I always liked Fellowship the best.

JAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJA

Akavir or bust

More data =  more precision. It was an automated, autonomous process that benefited from larger pools of data.

That's the narrative, but I've yet to see any evidence supporting it.

France had an elaborate surveillance apparatus that was expanded after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Almost a year later, larger attacks rocked Paris, and yet intelligence was just as clueless despite their (allegedly) enhanced capabilities.

Just as clueless as the US was about the Boston Marathon bombings.

Just as clueless as the US was about the San Bernardino shootings.

And the Planned Parenthood shooting.

And so on and so forth.

The Boston Marathon attacks are especially damning because the government did have intelligence to suspect the Tsarnaevs were up to something, but the brothers got lost in the flood of information. Finger-pointing ensued between governments. It's a bad day when the FSB looks better than the NSA.

RC would be Darth Death Sticks

Nope, PCLOB only addressed the concern of the public about the government having access to records, nothing about the legality or efficacy. The directors of the NSA, FBI, NI, CIA, and heads of the military branches have testified to the effectiveness of metadata in identifying and killing terrorists.

The program's lack of effectiveness and its questionable legality were the board's primary reasons for ending the metadata collection program. From the report itself:

...[the metadata dragnet] lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value... As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program.

Keep in mind, the board had access to those agencies' own classified documents in reaching its conclusion. Another report found the same lack of effectiveness. The particular claim that mass surveillance has thwarted around 50 potential terror attacks remains completely unsubstantiated to this day.

So...just like it was before the metadata collection. Yes, the Freedom Act took away the government's ability to collect metadata; now they have to go through telecom companies, who have no obligation to store any metadata. Metadata analysis is what was used to determine a link to terrorists, provide evidence to the FISA court for a warrant, and subsequently gain access to more tools like wiretaps. Now with the onus being on the government to provide proof before even having access to the metadata (which was anonymous and autonomously analyzed), it's barely effective. It's like asking cops to write speeding tickets without a radar gun.

But as has already been stated in the article, zero telecoms have refused to cooperate so far. No such 'compliance' problem exists.

More importantly, the term 'anonymized' is a load of bollocks. It's a weasle word at best. If anonymized metadata was truly as innocuous as it sounds, there would be no reason to collect it in the first place.

The bulk metadata collection wasn't effective in the first place, anyway. There was way too much of it to be of any practical use.

Not even going to bother quoting the rest of the rebuttal. Of course telecom companies will hold billing data for a few years; billing data is not at all equivalent to the metadata needed to identify terrorist suspects. Unless these companies are going to hold call data, they're not collecting records. Rubio is correct.

But again, no such problem actually exists. They're all cooperating. It's making a big deal out of nothing.

There's no source, so we have no idea what Rubio is even referring to here.

3/10 article

Presumably from Fox News, but I'm having trouble finding a source. Here's something close enough.

Quote from: Cup-O on December 16, 2015, 03:29:33 PM

Quote from: Desty on December 16, 2015, 03:28:39 PM

Quote from: Cup-O on December 16, 2015, 03:23:38 PM

Quote from: Desty on December 16, 2015, 03:22:03 PM

Having a symmetrical face, red lips, the right skin tone all matters, because they're a sign of good health

faces really aren't that symmetrical though
some people naturally don't have red lips
skin tone doesn't even matter really

Just don't type anything at all if you don't wanna spend effort.

calm your tits

umad bro?

stop

Having a symmetrical face, red lips, the right skin tone all matters, because they're a sign of good health

faces really aren't that symmetrical though
some people naturally don't have red lips
skin tone doesn't even matter really

just think of it this way

smart humans wouldn't exist if stupid humans didn't exist, either

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.

—

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.”

—

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.”

(fuck clone wars).

but the first Clone Wars animated series provides some much needed coherency and character development lacking from the prequel trilogy

Quote from: Cup-O on December 15, 2015, 11:37:00 PM

what

Rubber dinghy rapids, bro

no i meant the towers

what

i think everyone wins in that scenario