you had oNE JOB STEVE

I don't know if Rubio is ignorant or just incompetent, but he's said a lot of wrong statements regarding mass surveillance, specifically the USA Freedom Act ending the government's bulk collection of phone records. The Daily Beast (inb4 muh bias) ran a good write-up recently that I've excerpted below, emphasis mine:

—

1) Rubio on the USA Freedom Act ending bulk collection of phone records:

“I know this, if God forbid there’s an attack tomorrow morning in another major U.S. city, the first question everyone is going to have is: Why didn’t we know about them, and how come we didn’t stop it? And the answer better not be: Because a tool we once had that could have allowed us to identify them is no longer available to us,” Rubio said Sunday on Fox.

The facts:

The government has had a great deal of trouble trying to rationalize this program. Simply put, its own oversight panels keep publishing reports that don't fit with the government's mass surveillance narrative, in regards to both its effectiveness and legality.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, author of the USA Freedom Act, had this to say, arguing that bulk collection is similar to looking for a needle in a haystack:

“People should understand that more isn’t always better,” said Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who championed the USA Freedom Act in the House of Representatives. “Drowning our intelligence agents in endless records means we miss the most important pieces. We have seen this again and again. Remember the Boston bombings, the Paris attacks, and even the San Bernardino attacks happened with bulk collection in place.”

—

2) Rubio:

Rubio said the USA Freedom Act “took away the right to collect metadata, which means that we can now not access the phone records of individuals that we either suspect of being involved in terrorism or who carry out an attack to see who they were coordinating or talking to.”

The facts:

The bill “did not take away the ‘right to collect metadata from terrorist suspects,’” Sensenbrenner told The Daily Beast. “It stopped the bulk collection of innocent Americans’ records and established an efficient process for obtaining records from suspects... USA FREEDOM simply requires the government to obtain a lawful order to access information from the phone companies.”

The USA Freedom Act also puts the onus of record keeping on telecommunications companies, eliminating the U.S. government's role in keeping a massive database of records.

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3) However, Rubio claimed that the telecoms were refusing to cooperate with the law:

Rubio said on Fox this week that there are a “large and significant number of companies that have already said, ‘We are either not going to collect records at all.’”

[citation needed]

Asked which companies this might be, neither the Rubio campaign nor his Senate office responded.

“I know of no phone company that says they are not going to collect phone records—under FCC rules, companies must keep billing information for 18 months,” said Neema Singh Guliani, a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. “In fact, in many cases, companies keep phone records for longer than two years. T-Mobile, for example, has said that they keep records for seven to 10 years.”

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4) Rubio also claimed that the USA Freedom Act gives the government only 2-3 years' worth of records

“You can only see them up to two years to three years,” Rubio said.

Maybe he should actually read the law:

“This is incorrect,” Guliani responded. The length of records would determine on how long the phone company was keeping records, he said: “The government would be able to obtain an order from the FISA court for any records that the phone company had related to the individuals that conducted the attack.”

Cato Institute policy analyst Patrick Eddington, who specializes in homeland security and civil liberties issues, added that “as the Director of National Intelligence noted in his testimony, anything over 18 months old is pretty much useless.”

or their programs in general

T4R

I'll write something up later.

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6785645/scott-weiland-stone-temple-pilots-dead

famous for being the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots and the supergroup Velvet Revolver


fuuuuuuck 2015

Very disturbing read from Reuters:

The scariest thing about Islamic State? Its kinder, gentler side. 
By Jacqueline Lopour | November 27, 2015

The attacks on Paris brought Islamic State’s brutality home to the Western world. Before last week, reports of the group’s atrocities were shocking but easier to dismiss, happening far beyond European borders. The world expressed outrage but largely stood by as the group pushed out recruitment propaganda depicting sex slavery and the brutal torture and murder of its captives. These incidents are horrific, but they overshadow a more insidious, long-term threat: Islamic State’s kinder, gentler side.

Thousands of peace-loving people live in Islamic State-occupied areas and are fed a steady stream of positive propaganda: Islamic State members feeding the poor, and hosting ice cream socials, carnivals, and tug-of-war contests. Islamic State is trying — and in some areas, succeeding — in winning hearts and minds. Left unchecked, its public support will grow, making the group more difficult to defeat in the long run and giving it the space it needs to conduct future attacks like those in Paris and Beirut.

Charlie Winter, of the counter-extremism think tank Quilliam, performed a month-long study of Islamic State propaganda. Winter discovered that — contrary to what we see in Western media — over half of Islamic State propaganda shows people going about everyday activities in a peaceful and normal manner.

In many ways, the group serves as a functioning government in the areas it controls, offering services once provided by the Syrian and Iraqi regimes. It collects taxes, picks up trash, runs schools, issues marriage licenses, provides security, and even employs former government bureaucrats to make sure everything runs smoothly. In Syria’s Deir ez-Zor province, Islamic State has issued regulations to protect natural resources and the environment, suggesting that the group is settled in for the long run. Some Syrian citizens under Islamic State control claim that the group’s efforts have helped return some sense of normalcy to their lives, a welcome reprieve from the grueling civil war.

One resident of an Islamic State-controlled city told Time magazine that he originally opposed Islamic State, but changed his mind after it paid for his brother’s wedding, provided him with fuel, and helped fix his neighbour’s house. Islamic State also carefully controls what those under its control can read and hear: outside media and anti-Islamic State messages are forbidden. This is terrifying. Given enough time, this captive audience could eventually determine that Islamic State’s harsh system of rule is worth the veneer of peace and normality, and grow to support the group. This is classic Stockholm Syndrome, but on a much wider and far more devastating scale.

There is precedent for such a transformation. In the 1990s, the Taliban gained considerable public support by establishing law and order in a chaotic Afghanistan. Groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah used charitable acts and social welfare programs to transform themselves from violent fringe groups into political entities with support from wide swaths of the population. Both groups have devoted significant time and resources to social welfare wings, which support schools, libraries, medical clinics, orphanages, food aid, and sports leagues. By 2006, Hamas had enough support to win a decisive victory in Palestine’s parliamentary election. By 2008, Hezbollah had gained control of over a third of Lebanon’s cabinet seats.

It is frightening to imagine that Islamic State could eventually follow this trajectory. Although Islamic State rejects democracy, if it continues to rally public support through works of charity and governance, it could become entrenched in society and be that much harder to defeat. Even the group’s draconian treatment of women may not be enough to stymie public support. For example, women in Afghanistan once enjoyed considerably more freedom than they do today — they wore modern clothes, attended university, and worked in professional settings. The Taliban put a stop to this, but much of the public was willing to see women’s rights decreased in exchange for less violence. History is poised to repeat itself in Syria.

The international coalition against Islamic State invests significant resources to counter the group’s negative propaganda, but not enough attention is paid to debunking the group’s positive messages. Now is the time to address this problem. In just a couple of years, it may be too late.

All in favor say aye

Aye

All of them get an equal amount of prep time. Who wins?

whoever posts last when the mods lock this gets to be ninja

without LC

How would you describe your sexual orientation?

The next debates will air on FOX Business Network TONIGHT. 

babby table @7pm EST

grown-up table @9pm EST

Where to stream:
http://www.foxbusiness.com/live-coverage/fox-business-network-wall-street-journal-gop-debates?intcmp=whatshot

thanks to Thunder for the link and babby debate time, I've been asleep all afternoon so didn't do this stuff myself >.>

Previous post:

Even if that game is otherwise GOTY material in terms of everything else.

What's the rationale behind this (silly) thinking?

The proposal specifically asks for EU member countries to grant Edward Snowden asylum, and to resist attempts at his extradition.

blah blah blah HuffPo--suck it

sauce

Ryan Grenoble News Editor, The Huffington Post   
Posted: 10/29/2015 11:58 AM EDT         

EU Parliament Votes To Drop Charges Against Snowden

They also encouraged members to block his extradition "in recognition of his status as a whistleblower and human rights defender."
 
A big win for Edward Snowden came with the narrowest of margins. By a vote of 285 to 281, Members of European Parliament (MEP) passed a resolution Thursday calling for EU member states to drop criminal charges against the former NSA contractor and protect him from extradition.

In June of this year, the White House rejected the idea of dropping charges filed against Snowden under the Espionage Act. The former CIA contractor fled the U.S. in 2013 and resides in Moscow.

“The fact is that Mr Snowden committed very serious crimes, and the U.S. government and the Department of Justice believe that he should face them,” Obama administration spokesman Josh Earnest told the Guardian at the time. “That’s why we believe that Mr Snowden should return to the United States, where he will face due process and have the opportunity to make that case in a court of law.”

Snowden faces the possibility of extradition to the U.S. should he enter any of the EU’s 28 member countries. At the time of his departure, Snowden applied for -- and was denied -- asylum in Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. The FBI pursued him relentlessly, even notifying Scandinavian countries in advance of their intent to extradite him should he leave Moscow via a connecting flight through any of their countries.

The EU proposition specifically asks countries to "drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender."

Snowden called the vote a "game-changer" on Twitter, adding, "This is not a blow against the US Government, but an open hand extended by friends. It is a chance to move forward."

Reminder that neither of the White House's review panels were able to justify mass surveillance in its current state. The WH is ignoring its own evidence.

behold the japanese spider crab

You cannot.