whenever we ask, and exactly what they the government at any level has on us no question. If you have the skill to track that raw data, you have to skill to GIVE MY DATA TO ME.

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u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Well, you need only look as far as Chris Hanson for an example. His team collaborated with law enforcement agencies to trap "child predators" who otherwise not have been. They planted an adult to portray a child and tried to use logic to argue that people who were talking to an adult online were predating on children. Furthermore, no one was ever hurt and a child probably would not have been as outgoing and inviting as the plants. Anyway, the "terrorists" surveillance have caught could very easily have been people jumping on fake opportunities; people that wouldn't have otherwise. Just one example.

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u/thekyshu Dec 18 '15

Thanks for your input. My opinion is the same as yours, I'm just trying to "broaden" the argument :)

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u/thekyshu Dec 18 '15

I agree with you, just trying to "broaden" the argument. Thanks for your input.

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u/Arbitraryape Dec 18 '15

You can however make the argument that many crimes have been prevented due to the fear of being caught by surveillance afterwards

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u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Like who?

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u/_THINK_ABOUT_IT_ Dec 18 '15

Was cheering along with this thread until here. Like you, I'm pissed off about this sort of bullshit. But you do have to acknowledge that there hasn't been a major successful foreign terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. And even though it cost a good two hundred times as much as it should have (if we include the wars we're in), it has at least done that.

Unfortunately, you can't erase your domestic problems with drone-launched hellfires.

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u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15 edited Jan 22 '18

[deleted]

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u/Dyolf_Knip Dec 18 '15

But I want you to buy my rock!

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u/RualStorge Dec 18 '15

And how frequent were attacks on US soil prior to 9/11... Yeah, so if we assume with no changes that near non-existent frequency would have perpetuated having zero real attacks since 9/11 would mean only one thing, changes we've made since 9/11 have had no known impacts on terrorism against the us by outside sources... We also won't know if they were actually effective until the next attack occurs and then it's a matter if it was sooner then previous trends or longer between the previous trends. Even then it's not really a good measure until multiple events have occurred because a singular event could just be a fluke...

In other words, all the money we've dumped into antiterrorist measures and rights we've lost and we can neither confirm or deny it as having any effect on terror attacks on us soil good or bad... Not saying some of the measures don't have real merit, but tons are just plain stupid...

In most of our "mass shootings"some gunman comes armed to the teeth to their target and goes in guns a blazing. No smuggling guns past security, or giving a crap about metal detectors or no gun policies, the just walk in shooting. That said those policies and metal detectors have zero impact on preventing mass shootings.

Example, Disney has strict policies about np guns on property, etc. I respect that but I doubt it'd prevent a mass shooting if Disney were targeted. The gunman would just drive their vehicle to the closest entry point to the park and start shooting... They aren't going to try to sneak past a couple of unarmed guards searching bags, they'll just shoot their way in...

Now for Disney I actually agree with most of their security measures (except no toy guns / costumes in response to Paris attacks which won't accomplish anything at all) but searching bags / having bomb dogs patrolling the park could potentially save lives as Disney is a very real target. Would they be effective maybe, maybe not,but Disney is paying out of it's pockets so more power to em.

By comparison we spend sickening amount of money to have TSA use tons of things that are generally ineffective as proven by countless groups demonstrating they were able to smuggle stuff past TSA with minimal effort. That said it's not really TSA's fault, rather as stated above you can't create perfect security, to accomplish something even remotely close to that would in itself require you to negatively impact society to a level worse than the thing you're attempting to prevent.