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[Rico]

They do, but when the center responds to a situation that doesn't call for intervention, that's the definition of a "false positive". You constructed a scenario where the a center gives (at least immediately) a "true negative".

There are plenty of real-life situations in which 911 rightfully allocates resources to non-emergency events. Consider the person with a broken foot who can't drive himself to the hospital for treatment and doesn't have friends to drive him, et cetera. 

I keep hearing great things about Justice League, but can't seem to ever work up the will to actually watch it. For the sake of the argument, maybe you could recap what's relevant about the episode?

Mr. Terrific has spread the Justice League out very thin to optimally respond to a great number of events, including having assigned several "heavy-hitters" off-planet. A metahuman threat happens and there is no one of sufficient power to respond to it, and a combination of the lower-powered Leaguers who remain on Earth fail to accomplish anything. Thankfully the villain is relatively benign and everything wraps up magically by the end of the 30 minutes, but given any more serious villain there was possibility for severe damage and death to a large city because there were no resources in reserve.

While this deserves another topic if this is a discussion we're going to have, it's an interesting thought: If you have 10 firetrucks, and 10 4-alarm fires you presumably send out all 10 trucks. If you have 9 4-alarm fires and 1 1-alarm fire, do you allow the 1-alarm fire to happen and send a truck to mitigate it once an extra becomes free in case something more serious breaks out? And if so, what's the cut-off? Would the damage and loss-of-life from a 5-alarm fire be so much more severe that it's worth a couple of 1-alarm fires just in case?

But before I summon that up maybe you could respond to this: If you assume there's no policy difference, you're implicitly saying the presumes-bad-faith call center's allocation is irrational or insane....

I don't think that's true at all. Say you assume everyone's lying to you, but you have an obligation to still distribute resources (there's a government mandate, you feel a moral imperative "just in case", whatever). The only sensible way to proceed is to act as if you're being told the truth, regardless of if you believe it. And if the results are indistinguishable between either extreme, then there cannot be a need "to assume that its users come in good faith and that those who don't (or in the case of this woman, maybe can't) are the exception."

[Classic]

The only sensible way to proceed is to act as if you're being told the truth, regardless of if you believe it.

But Rico, this is exactly what I mean when I say

You're making it a pretends-good-faith emergency center.

Iirc, you injected the mandate to act in the interests of its ward into the hypothetical example.
I assume that there is no reason for the "bad faith" call center to do anything but hoard its resources if it has no such mandate?

Because of the mandate to act, you're making the call center presume good faith as a policy anyhow, which I guess is just as good for what I want these hypothetical call centers to do. They can't get their jobs done without a policy of presuming the good faith of callers.

Anyway, is it sensible to treat as truth what you believe is a lie in the off-chance that it might be the truth? If you thought, for a fact, that you couldn't trust your senses, why would you act as though you could? We don't think Charlie Brown is making a good decision by letting Lucy hold the football for him.

There are plenty of real-life situations in which 911 rightfully allocates resources to non-emergency events.

I explained what I guessed you'd meant by "trivial", and your earlier followup left it ambiguous as to what you meant. By "breadth" I thought you meant to include, and remind me of, prank calls to the emergency line. The easy example of a call made in bad faith. This was a silly misunderstanding.

JUSTICE LEAGUE!

Uh, that's a resource distribution problem not really under the purview of this discussion, but OK.
If I'm reading you right, key resources were away from high-priority areas. This episode is also a little weird, because it seems like the League is taking on additional responsibilities that spread its resources too thin, not just needing or being prepared to respond to lots of calls at once.

If you have 10 firetrucks, and 10 4-alarm fires you

Um, that's... Your example is funny, because I wasn't sure what you meant by a 4-alarm fire and wikipedia suggests that even a 1 alarm fire can have two engines allocated as basic policy. You're already spread mad thin.

I'm also not sure of how real triage works in real-life hellfire scenarios. It might actually make more sense to quash an easy fire and maintain a steady perimeter of damage at another site, than to let the easy fire become difficult to manage and make progress on the harder one.
Fires aren't usually like medical triage where sometimes it just makes sense to let a "lost cause" solve itself.

[Thad]

I've been saying for years that Republicans would become advocates for due process just as soon as they figured out that they would never be labeled as the "soft-on-terror" party no matter what they do.

To wit: Rand Paul sponsors bill to ban warantless domestic drone surveillance.

Granted, Rand Paul may not be a representative Republican, and whether the thing will pass either chamber remains to be seen.  But it's a good first step.



Disclosure: I've done Web development for a company that makes aerial surveillance equipment.

[Shinra]

I think calling Rand Paul a republican at this point is kind of like calling Joe Lieberman a democrat. Technically true, but I wouldn't go out on a limb expecting anyone else in his party to take him seriously at this point.

[Thad]

1. Calling Joe Lieberman a Democrat isn't even TECHNICALLY true anymore, and hasn't been since 2006.

2. The Pauls may be on the fringe of the Republican Party, but the fringe of the Republican Party is pretty damn influential.

[Classic]

I feel like the Tea Party is its own party at this point.

[Brentai]

I've done web development for Experian.

Do I win?

[Thad]

Intelligence community finally allows senator to publicly state that intelligence community broke the law.

[Thad]

Appellate court says warrantless GPS phone tracking is totally okay.

I really don't see this passing muster with the same SCOTUS that's ALREADY thrown out warrantless GPS tracking, but in the meantime we're going to have to deal with the precedent.

[Thad]

So yeah

As the ACLU's Naomi Gilens points out, "more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade."

[...]

While it's useful for the public to have these statistics, they give just one small piece of the overall surveillance puzzle. For example, these statistics likely don't include cell phone location tracking by law enforcement. They also omit government access to emails stored by third party providers. And they entirely exclude the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program under the FISA Amendment Act. While hard numbers are hard to obtain, what little evidence we do have suggests that all of these forms of surveillance have been increasing.

and this is part of my "can't really see my way toward voting Obama again" position.  I'm not the kind of guy who spends eight years criticizing one President for doing a thing and then just kinda shrugs when another President does the same thing only worse just because we're part of the same granfalloon.

[Royal☭]

and this is part of my "can't really see my way toward voting Obama again" position.  I'm not the kind of guy who spends eight years criticizing one President for doing a thing and then just kinda shrugs when another President does the same thing only worse just because we're part of the same granfalloon.

So you're not a Democrat is what you're saying.

[Brentai]

I don't think that's really a startling new revelation.

For my part I'm only hoping for a decisive Democratic victory so that we can wipe the GOP off the table and create some space for the new party to crush the Democrats in about 8 years.

[Thad]

Court rules that reading someone else's E-Mail isn't a civil violation if it's in the cloud.

In a case decided on Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that accessing someone’s online e-mail without their permission doesn’t violate the 1986-era Stored Communications Act (SCA). Though they differed in their reasoning, the justices were unanimous in ruling that e-mail stored in the cloud (like Gmail or Yahoo Mail) does not meet the definition of electronic storage as written in the statute.

This new decision creates a split with existing case law (Theofel v. Farey-Jones) as decided in a 2004 case decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision found that an e-mail message that was received, read, and left on a server (rather than being deleted) did constitute storage "for purposes of backup protection," and therefore was also defined as being kept in "electronic storage."

Presumably this applies to most any webmail/IMAP solution.  Which, it should go without saying, is completely fucking insane in a world where most everybody keeps their E-Mail in the cloud.

Curious what that means for, say, my privately-run IMAP server that I control myself.  Hope this gets fixed (either by Congress or SCOTUS) before a case like that has to be tested.

It's also a purely civil concern, so it doesn't address the issue of the police or other state actors getting into your E-Mail account by guessing the answer to your security question.

[Thad]

So today's big story is NBC getting ahold of a memo that lays out the Obama Administration's justification for assassinating American citizens.

“The condition that an operational  leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.

Instead, it says,  an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American  has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is  no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.” The memo does not define “recently” or “activities.”

As in Holder’s speech, the confidential memo lays out a three-part test that would make targeted killings of American lawful:  In addition to the suspect being an imminent threat, capture of the target must be “infeasible, and the strike must be conducted according to “law of war principles.” But the memo elaborates on some of these factors in ways that go beyond what the attorney general said publicly. For example, it states that U.S. officials may consider whether an attempted capture of a suspect  would pose an “undue risk” to U.S. personnel involved in such an operation. If so, U.S. officials could determine that the capture operation of the targeted American would not be feasible, making it lawful for the U.S. government to order a killing instead, the memo concludes.

In other words, the entire thing is filled with poorly-defined, broadly-defined, and just plain undefined fucking weasel words and amounts to "Whenever the hell we feel like it."  Which may come as a surprise to, well, the same sort of people who were surprised to learn last year that a Republican presidential candidate did not like poor people very much.

(Charles at Popehat has a bit more of a rundown of the various loopholes in the memo and why it really does amount to a blank check.)

Any politician who pushes real action -- a bill, a lawsuit, a congressional investigation -- to reestablish that no the President cannot just kill whoever the fuck he wants for any reason has my support, regardless of party and regardless of what stance he may have taken on the issue during the Bush Administration.

Any pundit who thought it was okay for Bush to do it but has had a sudden change of heart, on the other hand, or any politician who bleats about this but makes no visible effort to actually DO anything about it?  Well, you can guess how much sympathy I've got for THEM.

[Büge]

Any politician who pushes real action -- a bill, a lawsuit, a congressional investigation -- to reestablish that no the President cannot just kill whoever the fuck he wants for any reason has my support, regardless of party and regardless of what stance he may have taken on the issue during the Bush Administration.

Yeah, but if they stay quiet on this one, then maybe someday THEY will be the one who gets to wield that kind of power.

[Thad]

Well, obviously, which is where the part about "any politician who bleats about this but makes no visible effort to actually DO anything about it" comes in.

[Thad]

DHS "watchdog" says DHS can stop anyone within 100mi of the US border and look at all the data on any devices they've got.

You'd think Doctorow would be grateful.  The DHS is practically selling his new book for him!

[Büge]

Thank god I don't carry any electronic devices.

[Thad]

There's always encryption -- indeed, with SSD's becoming more standard, there's less of a performance issue with encrypted laptop hard drives than ever.

I haven't encrypted my phone or my tablet mostly for practical reasons: I figure if I ever lose one of them, I'm a lot likelier to find it again if whoever finds it can still boot it up.  The most private stuff I've got on there is E-Mail, and if there's anyone who still thinks E-Mail is private, let me disabuse you of that notion right now.

That said, if I lived within 100 miles of the border I'd probably be encrypting my shit now.

[Ted Belmont]

There's always encryption -- indeed, with SSD's becoming more standard, there's less of a performance issue with encrypted laptop hard drives than ever.

I haven't encrypted my phone or my tablet mostly for practical reasons: I figure if I ever lose one of them, I'm a lot likelier to find it again if whoever finds it can still boot it up.  The most private stuff I've got on there is E-Mail, and if there's anyone who still thinks E-Mail is private, let me disabuse you of that notion right now.

That said, if I lived within 100 miles of the border I'd probably be encrypting my shit now.

So hey, know any good Android encryption programs?