No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

I think this sort of system is perfect for implementation by the NSA.

The way I analogize it is if a researcher (under the appropriate waiver of authorization by an IRB, of course) wants to look for patients with XYZ diseases in a particular database owned by a HIPAA covered entity. The database query goes through ALL of the medical records, but only pulls out the patients with XYZ disease for the researcher's review.

The savvy IRB coordinator makes sure that the waiver of authorization covers ALL of the patients in the database, not just the patients in the database with XYZ disease in the database, even though researcher never saw the medical records that weren't hits, because the protected health information was technically used for the researcher's purpose and not for Treatment, Payment or Healthcare Operations.

A federal judge may not be as willing to grant a warrant for that kind of broad search, as the IRB was willing to grant the waiver of authorization.

(I can take this analogy further into the fascinating world of HIPAA and human subject research, but then I'd be called a geek by a variety of people, including and especially, my boyfriend.)

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Ignoring the factual inaccuracies in your post which others have pinted out --

RT's scenario is not that far-fetched, Hank.

The NSA monitors communications in just about every foreign country on the planet. Remember that foreign SIGINT is a core part of the NSA mission. They only have done domestic SIGINT for counter-espionage, and now counter-terror operations.

The NSA's work is computer-driven, and certainly includes monitoring based on the appearance of certain terms in communications as well as a "constellation of other factors." That is how the actual people choose which of the automatically-gathered communications to review in addition to the existing focused targets. Without such programs, the task would be impossible.

Plus, you seem to discount the idea that the government sought to cast a very wide web after 9/11. I'd suspect that they did.

The 1700 people you suggest (which I assume you're drawing from a yearly no. of FISA approvals) is chicken-feed when you're talking about monitoring the security of a nation with roughly 300 million citizens, tens of millions of legal and illegal aliens, and millions of visitors at any given time.

S_A_M

Question for Moral Relativists.....
 

If you believe in Universal Human Rights you believe in a UMC. So without a UMC what is wrong with torturing foreign nationals. Why give foreign nationals any rights at all?

If the reason is the Geneva Convention then what is the purpose of the Geneva Convention? Froma a moral relativist point of view the Convention is there so if other people catch our peopel they won't torture them. But in this case they are not respecting the Geneva Convention.

In addition, does that mean without the Geneva Convention would it be OK to torture prisoners of war.

When we are fighting the Taliban, if they don't respect the Geneva Convention then why should we when dealing with them. It doesn't do us any good.

If you don't believe in a UMC then how can you complain about what is going on at Gitmo?

Another Moral Relativist
 

A friend of mine who went to Caltech (studying Physics and Economics) is an Atheist. No Surprize there. He thinks my ideas about a UMC are absurd and ridiculous. I recommended that he read "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris. I knew it would reinforce his opinion that I am an irrational idiot, but I also knew he would like it. Here is his response to me after reading it. In addition, he has a link there to his Blog where he pulls out the best quotes from the book. I would highly recommend reading them. They are classic. I should warn you that if you have deep religious convictions you will find this stuff pretty offensive.



Spanky:

Harris disucsses the idea of moral being realistically right/wrong (not moral relativism). This doens't imply that someone designed such morals. I quote Harris:
The fact that our ethical intuitions have their roots in biology reveals that our efforts to ground ethics in religious conceptions of 'moral duty' are misguided… We simply do not need religious ideas to motivate us to live ethical lives. Once we begin thinking seriously about happiness and suffering, we find that our religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally. P172
Robert Wright in the Moral Animal describes in detail how smart social creatures like ourselves would gravitate to certain behaviors because they are optimal for our species over time. Many economic behaviors follow from these moral or ethical behaviors - some that would not be technically rational when you only focus on economic utility of the particular item in question. Dean Kahneman, the Nobel lauerate in Economics, pursues these further to demonstrate humans are not in fact 'rational economic players' in all cicumstances, because we were built to operate in different envrionment from today's global marketplace. We were actually village people. YMCA.

http://bensbookblog.blogspot.com/200...am-harris.html

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Actually Hank, to follow up on my last post. I got home tonight and saw a WaPo article on the program in which administration sources seem to explain BOTH that RT's suggestion is almost exactly right as to the method -- and that, indeed, Wonk may well be correct as to the motivation.

The main thrust of the article was about the FISA court's reaction to the program, but the article also indicates that the warrantless wiretaps are being used as part of a widescale "threat detection" program in which the G doesn't have the individualized evidence which FISA would require for a warrant.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...26.html?sub=AR

Here are a couple paragraphs:

"Still, Bush and his advisers have said they need to operate outside the FISA system in order to move quickly against suspected terrorists. In explaining the program, Bush has made the distinction between detecting threats and plots and monitoring likely, known targets, as FISA would allow.

"Bush administration officials believe it is not possible, in a large-scale eavesdropping effort, to provide the kind of evidence the court requires to approve a warrant. Sources knowledgeable about the program said there is no way to secure a FISA warrant when the goal is to listen in on a vast array of communications in the hopes of finding something that sounds suspicious. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said the White House had tried but failed to find a way.

One government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration complained bitterly that the FISA process demanded too much: to name a target and give a reason to spy on it.

'For FISA, they had to put down a written justification for the wiretap,' said the official. 'They couldn't dream one up.'"

* * *

"The NSA program, and the technology on which it is based, makes it impossible to meet that criterion because the program is designed to intercept selected conversations in real time from among an enormous number relayed at any moment through satellites."

S_A_M

P.S. The news that the NSA has this capability is not new or secret (as my last post indicates). The difference is using it domestically.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

You have a boyfriend?

I Don't Know If I'll Have Time...
 

To post anything for the next few weeks, so I'll take this free moment to say

Happy Holidays.

I hope you get all the shit you want and some quality drunken disfunctional time with loved ones...

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Beard. Poor kid. I don't think she realizes.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

In my defense, it was a pretty dumb hypothetical.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

I would surmise that if the President had asked Congress to declare war on Afghanistan back in the fall of 2001, Congress would have done so in about three seconds. What the President asked for -- and you can read a little about the negotiations in Tom Daschle's op-ed in today's WaPo -- was much, much broader. Clearly, he wanted the authority to do other things, and didn't want to be limited by a declaration of war, which by its nature limits the hostilities to certain nation-states.

We now understand in a way we did not when the common law was developed that the destruction of wetlands harms us. That is why I'm drawing a comparison between wetlands regulation and smoking out your neighbor. The principle is the same.

You can pull a Pombo on me and try to pretend the science is otherwise, but that's a different story.

And this is why the government rarely dictates price or requires certain levels of consumption. Most regulation takes a different form. An obvious counterexample is the situation of a regulated monopoly, where any college freshman who's taken Ec 101 can explain why the market will not yield optimum results. But that's usually not what government regulation entails.

OK. If you want to talk specifics, I'm game.

My point is that a so-called "free" market relies on quite a bit of government regulation. Property law, contract law and tort law are all ways in which the government regulates the market.

Perhaps you have something else in mind when you refer to "free" markets, but it seems to me that you are referring to the process by which the market is regulated -- i.e., by private actions brought in common law rather than other forms of government action -- rather than the substance. If we want to protect wetlands, judges (a government actor) can construe the tort of nuisance to prevent you from doing all sorts of things with your wetlands that will have an effect on your neighbors by ruling that they have a property right to be free of the effects of your actions.

I get the principle, but I'm not sure how you can say that I'm infringing someone's property rights (under present law) if I light a fire in my fireplace. And yet burning wood creates some pollution. If those costs are internalized, the wood should cost more.

Intellectual dishonesty?
 

I'm guessing these friends were also convinced by the idea that Clinton's perjury wasn't so bad because it's not like it was the first time someone had lied under oath.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

What about the possibility that they are doing some sort of searching for which they couldn't possibly get a warrant -- e.g., data mining.

eta: stp

eata: five-peat!

I have no argument with the fact that the world is interconnected. But when you declare someones property is a wetland you are infringing on their property rights to benefit society at large. That is fine. That is what governments do. I am just saying that the property owner should be compensated. Just like if you condemned his property to create a nature preserve. You would compensate him. But if you tell him to turn his property into a nature preserve you don't. Not fair.

Funny you should bring up Pombo because we are trying to recruit someone to run against him in the primary (thanks to the Gerrymander you love so much he has a safe seat). The guy we had recruited just backed out yesterday but I think we may have a replacement. If we don't find anyone McCloskey is going to run against him. I just had lunch with McCloskey today to discuss the situation.

Pombo is one of those idiots that thinks that property rights mean you don't have to respect public property rights. You can spew any crap of your property into the public domain and not have to pay for it. Pombo does not understand that whan you have property rights you are also responsbile for your property, and what exits it.


Yes, but then again efficient markets is what you are shooting for. Free markets is usually the best way to get there. Monopolies never produce efficient markets, so contrary to what Friedman, Rand, Buckley and Schafley thing, all monoplies have to be regulated to produce a more efficient market.



The problem is that a distinction is not drawn. If you own wetlands, and dump sewage into them and the sewage leaves your wetland and goes into someone elses portion of the wetland, you need to either stop it or cough up some dough. You should not be compensated for that. What you are doing is not just a nuisance but an infringement on either the public or some private owners land. These "nuisance" laws are really a watering down of the victims property rights. A "nuisance" law is usually a way for a landowner not to take full responsiblity for their property. You should have no right to dump stuff in a stream that will go down river of your property. There is the common law concept that has developed that if nature takes something of your property and puts it somewhere else that somehow you are only partially responsible. In the old days that may have been practical, but into todays modern society there is not need to let people to use the excuse to say "well the wind blew it off my property on to yours so I am only a little responbile".

However, that should not be confused with someone being prevented from doing something on their property that effects no one else. If I build a wall around my wetland and drain it, and what I do does not effect anyone around me then I can do it. If the government decides that my property needs to stay a wet land for bird migration, fine, the government can either compensate me for the restricted use of my property, or buy the property.






Home fires cause all sorts of problems in the LA Valley. Home fires produce a lot more pollution, especially in winter, than all the cars put together. There are Chimneys one can buy that filter out the smoke, or most of the smoke. But people seem to think, as you do, that they have a God given right to blow smoke into the public airways. The same goes for burning leaves - which is illegal. In our modern society there is no reason that people should not be held accountable for their externalities.

The government should not be able to seize land without compensating the owner, but neither should a landowner be said to have the right to pave over the land if doing so harms others.

A point of my posts has been that what you mean by "free markets" is not altogether clear. Perhaps I haven't been explicit enough.

Which is to say that defining the extent and scope of property rights is tough.