Borowitz has been doing satire at the New Yorker for a long time. This one is just profoundly close to being not-satirical. The world isn't very different from last month, except that more people are becoming more aware how our government conducts itself.
Could we please stop with the NSA horseshit. The Democratic National Party has identified techies as a target demographic for their Media Circus and is seeding these stories to garner votes and attention.
We need to be concerned about the bigger picture, the story being covered up by the "OMG Snowden is a cyberpunk, how dreamy". The bigger picture is that Washington, D.C. has allowed the security apparatus to rot. Misplaced nuclear missiles, abysmal physical security at nuclear bomb plants, total lack of mandatory access controls on computer system, inability to close the decision loop on protecting assets on foreign soil, etc.
The DNP keeps running these tech celebrity scandal stories to distract from the catastrophic state of American security.
NO! The often cited "problem" with American perception, and how we've even gotten to a point where this type of thing is possible, is exactly because people lose interest in a story so quickly.
You're talking about an the US government pursuing a political dissident across the planet, and doing so because he exposed them performing wholesale 4th amendment violations to every person in The United States.
That is a HUGE deal. That is so much more a huge deal than another article about IOS7, or another article about how google's reign is over.
I hope there is a Snowden story at the top of HN every day until his story reaches a conclusion, and if you care about your civil liberties, I hope that you can sacrifice the 80px of so of reading every morning.
That is a HUGE deal. That is so much more a huge deal than another article about IOS7, or another article about how google's reign is over.
This! Over and over again. I hate seeing HN getting so politicized lately. But it is unavoidable considering the current state of affairs.
Each time I click the upvote button an an NSA article I am a bit concerned that it will just end up in another NSA bashfest. But even here on hn the voices of the apologists for the unprecedented war on privacy by the Obama administration are too strong and can not be challenged enough.
Snowden is a sideshow, a freak biting the heads off chickens to draw the crowd away.
To the extent that there is any NSA story at all, it is that if Snowden can do this in his spare time, then China and Russia have been helping themselves to a copy of the intercepts for years. This is not about the 4th Amendment, it is about a de facto state of war. A state of war that the DNP is covering up with a blizzard of distractions.
Stories about Snowden might be tech celebrity scandal, but stories about the NSA are not. And do you have any evidence that the Democratic Party is attempting a coverup here?
The evidence is that the DNP has media operations research down cold. They are the RAND Corporation of public dialog manipulation.
The evidence is that the DNP was caught actually doing things with the IRS that are 1000% worse than what the NSA is hypothesized to maybe have done. That they desperately need a way to cover it up, something spectacular and engaging to run in the press.
The evidence is that everybody knew the NSA has been doing this since the OSS days. The liberal kiddies voting up this Snowden crap weren't even alive for the running gag of Echelon surveillance in the 1990s, where everybody assumed the NSA was intercepting everything and that you might as well put in suspicious keywords to screw with them.
The evidence is that the NSA intercept rooms at telecom interchanges were well known for decades. Again, it is a running joke that the NSA controls entire rooms and even floors of majors interchanges.
So given the half-century long intel program, why is there now media saturation and 48 point headlines? The answer must be that somebody needs there to be a media circus, that somebody keeps feeding leaks and quid-pro-quos into the media machine. There are many organizations who have the capability to do it, like Johnson and Johnson, but most of them can be ruled out as getting no benefit. The one remaining org that needs a distraction is the DNP, to let the Benghazi, IRS, Syria, and other fiascos blow over.
Are you implying the Democratic Party basically manufactured Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks as a cunning distraction from the state of American security affairs? Why try so hard to distract the public at large from a set of issues they're already completely unaware of?
The IRS debacle. A tax strike would cause a cycle of Social Security and food stamps to be delayed, and even confused old people and urban minorities would understand who hung them out to dry. The Democrats would join the Whigs in the dustbin of American history.
You seem to be implying that a tax strike would be inevitable, and that enough people would participate for it to matter. But most of the country doesn't agree with the Tea Party's revolutionary ideals. Lots of people don't consider it a 'scandal' at all. I don't believe the vast unrest and civil revolt the Tea Party wants would actually manifest.
Consider that the Republicans have had their share of scandals, illegal wars, and their own turn at the wheel using the IRS to investigate their political opponents. They're still around.
So the Democrats are the ones to blame for making a big story out of Snowden?
That's a very interesting theory. And you follow it up with a long list of security state problems.
I don't want to dismiss you out of hand, but you have to acknowledge that not every person writing about Snowden is a Democrat, or manipulated by Democrats, or is somehow caught up in some tech celebrity hero worship.
I hate tech celebrity stories. I'm a registered independent. Voted with the Republicans a couple of times nationally, with the Democrats a couple of times, and with a third party a couple of times.
I find it strange to be accused of being manipulated by one party. Hell, it's both parties that got us into this mess. Why would the Democrats think they could control this message? They're going to lose as many, and maybe more, people from the center as the Republicans are.
And if you're seriously suggesting that we need even more access and control over information, instead of just cleaning up the bureaucratic mess we already have, I'm at a loss for words. I suppose once the hole gets deep enough, the only logical choice is to keep digging?
American security is in exactly the state that it deserves given the completely shitty leadership both parties have shown over the last 30 years or so. Nobody knows what their mandates are, nobody seems to have any idea of how to identify and properly assess threats, and there's hardly anybody in charge. This is a failure of Congress and the President. A good housecleaning would not only fix privacy issues, it might straighten the rest of the mess out. Maybe.
It might be just that we've created an intelligence and security apparatus that's too damned big. In which case, it's all going to need to be decentralized/privatized/deregulated somehow.
But all of that aside, your comment struck me as an attack on the readers and voters here, so I felt I should reply. Snowden is but a small story in a much larger tapestry of a security state gone to hell because of poor oversight and structure. I don't think the Democrats have any more or less to do with that than the Republicans. And I don't think they have much to gain by pointing out what a mess they've helped create.
Your local voter registration office, when you register to vote, will allow you to "declare" for one party or the other.
The idea is to prevent people who would vote for one party no matter what to go and vote in the other party's primary. Some states have written this into law. Some states you can register one way and vote in all the primaries if you choose.
Remember that each political party can, and does, make decisions however it likes. The Republican party recently changed its rules midstream during the convention just to keep attention away from Ron Paul.
The other purpose of declaring for a party, if you choose to do so, is that then they can pester the living shit out of you to raise money. My wife registered under one of the parties. They call dozens of times each year looking for cash.
You have to be registered with the government as a voter in order to vote at all. When you register, you list your party affiliation. If it is one of the major parties, that information also adds you to the party's list of members, granting you the ability to vote in their primary elections. If you register as an independent (e.g. unaffiliated) voter, it depends on what state you're in, but sometimes you can vote in either primary and sometimes none at all. Note that there is also an Independent Party, which is different from lowercase independent, meaning no party affiliation at all.
The vote you place is anonymous. Your vote is not tied to your voter registration, but you have to prove that you have registered in order to place that vote.
> And if you're seriously suggesting that we need even more access and control over information, ...
We are rapidly approaching the day when anybody who wants a nuclear bomb can have one. I don't mean states, I mean disgruntled individuals. If a person can 3-D print one pistol, they can 3-D print a million pistols. If they can 3-D print a million pistols, they can 3-D print a million isotope separators.
The total obsolescence of privacy is a given. Soon Total Information Awareness will not be a shadowy government conspiracy, it will be a mandate written into the Constitution.
The only domestic intel question is whether it will be written by the planners or by the survivors.
> I find it strange to be accused of being manipulated by one party.
Indeed. From your point of view, you have gathered plenty of information, weeded out the crap, and applied careful logic to the good information. From your point of view, you have come to solid conclusions about the NSA and you do not like them. Any thinking person sees the obvious contradictions between spying and democracy, right?
But why did you spend all that effort on the NSA issue? Their domestic surveillance has been an open secret for decades. If we go back to the OSS and its precursors, for the better part of a century.
Out of the universe of thousands of current issues, matters of importance that have a public dialog going, why has this particular moldy old scandal been dug up and kept on the front page of CNN for weeks?
Because somebody is keeping it there.
You say that the Democrats stand to lose greatly from the NSA scandal. Not nearly as much as from the IRS debacle! They are terrified that if the IRS debacle stayed in the public consciousness, the Tea Party would be able to call a one month tax strike. That would cause a Social Security payment cycle to be delayed and destroy the DNP forever. Literally dedtroy, they would have the credibility of Whigs or Soviets afterwards.
Hence the absolute desparation to plaster the news with anything, everything except IRS. We can also expect to see a parade of insane wars as distractions. Libya, Syria, who's next?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5925294