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Syria – Trump Administration Will Continue Obama Policy
There is a serious confusion about statements made yesterday by the Trump administration. It sets the fight against ISIS as the top priority and no longer demands an immediate leaving of Bashar Assad as the Syrian president. Reports try to sell this as a new position. But it is not new at all.
The U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley announced a "change of priorities":
"You pick and choose your battles and when we're looking at this, it's about changing up priorities and our priority is no longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out," U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley told a small group of reporters.
Secretary of State Tillerson confirmed that position:
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, speaking in Ankara on Thursday, said Assad's longer-term status "will be decided by the Syrian people."
Southfront headlines the Haley talk as ‘Assad Must Not Go’. The International Business Times wrote about those statements:
The United States has announced a shift in its diplomatic policy on Syria and is no longer insisting that its president Bashar al-Assad be removed as the head of the war-torn country.
In a clear departure from the Obama administration's stance on Assad, and against EU policy, the US is now moving its focus to its battle with Isis.
But the Trump administration statements are not new at all. The "announced" positions were established under Obama:
President Barack Obama spent a significant portion of his final State of the Union speech discussing the fight against the terrorist group ISIS.
…
Obama said that fighting ISIS (also known as the Islamic State, ISIL, or Daesh) and other terrorists is the top priority of his administration.
Also in January 2016 then Secretary of State Kerry used a similar wording as Tillerson used now:
"It's up to the Syrians to decide what happens to Assad," Kerry said. "They are the negotiators and they will decide the future.""It's up to the Syrians to decide what happens to Assad," Kerry said. "They are the negotiators and they will decide the future."
There is no change of policy. The top priority has been and will be for a while the fight against ISIS. The U.S. will use this to occupy the eastern parts of Syria. When ISIS is suppressed enough to no longer be an immediate issue the removal of Assad will again become a top priority.
That Assad's position will be "decided by the Syrian people" is just obfuscating as long as it is not said WHICH Syrian people are HOW to decide over it.
The War On Syria will go on until the U.S. really changes its positions and until the Wahhabi oil sheiks stop their financing of their various Takfiri mercenaries – be they ISIS, al-Qaeda or whatever name they want to apply.
To Jackrabbit
Yes I don’t really see myself as one either.
To From The Hague
You’re not wrong however I think that means everybody is then stuck with a false choice where one ends up with very serious abuses of power no matter what. Which in turn means (at least in my opinion) that no one is right either since there doesn’t seem to be any correct solution.
To ASAFP
Runaway robot is very right.
Sorry that this reply gets long even as a quick summary.
Now some wisely point out that all of this including all the files and so on might be a significant effort by the various agencies to appear much more capable or at least stronger and more powerful than they are. It is a possibility but I find it much more likely that they’re simply drowned by more data than they can use at this point (Binney’s argument).
At the face value of the leaks themselves everything and everyone are surveilled all the time. You can read the actual material that has been released here (it is updated as more is released):
https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs
You’ll likely find the older stuff more interesting than the newer.
The reason there’s so much from the Intercept is that they (through Greenwalds) made themselves the gatekeeper. They’re the only ones who actually have the unreleased documents at this time as far as I know. Big mistake by Snowden in my not so humble opinion —you’ve all realized I’m an opinionated grumpy idiot at this point right? 😀
As far as I know there’s also no one with any serious technical understanding with access to the unreleased files but it might also be the case that there isn’t much more left of any significant interest and that it simply wouldn’t matter. Stuff at the level of the Wikileaks Marble release is what the hackers (in the positive sense) really need to try to grasp at creating publicly available countermeasures.
Although one already knows enough not to be able to trust any commercially available hardware (and you don’t have your personal silicon foundry) so maybe even that does not matter all that much.
According to the leaks the surveillance is against not only phones, not only metadata, not only pure content, not only email, but everything including such things as your voice pattern and most likely also your spoken and written vocabulary and writing styles, your mobility, your social acquaintances, and so on. A super-STASI automated KGB/Gestapo system.
You can find the name of part of the system for voices on one of the slides regarding the pathways for intercepted internet “phone” calls like Skype etc. and how everything is dissected and distributed and reassembled into various databases, I forget the name of the slides and there has been so many different code names now that I’ve forgotten what the name of the specific type of system was (maybe it was NEURON?).
Their “defense” is that it isn’t surveillance as long as nobody human looks at the data despite these things being fully automatic systems.
While that is not a valid argument on their part it makes sense that they use it (it is one that looks natural from their point of view) because they know they would have to spend significantly more resources if at each point of collection (which is pretty much everywhere, globally) they had to run everything through some kind of whitelist or blacklist or both. They have their hands more than full enough by keeping the automated systems up and running and expanding and developing it to be better including adding new methods.
Total surveillance can only be total, adding exceptions is not remotely practical at the collection stage, such a thing is a job for the automated analysis of the data which happens later, and also possibly a job for human analysts (like Snowden was) if it ever gets that far.
And this isn’t done just by the NSA, or the CIA, or the USA, or Google, or Facebook, or Bai-du, and this isn’t done not only by the Five Eyes or the Nine Eyes. Anyone who can, does, both alone and together, knowingly or unknowingly. It is an ecosystem, and it applies evolutionary pressure upon itself in the same kind of cooperative competition where being attacked is a way to learn how to both attack and defend in the same way.
The data is stored, not yet for eternity (it’s said to be stored for three to six months in general but that’s based on old numbers years ago and some of it like phone records are in some countries officially stated to be kept for longer) but they/everybody were constantly working on improving the retention rate for all the data. “Just in case it might prove to be useful” because it is the only way to make the automated analysis reach higher detail while spanning more time and discovering influences and correlations that would otherwise be impossible to discover. Thus in any coming events the system could possibly find out even more about why things might happen and who to watch and maybe also what to say and who to say it to and in what manner to manipulate the result into one that is deemed beneficial.
Total surveillance is total manipulation.
[And by the way on that topic if you know a tiny little bit about Deep Learning and/or Machine Learning (which is the very low level of knowledge I’m at) then you know that one has to train these systems with data relevant the kind of thing you want it to discover. Maybe that would be terrorist attacks, or maybe it would be political subversion, manipulation, corruption etc., or specific crimes. Anything. Now it should also be said that the world and humans supply all such things regardless and maybe that will suffice. It is very hard to say what is being done or not without unfettered inside access. Snowden wouldn’t know, or at least I don’t see why he would.]
Snowden’s documents were old at the time and are older now, newer bits and pieces of information surface once in a while, beyond that one has to extrapolate (at the very least based on Moore’s law but most likely by more, maybe much more). Two and a half years used to be considered a human generation equivalent in computing but even that measure is old now. So at least one or two generations have passed, that’s a long time for computers and anything related to them.
Snowden’s documents are only a limited set (and only about one or two percent of his files are said to have been released so far although maybe the 98-99% remaining are simply too mundane to matter) of the most “public” information available internally inside the NSA (which is of course only a tiny bit of everything that is going on in a single agency, or a single species if you will).
There aren’t any borders, no actual oversight, and no way any humans either inside or outside of any of it has the capacity to grasp all of what is hidden or even a significant fragment of it.
The dream of “control” remains elusive, it is self-defeating, at least for humans (including “super-human” or “meta-human” structures such as companies and organizations or governments). And “everybody” is working on solving that problem too of course (or maybe they were already successful, one can wonder).
Most people still don’t seem to get it or maybe I’m just bad at noticing it if people get it, and I probably don’t get it either (this all applies to me too; I’ve only been trying too hard compared to my abilities). And now every time I even think about it I have to stop because I simply am not able to handle it for any meaningful length of time and I suspect that is true for many others as well since hardly anyone talks about it in this manner.
Previously, historically this sort of thing has always turned out to be massively self-destructive. Maybe that will or has become true this time too (one could interpret current events that way, be wary of confirmation bias), or maybe not, maybe this time the crazy idea of “control” will “work”.
One can only live on and try to find answers. For my part it happens at a frozen snail’s pace.
Posted by: Outsider | Apr 4 2017 0:37 utc | 173
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