I was about to say, I don’t want that empty-headed twit anywhere near me on the freeway. God has a very bad record when it comes to protecting his devotees.
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The neat thing about writing for the NSA is that you never actually have to submit your articles.
They already know what you have written.
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Socrates’s initial column explains how he was originally opposed to mass surveillance, until he failed a polygraph test
And that’s where my brain short-circuited.
- WTF, polygraphs? Everyone know that psychics are more effective.
- Opposing mass surveillance until failing a polygraph? I have never heard of this type of logic fallacy before. What is it called? ‘If you can;t out-reason them, confuse them?’
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In response to item number two, I believe the quote popularly attributed to W. C. Fields is appropriate:
"If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”
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Yeah, it’s been challenged, and upheld. The rationale is that, “because the applicants sought positions of public trust, the agencies have the right to inquire about the backgrounds of their agents.” Which sounds really important on the surface, that argument breaks down when you realize that nobody in positions of authority is getting polygraphed. Polygraph the judge who ruled on the case and see how he feels. Or anyone who wants to run for elected office. Those are the people who are most able to corrupt justice and/or democracy. Let’s see how long polygraphs last then.
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I disagree; that has all the hallmarks of an excuse for the newspapers or the TLAs. “It’s your fault, if we were able to carry out a brute force attack on your password then you have no expectation of privacy.” “Bad information hygiene” - so how was an ordinary person supposed to know, say, that the HTC implementation of fingerprint passwords had a hole the size of the Grand Canyon? Not all of us have time to spend keeping up with this stuff.
(Incidentally, today the Daily Mail, the UK tabloid that spends its time printing stuff which seems intended to cause its readers to go out and attack foreigners, single mothers and Muslims, was complaining today all over its front page because the police won’t give them confidential information any more. Anybody who thinks that people do not deserve privacy as a right should look at the ghastly British tabloid press and see how strong is its desire to invade privacy to get sensational stories - and realise how strong are the forces ranged against the individual.)
Yet it is entirely consistent with ‘Socrates’ wishes - after all, he wanted total transparency into his life, per his own words:
If people knew a few things about me, I might seem suspicious. But if people knew everything about me, they’d see they had nothing to fear.
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Well, the guy in question is about to get the taste how it feels to be a bit too well known to subjects he does not have trust in. Maybe it gives him another epiphany.
But if he changes the opinions, he will lose the column. You rarely get away with writing against the agency’s core principles.
Isn’t biometrics suspect by default?
Also, if it is too new it is prone to be buggy.
To people like us, yes. We are a very small subset of the population.
I wrote “ordinary person”. Now look at all the product blogs commenting on everything about fingerprint recognition other than “is it secure”. The average techno-journalist doesn’t get it. CIOs have been persuaded to buy laptops with fingerprint recognition. How do expect Joe in Walmart to get it?
By bad information hygeine I meant something more along the lines of using the same username in forums that you have as a Facebook URL, as you have connected to your Gmail account etc. So that if someone wanted to figure out your identity from one place, all they’d have to do is Google your username.
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That’s a feature, not a bug.
"Socrates’s initial column explains how he was originally opposed to mass surveillance, until he failed a polygraph test because the person administering it didn’t have enough data on his personal life, and thus couldn’t understand his answers. " Well folks, we’d better set up police camps so we can understand why these dowsers keep not finding explosive devices after the rods were sold to the TSA… Educated persons can be such morons sometimes outside of their field of expertise.
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