Monday, January 20, 2014

"I think if Martin Luther King was alive today he would..."

"You don’t get to use Martin Luther King Jr. as your “Imaginary Black Yes Man”!!!"



"New York Assemblyman Michael Benedetto wants to flat-out make it illegal for anybody under the age of 14 to play tackle football. In a world that will never be risk-free, and where all choices involve trade-offs, it's a hell of a presumption that would substitute the preferences of politicians for those of children and parents...

Football is dangerous. Maybe it's too dangerous—for some people. But it's worth the risk for others. We all have to make choices for ourselves, and our families. The fact that some politicians wouldn't make the same choices as other people isn't surprising. Nor does it give them any special rights over the rest of us."



"...the controversy over President Barack Obama's proposed revision of this program, known as the Section 215 program, is largely political theater. The important question is not how to adjust it to "balance" security and privacy. It's whether the government should be doing this at all. The administration has strained to give the impression that the program is essential to saving lives. NSA Director Keith Alexander said its surveillance programs have helped "prevent over 50 potential terrorist events." That is true, just as it's true that, between us, Tom Brady and I have three Super Bowl rings. The NSA has unearthed a lot of valuable information that has foiled numerous attacks—just not through this program.

What is overlooked in the debate is that the administration has more or less admitted this point. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, in a ruling last month against the NSA, noted that "the government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature." In seven years, not a single instance. When Obama appointed a task force to assess these surveillance efforts, the members questioned NSA officials on that very matter. They learned, as they said in their report, that "there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the section 215 telephony meta-data program.""




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