Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the what's-a-little-metadata-between-friends? dept

The DOJ has stated that it thinks Americans have no 4th amendment protections when communicating with foreigners. But what if they don't do that? Michael won most insightful comment this week by musing on how this DOJ position could be combined with another recent issue:

In addition. Based on the Aereo case, we can then assume that anyone NOT communicating with foreigners is simply doing so to avoid their communications being intercepted without a warrant - making their communications suspicious and allowing us to get a broad warrant to intercept all such communications.

Game, set, match.

Second place for insightful goes to TheResidentSkeptic for summing up the ridiculousness of Chris Hadfield's "Major Tom" video coming down from YouTube:

An Astronaut - whose entire career was funded by the PUBLIC - while in flight for NASA on the ISS - which are both funded by the PUBLIC - makes a magnificent transformative FAIR USE video for the PUBLIC to watch and learn and remember David's version and the PUBLIC loses it for another ONE HUNDRED YEARS before it enters the PUBLIC domain (if ever).

sarc/
Thank God copyright saves the PUBLIC from things like this by taking it down...
/sarc

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we'll start out with an anonymous comment from that same post, noting that even though the video can (and will) be downloaded and saved, that doesn't mean nothing is lost:

Sadly, all downloading gives you is the video. The description, the comments, nothing of that will be saved by downloading.

Even if everybody downloads the video, culture will still be lost.

Next, we've got a response to Michael Hayden's admissions about the uses of metadata. One commenter suggested that our community was exaggerating its concern, considering no government agents had come calling for them, but an anonymous reply explained why that's not the point:

Has a government agent shown up at my door?

No.

But the day will come when the government takes an interest in me. Perhaps I will be nabbed speeding. Or for driving too carefully. Or maybe my 1040 will be selected for additional scrutiny. Or my TSA groper does not like the way I glare at him.

On that day, Our Royal Masters have at their command everything I have said, done, yea even thought for the past 13 years.

Should I be concerned about this?

Concern does not begin to capture my feelings at this state of utter and complete helplessness.

For the funny side, we start out on that same post, where another anonymous commenter mused about whether Hayden should play his cards a little closer to his vest:

Oh my, he just gave away important data to the terrorists! Why isn't be being thrown into solitary confinement as we speak?! He just betrayed his country and damaged national security after all.

In second place, we've got Bt Garner with a response to the students who had their "pop tart guns" taken away:

They'll have to pry my pop tart gun out of my cold, sweaty, type 1 diabetes induced coma frozen hands.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we remain on that post, where one commenter asked when common sense was outlawed. Gwiz had a thought on what really happened:

Common sense was never outlawed, but apparently there is zero tolerance for it these days.

Finally, we head to our post about AT&T's attempts to dissuade the FCC from reclassifying broadband providers, where Josh in CharlotteNC offered a summary of the situation:

In other news, lovers of gravy warn that stopping the gravy train will be bad, horrible, and a sign of the apocalypse.

That's all for this week, folks!

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