WH on NSA snooping: You can totally trust us.

[Elok]

Another source characterizes passive-aggressive behavior as: "A personality trait marked by a pervasive pattern of negative attitudes and characterised by passive, sometimes obstructionist resistance to complying with expectations in interpersonal or occupational situations. Behaviors: Learned helplessness, procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, or deliberate/repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive-aggressive

Or, more succinctly, "passive-aggressive" means opposing someone without making the opposition directly. If I am actually castigating Ken directly (using good manners, bad manners, or a string of f-bombs) I am by definition not being passive-aggressive.

[dannubis]

Look up "vestige" sometime. Also "passive-aggressive."

My post actually

1. gave you a good example of passive-aggressive behavior
2. repeated the word vestige in the correct way

So unless you have some deeper point you are trying to prove you can drop it.

[Elok]

Maybe I just lose my temper slightly when people incapable of supporting their arguments in any way fall back on tired cliches and xenophobia. One might even suspect that by doing it back in an over the top and blatant way, I'm actually trying to make a point.

Or maybe I'm just a dick, who knows.

Hey, as long as you're comfortable becoming the thing you hate, I guess. Also, you weren't really being any more over-the-top and blatant than your opposition ("Europeans don't understand freedom"), so I don't think it worked. This is not to suggest that you should try to be even worse, because honestly I don't think you can win at that game. Bear in mind that, while you may know something about America, we know basically squat about the U.K. beyond tea and cricket and such. This is more or less to be expected, since our country has a much stronger influence on your country's affairs than vice-versa--can you, offhand, tell me who's in charge in Mongolia right now? Probably not, but educated people in Mongolia likely know something about your government, and they almost certainly know a bit about ours.

This is not to say "YEAH USA WE'RE NUMBER ONE" or anything, but honestly, what do you expect? Nobody in Constantinople knew who was in charge of the Lombards. Nobody in Charlemagne's court could tell you the first thing about events among the Avars (when they weren't at war). And for a good while, nobody in your country had the slightest idea who the hell that Gandhi fellow was, or what precisely his problem was. For good or bad, it's the attitude of empire. You can get angry about it, or you can accept that stereotypes are what happens when ignorance goes to war. And then deal with it constructively.

Could say more, but I have errands to run.

[PLATO]

Uncrimethink prevents unperson. Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Amsoc. Unownlife Doupleplusgood. Recdep unthinkpol!! Minitrue doupleplusgood!


Am I covered now, NSA???

[Felch]

Is that a reference to "Finlandization"? Beijing doesn't have any reason to hate this guy as far as I can tell so I don't see how the term is applicable.

More like Finland is the sort of country that always seems to top those arbitrary rankings of human rights, while China generally comes even lower than the US.

[Elok]

My post actually

1. gave you a good example of passive-aggressive behavior
2. repeated the word vestige in the correct way

So unless you have some deeper point you are trying to prove you can drop it.

I'll grant you "vestige," I guess, but seriously, you don't know what passive-aggressive means. Suppose you tell your kid to rake the lawn. He doesn't want to, but he sighs, goes out and deliberately does a half-assed job, missing leaves and spilling them again when he bags them, so you'll avoid asking him in the future. Or he says he will, but procrastinates and keeps putting you off with excuses. Or he does it, but he whines incessantly about how hard it is, invents difficulties ("this rake doesn't work well," "don't we have any bigger bags?") and does his best to make the experience a PITA for you while nominally obeying. All of those are excellent examples of passive-aggression; he avoids confronting you openly but sabotages the process in some way. Being snarky/sarcastic to Ken is not passive-aggressive, because there's nothing passive about it. I am being openly and directly hostile to him.

[kentonio]

Hey, as long as you're comfortable becoming the thing you hate, I guess. Also, you weren't really being any more over-the-top and blatant than your opposition ("Europeans don't understand freedom"), so I don't think it worked.

Occasionally when someone is being obnoxious, doing the same back is enough to make them stop for a brief second and think 'oh yeah, that kinda sucks'. Clearly this is asking a little much at Poly however.

This is not to say "YEAH USA WE'RE NUMBER ONE" or anything, but honestly, what do you expect? Nobody in Constantinople knew who was in charge of the Lombards. Nobody in Charlemagne's court could tell you the first thing about events among the Avars (when they weren't at war). And for a good while, nobody in your country had the slightest idea who the hell that Gandhi fellow was, or what precisely his problem was. For good or bad, it's the attitude of empire. You can get angry about it, or you can accept that stereotypes are what happens when ignorance goes to war. And then deal with it constructively.

The thing is though, this is not Mongolia and this is certainly not the 1950's. America is the sole world Superpower (for another 10 years or so), the single biggest provider of pop culture in the western world, covered in the minutest details on basically every large news source, and speak the same language (kinda ) as us. Oh and some of us have been close friends with Americans from all over the US for many, many years and communicated nearly daily with Americans online for as long. Oh and some of us might also be dating Americans.

Obviously this does not mean that you lovely folks need to know as much about our small countries, but it does mean that we know an awful lot about you. Like NSA levels of a lot.

[kentonio]

Being snarky/sarcastic to Ken is not passive-aggressive, because there's nothing passive about it. I am being openly and directly hostile to him.

[The Mad Monk]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]174484[/ATTACH]

Does Ellsberg care, because, Obama?

[DaShi]

TMM makes MrFun look good.

[Hauldren Collider]

I wonder what else President Obama hasn't told us that he simultaneously thinks it would be healthy for us to debate.

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) June 10, 2013

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

51st state joins in as well.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/data-collection-program-got-green-light-from-mackay-in-2011/article12444909/#dashboard/follows/

[Wezil]

Link no good....

[DinoDoc]

Link no good....

Data-collection program got green light from MacKay in 2011

Defence Minister Peter MacKay approved a secret electronic eavesdropping program that scours global telephone records and Internet data trails – including those of Canadians – for patterns of suspicious activity.

Mr. MacKay signed a ministerial directive formally renewing the government’s “metadata” surveillance program on Nov. 21, 2011, according to records obtained by The Globe and Mail. The program had been placed on a lengthy hiatus, according to the documents, after a federal watchdog agency raised concerns that it could lead to warrantless surveillance of Canadians.

There is little public information about the program, which is the subject of Access to Information requests that have returned hundreds of pages of records, with many passages blacked out on grounds of national security.

It was first explicitly approved in a secret decree signed in 2005 by Bill Graham, defence minister in Paul Martin’s Liberal government.

It is illegal for most Western espionage agencies to spy on their citizens without judicial authorization. But rising fears about foreign terrorist networks, coupled with the explosion of digital communications, have shifted the mandates of secretive electronic-eavesdropping agencies that were created by military bureaucracies to spy on Soviet states during the Cold War.

The Canadian surveillance program is operated by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), an arm of the Department of National Defence.

In recent days, disclosures of secret surveillance programs operated by the U.S. National Security Agency have set off a storm of debate. Leaked documents and accounts have described an NSA project known as PRISM that allegedly gives the agency access to data from nine U.S. Internet companies including Google and Facebook. Another leaked document describes the existence of a government program that collects the “telephony metadata” surrounding millions of phone calls placed by Americans every day, without anyone listening to the actual conversations.

In Canada, a similar sensibility – though not the same sweep – appears to have also taken root. “Metadata is information associated with a telecommunication … And not a communication,” reads a PowerPoint briefing sent to Mr. MacKay in 2011. “Current privacy protection measures are adequate,” officials said, as they sought renewal of the Canadian metadata program.

CSEC and the NSA take pains to distinguish between the contents of a communication (which is out of bounds legally, if it involves a citizen) and the surrounding metadata (which is considered in play).

Mining metadata may never reveal what is said. But phone records, Internet Protocol addresses, and other data trails can reveal who knows whom, and how well. Authorities who suck up signals on a vast scale can use the metadata to create pictures of social networks, even terrorist cells, if they armed with enough raw computing power to sift through gigantic pools of data.

In Canada, a regime of ministerial directives – decrees not scrutinized by Parliament – have authorized the broad surveillance programs. How the data is obtained has not been disclosed in the documents obtained by The Globe or in comments from CSEC.

Officials do say that CSEC “incidentally” intercepts Canadian communications, but takes pain to purge or “anonymize” such data after it is obtained. Beyond that, “metadata is used to isolate and identify foreign communications, as CSEC is prohibited by law from directing its activities at Canadians,” wrote spokesman Ryan Foreman in an e-mail to The Globe.

CSEC is subject to oversight by a watchdog agency known as the Office of the CSE Commissioner, which has given broad approval to the metadata-mining program.

Five years ago, however, Justice Charles Gonthier, a retired Supreme Court judge, raised questions about the practice, according to government records released to The Globe.

Could CSEC, he asked, be wrongly passing along information to partner agencies, such as the RCMP or CSIS? While raw intelligence is sometimes allowed to pass between these agencies, Justice Gonthier’s broad concern was that CSEC’s metadata-mining efforts could be used as an end run around lawful warrants.

He wrote in a 2008 memo that ironing out such rules was important, since they set up “the legal requirement (e.g. ministerial authorization vs. a court warrant) in cases where activities may be ‘directed at’ a Canadian.”

CSEC suspended its metadata-mining program for more than a year in 2008. The documents show that Mr. MacKay signed a new ministerial directive in 2011 to continue the surveillance under new rules – and also authorized other espionage programs, some of which have been completely censored from the Access to Information documents obtained by The Globe.

Here ya go

[Wezil]

Thanks DD.

The Globe is behind a paywall here.