Woah. This is a pretty cool reactive article. It's the first one that I've personally encountered which reacts like it's supposed to, engaging me as I read.<p>Congratulations to whoever put this together, it was very well done.
This guy, Stewart Baker:<p>"You ask me proofs that it works, I can show you proofs that the lack of it really fails"<p>That is so flawed from a logic point of view that I won't even bother.<p>"We can't be transparent .. we have to get comfortable with the idea that we're delegating to somebody.."<p>There are two things here:
1) Most people agree that we can't talk about the details of implementation of a strategy agreed to by the US people to defend our country. The problem is that the mass surveillance that we've heard of in the last 5 months is not exactly a "detail of implementation" is it? It's a whole gods damn strategy that the US people didn't directly agree to. (Now yes, it's a democracy, we elected representatives who agreed to this. So what? Our constitution doesn't give full power to our representatives. If they didn't think for a second that a question of that magnitude might require some public debate, they are wrong, period).<p>2) He talks about trust. The problem is that trust is not something that you just ask for. If you are corrupt, lie, cheat, and all around screw up for long enough, people will stop trusting you.
The description about Feinstein is wrong. She didn't backtrack about anything. She's only pretending to do it, while passing Newspeak bills with backdoors that codify and legalize NSA's mass spying.<p><a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/sen-feinsteins-nsa-bill-will-codify-and-extend-mass-surveillance" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/sen-feinsteins-nsa-bil...</a><p>Feinstein has done nothing but help the NSA so far. She's not going to just stop because she suddenly developed a conscience. I wish Californians would just recall her, because otherwise we're stuck with her and her pro-surveillance state bias until 2018. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, if she wasn't also the head of the Intelligence Committee, and having tremendous power in the Senate to continue things as they are.
With these NSA revelations, I feel like there is still an elephant in the room nobody has yet started talking about...<p>THIS DATA CAN BE USED TO UNDERMINE YOUR STARTUP.<p>It's not just privacy we should be concerned about. It's our economy.<p>Whether it is corporations willfully collaborating in secret with the government or government secretly infiltrating corporations - either way, this presents a serious opportunity for exploitation of the public marketplace.<p>Because with this amount of data, the NSA has a goldmine of business intelligence that it can put to 'strategic use' via third-party 'partners' who can actively participate in the market; ie- COMPETE WITH YOU.<p>This is unfair and a terrible flaw in an economic system.
Totally aside from the content, this is a really good example of effective design of long-form exposition in the medium of a web browser. Designed for the affordances of the screen, without sacrificing in-depth textual content.
Why are so many people persuaded by arguments of the form, "It doesn't matter what the government knows if you have nothing to hide?"<p>I'm not questioning why the NSA uses this argument -- clearly, they use it because it works -- people are persuaded by it. What I'm asking is, why does it work?
Excellent! I'm excited about mixed media articles getting better and better!<p>One small tweak I would make is to have the video start playing not when it's in the middle but closer to the top of the page.<p>Reason is, I find myself distracted by listening to the guys speak before I finish reading the text.
Can someone explain why, if I change the slider to indicate that I have only one friend, the number of "friends of friends" is 163? Is my only friend really so popular?