Affirmative action literally requires quotas to implement.
In India they’re more explicitly called out as ‘reservations’, in the US they are based on statistical models of the population.
Once your company gets above a certain size, or if it does business with the gov’t it is required to comply or you’ll get the Department of Labor on your butt and get sued using the evidence that the composition of your employees doesn’t match the model - so you are defacto illegally discriminating. It hit Google pretty hard.
Oh boy, wait until you read [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn], where the Supreme Court ruled that growing food for your own use, on your own land falls within the boundaries of the interstate commerce clause, and hence can be regulated by the Federal gov’t.
> Why do you think he got hunted to the ends of the earth?
Because of what the guys at the top were doing.
If it had just been the LOVEINT stuff, I think the NSA would've said "oh, right, yes that's not meant to happen, few bad apples, nothing to see here".
But showing a large systemic attitude, lying to congress… and specifically that America works with foreign partners to circumvent constitutional rights everywhere, that will have upset the people in charge.
Plus getting most big tech to use E2E encryption for chat so wiretapping their servers stopped being useful.
That, and also because they can. Hell, extrajudicially destroying people for threatening the system is basically the entire reason for the national security apparatus.
Big corp doesn’t get to do that (generally), hence actually having to (eventually) stop it.
> extrajudicially destroying people for threatening the system is basically the entire reason for the national security apparatus.
This is a great take . . . if you're a liberal arts major in undergrad. It is literally sophomoric. Abuses in the intelligence community do not obviate the legitimate reasons why the government collects intelligence.
So you’re saying the folks responsible for ruining Snowden and others… saw consequences? COINTELPRO and MKULTRA resulted in… people getting prosecuted?
Obviating or not, when the abuses see no real consequences, at what point do you say the abuses are just… part of the story too?
Frankly, saying otherwise is the Sophomoric take, isn’t it?
Those would be excellent examples of "Abuses in the intelligence community"
Even though I strongly dislike the abuses I learn of in the intelligence community, I don't see how these abuses "obviate the legitimate reasons why the government collects intelligence", nor do I see how you could go from that to the much stronger claim "extrajudicially destroying people for threatening the system is basically the entire reason for the national security apparatus."
Do they extrajudicially destroy people for threatening the system? I have every reason to assume so. Is that the "entire reason" for them? No. Each agency in each nation also has the completely lawful purpose of protecting their own citizens from the agencies of other nations.
The FSB, if they are acting against the US, is certainly not acting lawfully in the US. Just like if the CIA is not operating lawfully against, say, the FSB in Russia.
Literally the entire point of a foreign intelligence service is to operate outside the rules, or they wouldn’t be secret agencies. The ‘secret’ part is there, so they can do what they want without getting in trouble. Otherwise they’d be like NASA and publish everything they do.
And people operating on behalf of those agencies are of course people - who will be targetted, and if found, destroyed by competing agencies. That is literally their job. And it’s done extrajudically, because they are targetting people outside of their home country in most cases, hence no applicable judiciary. The CIA isn’t going to take anyone to court, because there is nowhere they are allowed to operate legally (per US standards) which wouldn’t want to throw them in jail for existing (by foreign standards). Hence extra-judicial.
And if you think, once they become accustomed to operating outside the rules, and have extensive mechanisms for maintaining secrecy, and finding and then destroying ‘enemies’, they will be ‘scouts honor’ following the rules in their home country, then that just isn’t how this clearly all works. As shown by numerous examples, a few I linked to earlier. And when those examples are found, nothing bad happens to those agencies, near as I can tell.
And ‘a threat to the system’ is called a threat to National Security. What else do you think it means?
Ethics aren't objective anyway, so it's not useful to rely on them. The US prides itself on being a melting pot full of diverse entrepreneurs. Diversity means different sets of ethics, sometimes varying greatly. I'm hopeful the US can get to a place where we expect everyone to agree on ethics and only reward those that operate with american ethics in mind. Which interestingly enough, I find the ethics that america loves to espouse with their words, more often reflects the enacted ethics of many immigrants when compared to the people who have many generations in this country.
This is also a fundamental property - if you can save time in some code/execution paths, but not in others (which is a very desirable attribute in most algorithms!), and that algorithm is doing something where knowing if it was able to go faster or slower has security implications (most any crypto algorithm, unless very carefully designed), then this is just the way it is - and has to be.
The way this has been trending is that in modern systems, we try to move as much of the ‘critical’ security information processing to known-slower-but-secure processing units.
But, for servers, in virtualized environments, or when someone hasn’t done the work to make that doable - we have these attacks.
Of course. But until enough people feel the pain to actually fight back (and not in the courts, but you know - violently, so there are actual consequences), it’s clearly suicide to do anything else, yes?
> "But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait."
> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty." [...]
> "You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
-- They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (published 1955)
The issue is the people having to make the decision can only recognize it in retrospect - it’s why it works.
And there has been so much BS in corporate and academic circles the last 5-10 years, anyone willing to put up a fight for ‘the right thing’ likely got shown the door years ago.
My point is that it’s saying ‘hey maybe the house is at risk of a fire’ because they smell smoke - in the middle
of the house burning down around them.
Why do you think Trump fired almost everyone at the national security council already?
I can’t remember the exact, pithy phrasing - but there’s a sentiment expressed sometimes in activist work that I find helpful: “We wish you were with us before, but we are so happy you’re here now - there’s much work to do.”
A meditation, perhaps - shared because you will likely encounter this situation often over the coming years and maybe it will help you as it helped me.
Analogies are weak. We should discuss and express concern for everything that happens, and not give up part way through and cease highlighting/flagging anything at all, simply because of repetition, or the vague emotion of "you should have known already". The parent did know. Everybody did know. It's irrelevant to the specific topic.
I.e. the genre of negative response you've given is distracting, accomplishes nothing helpful, and, sadly, is very common.
In India they’re more explicitly called out as ‘reservations’, in the US they are based on statistical models of the population.
Once your company gets above a certain size, or if it does business with the gov’t it is required to comply or you’ll get the Department of Labor on your butt and get sued using the evidence that the composition of your employees doesn’t match the model - so you are defacto illegally discriminating. It hit Google pretty hard.
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