The Glade 4.0

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

++ ungood.

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Holy shitsnacks!

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"Situational awareness"? "Common operating picture"? What does any of this mean?

Also:

This statement is baffling in multiple dimensions. It makes about as much sense as: "The ATF launched the Office of Horse Inspection to assist its efforts in tightening banking regulations." I literally don't understand how the **** any of the things mentioned in this sentence are supposed to relate to one another.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

So, the government is going to read what people put into the public domain ... right?

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In time, this too shall pass.

That would depend on what mean by "public domain". All of the systems mentioned are publicly accessible, but almost all of them are privately owned and operated, and many (if not most) are even transmitted over privately owned and operated media. That is, the public might "own" the airwaves, but it doesn't own any significant portion of the circuits and routing hardware that comprise the internet.

Systems like the Glade are analogous to a private restaurant or store. They are open to the public, and that includes members of the government acting in their official capacity, but they are not "public domain". As with a restaurant or retail establishment, you shouldn't go into them with the same expectation of privacy that you have in your own home. And given the relative ease with which information can be collected over the internet in contrast to physical establishments, you should certainly give that point even more consideration. As always, if you're doing or saying anything in a publicly accessible space that you wish to remain truly private, you are sabotaging your own privacy.

However, none of that makes it acceptable for the government -- or for that matter a private entity -- to indiscriminately surveil* such media. It is not acceptable for the same reasons that it wouldn't be acceptable for DHS to hire a bunch of people to stand around in restaurants nation-wide, recording everything that goes on and then demanding that the owners foot the bill for it on top of everything else. Because that's how it works with a web server. DHS hasn't made any efforts to make their surveillance activities identifiable. The owner of a website cannot even determine if their site is being used by DHS for this purpose, let alone refuse access to them if they object to this use of their own property. Moreover, if they are under surveillance, it is costing them money in the form of bandwidth. In this respect, it is quite different from the hypothetical. For the most part, it doesn't cost a store/restaurant/whatever owner anything for someone to just loiter around without actually buying anything.

These issues are precisely why legitimate search engines make a point of using unique, identifiable user agent strings and why, moreover, most of them honor the "robots.txt" system. They recognize that publicly reachable space is not the same thing as public space, and that collecting and disseminating information from such sites is not kosher without consent of the owner. Thus, they provide a means by which website owners/operators may identify their activity and refuse it.

* before someone ***** about it, yes, I know this is a neologism.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

"Situational awareness" is a buzzword than means exactly what it sounds like. It can mean anything from paying attention to what's going on around you, to the national strategic situation.

"Common operating picture" is a term from the military that means basically that all the various parts of a unit are communicating with each other. In other words, for example, the supply section is not simply keeping supply issues that affect the operations section to themselves; they are communicating with each other. The problem is that it went from simply being a term meaning everyone was on the same sheet of music to a buzzword for electronic battlefield management systems. Like many military terms, it has gained popularity within DHS which loves to selectively borrow ideas from the military without fully understanding them.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I suspected as much.

Yeah, I understand what "situational awareness" means (or was intended to mean) in a military context. You can have situational awareness about a skirmish or even about the uranium enrichment activities of Tehran. Those are ... you know ... specific situations about which one can be aware (or not). But when DHS uses that phrase, it just begs for someone to ask "what situation?" They seem to be referring to the situation of "human beings existing", which is just a wee bit broad, IMHO. Call me crazy.

On a side note, I wonder if DHS has a big database somewhere full of posts copied wholesale from twitter, fora, etc. I'd love to hear the copyright exemption justification for that.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Laws are for serfs, not lords.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Foot the bill for what, the square footage that's part of the restaurant?

I think it's not only acceptable, but commonplace. Unless you mean that YOU find it unacceptable, then I see where you're coming from, but your opinion is not obligating the government.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I'd like "Trolls" for $200, Alex.

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The government beleives if you pass on your info to a third party, it becomes up for grabs. That is how they cast their wide dragnet for banking info and other private information. They said if "you wanted to keep your banking activities private, don't use a bank..."

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This, with a side of "I didn't read the post", for $400.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I think you're an idiot if you think there's a problem with anyone (government or otherwise) reading what is being publicly distributed, that's probably why you think it's trolling.

Even blooming idiots know better...but this is the age of Facebook, where idiots think they can post crap about themselves and it won't bite them in the ***...so I guess you guys think because you're just doing what everyone else is doing, it should be OK...

Idiots. Get the meds checked.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I think there is a substantial difference between people freely reading what's in the public domain, or even hosted on web sites freely readable by the general public, and paid government agencies 'monitoring' journalists on the taxpayers dime.

If you don't see the difference, I'm not sure what to say other than.. well.. it's very sad.

I guess a beat cop sends you into some kind of emotional fit of sadness, then. He's actually PHYSICALLY watching!

Yes, people get paid by governments to watch for stuff happening. What's sad is your whining about it.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Alas, I fear there is no hope...

Sad AND afraid..

Yeah, get the meds checked.

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In time, this too shall pass.

That comparison makes no sense.

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The argument that having a witness to a disclosure intended for public consumption is somehow unacceptable if the witness is a government employee sqecifically employed as a witness is probably what's throwing it off for you.

I figured the imagery of someone physically present as a witness might trump someone virtually witnessing the disclosure. It might ... somehow ... be worse. Yeah, it's a stretch, but who knows? The paranoid might just react more strongly to seeing who's watching them than just knowing they're there.

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In time, this too shall pass.

The problem is there are so many laws banning so many things the average person commits several federal crimes per day. The main defense people have is the government needs probable cause to do anything to you about it, so anything that makes probable cause easier to acquire makes it easier for the government to lock up whoever they want.

The damage isn't done by the government if a DHS reads about someone breaking the law, it's done by the idiot committing the act then disclosing it.

There's no "right to not get caught", or "right to make a public statement, but the government shouldn't be allowed to use it against me". This isn't about government spying, and it's not about illegal search and seizure. it's about people being stupid, and being stupid should hurt.

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In time, this too shall pass.

The difference is between someone who happens to witness an act vs following specific people waiting for them to commit an act. A beat cop is not a good comparison; a detective tailing a suspect is a better one.

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No, the damage is done by creating myriad laws that are too difficult to follow, even for those that create them, and then enforcing the laws selectively.



Yup, with the ease of information gathering and storage today it would be like having a detective trailing everyone. Hmmm, where's that been tried before?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Publicly accessible material is not the same thing as publicly distributed material. A newspaper or, even moreso a television program, is publicly distributed. Its publishers not only makes the material accessible to a public, but actively distribute their material to the public. It's not merely a case of "if you're interested, you come to us and get our material", but of the publisher taking deliberate action to place their material, quite literally and physically, into public spaces -- i.e. news stands in public right-of-way.

Were the actions of the DHS restricted to such media, I might feel differently. At that point, it wouldn't be inappropriate so much as "mere" waste of time and taxpayer resources with no clear justification. For the most part, internet forums and social networking media do not fall into the same category.


No, I think it's trolling for exactly the reason that I implied: that you didn't read (or didn't comprehend) my post. I say this because your responses to it are complete non-sequiturs:



Me, in the post that you were supposedly responding to:


Hell, you clearly didn't even read the one sentence of mine that you quoted in your response (emphasis mine):




Really? Really?

You think it's commonplace for Department of Homeland Security personnel to stand around in restaurants, recording everything that transpires?


Hellfire is a place where people engage in debate in discussion. I expect people to have at least a 3rd-grade understanding of how to distinguish between fact and opinion. I am not about to signpost everything I say that carries an element of opinion for your or anyone else's supposed benefit -- and neither should anyone else unless they just personally feel like it. It's a complete waste of time. This is an obviously an editorial context. If you can discern fact from opinion without being told, then it serves no purpose for me to declare "THIS IS AN OPINION". And if you can't discern fact from opinion on your own, that's your problem.

I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt that you just somehow accidentally a few dozen words, but I don't think I can. I offered up an entirely civil and expository post in response to a specific question that hinged on the nature of "public domain". It wasn't argumentative. It wasn't even a rebuttal to anything that anyone had said thus far in the thread. And yet, here you come out of nowhere with a stream of name-calling, insult-laden, largely nonsense "arguments". You do this over and over again in Hellfire and over and over again, I make myself ignore it because, hey -- don't feed the trolls. But you know...

[/quote]
The joke is on you, because the further I get into my treatment plan -- which, by the way, extremely **** classy of you to drag my personal medical history into an argument again; you're a real class act and a wonderful person -- the less inclined I am to just bite my tongue and ignore people who are shitting up a communal resource with vitriol and drama. So maybe you should be careful what you wish for. What you're doing right here? Hellfire is a worse place because of it. You, yes you personally, are contributing to why people rightfully don't want to read and post here anymore.

And before you waste breath telling me, I'm well aware of just how little a **** you give about me, or my (or anyone else's) opinion of you or your behavior. The supreme irony is that this is precisely the problem. There's a word for that. There's a word for a persistent inability to: empathize with other people, care about how your actions affect them, and respect basic social or legal norms. That word is sociopathy. It's not a trait that you should be patting yourself on the back about. So maybe you stop worrying about how well my meds are being adjusted, and use the time saved to go have yours checked.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.