One wonders if Glenn's persistence in reporting this issue is due to being targeted by NSA contractors like Palantir, regarding Palantir's work against US activists. A "Spotlight" as the email says: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2LJZSZknE-I/TVpg4sNeUHI/AAAAAAAAC6... Via street nigga's thread.
Exactly what is Palantir --- specifically Palantir, not nutball HBGaryFederal head Aaron Barr --- accused of doing unlawfully or unethically in this "dalliance"? Collecting public information for law firms isn't unethical.
Having one of your 27-year-old SEs eagerly working alongside Barr to move a deal forward has bad optics. But believing that Glenn Greenwald should be thwarted is an opinion that, while obviously objectionable on HN, not actually unethical.
Could you explain exactly how Palantir is accused of attempting to unethically damage Glenn Greenwald's career? In more detail than "one of their SEs was in an email thread with Aaron Barr"? Because what you just wrote is a straw-man version of my comment.
"believing that Glenn Greenwald should be thwarted is an opinion that, while obviously objectionable on HN, not actually unethical."
Are you trying to say that an employee for NSA contractor Palantir discussing targeting a journalist because of his work on a topic is separate from the employee's beliefs, therefore is not actually unethical?
How exactly did the journalist, or his career get brought up in a conversation between federal contractors about solicitation for work again? Was it to talk about of the reports they liked from him?
Here is a reason one might ethically believe Greenwald should be thwarted: because they believe that Greenwald is deeply dishonest, making up details about stories in order to fill in the gaps of his narrative and reporting them as if they were facts, so that half the Internet now believes that Google, the one big Internet company known to have actually invested real resources in opposing dragnet surveillance, is instead in league with the NSA, and instead of using Google Mail we should all support incompetent kooks like Ladar Levison.
Now, some important caveats:
(1) It is obviously possible to unethically thwart any writer's agenda. Publishing things you know to be untrue, even in the service of what you believe is a higher truth, is unethical; it's exactly what someone might accuse Greenwald of having done. For that matter, invading Greenwald's privacy by, I don't know, stealing his bank records would also be deeply unethical. But Palantir hasn't been accused of either of these, or, for that matter, anything else unethical w/r/t Greenwald. Feel free to enlighten me here.
(2) If you can't tell, I'm not a major Greenwald fan. Having said that, I also believe the best antidote for bad speech is good speech, so orchestrating a campaign to suppress him doesn't seem like a good strategy to me. It apparently sounded like a good idea to one of Palantir's SEs, which ended up getting the guy fired.
While many misinterpret the the facts, there's a kernel of truth in those discussions that you gloss over.
GMail is not secure against the NSA or even a state judge's warrant. That has numerous advantages for society but regardless it's not and never will be secure against government orders. That's never been its design. Levinson's service was secure against them for certain clients.
The reason the anti-NSA crowd is intrigued by him is the same reason sources told their secrets to Bob Woodward. He proved willing to protect Deep Throat's identity despite immense effort to out it. Similarly Levinson was willing to risk his business and contempt proceedings to protect Snowden.
Am I reading this comment correctly? Is this a comment that argues that Lavabit, which "encrypted" mails serverside and didn't even have forward secrecy enabled in its TLS configuration, was more secure than Google Mail?
The government's wiretap order and the subsequent contempt proceedings suggests that despite the technical problems of Lavabit, the government did not get the data they sought. Had Snowden used GMail, do you believe the government would have received the information they sought?
This isn't security in the sense you'd use it in an audit. It's just a design decision. In the vernacular, designs that permit the release of private information are sometimes called insecure.
Lavabit was just as susceptible to a state warrant though. That's why Levison had to shut it down (despite having no objection with complying with other warrants previously).
Here is a reason one might ethically believe Greenwald should be thwarted: because they believe that Greenwald is deeply dishonest, making up details about stories in order to fill in the gaps of his narrative and reporting them as if they were facts
Weren't the people trying to (order people to) thwart him in the best position to know whether details were actually made up?
You seem to think the US warrant process hasn't been made subservient to enabling dragnet surveillance.
Unless a service enables you to put your data really truly out of reach of any demand for it, those NSA slides about which companies are part of the Prism program are probably an accurate list of companies enabling dragnet surveillance.
I'm not much of a fan of "X probably didn't do Y because I cannot guess what would be to gain."
There has been no word from Gox that their social account has been compromised so the clearest conclusion to guess is that they wiped their timeline. Why? That doesn't exactly matter before establishing who and right now the who seems to be Gox.
Who is our allies? Who are our enemies? Do we spy on them equally?
Is the information yielded from spying only used for valid national concerns?
The answer is of course you cannot see why you should care, since any duplicity is hidden behind the cloak of good ole patriotic national security there is nothing for you to see. Continue on brave blind soldier.
We should spy on all foreign states equally. We should be actively performing industrial and national-security espionage against foreign companies.
Please define what you consider a valid national concern.
All of this said - I am wholly opposed to any and all domestic spying without proper legal and constitutional authorization. Further, information learned about America citizens through foreign espionage must never be used and should be destroyed as soon as it is discovered.
Good luck taking on the U.S. military, which, even if you could defeat via some joint coalition involving the EU, China and Russia - the economic fallout from such a war would probably be globally devastating - much worse than whatever damage the US inflicts by blatantly spying on foreign entities.
I think it is up to you to define valid national concern. Since you are OK with it the onus for explaining how policy is carried out in action and why it is OK is with you.
As far as I can tell many resources both human and otherwise have been expended by the US govt to solidify US corporate grounding. Many of those corporations seek to maximize profit and revenues by offshoring labor and finances. I do not accept this byproduct of excessive lobbying as valid national concerns.
If the nation's sovereignty is a conduit for corporate profits, and immense personal profits by the few monied enough to lobby state actors, then the nation is not very sovereign at all.
I essentially did in the first sentence of my original reply - any foreign affair that could potentially involve our defense or economy is a valid national concern and therefore should be the reason we perform significant foreign espionage.
I do not follow where you are going with the lobbying/off-shoring concern? I do not have a position at this time, one way or another on the idea of whether a nation controlled by corporate-interests is sovereign or not... I could see arguments for both - I will say such a system is not democratic however - and I strongly opposed to non-representative forms of government.
Sorry but infrastructural parts of fracking count as fracking. It's not like people are complaining solely about injection or leaking. Or the constant convoys of diesel vehicles, the expansive works they drive to and from.
In this case one tower is highlighted, but the process the tower is involved in is... Fracking.
Would it be different if it was a municipal water tower? Yes, since the man's job is to promote drilling and pumping hydrocarbons, not piping municipal water supplies. Of course it would be different.
That's some fairly tortured logic. Legally it has no bearing.
If the lawsuit was judged with your standards, a CEO of a water utility would be a hypocrite for opposing the same water tower being built "for municipal use" next to his ranch.
To dig deeper, do you question the motives of the other parties to the lawsuit - his ranching neighbors and other members of the community? Are they washed with your brush of perceived "hypocrisy" because they happen to live next to the CEO of Exxon?
Yes, the CEO of a water utility would be a hypocrite for opposing the development of a water tower next to eir ranch. Presumably the CEO of a water utility would understand that water towers are a useful part of municipal water distribution (though they have been largely replaced by pumps these days) and would have been involved in the selection of a location as part of his role in the utility.
On the other hand, a water utility CEO who didn't want that water tower near eir place for aesthetic reasons might ensure that there are multiple sites proposed, then start campaigning on environmental grounds to prevent the necessary roads being bulldozed to the site(s) where E doesn't want the tower: the NIMBY situation can be expressed in terms that everyone else with agree with ("there's a rare butterfly which only breeds in this area. Disrupting the environment would be awful!").
And that's what's happening here: "I don't want a fracking project messing up my backyard, so I'll protest against the stuff required to make that project viable."
The CEO is fully aware of the infrastructure requirements of the project, and if E wasn't concerned about the environmental impacts would otherwise have been proud to have a project nearby because it's a visible sign that the USA is taking responsibility for its own fuel supplies.
That is effectively what I was attempting to highlight. No minds read.
On the topic of tortured logic, I would love to know why you don't think the lawsuit[0] is about fracking when it involves water and the infrastructure that supplies it for those activities.
This lawsuit is about repeated assurances to the MANY plantiffs that the only plans for the property were for "low rise" (below the tree line) water tanks and the company later deciding to violate existing zoning regulations and seek to built the 160 ft water tank.
Your bias on this issue is only exceeded by your laziness.
And if you would direct your attention to the man's profession, you can see where people's idea of hypocrisy stems from. Thanks for calling me lazy, easy out that is.
You seem to be reaching to put the man on level ground with his peers. He is the CEO of a company that is partially responsible for many such installations sprouting up near other peoples regular homes. The man is complaining about his luxury mansion depreciating in value because of development.
He should listen to Exxon and other energy company lawyers and move away from progress if he doesn't like the smell or sight of it.
I am a lazy troll according to you. I earned this by referencing the free market principles that define the Exxon CEO's home as being in the path of progress. If he doesn't want his 'luxury' (according to court doc) home value to decline he wouldn't build it around natural resources the likes of which he aims to profit personally from to buy things like 'luxury' housing.
This is a situation many have to deal with yet are not news-worthy because they are not personally profiting of the types of ventures that they raise lawsuits over.
You can call me a troll for pointing that out as that is your right but you cannot accuse me of altering my comments to askew context, because that is rubbish.
I'm calling you a troll for re-writing your comments without even noting the "edit" -- 4 hours later in a lame attempt to refine your propaganda. This isn't Reddit.
What propaganda? You are the one that started this thread propagandizing your position that the man was not a hypocrite regardless of him being an energy company CEO and the case was not about fracking since it involves a company that just happens to provide services for fracking.
As others have pointed out, the CEO is a hypocrite for wanting to hinder the health of his local economy since he is in a position that directly profits off such ventures. That his luxury home wouldn't be if not for the eminent domain of infrastructural energy works next to residents across the globe. Residents who don't have the money or time to fight his and his company's legion of lawyers.
The heinous act of editing comments to be more grammatically correct or readable is worthy of this type of reaction from you? Of course this isn't Reddit, no one referenced it aside from you. Try to engage the topic instead of pounding sand about unsubstantial edits.
So how do state secrets privileges introduce anonymous evidence? Maybe at this point it would be helpful for us to have a specific case to refer to. Could you point us to one?
