A Media Shield Law is a law that shields high ranking political assholes from the Media and makes it a crime for media to hide their sources from those same political assholes.
Since you already have old laws that lay down rules for the protection of sources by media, it behooves the assholes running the US to make new laws that counteract that sort of shit.
"Basically, the White House has now made it clear that for all its talk about respecting the constitution and civil liberties, when it comes time to actually show real leadership, it won't do it, and instead will back efforts that make a mockery of basic civil liberties."
For the Love of Pete!
What does it take to make you people understand that Obama is a professional liar, who was hired by Corporate America to sweet talk the public into mass-slumber while the crooks who hired him rob you all blind? Must the man shit on the shoes of every individual in America separately?
No wonder the powers that be have no respect for the public.
Its a brainless mob of day dreaming children, pretending that bad things only happen to bad people, while ignoring the daily bum-fuck they get from their Government.
Make copyright non-transferable - to a corporation, individual or heirs - and last the life of the creator, falling into public domain automatically on the day the creator dies, and I think you might have something bearable, and at least a lot better than this crap where those who had nothing to do with the creation make all the money.
Not to mention that stopping the drone strikes would seriously interfere with the CIA-NSA friday night kill-pools.
What would all of those highly trained joystick jockeys do if you took away their ever-so-popular weekly computer-kill contests and kill-number gambling pools??
I mean, none of these kids are trained at wet-work anymore, and would be less than useless for field work.
"If we had public voting, then we would start to see campaigns against prominent people (and perhaps even less prominent people) because of how they voted in public elections. Maybe you think it would be desirable to have a campaigns against a new corporate executive because (according to public voting records) he voted UKIP at the last election."
Good grief man, has your country no laws??
When did it become legal to start a public or private campaign against any individual because of the way they voted on something political.
Hell, if such activity is legally allowed in your country then you're absolutely right, your country needs a secret ballot - but know this, that your country will then always have shitty government making shitty laws like those because the secret ballot allows shitty government to thrive.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
Once again your whole argument balances on this idea that the ballots are safe and secure between casting and counting, and my whole argument is that there is no such thing as absolute security when there is a shitload of cash to be made.
Your faith in the system is touching, but it is precisely that kind of faith that allows criminals to make their living.
Any area of the system that people "believe" to be secure is exactly the area of the system that criminals will exploit.
You may know a lot about Why and When the Secret Ballot was introduced in your country, but you really know sweet diddly about criminals and the lengths to which they will go for money and power - apparently.
For instance, how much would it take to bribe the people who CHECK THE SEALS for tampering, after they arrive at the counting area??
Oh and by the by, it is no longer 1813. Times have changed. People have changed. Jobs are no longer sacred.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
"It may need only a few dozen. "
Good grief man. If the crooks know in advance that they only need 12 votes to swing the race, then the crooks already have the election itself rigged or they would have no way to know such a thing.
Your logic is circular. There is no way to know with accuracy the "closeness" of a political race, unless you have actually rigged the race and know the results in advance.
To claim that watching the polls and adding up the TV pundit reports will let you know that you only need to fudge 12 votes is probably the silliest fantasy I've read here to date.
You seem to be almost alone in your nearly religious fervor over the vast importance of the secret ballot to produce honest governing, yet this same process is now being adopted by numerous dictator-based nations around the world to placate their abused public, while keeping the same assholes in power.
Half the operations deal with ways and means of attacking those that the NSA and the Fed do not like.
I would assume they do not like any of those organizations for very obvious reasons and would have spent quite a lot of their energy (read tax payer money) attempting to both spy on and infiltrate all such organizations for years.
I'm beginning to think that this is the NSA's true mandate.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
Vote Counting is 100% controllable by the bad guys.
All it takes is a lot of money to pay of a few individuals at key points in the process. This is why the most common manipulators are businesses and politicians. One has huge annual profits to draw from and the other simply digs into the tax payer's pocket.
-A sealed box from a district that is normally 80% plus for the enemy candidate is simply lost in transit. -Sealed Ballot Boxes can be opened and Resealed by the same process that Sealed them originally. -The counters and their overseers can be bribed, paid, coerced, or even hired to do whatever one needs.
I'm certain that criminals will come up with many far more brilliant methods of getting around any so-called security devised to prevent the ballots from being tampered with.
When it comes to electronic counting there is absolutely nothing to prevent manipulation of the tally and no way to prove manipulation occurred.
The real problem here is that with a SECRET BALLOT, there is no way to know that any of these criminal activities have occurred. Manipulation, even when discovered, cannot actually be proven, since there is no way to account for all the votes in the first place.
A tally is useless unless there is a way to verify the precise counting of every individual ballot to the voting public, and to prove that manipulation has occurred when it does. This is precisely the sort of verification that the Secret Ballot was designed to prevent.
That means there are laws to deal with those who attempt to do such things - and all it takes to get a company in trouble would be one employee blowing the whistle.
The ONLY way Vote Buying is useful is if hundreds of thousands or millions of people are coerced/paid to vote a specific way, and only if ALL the criminal Vote Buying operations are aiming at electing the same candidate.
And only one disgruntled voter is needed to blow the lid off such an operation.
Where is the fear??
Make these laws nasty - a vote buying/coercing company loses its license and is dissolved, its members disallowed from starting a new business for ten years, after they get out of prison ten years later. Splash their names all over the news and the web so that everyone knows who they are and how they operate. These people are after all doing the whole nation a disservice, weakening the entire country.
The members of any non-corporate vote buying operation receive ten years in prison and a 250,000.00 fine, with no parole.
That should be enough to allow even totally paranoid Secret Vote enthusiasts (who are not just political/corporate shills) to relax their sphincters a bit.
"It would also mean that everyone would know how everyone else voted, so there would be no secret ballot. so it is a damned good thing that it will never be allowed."
Why? The secret ballot has never prevented any of the things it is purported to prevent. Voter crime is merely the venue of the politician and his corporate owners, who, having no restrictions preventing them from counting the votes as they please, run the elections like a good ad campaign.
There are already a shitload of laws in operation today to deal with all of the crimes currently associated with voter coercion.
All the Secret Ballot does is prevent the voter from verifying that his/her vote was counted properly, exactly as planned.
You seem to think that this Secret Ballot thing is somehow sacred. It was devised and installed by businessmen, not by angels. It was designed specifically to turn every vote into any vote, usable by the counters to either add where they wanted or discard altogether, without consequences, since nobody can verify a votes origin or existence.
As for your "any fool" reference, how many fools get to see the actual collecting and counting in action? Especially now that we have electronic counting - a process that can be manipulated by anyone with a password and access to the counting device, such as the manufacturer of the device, or his politician friends.
How does anyone verify that the counters were not coerced/paid/hired, or in the case of mechanicals, designed to fake the count?
They cannot. Precisely the point of the secret ballot. It makes voting simply a part of business as usual - totally manipulable by the powers that be without consequence. It makes the vote as useless as prayer to the Pink Dragon of Wonderland.
Put a name on the vote and show the tally publicly, and you eliminate the possibility of vote fraud, by letting everyone see exactly where their ballot ended up and doing the count themselves. This will never be allowed, simply because it would make voting a useful tool for the people to choose good government.
In my experience, those who appear to be most adamant about the necessity of the Secret Ballot, always turn out to be those who have the most to lose if the voting/ballot process becomes verifiable.
The whole point is that "the secret ballot" was not really meant to do what everyone believes.
It is touted as a means of protection - to keep bad guys from knowing how you voted and causing you grief because of it - to keep your boss from firing you for not voting for his candidate for example.
The truth is that there are already laws on the books to deal with the sorts of crimes that "the secret ballot" pretends to prevent.
The "secret" ballot merely allows the count to be fudged without consequences. If nobody knows I voted for AAAA then my vote can be counted for BBBB, or CCCC and nobody will be the wiser. This is the purpose of the secret ballot. In other words, "the secret ballot" allows the vote counters to play the election any way they want.
"The Secret Ballot" is not some sacred law handed down by God. It is a trick pony handed down by politicians and businessmen, to insure that voting will not interfere with business as usual.
"After all, if huge numbers of people are sharing their ballots, the intimidation factor kind of goes away."
And if everyone actually signed their ballots, it would make voting into something absolutely useful as then the "tally" could be verified and everyone who voted could insure that their vote was properly counted and not lost or "repaired".
That's because Revolution is a circular movement that takes you all the way around to arrive right back at the place you started from.
What is needed, is evolution, not revolution.
The Fed lives by the sword. They would love nothing more than a national revolution. They have the means to suppress any size uprising and such a situation would let them eradicate all the insurrectionist leaders in the process.
It would allow them to declare martial law nationwide - a dream the fascists hold as the door to eternal profits - placing restrictions on all civilian travel, activity and speech. It would legalize slavery - work-gangs - internment camps - replacement industrial laborers and generally make the conquest of America a done deal.
They are not worried about revolt.
They are worried about common consensus - that all non-millionaire (and non-wannabe millionaire upper-class) Americans will someday agree that enough is enough and pull off a national strike. Simply stop working for the man.
This is why so much of the Fed's efforts are in designing ways and means of keeping Americans at each other's throats. It is also why they will put an end to non-commercial internet and social media and why they are recording every communication every American makes.
They are afraid of the public, but not of a violent public revolt. After all, the men and women behind all of this will not be the one's to fight a violent revolution - their minions will do that for them. And they have a lot of minions. The very process of destabilization necessary to the installation of a fascist state creates the poverty and desperation that produces minions from the ranks of the public.
In other words, the public will fight on both sides of a revolution, while the fat cats sip bourbon in their hill top mansions.
As the rulers put it at the start of the Dark Ages;
Become a soldier in our employ and torture, terrorize and kill the peasants, or remain a peasant and be tortured, terrorized and killed. The choice is yours.
This process even worked in South Africa to get blacks to torture, terrorize and kill fellow blacks for the nazi white land owners. It never fails.
Revolution is a dead end game and only the criminals can win.
When you want to fix a (s)election so that only one candidate has any chance of winning, the easiest way to insure that outcome is to field only whack-jobs and loonies as competing candidates.
Since the Republican Fascists knew their chances of putting someone known to be a Republican in office was utterly nil after Dubya Bush's reign, it behooved them to run a ringer - a Republican in Democratic Clothing and to choose a black man to insure a vote count could be fudged, and then field only their looniest candidates against the ringer.
Sure it helps to have minions employed in the vote-counting and vote-losing groups in case the public actually casts votes for one of the morons instead of the "chosen one", but essentially, given no other choice, the public will dutifully select the only possible choice you provided, giving you a nice verifiable vote count that needs very little in the way of "repairs".
Next president will likely be a woman because running the black man up the flagpole worked so perfectly. Should there have been any discrepancy noticed with the Obama Selection, the PowersThatBe would have simply claimed that the vote tally was due to all the blacks voting him into office.
That won't work twice, so they'll likely field a women next and claim the vote count was due to all the ladies voting her in, should things go south and the public starts asking questions.
Mind you, considering how dense the American public has become, the next POTUS should indeed be a Madame President, and likely one that nobody expected to run for the office, just the way Obama was selected. May even be a Black Woman.
As long as the American Public believes the vote system still works, the Madison Avenue selectors of POTUS will keep on running these gimmicks to keep the public placated, while their chosen one rewrites the laws to make corporate profiteering easier and more fun.
On the post: A Media Shield Law That Wouldn't Protect Glenn Greenwald Is Not A Media Shield Law; It's A Joke
A Media Shield Law is a law that shields high ranking political assholes from the Media and makes it a crime for media to hide their sources from those same political assholes.
Since you already have old laws that lay down rules for the protection of sources by media, it behooves the assholes running the US to make new laws that counteract that sort of shit.
You cannot have a free press in a fascist state.
On the post: As Feared: House Guts USA Freedom Act, Every Civil Liberties Organization Pulls Their Support
For the love of someone other than Mike.
For the Love of Pete!
What does it take to make you people understand that Obama is a professional liar, who was hired by Corporate America to sweet talk the public into mass-slumber while the crooks who hired him rob you all blind? Must the man shit on the shoes of every individual in America separately?
No wonder the powers that be have no respect for the public.
Its a brainless mob of day dreaming children, pretending that bad things only happen to bad people, while ignoring the daily bum-fuck they get from their Government.
I have to agree with the government on this.
The public truly deserves no respect at all.
Better??
On the post: The End Of Maximalist Copyright?
On the post: Study Shows US Government's Drone Killing Strategy Is Having Zero Impact On Al-Qaeda Attack Numbers
Re:
What would all of those highly trained joystick jockeys do if you took away their ever-so-popular weekly computer-kill contests and kill-number gambling pools??
I mean, none of these kids are trained at wet-work anymore, and would be less than useless for field work.
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Re: Re: True tally
OK, now you've run this horse in a complete circle.
If I sign my vote ballot, then my vote ballot is no longer my own....
I think this conversation has pretty much run aground at this point. You're not even making minimal sense any more.
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
Good grief man, has your country no laws??
When did it become legal to start a public or private campaign against any individual because of the way they voted on something political.
Hell, if such activity is legally allowed in your country then you're absolutely right, your country needs a secret ballot - but know this, that your country will then always have shitty government making shitty laws like those because the secret ballot allows shitty government to thrive.
How's that for circular logic eh. :)
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
Your faith in the system is touching, but it is precisely that kind of faith that allows criminals to make their living.
Any area of the system that people "believe" to be secure is exactly the area of the system that criminals will exploit.
You may know a lot about Why and When the Secret Ballot was introduced in your country, but you really know sweet diddly about criminals and the lengths to which they will go for money and power - apparently.
For instance, how much would it take to bribe the people who CHECK THE SEALS for tampering, after they arrive at the counting area??
Oh and by the by, it is no longer 1813.
Times have changed.
People have changed.
Jobs are no longer sacred.
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
Good grief man. If the crooks know in advance that they only need 12 votes to swing the race, then the crooks already have the election itself rigged or they would have no way to know such a thing.
Your logic is circular. There is no way to know with accuracy the "closeness" of a political race, unless you have actually rigged the race and know the results in advance.
To claim that watching the polls and adding up the TV pundit reports will let you know that you only need to fudge 12 votes is probably the silliest fantasy I've read here to date.
You seem to be almost alone in your nearly religious fervor over the vast importance of the secret ballot to produce honest governing, yet this same process is now being adopted by numerous dictator-based nations around the world to placate their abused public, while keeping the same assholes in power.
Methinks ye doth protest too loudly.
On the post: How You Know USA Freedom Act Is A Bad Bill: Half Of Its Own Co-Sponsors Voted Against It
Re: Don't Reform PATRIOT/FAA - REPEAL IT!
Half the operations deal with ways and means of attacking those that the NSA and the Fed do not like.
I would assume they do not like any of those organizations for very obvious reasons and would have spent quite a lot of their energy (read tax payer money) attempting to both spy on and infiltrate all such organizations for years.
I'm beginning to think that this is the NSA's true mandate.
---
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
All it takes is a lot of money to pay of a few individuals at key points in the process. This is why the most common manipulators are businesses and politicians. One has huge annual profits to draw from and the other simply digs into the tax payer's pocket.
-A sealed box from a district that is normally 80% plus for the enemy candidate is simply lost in transit.
-Sealed Ballot Boxes can be opened and Resealed by the same process that Sealed them originally.
-The counters and their overseers can be bribed, paid, coerced, or even hired to do whatever one needs.
I'm certain that criminals will come up with many far more brilliant methods of getting around any so-called security devised to prevent the ballots from being tampered with.
When it comes to electronic counting there is absolutely nothing to prevent manipulation of the tally and no way to prove manipulation occurred.
The real problem here is that with a SECRET BALLOT, there is no way to know that any of these criminal activities have occurred. Manipulation, even when discovered, cannot actually be proven, since there is no way to account for all the votes in the first place.
A tally is useless unless there is a way to verify the precise counting of every individual ballot to the voting public, and to prove that manipulation has occurred when it does. This is precisely the sort of verification that the Secret Ballot was designed to prevent.
---
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
That means there are laws to deal with those who attempt to do such things - and all it takes to get a company in trouble would be one employee blowing the whistle.
The ONLY way Vote Buying is useful is if hundreds of thousands or millions of people are coerced/paid to vote a specific way, and only if ALL the criminal Vote Buying operations are aiming at electing the same candidate.
And only one disgruntled voter is needed to blow the lid off such an operation.
Where is the fear??
Make these laws nasty - a vote buying/coercing company loses its license and is dissolved, its members disallowed from starting a new business for ten years, after they get out of prison ten years later. Splash their names all over the news and the web so that everyone knows who they are and how they operate. These people are after all doing the whole nation a disservice, weakening the entire country.
The members of any non-corporate vote buying operation receive ten years in prison and a 250,000.00 fine, with no parole.
That should be enough to allow even totally paranoid Secret Vote enthusiasts (who are not just political/corporate shills) to relax their sphincters a bit.
---
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
Why? The secret ballot has never prevented any of the things it is purported to prevent. Voter crime is merely the venue of the politician and his corporate owners, who, having no restrictions preventing them from counting the votes as they please, run the elections like a good ad campaign.
There are already a shitload of laws in operation today to deal with all of the crimes currently associated with voter coercion.
All the Secret Ballot does is prevent the voter from verifying that his/her vote was counted properly, exactly as planned.
You seem to think that this Secret Ballot thing is somehow sacred. It was devised and installed by businessmen, not by angels. It was designed specifically to turn every vote into any vote, usable by the counters to either add where they wanted or discard altogether, without consequences, since nobody can verify a votes origin or existence.
As for your "any fool" reference, how many fools get to see the actual collecting and counting in action? Especially now that we have electronic counting - a process that can be manipulated by anyone with a password and access to the counting device, such as the manufacturer of the device, or his politician friends.
How does anyone verify that the counters were not coerced/paid/hired, or in the case of mechanicals, designed to fake the count?
They cannot. Precisely the point of the secret ballot. It makes voting simply a part of business as usual - totally manipulable by the powers that be without consequence. It makes the vote as useless as prayer to the Pink Dragon of Wonderland.
Put a name on the vote and show the tally publicly, and you eliminate the possibility of vote fraud, by letting everyone see exactly where their ballot ended up and doing the count themselves. This will never be allowed, simply because it would make voting a useful tool for the people to choose good government.
In my experience, those who appear to be most adamant about the necessity of the Secret Ballot, always turn out to be those who have the most to lose if the voting/ballot process becomes verifiable.
---
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
It is touted as a means of protection - to keep bad guys from knowing how you voted and causing you grief because of it - to keep your boss from firing you for not voting for his candidate for example.
The truth is that there are already laws on the books to deal with the sorts of crimes that "the secret ballot" pretends to prevent.
The "secret" ballot merely allows the count to be fudged without consequences. If nobody knows I voted for AAAA then my vote can be counted for BBBB, or CCCC and nobody will be the wiser. This is the purpose of the secret ballot. In other words, "the secret ballot" allows the vote counters to play the election any way they want.
"The Secret Ballot" is not some sacred law handed down by God. It is a trick pony handed down by politicians and businessmen, to insure that voting will not interfere with business as usual.
---
On the post: As Feared: House Guts USA Freedom Act, Every Civil Liberties Organization Pulls Their Support
You're right obviously.
It could be and has been read that way.
Thanks for pointing that out.
I will try to be more precise in future.
On the post: Study Shows US Government's Drone Killing Strategy Is Having Zero Impact On Al-Qaeda Attack Numbers
How quickly we forget (the truth)
Al Qaeda was manufactured/created by the CIA, when the Russians were in Afghanistan, remember.
Their whole structure will resemble an American business because it was designed by Americans.
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Verifiable vote is not allowed
And if everyone actually signed their ballots, it would make voting into something absolutely useful as then the "tally" could be verified and everyone who voted could insure that their vote was properly counted and not lost or "repaired".
In plain words, it will never be allowed.
On the post: The Government's Antipathy Towards Transparency Has Made FOIA Lawsuits The Default Process
Re: Re: Re: Re:
What is needed, is evolution, not revolution.
The Fed lives by the sword. They would love nothing more than a national revolution. They have the means to suppress any size uprising and such a situation would let them eradicate all the insurrectionist leaders in the process.
It would allow them to declare martial law nationwide - a dream the fascists hold as the door to eternal profits - placing restrictions on all civilian travel, activity and speech. It would legalize slavery - work-gangs - internment camps - replacement industrial laborers and generally make the conquest of America a done deal.
They are not worried about revolt.
They are worried about common consensus - that all non-millionaire (and non-wannabe millionaire upper-class) Americans will someday agree that enough is enough and pull off a national strike. Simply stop working for the man.
This is why so much of the Fed's efforts are in designing ways and means of keeping Americans at each other's throats. It is also why they will put an end to non-commercial internet and social media and why they are recording every communication every American makes.
They are afraid of the public, but not of a violent public revolt. After all, the men and women behind all of this will not be the one's to fight a violent revolution - their minions will do that for them. And they have a lot of minions. The very process of destabilization necessary to the installation of a fascist state creates the poverty and desperation that produces minions from the ranks of the public.
In other words, the public will fight on both sides of a revolution, while the fat cats sip bourbon in their hill top mansions.
As the rulers put it at the start of the Dark Ages;
Become a soldier in our employ and torture, terrorize and kill the peasants, or remain a peasant and be tortured, terrorized and killed. The choice is yours.
This process even worked in South Africa to get blacks to torture, terrorize and kill fellow blacks for the nazi white land owners. It never fails.
Revolution is a dead end game and only the criminals can win.
--
On the post: The End Of Maximalist Copyright?
Re: Re: In defense of pirates
Both beautifully composed and logically sound.
Its nice to see real logic in action on occasion, among so much emotion.
Methinks his/her "jumbled piles of scribblings" might be well worth examining also.
On the post: Patent Reform Is Dead; Patent Trolls Win
Re: Bullshit is the perfect noun and adjective
Yes, there is one thing sacred to these people.
-------------------Money-------------------
-
On the post: As Feared: House Guts USA Freedom Act, Every Civil Liberties Organization Pulls Their Support
Re:
Since the Republican Fascists knew their chances of putting someone known to be a Republican in office was utterly nil after Dubya Bush's reign, it behooved them to run a ringer - a Republican in Democratic Clothing and to choose a black man to insure a vote count could be fudged, and then field only their looniest candidates against the ringer.
Sure it helps to have minions employed in the vote-counting and vote-losing groups in case the public actually casts votes for one of the morons instead of the "chosen one", but essentially, given no other choice, the public will dutifully select the only possible choice you provided, giving you a nice verifiable vote count that needs very little in the way of "repairs".
Next president will likely be a woman because running the black man up the flagpole worked so perfectly. Should there have been any discrepancy noticed with the Obama Selection, the PowersThatBe would have simply claimed that the vote tally was due to all the blacks voting him into office.
That won't work twice, so they'll likely field a women next and claim the vote count was due to all the ladies voting her in, should things go south and the public starts asking questions.
Mind you, considering how dense the American public has become, the next POTUS should indeed be a Madame President, and likely one that nobody expected to run for the office, just the way Obama was selected. May even be a Black Woman.
As long as the American Public believes the vote system still works, the Madison Avenue selectors of POTUS will keep on running these gimmicks to keep the public placated, while their chosen one rewrites the laws to make corporate profiteering easier and more fun.
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