Friday, July 19, 2013

Personality v Issues: NSA, Big Brother, Racism, Syria


THE ABSURD TIMES







 



Illustration:  This is simply to emphasize how we have lost issues in the cult or fad of personality.  It is the Guy Fawkes Mask, referring to an incident known as the “gunpowder plot” I have talked about in more scholarly monographs decades ago.  It is only recently that it has become part of the popular culture. 



          It truly seems that Amerikans, at least, can only understand ideas when they are personalized.  Hence, in discussing the NSA and what it has been doing, people are immediately diverted to a discussion today of Edward Snowden, and to a much lesser extent, Glenn Greenwald. 



          Another example is race and racism in the U.S.  The so-called Zimmerman trial received so much bandwidth that equal treatment of the cases of the 700 African-Americans murdered in the streets of Chicago since the original incident is mathematically impossible.  



          If we can comprehend 700 humans dying in the months that have passed, it is doubtful that we can comprehend the 5,000 persons/month who are killed in Syria each month, mostly by people we support by default.  While we are at it, how many leaders, including Hillary Clinton, have said that Assad’s “days are numbered”?  Can anyone explain what that phrase actually means?  I suppose it means finite, but then so are everybody’s.  Perhaps it mean “limited,” but then the same applies.  Since Hillary and several others are no longer in office, is it remotely possible that it means days in office are limited?



          But that is beside the point other than to illustrate that the focus on the personality Snowden diverts attention from the real issue of what the NSA is doing, something that regular readers here know anyway.



          So, what has NSA collected and stored?  Everything electronic transmitted in any way, shape or form.  This includes phone calls, teletype messages, e-mails, web traffic, television and radio programs, both that you listen to and watch, as well as those you don’t, even license plate numbers and when and where they were seen.  In addition, any and everything seen by any satellite.  How is this possible?



          Well, let’s try to do a little thinking here.  A Terabyte on information can be stored on the equivalent of the blade of a Swiss army knife.  So, there you have it.  Well, I guess we have to go a bit deeper than that, but I promise to try to keep all figures in base 10, and avoid base 2, base 8, and base 16 (all of which are involved somehow). 



          Back when home computers started to be sold on the market, one Kilobyte could store about one page of typewritten 8x10” text (well, actually, 1.024 Kilobytes).  Kilo means thousand, as we all know, we all do know that, don’t we?  Ok, whew.  I thought we were completely lost there for a second.



          So, 100K would store about 100 pages.  (K, short for Kilobyte, or thousand.)  The next step up is Megabytes, which is one more than 999,999K, or nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine Kilobytes, or about one million pages.  (It is possible that we are off by a factor of a hundred here, but I don’t think so.)  It does mean about a million pages.  Maybe it would take a 100 Megabytes for a million pages, but at this point who cares?  How many people do you know that have read a million pages?  How many years would it take for a watch to tick off a million seconds?  I don’t know right now and I’m not about to figure it out.  I’m so used to relegating figures such as this to scientific notation (a million = 1x107) that this system puzzles me now.  However, I believe you divide by a thousand to get the number of pages.



          This is compounded by the techniques of compression that enable a file to be compressed to maybe a tenth of its original size requirements.  Audio?  Well, an hour can fit onto about 30 Megabytes.  Video requires a bit more.



          But now we move to the next level, the, ready now?, GIGABYTE.  That means about a billion bytes.  A billion billion and you get a terabyte.  You have to agree that this is quite a bit to fit on a surface of a Swiss army knife.  It may be most pages than in the entire Library of Congress, but at this point I’ve lost track.



          A bigger point is that they have a gigantic complex in Virginia full of these bytes and still they are building a far larger complex in Utah because the NEED THE ROOM!!!  At this point, even Scientific notation needs scientific notation to mark how much stuff they have. 



          Now, they tell us that they just use metadata, and “Who Put the Metadata in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?”   No, they have the whole thing, not just the metadata.  Fortunately, there are only about a million employees who have access to all this stuff so whatever you have produced is probably unnoticed. 



          Now, it is really such a big deal that Edward Snowden had an attractive female companion?



          We have one other issue, just for the hell of it.  Right now, even Congress is aware not only of this, but the truth we have been telling for a couple years now:  The so-called “rebels” in Syria are mainly religious maniacs.  The solution some offer?  Give arms to the “good” anti-Assad people and have them “kill” the bad anti-Assad people.  I really don’t know how long this nonsense is going to continue in the corporate press.  I would guess that we would extinguish human life on the planet before it stops, but it will stop.

   Since just about everyone hates Glenn Greenwald now, here is an interview with him on NSA, et al.



THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2013

Glenn Greenwald: Growing Backlash Against NSA Spying Shows Why U.S. Wants to Silence Edward Snowden

As Congress holds its second major public hearing on the National Security Agency’s bulk spying, we speak with Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first published whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations. The NSA admitted their analysis of phone records and online behavior far exceeded what it had previously disclosed. "The fact that you now see members of both political parties increasingly angry over the fact that they were misled and lied to by top-level Obama administration officials, that the laws that they enacted in the wake of 9/11 — as broad as they were — are being incredibly distorted by secret legal interpretations approved by secret courts, really indicates exactly that Snowden’s motives to come forward with these revelations, at the expense of his liberty and even his life, were valid and compelling," Greenwald says. "If you think about whistleblowing in terms of people who expose things the government is hiding that they shouldn’t be, in order to bring about reform, I think what you’re seeing is the fruits of classic whistleblowing."

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