jwtadvice's comments

Reading between the lines:

> The Tesla brand name takes this seriously. Question the headlines, opinions, etc.

> You are safe using Tesla. What happened to this person won't happen to you.

> The driver made some questionable decisions; the blame isn't uniquely Tesla's. Other safety mechanisms not under Tesla's control also failed.

> Statistically, Tesla Autopilot is safer than not using Autopilot.

> We accept that we will not be able to prevent all deaths. You need to too. Telsa has saved lives in addition to taking them. Focus on this please.

> We care about safety.

Surveillance partner for NSA PRISM program, with Condoleeza Rice on its board.

Stopped using DropBox due to ethical concerns years ago.

You are completely right. Adversary is the correct term.

It's a knee-jerk reaction to totalitarian domestic propaganda.

Has a tendency to breed confused, alarmist, emotional and untechnical conversation.

Here's the truth: Russia isn't evil. Neither is the United States. But they are enemies. The people are getting caught in a propaganda war, which has shifted conversation from the venue of technical to ideological. (Propaganda, in practice, breeds ideological self-affirming thinking.)

The breakdown of conversation isn't the fault of the "traitors who support the evil Russians" or the fault of the "domestic saboteurs who support the US mass propaganda apparatus" but the fact that the two countries can't get their shit straight and work toward a post-Cold War without throwing acid at each other.

(I'm rewriting the last sentence of this over and over because I realize its going to attract ever-yet more comments of the form "but Russia's evil and they started it and you can't really compare the US and Russia - can you?". Screw it.)

The post-Soviet era is and was not the end of history. Geopolitical competition exists as a human condition.

Much of the "communist versus capitalist" competition that "justified" the Cold War, was actually just a result of two powers that were going to compete anyway pushing competing views of global economic-political organization.

The competition was not itself about economic philosophies. Rather competition of economic philosophies was the result of conflict.

The United States today is a waning power relative to the rest of the world. However, it's still the de facto superpower.

The American strategy is to keep its foot on Russia's neck and while containing the possible rise of China's power (seeking to keep it to a regional, rather than global setting).

Yes, the Cold War is still going. There's less of a chance of an immediate nuclear exchange, but the US and Russia continue proxy warfare (e.g. Syria, Ukraine, Iran) and propaganda warfare (e.g. US and Russia's interference in one another's elections)

They also don't/won't sell Chromecast product.

This is the danger of vertical integration. Once upon a time the US government did built and used antitrust and antimonopoly legislation.

Seems punitive to me, rather than 'fair'. US copyright law has no jurisdiction the same as German copyright law, other than by coincidence of geography/volunteer base. I think Project Gutenberg is doing the best thing it can for itself. I associate the project with doing the best thing it can for people.

In general, we're going to run into increasing numbers of cases like this.

Except that they block world leaders (and other globally important actors) as requested by the US security/power community.

PR. No thanks.

Military funded (DARPA's Social Media in Strategic Communication program) to develop the research necessary for running highly automated global-scale social network propaganda campaigns.

Coworker at Fortune 500 does this. Old housemate at different Fortune 500 did basically this (slept on the floor, only owned cardboard boxes, one week of clothes and a car).

Both of these people are incredibly rich. One came from parents with oil and financial sector money. The other has multiple real estate properties. Both have six figure incomes.

Other people I know in the tech sector are less extreme, but nonetheless have various plans for exiting the corporate world so that they can feel financially independent enough to retire early and then work on problems they find enriching/bring value to people rather than shareholders/etc.

Though one of them was obsessed with immortality and saving up for when cryogenics and Kurzweil's singularity were figured out. So I guess it's not all about the rat race for everybody.

I would really like to know more about the involvement of the Stanford Research group in enabling these exploits. Speculating on a whim here, but it wouldn't seem like much research would be needed with the exception of perhaps either WEP/WPA injection/extension/decryption attacks OR wireless frame injection attacks that exploit the data link layer.

I really hope that Wikileaks:

A. Works with companies to get these vulnerabilities patched. I know that US media outlets are paid to be hard on Wikileaks when it does this to harm its reputation, but the campaign of negative publicity is less important overall than the quality work getting vulnerabilities fixed and for it actually improves the reputation over the long term with those who are familiar and closer to the security field.

B. After the vulnerabilities are patched, release the source code and documentation for these vulnerabilities to expose the companies, techniques and to corroborate the editing done for the story. The security community will grow from these examples and the public will have better information about what companies to avoid.

C. Publish more good journalism about the types of cyber-weapons wielded by intelligence agencies.

"Yes, because we've totally just been nuking or threatening to nuke anyone who looked at us cross-eyed for the last few decades... /s Your nomenclature is a bit hyperbolic."

Is quite clearly a strawman.

> You're using present tense with incredibly broad terminology

> you really think we're currently, actively holding a nuclear gun to everyone's head over every little thing.

Nope. Though perhaps I haven't made myself clear. Here it is more clearly: The US judiciously uses the threat of nuclear attacks on civilian population centers to achieve what it wants. This is one lever of power which the US pulls to achieve coercion and it uses its other levers much more frequently. It is the only nation that uses first-strike nuclear threats for coercive leverage in this way.

Is that more clear?

> Do you have any historical examples of the US actively strong-armining an opponent with the threat of a first strike over a political existential threat?

Soviet Union (before they developed their own nuclear weapons, for instance), China (over Taiwan), DPRK (over the peninsula in proxy war aftermath), Iraq (in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq). Off the top of my head. But of course it has used the leverage in many other cases, and for its extended nuclear deterrence.

> How about an economic existential threat?

Hasn't happened, though NatSec considers economic competitiveness a core principle of National Security. The Cold War in fact was economic competition as well as political. So maybe we could use that.

> How about cross-domain warfare with the threat of a nuclear first strike?

We've got a nice list going on now don't we?

> But to my knowledge they have never even come close to mplementation outside of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Did you miss the entire nuclear umbrella concept - a key US policy for the last 70 years? Wouldn't you have to admit that the deployment of a nuclear threat in the face of non-nuclear challenge (above) is cross-domain. So I think we've satisfied this one.

I don't really know how to reply to the rambling at the end of the post. It wasn't really a question.

Right, you've just reaffirmed what the parent poster said.

The US reserves the right to use it's nuclear weapons in this way. But in no way is this the unique, most important, or most manifest reservation of nuclear force. Nor is the US bound by policy that it will respond to WMDs this way.

This passage says "We don't rule it out."

It's not accurate to round that up to a representation of policy. The parent responded to this characterization quite well.

That is not the US policy.

The US policy is to use the threat of overwhelming force, nuclear and non-nuclear, for leverage in interstate conflict whatever that conflict may be and whether or not that conflict is a threat to the United States or its persons or just the outcomes it is interested in.

It's possible that nuclear forces could be used in a scenario like you suggest, but to round that up to policy is inaccurate and it is misleading.

It's interesting. I did not mean this comment as criticism (as you suggest).

I'm merely accounting that the point of the article ("in the 1950s, the US policies on use of nuclear forces was startling - to our sensibilities - in how it exercised them for power in pragmatic, utilitarian ways") equally applies today.

First. Strawman. Not helpful.

I actually lifted the nomenclature directly from National Security experts. I did not invent or distort any of the nomenclature.

Further, it is a very accurate representation of the terminology and nomenclature.

The point I hope to drive home is that 70 years later the same "chilling" (title word, not mine) is in effect.

> "competitor countries" in the nuclear context mean "countries that threaten us with nuclear war"

No. If you look at the list of target nations they include non-nuclear countries (Syria, Iran, etc).

> "coercive tactic" and "when it serves the US national interest" correspondingly means "threatening nuclear war to dissuade existential threats"

Mostly wrong. An existential threat could be an economic or political existential threat, or it could be conventional. And it can also be used (IS used) for non-existential coercion: say defending an ally.

> "competitive disadvantage" means "being on the losing side of a nuclear exchange".

No. It means facing a large risk of losing in a conflict of some kind for which there is a large interest in the US of winning. This does not apply only to nuclear exchange and indeed National Security practitioners are quite keen to discuss "cross-domain" warfare (lawfare, sanctions, political entanglement, etc).

> We can debate what the official policy should or should not say but please don't take the terms out of context to make them sound scary

You've taken the terms out of context.

I hope I didn't make them sound scary. I mean, reality is a bit scary some times but I wrote that as quite matter-of-fact.

Yes official policy is important. This is for several reasons:

1. Official policy communicates expectations. Others derive their behavior from, in large part, the official positions of others.

2. Official policy provides a mechanism of commitment. It is difficult to withdraw from or engage in something that is against public and officially stated policy (in both domestic politics and international relations).

3. Official policy is a mechanism to inform and constrain other national choices. It is difficult to have multiple official policies that clearly contradict, such as having an official policy of dismantling all nuclear arsenals at the same time as having an official policy to provide a nuclear umbrella over protectorates. When administrations transition and when new staff come into security planning, their choices on other policies are constrained by existing policies.

4. Cultivating an expectation that official policy is a good predictor of behavior provides a strong signaling function to other states, and for the building of statecraft. Countries that have no credibility often have none because of their misalignment of actions and official policy.

But yes, nations do sometimes decide to change policy or act against their policy. In the case of Russia or China as you've written in the above comment it is very highly unlikely for a large number of reasons. But it remains possible in slim margins, sure, and could be fun to speculate about.

The US continues, today, to be the only first-strike nuclear nation threatening to (as an explicit policy) destroy civilian population centers in a host of competitor countries as a coercive tactic and if and when it serves US national interest.

The further continuation of this longstanding policy, which is in effect today, is a matter of debate - though there has not yet been a strong enough coalition of opinion to withdraw this doctrine.

There were several nuclear strike target lists leaked from the past several administrations and they all say the same thing: capitols and population centers of compeditors, strike first in scenarios where not striking could put the US at a serious competitive disadvantage, use the threat of a strike and the deterrent of weapons of mass destruction as a coercive measure in the toolbox of statecraft.

Had the exact same thought. The timing of the report is perfectly placed after the Russian president's most recent remarks and the Russian Congress's report on American influence efforts on Russia's elections.

From the contents of the report it's very clear this Russia-attributed activity is associated with an espionage campaign rather than a manipulation campaign, though more details may be forthcoming on there being an actual effort to perform active manipulation.

The Russian effort to use true (white), gray (stretched) and black (false) propaganda showed sophistication mostly in its ability to adapt and react very quickly. The actual messaging was pretty weak - primarily appealing to those who already held some of the same thoughts on their own. Both Russia and the United States know that white propaganda is the most effective propaganda because it penetrates, resonates and persists better and because developing sources of truth (white and gray) are able to build stronger platforms than those based on falsehood. In this instance it was the true statements spread by Russia about corruption in the United States, war crimes, etc that were able to resonate and activate masses of people.