FOREST GREEN

Shipping today, a custom Model No.3 in Zelena Green Gloss – destined for the wooded trails of Portland’s Forest Park. Includes internally geared 11-speed hub, grease-free Gates Carbon Drive and handmade bamboo fenders.

Fast and fun on city sidewalks, gravel roads and weekends among the pines.

View the gallery.

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

:(

For years, YEARS, I told that story, and I got called a liar more times than I can count. I always wondered, why would I want to make a story like that up? Did they think having seen this ridiculous, disgusting spectacle somehow made me feel like a big man?

“You think you’re cool, with your sports car and your successful career? Well wait until you hear my tale of gore, degradation, and animal husbandry! Then we’ll know who’s cool!”

Anyway, I’ll include a link to the relevant clip of Dirty Jobs, but I don’t recommend that you watch it.

https://youtu.be/klWeg2VDNPE?t=23

Joseph Menn (Reuters) is reporting that Yahoo! searched emails for the NSA. NSA. The details of the story are so mangled that it's impossible to say what's actually going on.

The first paragraph says this:

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails

The second paragraph says this:

The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts

Well? Which is it? Did they "search incoming emails" or did they "scan mail accounts"? Whether we are dealing with emails in transmit, or stored on the servers, is a BFD (Big Fucking Detail) that you can't gloss over and confuse in a story like this. Whether searches are done indiscriminately across all emails, or only for specific accounts, is another BFD.

The third paragraph seems to resolve this, but it doesn't:

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

Who are these "some surveillance experts"? Why is the story keeping their identities secret? Are they some whistleblowers afraid for their jobs? If so, then that should be mentioned. In reality, they are unlikely to be real surveillance experts, but just some random person that knows slightly more about the subject than Joseph Menn, and their identities are being kept secret in order to prevent us from challenging these experts -- which is a violation of journalistic ethics.

And, are they analyzing the raw information the author sent them? Or are they opining on the garbled version of events that we see in the first two paragraphs.

The confusion continues:

It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.

What the fuck is a "set of characters"??? Is this an exact quote for somewhere? Or something the author of the story made up? The clarification of what this "could mean" doesn't clear this up, because if that's what it "actually means", then why not say this to begin with?

It's not just technical terms, but also legal ones:

The request to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified edict sent to the company's legal team, according to the three people familiar with the matter.

What the fuck is a "classified edict"? An NSL? A FISA court order? What? This is also a BFD.

We outsiders already

What outsiders know about the NSA/FBI's ability to ask for strong selectors(email addresses). What what we don't know about is their ability to search allemails, regardless of account, for arbitrary keywords/phases. If that's what's going on, then this would be a huge story. But the story doesn't make it clear that this is actually what's going on -- just strongly implies it.

There are many other ways to interpret this story. For example, the government may simply be demanding that when Yahoo satisfies demands for emails (based on email addresses), that it does so from the raw incoming stream, before it hits spam/malware filters. Or, they may be demanding that Yahoo satisfies their demands with more secrecy, so that the entire company doesn't learn of the email addresses that a FISA order demands. Or, the government may be demanding that the normal collection happen in real time, in the seconds that emails arrive, instead of minutes later.

Or maybe this isn't an NSA/FISA story at all. Maybe the DHS has a cybersecurity information sharing program that distributes IoCs (indicators of compromise) to companies under NDA. Because it's a separate program under NDA, Yahoo would need to setup a email malware scanning system separate from their existing malware system in order to use those IoCs. (@declanm's stream has further variations on this scenario).

My point is this: the story is full of mangled details that really tell us nothing. I can come up with multiple, unrelated scenarios that are consistent with the content in the story. The story certainly doesn't say that Yahoo did anything wrong, or that the government is doing anything wrong (at least, wronger than we already know).

I'm convinced the government is up to no good, strong arming companies like Yahoo into compliance. The thing that's stopping us from discovering malfeasance is poor reporting like this.

this is that reporters are so shitty at reporting the details.

Q: What's the difference between 9/11 and a cow?
A: The government can't milk a cow for 15 years and counting.

I have a confession to make: I'm udderly (see what I did there?) sick of 9/11 fetishism.

On December 7, 1956, was the U.S. government still using the Pearl Harbor attacks to justify why key parts of the Constitution should be considered invalid? Of course not – even though that was the height of the Cold War, when our country faced a no-joke existential threat: the Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons to make humanity go extinct.

About a year ago, CNN ran a documentary series called “The Seventies,” with one episode dedicated to the rise of terrorism in that decade. And that episode genuinely shocked me. I of course have only childish memories of that time – I vaguely recall wondering why grown-ups who flew on airplanes thought saying “Hi” to someone named “Jack” was such a terrible, awful, no-good thing to do – but now that I'm an adult looking back on that era, I can see why Americans (and Westerners in general) would've been justified in thinking the entire civilized world was falling apart. There were some particularly bad weeks wherein there would be major airline hijackings every day – not only in the United States, but throughout the Western (non-Communist) world. Bombings were downright commonplace too, as were kidnappings and assassinations of even the rich and powerful. Yet America was able to get through all of that without gutting the Bill of Rights and making a holy fetish out of fear.

What the hell happened, to make early 21st-century America behave so much more helplessly, cowardly and reactionarily, compared to the craphole America of the 1970s? In the 70s, we'd just lost our first war (Vietnam); our economy was in the toilet (stagflation); there was an actual no-joke nationwide gasoline shortage thanks to the Arab oil embargo; the Cold War meant we had to live with the genuine existential fear of knowing "Our number-one enemy on the world stage has a nuclear arsenal sufficient to wipe us out in 15 minutes" -- by any objective measure, 1970s America was in far worse shape than the America of Sept. 10, 2001. So why did the latter America fail so spectacularly, when first it faced adversity?

It's not as though the majority of the Powers That Be, circa 2001, were entirely different people or an entirely different generation than those from the 1970s -- many of the young or middle-aged PTBs from the 70s still held power in 2001. And every power-broker in 2001 was old enough to have personal memories of the 1970s, even if they were not yet members of the "leadership class" back then. "Learning from history" for them would not have entailed reading books about how things were before their time; it would simply be a matter of remembering their own personal experience.

I'm sick and tired of being told it's my I have a patriotic duty to be afraid, and that defending the constitution is synonymous with dishonoring those who died fifteen years ago. afraid. Nine-eleven! Never forget! – now bend over and let the TSA fondle your genitalia before allowing you on an airline flight. Nine-eleven! Never forget! – now don't complain about the NSA spying on your electronic communications, but do tell yourself Edward Snowden is a traitor for bringing such unconstitutional actions this to light. Nine-eleven! Never forget! Never stop being afraid! Because if you're not still terrified fifteen years later, that supposedly somehow means the terrorists have won.