I seem to remember pointing out at the time that the Paul Revere post was slightly silly, in that using metadata to identify Paul Revere as being a key member of a violent anti-government conspiracy is actually a really good argument for using metadata, because, well, he was one.
A better argument might be if he could find, using the same technique, someone in 18th century New England who obviously wasn't a traitor but whose metadata indicated that he was. But, as far as I can see, no such person exists.
Or to use a dataset of people who were opposed to an oppressive government but not actually involved in a violent anti-government conspiracy, such as the White Rose crowd. But this is like arguing against SWAT raids using a series of videos of SWAT arresting or shooting armed violent criminals. Yes, we know that's what they do; their supporters keep telling us. You are supposed to be opposing them.
Isn't using metadata to identify Paul Revere as a key member of a violent anti-government conspiracy a bit like using metadata to figure out that Paul McCartney was a Beatle?
I've, uh, tracked down things in this way.
Same.
I really want to know who Ogged and Barry are stalking.
Also 1 is the same thing I thought when I first read the Revere post.
1: I've wondered a lot about whether American history classes still focus on the sneaky Americans who didn't follow the rules of the battlefield now that insurgency is deprecated. I doubt there's enough intellectual consistency to get anywhere except that everything's okay when the good guys do it.
It's true, the American experiment isn't looking too good these days.
If raising a secret, violent insurrection against the British is depreciated now, I've got a lot of ancestors with much more recent issues than Paul Revere.
7 reminds me that I watched The Patriot (because the remake of The Exorcist was sold out, which was fine by me) with a bunch of my Muslim friends I made doing participant-observation research on their social group, all but one first-generation American, and I came out horrified by how grossly propagandistic and creepy it was and most of them were saying, "Right on, yes, that's what you have to do to get rid of the British!"
Mel Gibson is maybe not the most subtle guy.
7: I'm not even saying it's deprecated necessarily (though they do tend to get in the way of my commute from time to time); just that the supporters of using this kind of metadata analysis are arguing that it's good because it allows you to accurately identify members of violent anti-government conspiracies, and so arguing against it should take some other form than saying "but look! See how easily it identified this member of a violent anti-government conspiracy! Isn't that terrible?"
4.1 Pseudonymous Unfogged commenters, who else?
8: I am relieved that at least the last word in that post wasn't "Jews".
11: I was impressed by how easily I was depsuedable when a couple of commenters did, way back in the day. Low stakes in my case, as I wasn't anonymous for any particular reason, but I hadn't realized quite how much of an open book I was.
8: My Israeli mother would say the same things!
The Revere post was countering the government's argument at the time that they were "just" collecting metadata, and the public had nothing to worry about. In fact, metadata tells you a whole lot.
See how easily it identified this member of a violent anti-government conspiracy! Isn't that terrible?
Such a British attitude. In 'Merica, we have s Sacred Constitutional Right to violent anti-government conspiracy, as enshrined in the Second Amendment.
||
How many armies have to die in Anatolia before these dumb-ass crusaders start going by sea?
|>
14: How easy it was for someone to remove your suede jacket?
16: yes, metadata does tell you a whole lot. But if you want to get people worried about that, try using an example of how it tells you a lot about someone who was not, in fact, involved in a violent anti-government conspiracy. Try showing something like how, I don't know, it allows you to identify supporters of the SPLC using only information available to Jeff Sessions.
17 to 20, I think. People (at least white people) involved in violent anti-government conspiracies expect some protection from unwarranted government intrusion. I'm not even joking.
As mentioned before, my hobby of finding all living 4th cousins involves quite a bit of this, covering a period of nearly 2 centuries.
19: Just turning the heat up usually works.
23: "this" meaning "the same kind of detective work that found Comey's twitter account".
"No man can be my equal. Take me to the future of your world."
That added nothing. I was just picturing Carp wandering around cutting off his relatives' heads and needed to express the earworm.
I tactfully refrained from saying it, but 29.1 is true.
You guys will be surprised when my 600 cousins and I start an armed insurrection.
I've wondered a lot about whether American history classes still focus on the sneaky Americans who didn't follow the rules of the battlefield now that insurgency is deprecated.
Here's continued evidence of this in the culture, albeit 9 years old (Christ), and I think the cohort that created it went to high school pre-2001.
But, seriously, "I'm not plotting against the United States government, I'm just stockpiling illegal weapons and engaging in military training for when the United States government co-operates with the anti-Christ or makes war on white people" is the kind of thing people have said with every expectation of being successful at convincing others they were harassed by the ATF.
A filthy open book indeed. I was so shocked!
37 to 14. I was paying attention to the lecture I am in, is my excuse
I should probably be insulted, rather than wistfully flattered, by imagining that I have any shocking secrets.
Oh, you know who I did this for: Mimi Smartypants. Now you'll all tell me that she's not really pseudonymous, but it took me most of an afternoon a few years ago. I didn't have any reason; just curious. I'll never tell, Heebie!
18: Ha. It takes a while, but they eventually catch on.
19: Just turning the heat up usually works.
Are you an actress and is peep a bishop, or what's going on here.
I remember spending an afternoon failing to figure out who Mimi Smartypants was, so ogged is better than I am at this. (I did figure out a lot of you lot before Facebook made it relatively easy.)
I'm still trying to figure out who doesn't comment here but was reading in a local coffee shop.
"I'm not plotting against the United States government, I'm just stockpiling illegal weapons and engaging in military training for when the United States government co-operates with the anti-Christ or makes war on white people"
Shit, you can stage an armed occupation of a National Wildlife Refuge and get acquitted for it. Its the American way.
That guy with the "Kill Whitey" tattoo should have added a comma between the words before trial.
You can fix most things with punctuation.
My English Muslim friend refers to the Puritans as English ISIS.
Except that when some 17th century Englishman announced they were a Puritan their friends and family had normally seen it coming, while every time some Muslim guy joins ISIS it is apparently a TOTAL SURPRISE to everyone else.
It was the haircuts gave them away.
Hats with buckles are an obvious sign.
As well as a tendency to be Right but Repulsive.
An' thou dost envisage some thing, speak the truth of it.
When I read Hackett-Fischer's book, the thing that stood out was that the British had NOT been collecting metadata or shown any real concern about the unrest in the colony. When Gage finally sent out a two man team to figure out how serious the problem was, they didn't get past Watertown where a black waitress called them out as British spies and suggested that they'd better be careful if they headed further west.
My favorite obscure networking fact was that Paul Revere did NOT spread the alarm to every Middlesex village and farm. No one remembered to alert Waltham which just goes to show you. It was also interesting to note that despite the late hour, an awful lot of the militia guys were out visiting their girlfriends that night.
Though this might make my Irish RC ancestors turn over in their graves, I'd like to put in a good word for the English Puritans. Those impossibly earnest early modern activists, with their funny haircuts, and their double-entry bookkeeping of the soul, and their cries of "anti-Popery!" A bunch of stern and humourless stick-in-the-muds who wanted to ban Christmas. Who could possibly sympathize?!
But first, weren't the Puritans basically right (and here I mean "correct," not "right-wing," because here I think they maybe trended left) in their demands for parliamentary supremacy over the arrogance of an unchecked executive/monarchical authority?
And second, and in an American context, didn't the Puritans help to create New England, which turned out to be an anti-slavery region, which helped save America from becoming a total hellhole?
And second, and in an American context, didn't the Puritans help to create New England, which turned out to be an anti-slavery region, which helped save America from becoming a total hellhole?
It eventually turned out that way, yes, but the Puritans themselves loved them some slavery. It just generally didn't take the form of plantation agriculture and didn't become central to the region's economy the way it did in the south.
If you want a real tough-necked Puritan bastard, consider the career of William Prynne, who had his ears cropped and his cheeks branded for writing a 1,000 page book denouncing the theatre, now little read, which was thought to be disrespectful of Queen Henrietta Maria, yet who composed a Latin epigram denouncing the Archbishop of Canterbury as he was being led back to jail after his mutilation. As an added bonus, his wikipedia entry is almost unvandalised since the 1911 Britannica.
57: but the non conformist movement that the Puritans were part of also gives you the Quakers and various other groups who were very active in abolition and other noble causes.
And, as a side effect, the English Jewish community; Cromwell overturned the Crusading ban on Jewish settlement introduced (amid massacres) to Catholic England by Edward I.
Going back to the earliest part of the thread: And here I was, thinking I had elite internet sleuthing skills for figuring out who nworb is.
I'm not desperately pseudonymous because it reminds me that anything I say that's really stupid could come back and bite me.
Meanwhile, in the spirit of Apo (PBUH) I have found the world's greatest Christian DVD series.
A lot of those Bernie bros who so infuriated poor halford may have been paid trolls.
For some reason that I did not understand at the time, they liked to call me a "vagina." (I now believe non-native English -- i.e. Russian -- speakers wrote the algorithms controlling these bots and perhaps imagined "vagina" to be the equivalent of the c-word when hurled at a woman.)
Tell.