Carly Fiorina boasts: I sold the NSA its mass-surveillance servers

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Fiorana has proposed an increase in military spending as part of her platform: an additional $500B over the next decade.

I wonder what a world looks like where $450B goes to agencies like NOAA and NASA and $50B goes into the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Wasn’t going to vote for Fiorina anyway (probably wouldn’t even get a chance in reality), but it sure is nice of her to step right up and tell us that she’s not on the side of the people!

That’s another one down…

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So now we have a bona fide and confessed traitor running for president. Lovely.

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If NASA and the National Endowment for the Arts teamed up we could have nightly movie screenings projected on the face of the moon. As an added bonus, we’d all get to have a laugh knowing that people south of the equator would be forced to watch it upside down.

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“I felt it was my duty to help, and so we did,” Fiorina said. “They were ramping up a whole set of programs and needed a lot of data crunching capability to try and monitor a whole set of threats… What I knew at the time was our nation had been attacked.”

i.e., “I am a reactionary nationalist.”

This crop of candidates is an ostentation of bad ideas and poor character.

They’re standing out in my mind as peculiarly bad even in light of the party’s recent heritage; past GOP candidates were at times predatorily folksy, racist, xenophobic, nationalist, militarist, etc, but this cycle it seems like they’ve pulled out all the stops.

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A confessed traitor and pathological liar.

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I hope all the “From my cold dead hand” crowd know that the Republicans are making an extra special effort to make sure they are all neatly catalogued in a NSA database.

Simultaneously yelling “Freedom” and “Control” and expecting you to mentally juggle the contradictions.

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Fiorina … promptly redirected truckloads of HP servers that had been destined for retail stores into the custody of federal officials who took them to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.

Something is really fishy about this. Large scale operations don’t typically use hardware that’s ready for retail, because it is very inefficient. They either use custom rack-mounted cases for density and ease-of-maintenance, or they used stripped-down retail stuff … and by stripped down, I mean without a case, no keyboard, no mouse, no CD player.

The only thing I can think of is that these either weren’t retail-ready, or she sold the parts at a deep loss. The second sounds more feasible given the horrible metrics she uses to measure success (“lose a little on each unit but make it up in volume”)

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She might mean business retail rather than public retail. Could have been hardware destined to a data center.

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Good point, thanks. I don’t know of any retail store that sells rack-mounted servers, so I assumed the word “server” meant a high-end computer rather than rack-ready.

The original story only mentions one tractor-trailer, so the overall effect (for the NSA or HP) is pretty small:

Deitz recalls that a tractor-trailer full of HP servers and other equipment was on the Washington, D.C. Beltway, en route to retailers, at the very moment Hayden called. Fiorina instructed her team to postpone the retailer delivery and have the driver stop. An NSA police car met up with the tractor-trailer and the truck proceeded, with an armed escort, to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

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Did you have to cite the Daily Mail? They “rewrote” a store from Wired

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Fixed that for you (from the GOP point of view).

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People who support authoritarianism never think it will be applied to them. They always think it will only be used to control people they don’t like. Dangerous, other people.

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The US (not the world) would look just like inside the head of every one the GOP presidential runners: devoid of retrospection, creativity, humor, and empathy. They’re obsessed with bowing to the MIC (and the profits they earn), end of conversation. We’re already getting a look at our nation where law enforcement has become drunk with the cast offs of the military from our many illegal wars, rivers are being filled with chemicals, prisons are privatized (hence the incentive to arrest more people including children)…I could go on and on. The Arts? It is to laugh.

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I only read it for the pictures, I swear! Never the articles!

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Remember when the Republicans used to be against anything that appeared to be communistic? Good times.

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The most interesting thing to me about ALL Repubs is that they will say outrageous things like this and have no clue how repulsive they come off, even (i’m guessing) to their own potential voting base - just keep talkin’ folks!

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Carly Fiorina has also said recently that she thinks waterboarding is fine. That would have scratched her off my list if she’d ever been on it. Her positions were not only not moral, they were not even honest.

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Maybe the NSA paid HP do build something entirely bespoke. Lots of engineering companies do that.