

Chomsky: spying does not protect you - wslh
https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/19-3

======
danenania
There is a practical way to reduce terrorism and make the US and the world
safer that won't cost a dime and doesn't require compromises on civil
liberties.

Stop starting and getting involved in foreign wars, stop supporting the
abusive policies of Israel, and stop supporting corrupt and abusive
governments around the world.

You don't hear much about that option on TV, but it's by far the simplest and
best course for all concerned save a handful of greedy and duplicitous folks
at the top.

~~~
joelrunyon
This is copy/paste the same exact response from the top thread on reddit[1]

Been seeing this a lot around here lately...Could be the same user, but I've
seen it happening enough that I bet it's not.

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1gxehl/chomsky_sp...](http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1gxehl/chomsky_spying_does_not_protect_you_if_we_had/caorp3s)

~~~
discostrings
It looks like the reddit user "kaax" is taking insightful posts from HN and
posting them on reddit [for karma?]. See the Bitcoin comments at
[http://www.reddit.com/user/kaax](http://www.reddit.com/user/kaax) and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929622)
.

~~~
danenania
It's kind of sleazy but I guess given the topic that I'm just happy for the
words to reach more eyes.

------
beloch
If you're looking for a simple way to reduce support for the Taliban and start
bringing stability to Pakistan and Afghanistan, look no further than grounding
the drones.

Vietnam taught U.S. strategists that wars of attrition simply don't work.
You'll never kill _all_ of the enemy because every attack creates more enemies
than it destroys. In this sense, drone attacks do exactly the opposite of what
they're supposed to do. U.S. drones do more for General Atomics than they do
for U.S. citizens! Every shot fired generates future business for weapons
manufacturers.

The use of drones also sets an ugly precedent. If the U.S. can kill anyone
they want, anywhere they want, so too can China or Russia or any other
country. Sooner or later that's going to be U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. There
will be moral outrage, but no moral high-ground to stand on and no recourse.
Just terror.

~~~
shardling
>Vietnam taught U.S. strategists that wars of attrition simply don't work.
You'll never kill all of the enemy because every attack creates more enemies
than it destroys.

There is an absolutely amazing Rumsfield moment where he acknowledges this,
but draws the conclusion that the solution is to kill them more quickly!

------
abalone
Favorite quote: "Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists
maybe in history."

"Suppose you are walking down the street and you don't know whether two
minutes from now the guy across the street and everything around him is going
to be blown away by a sudden explosion run by somebody a couple thousand miles
away. You're terrorized. And in fact villages, regions, countries are
terrorized by these [drone] operations."

~~~
MarkMc
OK, I can understand Chomsky's argument that drone strikes should be classed
as a terrorist operations. But the 'biggest in history'? What about the fire-
bombing of Tokyo, the rape of Nankin or the genocide of Cambodia?

~~~
rdtsc
Terror and murder count don't go hand in hand. They are rather orthogonal.

There were murdering regimes that murdered without sowing too much terror
through the population because they were good at hiding and squashing the
news. As people disappeared news did spread but it was always rumors that
could be dismissed.

Then there is terror -- a single death using a particular technique or weapon
withe the particular amount of publicity could be very terrorizing. It is is
always attacks on small-town America. Imagine this news story "Cuban drone
killed a young family in the small town Idaho because it was believe to be the
hiding spot of (Luis Posada
Carriles)[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles)],
a known terrorist sheltered and protected by the US government"

Ok, so one family killed. Now imagine the terror, the talking heads
("experts") on TV, the news channels, the presidential address, declarations
of war, additional security checks etc etc.

See the difference?

------
ryanSrich
In response to stopping terrorism, violence, etc.

It's a fact that humans are products of their environment[1,2]. This has been
known for quite some time. However the degree to which we are products of our
environment has always been a hot topic of discussion. On one side we have a
status quo in the medical profession that insist we are pre determined for
disease both physically and mentally. On the other side we have social
scientists that say we are solely products of our environment and genetics
only gives us predispositions to things like mental illness or obesity and so
on.

I tend to agree with the social scientists. We have triggers; genetically.
They are either pulled or left alone. The environment in which you live is the
catalyst for that type of action.

Going off of that I'll point to Michel Foucault, a mid-twentieth century
philosopher and social critic. The bulk of his work focuses on dissecting the
ideas of power and knowledge. He understands these two entities to be
synonymous with each other, which lays the foundation for his critique of
governmental and institutional power. Through his critiques, Foucault
positions himself as a post-modernist philosopher interested in the societal
controls of modernity. He believes power, and therefore knowledge is not
absolute; it is defined, enforced and accepted within the society in which
it’s institutionalized. This of course is the opposite of modernism, which
exercises the belief that science and reason possess the knowledge for an
ultimate truth. Stemming from the industrial revolution, modernity reigned
supreme through much of the twentieth century and arguably still does today.

Without the willingness to accept that our environment effects so much of what
we do we will never understand the means in which to change it. The ideas of
violence and power are not born inside of our minds. They grow, over time,
from our perceptions. Forcing an ideology or a standard on an environment will
not change the behavior of the individuals occupying it; it will only enforce
the causation of negative action.

1.)
[http://www.mindingourbodies.ca/sites/default/files/suicide_a...](http://www.mindingourbodies.ca/sites/default/files/suicide_and_nutrition_20110415.pdf)

2.)
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1556-4029.2007....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1556-4029.2007.00562.x/abstract;jsessionid=811EC401E930A13C826B1F72CFD0E1BD.d03t04)

\+
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucauldian_discourse_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucauldian_discourse_analysis)

------
carbocation
Link is down for me; here is a google cache copy:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/19-3&strip=1)

~~~
GoogleCache4NSA
Yeah, let's all tell google that we're visiting some subversive website. Then
when the NSA scoops up the most recent dump of activity, they can correlate
all the Verizon and AT&T IP addresses, and the Google cookies, and compile
their... "list" of subversive Hacker News readers, right?

Something they wouldn't be able to capture via normal streams, since the HTTPS
connection to commondreams.org masks the referrer info so that it can't be
sniffed from any plaintext HTTP GETS.

Hey, I wonder why the site's down?

~~~
carbocation
If the NSA wants to know who most HNers are, it would be much easier to check
our profiles.

------
personlurking
Here's a video interview with Chomsky linked to within the OP's link

("What do Takism Square, Google Glass, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and NSA
data gathering have in common? Find out in this interview with Noam Chomsky.")

[http://grittv.org/?video=noam-chomsky-on-secret-trade-
deals-...](http://grittv.org/?video=noam-chomsky-on-secret-trade-deals-
killing-polio-workers-fighting-for-the-commons-in-turkey-the-heroism-of-
bradley-manning)

~~~
Spearchucker
That reminds me of a question I've pondered - what will the impact of
Snowden's NSA leaks be on a. the perception of Google Glass and b. on sales?

~~~
EliRivers
Indeed. Given Google's insatiable thirst for data, and the NSA's apparent
open-door policy with regards to other people's data, will Google glass
essentially be seen as a way for the NSA and chums to watch what everyone is
doing, all the time? How do you feel about someone in your workplace/social
space/anywhere recording you on behalf of the NSA?

------
PavlovsCat
_[Bradley Manning] ought to be regarded as a hero... Like the trade agreement,
the public has a right to know what 's being done to them by their so-called
elected representatives, but there's a principle that he's violating, namely
that power has to be protected from scrutiny...that's the principle of every
dictatorship ... you can hear it from the high priests of government. Bradley
Manning is violating that._ \-- Noam Chomsky

What else is there to say? And I mean "say", not "squirm".

------
calibraxis
There's a recent philosophical interview where middle-school students asked
Chomsky some questions: ([http://www.zcommunications.org/noam-chomsky-beyond-
fascism-b...](http://www.zcommunications.org/noam-chomsky-beyond-fascism-by-
noam-chomsky))

I liked the discussion of proto-humans, and comparisons to other species.
Helps put our violence and self-destructiveness into perspective for me.

~~~
emiljbs
Do you have any other nice interviews with Chomsky like that? I find it very
hard (as a non-native speaker) to hear and understand what he says in
interviews, so text is best for me...

~~~
foobarqux
[http://www.chomsky.info/interviews.htm](http://www.chomsky.info/interviews.htm)

------
PavlovsCat
The quote in the linked article from the bit about Google glass was a bit
short, so I transcribed it, corrections are welcome (it starts at 11:07).

\--

 _Meanwhile, in the course of this "Terrorist Generation" campaign, for Obama
to claim, "you know, I'm really worried about terrorists, so I have to to read
-- well, they claim they don't read it -- I have to get information about your
email, where you are, who you're talking to, what you have on Facebook; I've
gotta put that on my big database"... actually, we're moving into a world
which was described, pretty accurately I think, by one of the founders of
Google... I don't know if you followed the stories about Google Glass?

Well, Google has some new, ridiculous thing, they're marketing glasses which
have a small computer on them. So you can be on the internet 24 hours a day,
just what you want. It's a way of destroying people, but quite apart from
that, this little device has a camera, and presumably, if it doesn't already
it will soon have a recorder, which means that everything that's going on
around you, goes up on the internet.

Some reporter asked Erich Schmidt, didn't he think this was an invasion of
privacy, and his answer was exactly right, comes right out of the Obama
administration, he said: "If you're doing anything that you don't want to be
on the internet, you shouldn't be doing it." This is a dream that Orwell
couldn't have concocted.

We're moving into it, and it's not the only case. If you read the technical
journals, there's more stuff coming along. So, for example, right now there
are corporations that are concerned about using computers with components made
in China, because it's technically possible to build into the hardware devices
which will record what the computer is doing and send it to those bad guys.
well, the articles don't point out that if the Chinese can do it, we can do it
better, and probably are, so it may end up in Obama's database the next time
you hit the computer._

\--

I guess you can scoff about the notion that computer would (need to) have a
"recorder", or point out that Glass doesn't record without the user's say so,
but still.. considering his age and that it's not his field, that guy is
paying more attention to things than many of those geeking out about them. And
that Schmidt quote is a smug, idiotic statement; a threat, or should I say, a
dare. If he wanted to make a difference and be remembered well, other choices
would have been more appropriate for him. Oh well.

