Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Russell Brown,
Classic, so the NSA have been reading my Hotmail. Just as well I have never considered anything about Hotmail to be secure. If I wanted to send secure things over Hotmail, I'd encrypt them myself first. I don't think this has ever actually happened. NSA might be able to crack it. If I wanted to keep secrets from the NSA, I'd take a lot more precautions.
Also:
The question is not, then, whether the NSA can or can't uncover nearly every aspect of an individual's digital life and go all "Enemy of the State" on someone.
It's also whether they could go all "Enemy of the State" on actual enemies of the state, who will most likely make efforts not to be be obvious about what they're up to.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to David Hood,
From public accounts (in the cases where there have been public accounts) it has mostly been from people thinking someone was getting a bit extreme, alerting the authorities, and the authorities actually investigating.
So then we still don't have any evidence that data mining has had any success in this regard. I mean what you're describing above was how people have been busted since the ancient world, well before there was any such thing as data mining. Someone informs on you, you're investigated, and some real evidence is then found.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Rich Lock,
Well, 9 times out of 10 the targeted ads I get on youtube are for pop albums by acts like one direction or beyonce, hair conditioner, female skin cream, and creams for…other problems that only women get.
What have you been watching? My annoying YouTube crap is mostly travel insurance. I haven't traveled in years, have never purchased travel insurance. I can only presume that people who watch the same kinds of things as me sometimes buy travel insurance. A deep pattern linking people watching instructable videos on worm farming and mathematical proofs, and a fear of ill health abroad.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Rich Lock,
There’s been half a dozen separate stories in the UK press over the last year or so about the arrests, prosecution and sentencing of various small groups.
Do we know how they got their intel for it, though? It is an unfair thing I'm claiming, in one regard - they can't really go into much detail on any technique that they want to continue working.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I’m just not sure that an argument that there aren’t really any downsides to sex is a good argument.
I'm not making that argument. I'm saying there's a balance of goods and harms in it, and trying to put in perspective the harms compared any number of things we do every single day and wouldn't think twice about, and yet can have deadly consequences. I'm arguing that the dangers of sex are way, way down the list of things that are harmful over which we make no restrictions at all.
Which is not, repeat not, an argument that those other things should be banned, or better controlled. Each one is its own case, to be judged on its merits. Its an argument that the good of sex should not be ignored.
It's also got very much derailed from what I was discussing, the topic of the thread, about teen sex. How the potential harmfulness of sex, whether major or minor, comes to bear on the age at which they should be allowed to experiment with it, I have not yet connected up. It's a non-sequitur that people get STDs. People get killed riding pushbikes, but we don't stop kids doing it. People drown all the time, but we let children swim.
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Notes & Queries: Paul, in reply to diversitynz,
I think it's worth noting that Paul is pretty high functioning intellectually disabled. He knows, for instance, when people owed him money. He had his own money from which he paid his bills. He was capable of calling up a newspaper to place an advertisement. He would:
discuss weather, shopping, TV, politics, the news, and his neighbours.
He's a person that advocated for his own independence and got it. He has a much higher level of agency than, for example, a child, or my intellectually disabled aunt. He's probably more responsible than a lot of hardened drunks. But he's still vulnerable.
That's a much less clear situation when it comes to the many questions you asked in your blog about how David should have acted. If we were talking about someone who is not technically disabled at all, but pretty slow witted, gullible and foolish, there wouldn't be the conundrum. If, upon asking if they were happy to have their story told, they said it was OK, without really understanding the consequences (and to be honest, who really does understand all consequences? I'd like to meet that person and become their disciple), then there wouldn't be any real squick in this story at all. How far are we from that person? It's a very hard question to answer, would take someone who knew the person intimately. It could be approached formally, like the needs assessments that I frequently do with ACC for my son, which take hours, and in the end they are basing most of their decision making on my judgment anyway.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to David Hood,
That's brilliant.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Whether those patterns reveal criminal or terrorist activity has less to do with the ability to extract patterns, than with the presence of patterns in that dataset.
That's a good way of putting it. Currently, on the success rate of apparently nothing whatsoever, I don't rate their chances of finding patterns that are useful to them in preventing terrorist attacks, and if they do, those patterns will be ephemeral. But it's a lovely problem, rather like the millenium bug that kept us IT guys rolling in it for ages - you can't prove that it won't be a problem. You can't prove that there isn't a pattern in random data. This is an information theory result, as I understand it. So the thing can go on forever. It's wonderfully self justifying.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to linger,
So you’re comparing a mostly uncontrolled cause of death with a mostly controlled cause of death here.
This is all true, but what I find scary is just that the suicide really is that high.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
You hear of plenty of people dying from diseases from sexual contact though.
In this country, some stats on that would be awesome. The main killer STD, HIV turning into full blown AIDS, killed no one at all in 2011. I don't know how to find out, really. mortality data for 2009 in NZ doesn't even show STD related death as a category at all, but I can't be sure that an STD related death wouldn't be reported under a different category, like pneumonia.
Side note: It's pretty scary that intentional self-harm kills more people than motor vehicle accidents.
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