US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7075

On March 08 2017 08:05 ticklishmusic wrote:


ayy lmao, it's even more of a fake victory than i thought. ty for info.

on a serious note, yes, there are things that could improve the ACA for insurers, as well as consumers. they just don't happen to be sneakily eliminating the ACA carve out on deductions for insurance company executives like in the GOP plan.

On March 08 2017 08:01 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
This is great. Spicer just fumbles some words but it's clear that Trump has 0 information other than the Breitbart he read. I actually feel sorry for Spicer now having to defend Trump for this lol.

On March 08 2017 08:34 m4ini wrote:


Didn't it all start on Infowars or what that bullshit is called? The "real news" stuff? I remember trump praising that weird tinfoil guy a lot.

On March 08 2017 07:35 Plansix wrote:

The government needs a FISA warrant(or some due process) to spy on me and I don’t have a smart TV, so I’m pretty all set. I also do not give a fuck if someone can’t get VC investment because the government is regulating consumer products so random hackers can’t spy on people who just want to buy a TV. I don’t give a shit about anyone getting rich off of some dumb tech product like a smart trashcan or condom. And I could list an endless nubmer of things the tech industry does not understand, including ethics, liability and why long term planning is good.

And regulation is supposed to slow shit down and make people think about the long term prospects of what they are doing. Which is the opposite of the tech industry right now.

Source
Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

On March 08 2017 06:02 a_flayer wrote:


For every person that was shocked, there's two who don't care and at least one that thinks its a good thing. The ones who always believed were considered to be tinfoil hat people.

On March 08 2017 09:15 LegalLord wrote:
Too bad Wikileaks isn't releasing full source code for the CIA leaks at the moment. It sounds like a whole lot of fun to sift through CIA-made exploits for the funsies.

On March 08 2017 08:46 a_flayer wrote:


The CIA paid for backdoors in applications and didn't report backdoors it found to software maintainers so they could be fixed. The tools they created to misuse these backdoors are now out in the public. Even before it got to wikileaks, it was likely circulating around in an unauthorized manner:

Your government is not making you more secure, FISA is irrelevant. Your government is providing backdoors for the whole world to use. This is exactly why one shouldn't do these kinds of things. You make something with the intent of using for good wholesome purposes and then suddenly its out there and it is ready to be abused. Even if it is not leaked, as long as the bugs exist then they can potentially be abused. You can't really go around using computers, routers, smart phones, etc anymore these days, even if you don't buy "some dumb tech product", and these are all being compromised in the same manner.

Let me reiterate: all branches of the government should always report security bugs to software maintainers so they can be fixed. This is the only way to improve security without making major sacrifices to the current way of doing things online. The only way to keep the evil Russians, the communist Chinese, terrorists and other rogue actors out of our ever-increasingly digitalized lives (and prevent data breaches of any kind).

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski approved foreign policy adviser Carter Page’s now-infamous trip to Moscow last summer on the condition that he would not be an official representative of the campaign, according to a former campaign adviser.

A few weeks before he traveled to Moscow to give a July 7 speech, Page asked J.D. Gordon, his supervisor on the campaign’s National Security Advisory Committee, for permission to make the trip, and Gordon strongly advised against it, Gordon, a retired Naval officer, told POLITICO.

Page then emailed Lewandowski and spokeswoman Hope Hicks asking for formal approval, and was told by Lewandowski that he could make the trip, but not as an official representative of the campaign, the former campaign adviser said. The adviser spoke on the condition of anonymity because he has not been authorized to discuss internal campaign matters.

The trip is now a focus of congressional and FBI investigations into Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election.

Lewandowski told POLITICO he did not recall the email exchange with Page, but did not deny that it occurred.

“Is it possible that he emailed me asking if he could go to Russia as a private citizen? I don’t remember that, but I probably got 1,000 emails a day at that time, and I can’t remember every single one that I was sent. And I wouldn’t necessarily remember if I had a one-word response to him saying he could do something as a private citizen,” Lewandowski said Tuesday.

Hicks declined to comment. But a White House official said campaign officials did not discuss Page’s planned trip before he left for Moscow.

“No one discussed the trip within the campaign and certainly not with candidate Trump directly,” said the official.
The official pointed to a July statement from Hicks which declared that Page was in Moscow in a private capacity and was not representing the campaign. That statement came in response to media reports from Moscow about Page’s presence there.

Both Lewandowski and the White House official cast Page as a minor character on the periphery of the campaign, who was a foreign policy adviser in name only.

“I’ve never met or spoken to Carter Page in my life,” Lewandowski said.

Gordon and Page had no comment on whether the Trump campaign officially sanctioned the trip, which has drawn the attention of investigators from the FBI and congressional committees investigating possible Trump campaign ties with Russian officials before the election.

And while Page has repeatedly denied wrongdoing in connection with his Moscow visit, it is now drawing increased scrutiny as a result of new disclosures about his contact two weeks later with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican convention in Cleveland. Just days after Kislyak talked to Page, Gordon and a third campaign official, WikiLeaks disseminated thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee’s servers — a hack that U.S. intelligence later attributed to the Russian government.

On March 08 2017 09:51 m4ini wrote:


Charming.

On March 08 2017 09:55 Plansix wrote:

The party of the working people and poor.

Take the NSA for example. Working in a military base under persistent scrutiny? Not the most funnest life one could live. But the technology there is beautiful.

I don't think I understand what the republicans actually want out of health care. I'm not sure they do either.

On March 08 2017 09:59 Tachion wrote:
I don't think I understand what the republicans actually want out of health care. I'm not sure they do either.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has now lost two Sunshine State offices where constituents frequently gathered to push him to hold a town hall, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

A week after the landlord of Rubio's office in Tampa declined to renew its lease over the protests, the owner of his Jacksonville office made the same decision, also citing the large crowds who gathered outside the building. The Jacksonville property manager said protests were disruptive for patients visiting a center for children with mental health issues that is adjacent to Rubio’s office, according to the report.

Rubio spokeswoman Christina Mandreucci lamented in a statement to the Post that the “unruly behavior of some anti-Trump protesters” was causing the two small offices to shutter, though she acknowledged that most people turning up to voice disapproval for Rubio “have done so in a productive and respectful way.”

The Florida senator has so far resisted calls to hold a town hall on replacing the Affordable Care Act and other key issues under consideration, saying it would be unproductive to have protesters “heckle and scream at me.”

Indivisible, a national movement of progressives that sprang up after the election to push back against the Trump administration, has organized many of the protests outside Rubio’s offices. Other local offshoots of the movement have confronted Republican lawmakers at town halls across the country.

Indivisible Clay County organizer Jeff Allstadt told the Florida Times-Union that protesters had been respectful and did not intend for Rubio to lose his office spaces.

“We’re just constituents, and we’re trying to make points, discuss issues with him, and we’re going to do it wherever he sets up shop,” Allstadt told the paper.