I get upset hearing news like this because it dismantles comfy beliefs. Some part of one's identity is inevitably linked to the national identity. I guess the way to not get upset is to remember that there are really no good governments. Any government, if unchecked by the people it tries to govern, will exploit and oppress while doing its utmost best to maintain a positive image.
A poli sci grad student friend put it best. Paraphrased: "Everybody wants to live in a country benefiting from international exploitation, but no one wants to actually see the methods used to effect it."
As I recall, I hung out with him before his room was ready. I guess I must have gotten his signature on the video release. That's about all I can remember of it.
I am a South African. We have lived through some of the most draconian Orwellian autocratic measures in the world. Furthermore, our journey to democracy has not been smooth - the last 10 years were marred by massive corruption.
Through all of this, our constitutional rights to freedom of expression, and freedom of press, has stayed sound. We have had multiple instances where journalists reported on some nefarious action and were intimidated or even legally threatened by authorities. However, our courts have, for the most part, sided with our freedom of expression and press rights. The South African government has had quite a couple of punches on the nose in our courts ;-).
I have read most of the comments in this thread. I think I understand most of the viewpoints, and I always try and have an open mind. I am also not an American citizen. However, like every Earth citizen I have a keen interest (possibly forced...) on USA issues. "If America sneeze the world catches a cold".
This is clearly a very contentious topic, and I will reply with some specific thoughts on specific comments. I just wanted to give the perspective of a citizen in a country where this is a serious history of government abuse. We cannot take these things likely. Now that I think about it, I think the Germans feel the same way (living through the Gestapo and Stasi years could not have been fun....).
One of my more memorable encounters in my taxi was with an older fellow who was moving cars to sell at auction (in Scottsdale, Arizona).
"How'd you find your way to the desert?" Phoenix was half-way between the labs in Los Angeles, the labs in New Mexico, and the testing sites in Nevada.
For a young single man, life on the secret bases in Nevada was pretty sweet. All the meals were the same price (steak, lobster, etc), ammunition was cheap, etc. The married guys didn't like it so much, but he was not married at the time.
Ooohhhh... Interesting. There are rumors on the internet about the federal government having extensive underground infrastructure in the western United States. This made sense to me: if you want to hide something, you put it underground. So I asked my passenger about this.
"Oh yeah, but there's way more stuff underground at Area 12 [0], than at Area 51."
I'm partial to the idea that nothing important happens at Area 51 anymore, just your average everyday testing of the latest thermodynamics-compliant military hardware. All the interesting R&D is now done somewhere else.
Ingo Swann [1] said in his Art Bell interview (iirc), w.r.t. his self-published book [2], that the secret program he was involved with, which he couldn't prove, never even got to the point where it needed to be 'classified'.
I mean all eyes have been on Area 51 for decades now, it makes sense they would move more sensitive stuff elsewhere. I never heard of Area 12 or any other "area" so those are still obscure enough for the mainstream.
> all eyes have been on Area 51 for decades now, it makes sense they would move more sensitive stuff elsewhere.
It’s kinda law of nature, actually. If all media attention is on some spot, you can bet that much more “interesting” things are happening elsewhere. Like:
- college girl suffer less sexual abuse than non-college girls;
- Catholic kids suffer less sexual abuse from figures of authority than non-Catholic kids (by some probably biased reports - 10 times less);
- Uber implemented more safety features in their app than Lyft (which was recently sued by some women exactly for that) - here the causality link is obvious: with media attention on them, Uber was forced to try harder.
But less people would click on “Area 12”, than on “Area 51”, so it goes.
I always thought one of the more interestingly codenamed nuclear tests was Mission Cyber, the weapon effect portion of Operation Touchstone which was conducted at the Rainier Mesa test site. From what I can tell it was an investigation into the effects of an underground nuclear blast on various nearby electronic and fiber optic systems. But they couldn't have picked better names to fuel conspiracy theorists.
hah, thanks. It was inspired by one of Michael Crawford's [0] usernames at K$5 (kuro5hin.org), Zombie Jesus Christ. At first the other K5 users thought Taxi Cab Jesus was just trolling Michael. But really the point was to post diaries about my days in the taxi. I was focused on more than the bottom line, and spent a little extra time, as needed, to help my passengers through their days.
Mr. Crawford had aspirations to solve all the world's problems, and sometimes had a messiah complex. Mr. Crawford was brilliant (dropped out of CalTech), but troubled, on account of his poorly-treated mental illness. I visited him in the San Louis Obispo County Jail [1], because I was in the area and it was something B.J. (Biblical Jesus) said to do.
Presumably none of the groundbreaking / fun research is carried out at Area 51 anymore.
If you were a research scientist doing classified research, and invented anti-gravity, would the powers behind the scenes allow this technology into circulation? Our guys certainly wouldn't want to let the Soviets know anti-grav is a possibility.
All the U.S. military-industrial complex's best toys are certainly still classified.
If they’ve invented a doomsday device, however, letting the Soviets know should be a top priority for it to function as a deterrent (per Dr. Strangelove’s logic).
I'm not convinced there isn't something more than drone flights adjacent to secret facilities. In the below link a private pilot describes:
The first time I ventured into the Nellis Ranges was on a flight from Tonopah to Rachel via R4807A where I went down to the edge of that side of 4808A [also known as "The Box"] and got some good views of Groom [Area 51] from the north. After departing Rachel, I was given permission to enter R4806W enroute to Henderson and proceeded to fly the perimeter of The Box and R4808N basically to Yucca Lake.
Link to website in question, which also happens mention what to me is one on the more notable aspects of Area 51 - that being some people working there are flown in and out daily from Las Vegas via private airplanes:
If you stay at the right hotel on the strip, you can sit in your room and watch those planes boarding, departing, arriving. Their terminal is right there in plain view.
It’s rhetorical I believe. I’m not the original poster but “workers commute via plane so we can test our war machines in the desert during a worsening climate crisis” is a practice many would take issue with.
Due to the private nature of these projects, some parts of the projects have to be developed and tested in a secure area. They need the best talent for these programs. To attract the best talent, they can't require a whole family to live in a secure facility. So, they have to bring in the talent from a non-secure area. The most sensible way to do that is by air.
The carbon footprint is not something that is ever going to factor into this arrangement, at least not until there is a very green plane available. I'm all for reducing carbon footprint, but there are about 100,000 flights/day so these two flights (there/back) make up 0.002% of daily air traffic -- it's a drop in the bucket from a carbon footprint standpoint.
I agree 100%. It's the same as public outcries about world leaders flying government planes to climate summits. It's not controversial at all to me, but it seems to be to a vast number of people out there for some reason.
I think it’s different because there are other options for world leader climate summits (eg, make them virtual) where as there is not a replacement for physically needing to be in a secure test location in the middle of the desert.
I’ve read more about celebrity attendance and private jets and the replacement for those photo ops seems similarly not relatable to this example.
The overarching point is that it doesn't matter in the scheme of things. It's outrageous as an example but it misses the point that industrial regulation and society wide incentives are needed to tackle climate change, not individual behavior changes of an extremely small group of people.
Even the world leaders need to meet in person. When you have people with that level of impact on policy - virtual meetings just do not have the same effect. They need to meet in person, talk, have side-bars, read body-language, get a drink together, do human things while solving human problems.
To attract the best talent, they can't require a whole family to live in a secure facility.
Los Alamos started out as exactly that. A secure lab, with a secure town built around it, housing all the engineers and scientists working on the bomb.
> they have to bring in the talent from a non-secure area. The most sensible way to do that is by air.
Not disagreeing, but adding a few steps:
The most sensible way to bring in talent from a non-secure location is to construct the secure facility right next door to a fantastic place to live for that talent. The second most sensible way is to locate it within a commute-able distance of such a place.
When neither of those are options, then the sensible thing is to facilitate the commute.
> Due to the private nature of these projects, some parts of the projects have to be developed and tested in a secure area. They need the best talent for these programs. To attract the best talent, they can't require a whole family to live in a secure facility. So, they have to bring in the talent from a non-secure area.
"Have to", according to the opinions of the people working on this project, who were not elected, and whose initiatives have not been signed off by the citizens of this "democracy".
> The most sensible way to do that is by air.
According to some people's opinion. It is surely more convenient though for the subset of people who benefit from such programs.
> The carbon footprint is not something that is ever going to factor into this arrangement, at least not until there is a very green plane available.
If the country was more democratic, what "factorsd into" various things may change dramatically. But as luck would have it, the truth of what going on here is a secret, and most citizens are not just ok with it, but seem to consider it a very good thing.
> I'm all for reducing carbon footprint, but there are about 100,000 flights/day so these two flights (there/back) make up 0.002% of daily air traffic -- it's a drop in the bucket from a carbon footprint standpoint.
What other flights and harms happen as a consequence of this research is causally related, but the unknown tends to appear as nonexistent (and thus "is" "nonexistent").
> area.
"Have to", according to the opinions of the people working on this project, who were not elected, and whose initiatives have not been signed off by the citizens of this "democracy".
Precisely. And that’s as good as it gets. There won’t be another group able to make the decision.
The initiatives were signed off in that citizens elect representatives, representatives vote on and allocate funds to programs, programs make decisions. There is legislative oversight. It’s also top secret though.
There’s no way for a citizens panel to evaluate these kinds of details due to their secrecy.
One way to improve it would be something like directing the entire portfolio to reduce carbon by 10% or something. But that would probably result in planting lots of trees or something.
> Precisely. And that’s as good as it gets. There won’t be another group able to make the decision.
As long as those running the show in this "democracy" continue to have their way...which I suspect is the case as long as people run on a cognitive model where they are unable/unwilling to distinguish between predictions about reality (for example: the future) and reality itself.
> The initiatives were signed off in that citizens elect representatives....
The election of representatives is not an agreement with all the subsequent decisions made by those representatives, but if the minds of the public can be conditioned appropriately, it can cause it to appear that way to them (and: they will typically defend this clearly false belief passionately, if the conditioning is adequately powerful).
> There’s no way for a citizens panel to evaluate these kinds of details due to their secrecy.
I agree that there is no current way, but that was true for many current human capabilities prior to humans figuring out how to achieve them. But if you never even try to figure something out, there's a decent chance it will never be figured out.
> One way to improve it would be something like directing the entire portfolio to reduce carbon by 10% or something. But that would probably result in planting lots of trees or something.
Agreed. And I suspect there are many, many more opportunities for improvement. A plausibly decent way to come up with a shortlist of ways of more: utilize the human mind's capacity to think, ideally: free from all constraints (conditioning, censorship, etc). Easier said than done perhaps, but the true difficulty can only be discovered if one tries. If we continue to refuse to try (or even think about trying), then we may be stuck at this local maxima forever.
Are you, in the same post, arguing that "the citizens have not signed off on it", that "they seem to consider the work being done a very good thing", and that "things aren't Democratic"?
Lol. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Count me in as someone who approves of military research. Seems like an incredible amount of humanities achievements come through military research and I quite like some of them. So, keep doing it please.
On a more realistic note, I'd much prefer democracies have the most advanced weapons in the world . And I think that the USAF protects most democracies in the world. So I'm pro a strong USAF.
> Are you, in the same post, arguing that "the citizens have not signed off on it", that "they seem to consider the work being done a very good thing", and that "things aren't Democratic"?
Yes.
Human beings are extremely illogical, prone to bias, etc - if the topic of this thread was directly about that abstract(!) idea (like in a thread about human psychology) this would not be controversial or difficult to realize/perceive, but since the topic of discussion is a specific object level matter, minds tend to not have access to that knowledge.
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information, and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.
I would enjoy to actually talk about cognitive dissonance, if you are willing, and able (and the conversation is not censored for being inconsistent with site guidelines, both explicitly stated and non-explicit/de facto enforced caps like: be curious, but not too curious).
Do you perceive yourself to be both willing, and able? I guess, there may be only one way to find out, considering cultural norms.
> Count me in as someone who approves of military research. Seems like an incredible amount of humanities achievements come through military research and I quite like some of them. So, keep doing it please.
During your contemplation of the matter, did you consider this (as well as the links above):
If not: why not? (I ask this question both rhetorically, and literally.)
Might it be possible that you lack substantial desire to hold beliefs that are necessarily true (or in other words: to have a default (or even occasional) cognitive state other than that which is outlined in my "naive realism" link above)?
> On a more realistic note, I'd much prefer democracies have the most advanced weapons in the world . And I think that the USAF protects most democracies in the world. So I'm pro a strong USAF.
"Each to his own" as the saying goes. Personally, I would much rather people have goals that are more balanced between the dominance of the country they live in with the well-being of all of humanity, regardless of one's culture or geographical location. Do you think that would be a bad idea, or that it is unrealistic, or that such thinking is (in fact*) an example of "cognitive dissonance"?
Note: this comment contains many juicy "baits" that might attract the mind's attention and invoke pre-conditioned behavior (rhetoric, ad hominem, etc)....it will be interesting to see if that is how you will respond, especially now that I have explicitly made reference to that common human cognitive behavior. Sometimes I will "inb4" specific common sub-perceptual intuitive behaviors (leveraging the phenomenon whereby humans tend to have an aversion to behaving in a way that was explicitly predicted before they do it), but in this case I think I will leave those not mentioned.
See: "Note: this comment contains many juicy "baits" that might attract the mind's attention and invoke pre-conditioned behavior (rhetoric, ad hominem, etc)"
I wonder: is this (laughing, and only laughing, in response to ideas that challenge your own) the extent of your capabilities, intelligent human?
There is what claims (explicit or implied) one makes about their capabilities, there is one's ability to demonstrate claimed abilities, and then there is "laughing it off", or downvoting &/or silence.
Then the issue is seemingly with having a large military that stays well-trained at all. There isn't any way to do that without expending enormous amounts of energy. Keeping a flight rating, along with all the unit-level qualifications necessary of ground armored combat forces burns far more fuel than commuting, even commuting by plane.
I would even say it's conceivable that having permanent housing in the middle of the desert might be worse than flying them in from elsewhere, but considering they're flying in from Vegas, living there probably isn't much better.
Quite a difference between this and, say, Bezos taking his private jet halfway across the world to see how his mega-yacht construction is progressing, while his other private jet is hopping between airports empty so it won't lose its time slots.
And to needlessly complicate the discussion: I would argue that the reason why climate and environmentalism are issues in the first place is because of us refusing to expand into, thus offloading potentially contaminating activities to, orbital settlements fabricated and operated in space.
Make silicons, do nuke tests, operate heavy machineries, indulge in vehicle races, in satellite scale cylinders up there in heliocentric orbits, and if anything goes wrong in one of them, just throw it out of the system or into the Sun, to whichever preferred.
That was the future that the humanity envisioned in the 60s-70s, that we stopped following almost altogether(due to radiation hazard and lift capacity problems with assumed manufacturing on Earth surface). We should get back to that.
Removing such a huge mass from the solar system is a larger endeavor than most believe. Believe it or not, even Pluto at a mass of 10^22 kilograms and a distance between 4 and 7 billion kilometers is still bound by the sun's gravitational well. To just "throw something out of the solar system" without the potential for it to disintegrate and come back at us in the future is an incredibly difficult feat. To have the mass of some kind of life sustaining cylinder capable of supporting the activities you've listed coming at us at solar orbital speeds would be a catastrophe our local nuclear wars could only hope to emulate.
There seems to be a pervasive belief that we can just eject huge quantities of mass from the very strong, very isolated gravitational well we are bound to. To say nothing of the possibility of building such a cylinder, the realities and consequences of the situation are far more dangerous than people yet consider.
I feel like most counter arguments generally fall into the category of X is okay because Y is worse. I find myself more and more stating that the two points are not mutually exclusive and that they can overlap. Both can be bad.
I make this point while recognizing that I agree national security has acceptable carbon footprint costs, while at the same time not liking arguments in support of that cost based not the premise that other policies are worse.
The worsening climate crisis is likely to cause war so it’s good to take actions which reduce the severity of the climate crisis which is likely to cause war.
For example, by reducing the carbon footprint of the military.
This is guaranteed (i.e., very likely) to result in a small set of unlikely-yet-possible problems which could be handld gracefully to instead become catastrophic. Given the likelihood of following this advice to result in catastrophic failures, one should eliminate this advice.
Another major war will be far worse for the climate than a few additional airliner flights a day. Investing in the development of technology that makes a challenge to American global hegemony untenable is a very efficient method of preventing that outcome.
If you really want to cut back on flights, it would be more efficient to cut back on luxury travel. Tax flights to tropical islands at 1000%. That wouldn't be very popular, but Janet airlines is utterly inconsequential compared to casual vacation travel.
Janet airlines exists to support the defense of American global hegemony, which is convenient for a very large number of people (particularly Americans and American allies.)
At some point, I would love to have a level-headed conversation with someone to articulate to me exactly what constitutes this "worsening climate crisis."
Extensive flooding in multiple countries that didn't have such extremes before; sea level rising around smaller island nations (ok, maybe this one isn't so obvious yet but many nations are vocally concerned); wildfires across unprecedented range in time and area in multiple countries. In my own country (UK), we've had a noticeable shift over the past 10 years from four defined seasons to a smear of weather conditions across the traditional boundaries (particularly spring and autumn), significantly higher peak temperatures and the lows moving later through the year, shifted rain patterns (and worsening flooding).
News and anecdotal data are terrible sources. Point him to well-researched articles that do their best to show causation. But please don't just claim that extreme flooding must be caused by global warming without any evidence of causation when there are many variables in our world.
I did a data science project to show that the earth was warming (no cause implied) to counteract arguments that it wasn't. There is good research out there - use it.
I'm in a position to effect behavior, set policy, and generally advance things, so I'd be a useful ally. But don't worry about it; I don't mean to bother you.
You being in a position to affect change while expressing obliviousness of the blatantly obvious is frankly terrifying.
Maybe, since you're missing something clearly witnessable by tge world at-large, you might help out by exposing what does not compute per your means of cognition.
Only the derisive talk like yours has an apparent agenda, negating a valid conversation which has spent decades fighting against this form of apparently intentional ignorance.
If you have something to contribute to the content, provide content - else, if you're against agendas, maybe practice not interjecting with yours in such conversations when the adults have them.
Or perhaps the "climate crisis" is bordering on pseudoscience. It's not even a falsifiable theory. Narrowly focusing on a "climate crisis" is doing demonstrable harm to our environment. Just look at how many actual environmental polluters are lining up to join the climate bandwagon. Actual polluters are using the cover of "climate crisis" to greenwash their pollution, not even mentioning the glaring hypocrisy of some polluters being allowed for purely political reasons.
So yeah feel free to keep trying to gatekeep legitimate conversations. Just don't pout when these conversations continue to be had whether you like them or not.
Good Shamylan twist you did there. So it turns out the issue is real and valid yet some people are engaging in the dialogue in bad faith. The solution to that issue is to eliminate the bad-faith dialogue, not to eliminate the dialogue. Baby, bathwater, etc.
Is there an alternative? People can’t live in the desert or they would do that. Or at least the people they need to accomplish that task.
Climate change is significant, but “considering the carbon footprint” of commuter airplanes for a multi-billion dollar project that creates world ending weapons is kind of missing to point, I think.
Maybe it'd just be multimillion if there weren't blanket exceptions to dialogue about how to keep it from becoming multi-billion, profitting just a few by turning out products like the F-35
It all depends on the person being on the jet. For many great workers, the result of them saving some time greatly offsets the carbon footprint. Without these details, this is just an excuse to point fingers.
What's the carbon impact of a war compared to the carbon impact of commuting to work on technology to discourage war? I'm sure the former is much worse.
It's a losing side to thus remain trapped in that dichotomy. Better to not validate that pretense as existant, I think. Trying to make things better (outside the solutions provided by the dichotomy) is a conversation closed down in this thread.
Let's not diminish the voices which speak of something better than either of two evils. I understand that the selection should never be just between "bad" and "worse", and seeing such rhetoric decries of misdirection away from more fruitful topics at hand.
Well, it’s not an entirely unreasonable thing to ponder about.
No expert, but chartering a 737 looks to be about $200k per month. Capacity’s about 200, so it’s not a tremendous extravagance. I wonder if the staff have to pay a fare?
> My girlfriend was led out into the street barefoot and only in her underwear in full view of our neighbors; I was led outside, handcuffed and only in t-shirt and sweats in sub-freezing temperatures.
> Each home was searched by 15-20 agents in full riot gear, causing further damage in both homes besides the broken front doors
> I was very surprised how forceful the search warrant was executed and how rough we, both unarmed senior citizens, were treated.
> Even my phone was taken, leaving me in Rachel with two broken doors and no way to communicate or call for help.
I don't care what the hell he did, this kind of abuse is not acceptable. It's no wonder Americans have lost respect for law enforcement: the people enforcing the law are often committing worse crimes than the supposed criminals.
Taking his electronic shit I get. But not letting the poor woman get dressed? That's just a bunch of thugs having a playday with their toys.
My house has been raided multiple times by local police (Victim of a senseless drug war). They have never let me get dressed. I have always assumed it was a safety issue. How do they know, I'm going to actually get dressed and not pull out a firearm or push a hidden button to blow us all up. Not excusing their actions, but this seems to be the norm.
Maybe they can grab your clothes for you from your closet? Surely there's got to be some creative way to allow a human to get dressed
And if said human is like the Riddler and has rigged the place to blow should the wrong t-shirt be picked up, well then that's called the risk of being a law enforcement field agent... it's in the job description
At marathons they have those solar blankets. Law enforcement could easily provide clothing or blankets for those being raided. Everyone deserves dignity imo, even potentially guilty people. No risk involved.
That would solve the problem of feeling cold but not the human dignity issue in someone being arrested (and possibly being brought in for questioning) in their underwear
Then they should guard you while you get dressed. The risk of getting shot is rather low for most cases and people deserve dignity. They are only accused of a crime not guilty.
As a citizen, I don't want some cop jumpy on fear and adrenaline holding me at gun point waiting to see if I'm going to pull a snub nose out of my jeans pocket.
As a cop, I don't want to find out if someone putting on their pants is going to shot me or my partner in that split second when they appear to lose balance and fall into the night stand that has a gun under the pile of clothes.
As a citizen, I recognize cops are already twitchy and jumpy anyway, and they kill more people in the US than there are murders. Maybe your boundless excuse for ever-increasing excessive behavior is really no excuse.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a basis we simply cannot lose. It means something. Once it stops meaning treatment of citizens with dignity, I don't know how you can expect that citizens won't retaliate and escalate the situation.
Most now fear cops unjustly invading their home more than criminals. They, though innocent, will defend tgeirself against assault. Do the math.
> I don't care what the hell he did, this kind of abuse is not acceptable. It's no wonder Americans have lost respect for law enforcement: the people enforcing the law are often committing worse crimes than the supposed criminals.
You are going to be very upset when you find out what police have done to citizens while they were sleeping in their homes. [1]
Sadly for Breonna, her boyfriend opened fire on the police and she was killed in a crossfire... tragic outcome but not the height of police brutality - there ought to be better examples?
If one wanted to stick with a police-on-minority action, the Fred Hampton case is a real helluva situation.
Criminals used yo go ppeacefully a lot more often. Seems the more they expect police to remove tgeir dignity, destroy their property, commit assault, and use deadly force, it's obvious those criminals will choose to play the same game.
I think one way to start addressing this would be to increase the payouts people receive for abusive police behavior and have those payouts taken directly out of the police pension fund instead of normal taxpayer money.
Increase the payout? You'd have to start the payout.
There's virtually zero chance of them paying for those doors. They can burn your house down with tear gas, and not pay for shit, even if you're innocent.
If they made a mistake like hitting the wrong address, they sometimes will. Even then, it generally requires getting a lawyer as they typically won't offer to pay up. If it was the right address but you were innocent, they generally don't.
Take it from the guilty cop's retirement fund and give them desk duty while their non-abusive colleagues are not punished. Never assume a problem is solved when you treat individuals the same based on statistics.
That's true, and collective punishment tends to not be good long term. But you'd also want some kind of incentive system to encourage the department heads to actively discourage the behavior internally as well.
I suppose, thinking about how the world has changed in the last couple of decades, we have to reconsider your rights to have access to your electronic data. I cannot make any payments, read any emails, access any data, etc, without my phone or tablet that has a 2FA app.
Yes, I do have offline backups. I _should_ be able to recover my data, but should it be so hard? Millions of people don't think about this, and are at risk.
No, but they are typically armed. SWAT teams have strict protocols to avoid death on both sides. These "what if" questions posed by armchair SWAT commanders don't translate into the real world. Things like "just try to shoot him in the leg" and "what if she's naked" just increase bloodshed. In a life and death situation, the only consideration that's actually important is if the suspect is armed. The more conditional protocols you add, the more times something will go wrong. We don't trade lives for clothing: that isn't and can't be how it works. A simplified version of the protocol is: is he armed? If not don't shoot. If yes is his back facing you? If yes don't shoot. It get's more complicated when you consider hostages, the suspects mental health, bystanders ect. "Is he naked" has no room in the protocol. Focus is extreamly important and something tangetial to life and death can't be part of the consideration.
> How many tens of thousands of innocent people did police kill that year?
You implied tens of thousands of innocent people are killed by police each year. The actual statistics say that police kill around 1000 people a year with no mention of guilt or innocence. Your implication is flat out wrong.
The media perpetuates an idea that police are evil, murderous bastards and everybody should hate them. It is false and dangerous rhetoric. Spreading it in ignorance makes you a "useful idiot". Arm yourself with knowledge. In many cases the media is flat out lying to your face.
> Arnu said both his homes were raided “without warning” on Nov. 3 “by 15-20 agents in full riot gear.” The agents broke open the doors while Arnu was in the Rachel home and his girlfriend at the Las Vegas one, and then they “were detained and treated in the most disrespectful way.”
I realise that flying drones over restricted airspaces is not allowed. At the same time it doesn't feel like this kind of treatment was justified. Wouldn't three or four police officers (and no riot gear) be enough?
Let me play devil's advocate here, I've known a number of law enforcement/military individuals and have asked them the same question. Here's the situation they paint to me. Imagine you have to go arrest someone, essentially using force to limit their freedom. You know virtually nothing about this person, except that they are the type of person who will break laws serious enough to get arrested. Now, do you want some protection from a gun, or no? And do you want to go there with 1 other person? Or as many as you can get.
It seems very excessive from the outside, because we have full knowledge of the situation at the outcome. When you go into these situations, you're essentially blind, so you're exposing yourself to the entire risk profile.
"except that they are the type of person who will break laws serious enough to get arrested."
Literally every type of crime involves arrest. It's that some crimes are custodial arrests and others are not. You can be arrested and in custody for going 26mph over the speed limit. That's a pretty low bar.
Yes, I know people in law enforcement and the military as well. Many of them disagree with the types of actions you see in these high profile raids.
Let's not forget that some of the very agents involved in things like Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidians have shown harsh criticism of how inappropriately the leadership handled the strategy for those.
It seems the idea is to always assume the worst. Wouldn’t it be better to assume what’s most likely (some reluctant cooperation, I suppose) and escalate if there’s no cooperation?
Also, would anyone risk not cooperating? Wouldn’t that in itself be a more serious offense?
Does tipping off local media in order to embarrass the suspect also make them more secure? People whose crime amounted to changing numbers on accounting spreadsheets have had all their doors simultaneously kicked down. They most likely have an idea of what the crime is because they have needed a warrant to get access to the property in the first place.
Yes this is it. People don't realize how many police officers are murdered each year (more than 1 per week). It's just a precaution.
I mean, don't get me wrong I think going after a news site is bull shit and I think we should all rally around this guy, but it was not these officers' decision to arrest them and I don't think it was excessive, it was safe (for everyone).
In other countries we wouldn't hear anything about excessive force (because the jaw of the one being arrested would have been broken).
In 2021 more than 140 firefighters died, coming out to more than 3 a week. First responder jobs are dangerous which is why there's training to reduce the danger. Having an officer grab them a pair of pants and a shirt wouldn't imperil scene safety and the fact that the raid team couldn't bother says plenty.
have you ever been a police officer? i haven't, but ive been in enough situations where guns were pulled that i know when someone doesnt know what theyre talking about
Funny, I’m not a police officer either, and I’ve somehow managed to go my entire life without being in ANY situation where a gun was pulled. Maybe you should re-evaluate your personal risk level and reconsider choices you’ve made in your life instead of defending shitty authoritarian practices of a government that wouldn’t give a shit about you.
Hard agree. If you are having guns pulled on your regularly, that's definitely not just "bad neighborhood" issues. You either have extremely bad luck or need to reevaluate your life choices.
Anyways, to get back on topic: having an old woman stand in front of her house in underwear while the neighbors watch is completely unnecessary but totally unsurprising. Moves like this contribute to the ongoing breakdown in policing legitimacy, and we shouldn't settle for a world where we have to choose the least bad unaccountable organized gang.
Just to put a finer point on it: this kind of humiliation would never happen during a home invasion, and for most people the humiliation is a larger harm than losing some computer equipment.
What where they even hoping to find? Since this was about publicly distributed video, they should have already had all the evidence they need.
Most civilized places the only thing coming through his door would've been a letter informing him about his upcoming appointment at a local police station.
It was a message. Can't you read between the lines?
Between Snowden, Assange, Manning and this guy the US government message is very clear: "Don't stir my shit or you're gonna be sorry for the rest of your life"
My understanding is that as long as they (the security forces) have already bought that equipment then they might as well use it. It doesn’t really matter if said equipment is best suited for the task at hand or not.
You cannot just fly drones over airspace you are not allowed to, take pictures of a classified base, and expect nothing to ever happen. This isn't a free speech issue like many are making it out to be in this comment section. The pictures were forbidden from distribution in the first place, and gathered illegally.
And this doesn't have anything to do with Area 51 in particular either. If someone did this to any Air Force base, the same thing would happen. Drones are banned from all bases for obvious reasons.
I don't think the drones flew over the installation. Rather, the article states, "features YouTube videos taken from drones flown over places around Area 51". (emphasis mine)
So long as the areas are either public lands, or he has permission from the owners, and follows FAA regs on drone operations, nothing wrong with it.
Even if in plain view, it can be very illegal [0].
Never assume that your own "common-sense" expectation of how the law or taxes works is the way it actually works. You are almost always guaranteed to be wrong [1]. In this case, your error could have seriously bad consequences,and your ignorance would be no excuse
>> "(a) Whenever, in the interests of national defense, the President defines certain vital military and naval installations or equipment as requiring protection against the general dissemination of information relative thereto, it shall be unlawful to make any photograph, sketch, picture, drawing, map, or graphical representation of such vital military and naval installations or equipment without first obtaining permission of the commanding officer of the military or naval post, camp, or station, or naval vessels, military and naval aircraft, and any separate military or naval command concerned, or higher authority, and promptly submitting the product obtained to such commanding officer or higher authority for censorship or such other action as he may deem necessary.
(b) Whoever violates this section shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both."
[1] Married to a top attny, the first thing said about almost any question is "go read the actual contract or the actual code" before even bothering to start reasoning about the thing. Even an attny's inital assumptions are very often wrong. We'd (at least should) be saying the same thing about any software system.
The flip side is that the rights and freedoms we take for granted in the US are fundamentally upheld by the people believing that we have them. The broad first pass in this case is referenced by the 1st amendment, which we generally take to mean living in an open society where we have the freedom to report on what we can observe. This thread being full of people chiming in to defend the general concept, regardless of whatever small-picture legal theory has motivated the government to do this, demonstrates this dynamic. Ultimately, the more people that naively say "These actions are plainly un-American", the better off we are.
You are saying that it is plainly un-American to have military secrets?
They go back to George Washington, before the founding of the country.
The rights and freedoms we have are not absolute. They are also tempered by responsibility to maintain, sometimes by force, the ability to have those freedoms.
Of course, all of us would like to live without the need for police or military. But the fact of the actual (not ideal) world is that there are always bullies and authoritarians who are happy to take what they want and rule how they like, not by assent or fairness, but by deceit, force, and violence. Anyone who wants to live a self-determining life or live in a democracy must be better armed than the bullies and expansionist autocracies, or they will soon be ruled by them.
Military and technological secrets are a key part of maintaining an advantage over expansionist autocracies, and are at least as American than Apple Pie.
So, NO, people claiming that we should not have a military or secret technologies are not making us better off — they are literally helping undermine the only force that keeps us from being ruled by the likes of Putin or Xi. Ask any Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, or Taiwanese. They did not enjoy the privilege of growing up well-enough protected to be ignorant of the threat. Consider that before posting that ignorance.
You do realize there is a huge distinction between having military secrets, and persecuting private citizens who report on things that are openly discoverable, right?
This tension has also been there the whole time. Leaking classified information is a crime, while propagating information that has leaked into the public domain is not. For good reason - those with deliberate access to classified information have been entrusted to keep it secret, whereas the public and the press have not.
As far as military advantage, we are made stronger by the military needing to stay ahead of the investigations of an open society. Because if private citizens can discover things from mere curiosity then foreign spy agencies most certainly can. If you care about military strength, attempts by the military to maintain superiority by lazily asserting control over civil society should concern you very much.
Seeing and disseminating info are two vastly different things.
Seeing something, vs taking a photograph, vs publishing a set of photographs are very different things.
Assembling a set of information, making a drawing, documenting in a more digestible form, analysis, those are all actions more related to leaking classified information than publishing info someone else found.
That distinction is what the laws are about. Plus, the legal conventions surrounding prior restraint are strong, but not absolute.
So, if you're talking about publishing a picture of the front of the Pentagon building, which thousands walk/drive by every day, fine. Using dozens of visitors to compile an architectural drawing of the interior locations of guarded rooms and publishing that? Not so much.
Inhibiting the compilation and free exchange of information is absolutely an inhibitor to adversaries. Even if they could technically see any of it publicly, it becomes insurmountable to see all of it publicly, or enough to compile an accurate picture.
That is why information is highly compartmentalized and distributed only on a need-to-know basis. I'm literally now working on components to a Navy machine that I can only guess what are the other parts and how they fit together. My parts aren't classified, but fall under CUI, Confidential Unclassified Info".
There's a very good reason that. E.g., even though you and I could walk to the door of every data center and power substation in the country, these things are kept obscure. Every data center I've seen is extremely nondescript. If you start assembling the exact location and configuration of every such installation, you'll soon and rightly see some friendly guys with FBI badges.
No professional pretends that this is an absolute protection, anymore than any professional pretends that an uncrackable safe can be built.
Of course a foreign spy agency could discover anything a curious citizen might. But they can't discover everything that every curious citizen might.
The point is to increase the workload and uncertainty for the adversaries.
Permitting open information compilation and publication at all times would dramatically reduce that workload, especially with the internet. So, look and be curious all you want. Just don't start compiling and publishing it.
And in this case, using drones to look "over the fence" into a USAF secret testing grounds should indeed get you targeted for investigation real quick, just as it would any foreign adversary's agent doing the same thing.
And no, it is not an argument that "stay[ing] ahead of the investigations of an open society" 'makes us stronger'. That is no more of an argument that curious hackers digitally wandering around some org's network will make them stronger. Yes, it is the responsibility of both to keep themselves secure, including employing white-hat hackers and such, but that doesn't mean that randos should be tolerated.
If you click the Notes tab it's right there. Executive Order 10104
Ex. Ord. No. 10104. Defining Certain Vital Military and Naval Installations and Equipment as Requiring Protection Against the General Dissemination of Information Relative Thereto
Ex. Ord. No. 10104, Feb. 1, 1950, 15 F.R. 597, provided: WHEREAS section 795 of title 18 of the United States Code provides: [Omitted.] AND WHEREAS section 797 of title 18 of the United States Code provides: [Omitted.] NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the foregoing statutory provisions, and in the interests of national defense, I hereby define the following as vital military and naval installations or equipment requiring protection against the general dissemination of information relative thereto: 1. All military, naval, or air-force installations and equipment which are now classified, designated, or marked under the authority or at the direction of the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of the Navy, or the Secretary of the Air Force as “top secret”, “secret”, “confidential”, or “restricted”, and all military, naval, or air-force installations and equipment which may hereafter be so classified, designated, or marked with the approval or at the direction of the President, and located within: (a) Any military, naval, or air-force reservation, post, arsenal, proving ground, range, mine field, camp, base, airfield, fort, yard, station, district, or area. (b) Any defensive sea area heretofore established by Executive order and not subsequently discontinued by Executive order, and any defensive sea area hereafter established under authority of section 2152 of title 18 of the United States Code. (c) Any airspace reservation heretofore or hereafter established under authority of section 4 of the Air Commerce Act of 1926 (44 Stat. 570; 49 U.S.C. 174) except the airspace reservation established by Executive Order No. 10092 of December 17, 1949.
Considering that this is pretty standard around all military installations, and that it took me about 10sec. to search "area 51 entry gate photos" and find a huge red "NO PHOTOGRAPHY" sign [0], and even one showing a citation of "18 USC 795" [1] among a brace of oth1er WARNING! signs, I'd characterize your attitude as, at best, damn foolish.
Yes, there is are very large amounts of things that the US Mil does in secret to maintain it's edge in the ability to fight off expansionist autocracies and be the arsenal of democracy. This is a very good thing, as without it, we'd be ruled already by the likes of Putin, Xi, or Un. People with a clue do NOT want access to TS+ info outside their role. But fools rush in ...
What's the case law on this? Has this been ruled constitutional? Looks like it was created in the run-up to WWII, and has only been modified to change the fine.
I'll refrain from expressing my opinion on what a load of horseshit the mere existence of this law is.
Ironically, the only reason you can so loudly make such a claim about the law is that the US military is sufficiently powerful over several generations to keep expansionist authoritarian governments at bay, even merely by supplying friends with our technology.
Maintaining the edge over expansionist authoritarian govts is essential to maintain democracy.
Maintaining that edge will necessarily involve controlling significant amounts of information.
The only horseshit I smell around here is an ignorant opinion loudly stated. But go right ahead and take some pics and publish them. Be sure to report back on the results.
The thing is, is that this guy has been documenting shit since the 90's. Why the raid now?
Disclosure, that's why. Look at the continuously delayed congressional report. Bet many of you haven't heard of that.
There are people in the highest levels of the US Military who don't want it to happen. There are people who do. We can only wait and see if Full Disclosure happens.
It's likely that the timing have a lot more to do with the messy situation in Ukraine, and a general ramp up in testing of illegally acquired Russian equipment or a reactivation of cold war period sig int projects, then anything related to extra terrestrials.
Add to that that the FBI is back in red scare mode and suddenly you have a situation where the authorities are willing to bend and break a few rules in order chase various paranoid conspiracy theories about how every non-aligned outlet is a secretly working for The Kremlin.
Literally everyone on the internet is aware of the UFO disclosures and congressional inquiry, even non tech people. You have to have lived under a rock to have missed it, and it doesn't make you special for having heard about it.
- What is "range 72"? I know of a Range 75 and 76. I haven't heard of a Range 72.
- The F-117 and HAVE BLUE aircraft, while similar looking, are substantially different in both design and size. And HAVE BLUE doesn't exist anymore. Both crashed.
- Red Flag is an USAF exercise. You probably meant the Red Hats squadron.
- SDI/Star Wars, as civilians know it, is dead and was never really a thing in the first place. It's a whole other ball game now. Hint: a player just landed this week.
F117 and Have Blue were both developed there, or at least tested. It’s been a while since I read Skunk Works. Maybe they’re not there right this second, but I took the comment to be giving some examples of secret things that have happened there, not necessarily things there right this second, because we really can’t know what’s happening there this second because I assume that’s secret.
Otherwise the comment is unnecessarily aggressive for no reason, and I think I detect a tone of condescension, which is unwarranted.
I guess I didn't write that comment very well and I have no idea what the current money toilet out there is. The Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago, SDI was canceled 30 years ago, the F117 was retired and hasn't flown at TTR for 30 years, and that goofy drone was public disclosed 30 years ago.
Happened where? At "range 72"? That was what the comment I was replying to claimed.
F-117 and HAVE BLUE testing primarily occurred at Area 51, not some place called "range 72". They were developed and built at Lockheed in California.
I don't believe I was particularly aggressive. The commenter posted a bunch of incorrect information. I called them out. That's how it should work. I see far worse on HN when it comes to programming language/editor wars.
"You don't know what you're talking about" is aggressive and rude; like you're calling them stupid. "Actually, I don't think that's right", along with some, "Can you clarify?" is not aggressive, and welcomes them into a conversation.
>I called them out. That's how it should work.
There's a way to do that constructively. See above.
To be fair, I did look at this in the best light possible and took your overly aggressive tone and hanging your hat on a scriveners error like putting a “2” instead of whatever other number when it was clear what the poster was talking about to be an EQ gap on your part and not malice.
A US citizen documenting aircraft seen from publicly accessible land onto an internet forum isn’t really espionage. The article didn’t mention that he was colluding with foreign government officials and most importantly he was never charged with a crime.
Thanks to civil forfeiture, he’ll likely never get his stuff back from the Government MAFIA’s attempt to terrorize him into silence.
I mean, there are super simple rules to follow. Like don't take pictures of restricted objects. Just follow them and you are golden.
If a person doesn't understand the importance of secret military bases and that all us power and influence in the world (and dollar purchase power) is like 70% resulted form their military, then I don't even know what to say.
> I mean, there are super simple rules to follow. Like don't take pictures of restricted objects. Just follow them and you are golden.
Show me where that rule is written. Typically the rules on state level are called laws and are published, so it should be easy for you to point out the law that forbids you to take pictures of "restricted objects" (how would you even know they are, do they have signs?) when they are in public places.
Note I am assuming here that he followed the restrictions around where to fly drones considering he urges others to do so:
> If a person doesn't understand the importance of secret military bases and that all us power and influence in the world (and dollar purchase power) is like 70% resulted form their military, then I don't even know what to say.
Ah yes the US military bullies other countries so we can be rich so let's not criticise it, when it does unjust/illegal things. I don't consider that a very ethical argument.
Punishing people for taking photographs from property/space available to the public is 100% security theater. If joe blow can do it from public property with his $20k camera then USSR or whatever boogeyman already has it 10x better.
That said maybe if you're going to poke the dragon pick your battles. There are a lot better 1A issues to focus on, but I guess you do you Area 51 man.
>I mean, there are super simple rules to follow. Like don't take pictures of restricted objects.
How about this for a "super simple rule", the gov can keep secret whatever they pay for. As long as they're taking taxpayer $$$ *we own it*, and have all the rights to utilize that technology for our collective benefit.
Yes, your example is more stupid. Because OP never asserted that "anybody be allowed to walk into the testing facility for new military planes."
It is beyond stupid, and an absolute affront to the First Amendment, that it is against the law for a US Citizen to even draw a picture of something they can see with their own eyes, while standing or flying outside of a restricted area.
If the military doesn't want people to see stuff, then don't leave it outside where it is visible.
How would a world-wide WMD ban even happen? The last remaining country with WMDs could just ramp up their WMD production to Cold War levels and then hold the rest of the world hostage. North Korea is proof that sanctions can't stop nuclear problems.
The only plausible route I imagine is if the non-WMD states put massive resources into countermeasures (e.g. missile interceptors or thwarting nuclear terrorism).
Yeah, in the same sense that murder is banned. The ban gives you an excuse to punish people who violate the ban, but the ban doesn't stop people from doing it.
And if one country keeps their nuclear program, who's going to do the punishing? Sanctions don't work. Saying you're going to ban nukes is pointless dreaming. Why stop there? Why not endeavor to ban wars as well? Just wave your magic wand and ban all the bad things out of existence.
I mean they are to a degree, it's just that the US holds the most influence in it (veto powers and such). They don't have zero accountability, they exist under the auspice of the government, Supreme Court and the President. It's just that they have approved of the things they do.
Well, true, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. Too little transparency to public for this amount of power.
Maybe you can say instead that executive branch is too powerful by inference, and special services are just their instrument projecting this power, but I think that’s not the whole picture. By design, such services become a semi-independent branch themselves, and iirc they are not really rotated, at least on low-to-middle levels.
I don't know about this one, but there's been at least a couple projects mentioned on HN in the last year or so that I suspected were probably more valuable to non-US intel efforts than they were to their ostensible users.
(And one of them appeared to oops while juggling a sockpuppet account on HN to help promote -- which was a little suspicious because that tactic seemed incongruent with the goal they claimed. I suppose, with that project, the non-US intel value could've been intentional. It's much easier to imagine a lot of people being motivated to follow Area 51, just out of curiosity and the mystique, and not seeing any harm in it.)
Which prompts the thought: with all sorts of geopolitical tensions going on right now -- as much as we Internet-age techies can be global citizens who extend fellowship (through HN, open source, research communities, companies, etc.) -- maybe we should try to be aware when actions we are considering doing would stray into delicate global balances that we don't understand. We don't know enough to know everything to avoid, but maybe sometimes we can guess, so it seems worth the occasional thought.
Rather than handwavey “geopolitical tensions” excuses, I have decided to universally condemn the US’s escalating and heavyhanded assault on the free exercise of journalism in all cases, from Assange to this and anything in between.
If I’m paying for it with my tax money, I should be able to read reporting on what it’s being spent on. This goes doubly so for people doing reporting who have no obligation whatsoever to keep US government secrets.
Security through obscurity is not a sound enough principle that resources should be expended and freedoms
curtailed to attempt to preserve it.
Slight correction there, you are not “paying with your tax money” thus expecting something from it. Paying to buy something assumes you willingly committed to the deal and had the option to back out. You did not have such an option so you may not expect or demand something in return for it.
While I get where you are coming from, realistically speaking we do have to accept the "extortion" that comes with having a governing body. I am happy to hand over my tax Rands (Dollars), provided me and my fellow citizens can benefit from it.
The point here is that is in most cases a "de facto" contract between a citizen and his/her government. As this is a contract, the citizen has rights to oversight on how his/her money is being spent.
Thanks for being understanding. Now like I also mentioned below, there is no true contract in reality. Since you need to have leverage to get your reward. The people don’t have much power in this de-facto contract that you mentioned, thus demanding things from the entity that has all the power sounds childish to me.
I am always justified in expecting and demanding basic human rights to peaceful free expression and reporting, for myself and others.
I’m not (here) saying the USG has a duty to disclose, just that they have a duty to not raid and otherwise persecute journalists. (I also separately think they have a duty to disclose precisely what the tax money is being spent on, but that is a different discussion.)
Here's a hypothetical example of an occasion on which we should ask ourselves whether we want to get into something, closer to home, without involving geopolitics. (And I'm not speaking of this Area 51 thing, but the more general question prompted by some projects.)
Let's say some new social networking startup wants to appeal to teens by being edgy/counterculture, and doing automated crowdsourced real-time tracking of local police, as one of the features of their app. (Because casually affecting a hint of teen revolutionary operator, with power over authorities, is easier and more appealing than producing videos of eating laundry detergent.)
If people at that startup stopped to consider unintended effects of that, when used by people they don't want to help (burglars, violent criminals, etc.), I think they'd modify or abandon the idea, before very bad things happened.
- You see John, Area 51 was my department idea. Best security measure
we ever come up with! It's getting expensive now..
- What you mean Paul?
- Well you know...All these thousands of people we fly in every
day, the random events, its an expensive facade to maintain!
But the department demands it!.
- I see Paul. I guess it's worth it no? Anything to keep
their attention focused on it. Last thing we want is them
finding out about Areas 52 and 53!
"I am Joerg Arnu, owner and webmaster of the Dreamland Resort web site (www.DreamlandResort.com). The subject of the web site is Area 51. I have operated that web site since 1999.
Last week Thursday (11/3/22) in the early morning my homes in Rachel (just outside of Area 51) and in Las Vegas were searched by a joint force of FBI and AF OSI. This happened without any warning. The doors were broken open and I in Rachel and my girlfriend in our Las Vegas home were detained and treated in the most disrespectful way. My girlfriend was led out into the street barefoot and only in her underwear in full view of our neighbors; I was led outside, handcuffed and only in t-shirt and sweats in sub-freezing temperatures.
Each home was searched by 15-20 agents in full riot gear, causing further damage in both homes besides the broken front doors. Despite my repeated requests for an explanation, I was only told that the search was related to images posted on my Area 51 web site.
I was very surprised how forceful the search warrant was executed and how rough we, both unarmed senior citizens, were treated. I have to believe that someone gave them bad information about us. All my laptops, phones, backup drives, camera gear and my drone were seized. With the equipment I lost all my medical records, financial and tax records, passwords, email and phone contacts, photos etc. Even my phone was taken, leaving me in Rachel with two broken doors and no way to communicate or call for help.
Not counting my expected legal expenses my losses so far include over $20k in equipment taken and over $5k in damage.
There are 40 pages missing from the search warrant I received and the case records are sealed. So, I cannot look up the reason for the search and I do not want to speculate. I left several messages with the FBI agent in charge but he has not returned any of my calls. At this point I have no choice but to take legal action to try and get my equipment back and to seek reimbursement for the damage.
In an effort to defuse the situation I have removed some material from my Dreamland Resort web site although I believe that it was legally obtained and legal to publish. I am not sharing anything on my web site that cannot be found on dozens of other web sites and news outlet publications. Considering how this went down I have no intention of removing any more material unless ordered to do so by a federal judge.
I believe the search, executed with completely unnecessary force by overzealous government agents was meant as a message to silence the Area 51 research community. The question now is: How far will they go?
"
This should serve as a gentle reminder that the police, the FBI, and other law enforcement are not your friends and that you should run encryption on all of your devices.
Even giving the government the benefit of the doubt with regards to some legitimate security interest in what this guy may have done, the process where the police just bust up your home and destroy your digital life needs to be drastically reformed. At the minimum, any damage caused should be automatically compensated, with the only exception being if the people residing in the structure fight back. This includes paying for replacement digital devices to make up for the ones that were physically taken rather than just having their storage copied. Furthermore, there should be punitive damages for individual agents who needlessly traumatize people, such as preventing them from getting dressed.
I agree that you should maintain backups, but I wasn't focused on the data loss specifically. Rather even if you do have backups, your computing devices/infrastructure being taken is its own disruption.
Also backups make data loss less likely but don't eliminate the chance. The FBI can still raid your house, your friend's house, your safe deposit box, and freeze your cloud storages all at the same time.
Why would he do that? He was already searched, they didn't seize the website, and they didn't order him to do anything. Worst-case is they eventually do, charge him, and use that as evidence he knew he was breaking the law. Best case is ... nothing? It's the government, not a friend he's in a tiff with. I don't see how the concept of "defuse" applies here.
In the US many crimes have highly flexible sentencing, like between 1 and infinity years in jail. Showing that you attempted to minimize the the harm, even after getting caught for it is commonly taken into consideration when sentencing.
Quite often it will be the defenses own lawyers telling the accused to remove particular pieces of information from public view.
If the USAF don't want UFO crazies trying to find out about their secret testing station, maybe they should move it to somewhere that isn't famous for UFO myths. Then they could open the gates to Area 51, perhaps charge for entry, and offer guided tours. They could even build a hotel (you can imagine the style of architecture) and a golf-course (Oops! Water shortage, so scrap that).
If you're talking about what happened in the article, we don't know exactly what the probe is about. If the guy truly hasn't done anything illegal then I don't know why they'd bother. I think they are rewarded for convictions.
I am sure this were joint Air Force and FBI raids, but the optics of the phrase "U.S. Air Force and FBI recently raided homes ..." is really not that great. Maybe just me, but few want to hear of the Air Force raiding homes in America. They should really leave the domestic law enforcement to the FBI, both literary and in public perception.
For what it's worth, every branch of the military has its own criminal investigative arm, as well as its own security. While the vast bulk of this is limited to jurisdiction on military installations, they can't help but venture out sometimes. My wife used to work as part of a classified Naval air unit working on experimental radar, for instance, and they couldn't do everything on a Naval base. Every now and again, some people wearing AT&T coveralls or something that got too close would be kindly apprehended and escorted somewhere else by unmarked black SUVs that were part of NCIS. But what else are they supposed to do? The local police aren't cleared to know what's being guarded, either. They'd get apprehended and have their phones wiped, too.
That question is answered in the article; they'll be on an advisory/support role under the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act, with the FBI responsible for the raid itself.
I'm sure lines get blurred on this front at times, but the FBI is entirely capable of running a raid on their own; they may be less capable of the "is this the classified document y'all were looking for?" confirmation that needs to come from the Air Force.
"Agents from the U.S. Air Force and FBI recently raided homes"
"The Air Force Office of Special Investigations and FBI entered homes owned by Joerg Arnu in Las Vegas"
"seized potential evidence for an undisclosed joint agency probe"
Note, for example, the U.S. Army isn't allowed to do things like direct vehicle traffic around a house that's being raided. Being consulted on the side about specific items to look for, etc, that's much less direct than the quotes above.
None of those quotes indicate who ran the raid versus who was present. (The Air Force investigators are absolutely allowed to be armed, armored, and enter along with the FBI agents during the raid; no violation there.)
I'd also be cautious assuming journalists are carefully parsing their wording specifically to avoid confusion about somewhat obscure aspects of federal law.
Domestic law enforcement is left to the FBI. Posse comitatus makes the military doing it illegal without some serious political situation - think Congress allowing it or a governor requesting the National Guard. I'd imagine the situation is either "the USAF was involved in tracking down a crime was committed on an Air Force Base" or, more likely, the real headline is "the FBI, with Air Force personnel in attendance as advisors, kicked in the door"
If the problem is featuring YouTube videos, isn't the appropriate action raiding the creators or perhaps uploaders of the videos?
Anyway, if the problem is the videos are of places around Area 51, isn't the appropriate action to enlarge the restricted area to contain the places that are sensitive?
And satellite images don't have too many sources either. So either you shoot down the satellites or contract with the operators not to sell pictures over Area 51 (or perhaps the greater Area 51 area).
None of this requires raiding a site that meerly collects these existing resources.
my stepdad was an MP in Korea. He said they had lines painted around the b52's on base. If you crossed the line without authorization you got three warnings and then you're shot dead. Messing around the military installations isn't like speeding or running a light, you need to take that stuff seriously because they absolutely do. I wouldn't try to video a military base with a drone without getting permission first regardless of what I think the law says.
Because, like large swaths of Southern Nevada, the airspace over Area 51 is restricted. Area 51 falls in restricted airspace R-4808N, and it's not legal to overfly it without permission.
The irony is that the article on the very website of this person who was arrested lays out were you are not allowed to fly drones and urges people to stick to the allowed zones so that the airforce does not have reasons to expand them.
Judging by what was written on your link I assume he was very careful to stick to what was allowed.
All of the airspace nearby Area 51 is restricted too. The nearest unrestricted airspace to Area 51 is 12 NM to the East. It's closer to 30NM if you also want to be near a public road.
The comment does not indicate the drones actually flew over Area 51 (or a military base) : "drones flown over places _around_ Area 51" (emphasis added)
We don't always have detailed evidence, so its useful to be able to make predictions with less evidence. When we have more evidence, we can verify the accuracy of our predictions in order to make better predictions in the future. Admitting "I was wrong this time" is the first step in being less wrong next time.
You're right, I should have been more careful and I get the irony. The comment sounded like it was a defense by the parent and I made an assumption.
However I don't consider it giving someone a hard time. I think of it as calling out people who decrease the quality of the conversation. You could throw that accusation back at me for my mistake but it is just that, a mistake.
If he got busted for flying drones over military bases, then I have no sympathy. If he was only republishing images captured by somebody else who did that and already published them, then he did nothing wrong.
Plus, he said he the drones were flying over places "near" the base. If the airspace he was flying in was not restricted, then publishing the images should be legal, though I wouldn't be surprised if that's not actually true.
Sweet, when is Google getting raided? Also note it says "drones flown over places around Area 51" which likely means the publicly accessible areas outside of the base.
I believe he’s incorrectly inferring that google passes through confidential information through its mapping program, which is false as it’s believed fairly widely (and possibly admitted) some parts of their global coverage are omitted or altered. Either way, google mapping “everything” versus one dude driving to this place, launching his drone, then taking photographs of one specific target, imho isn’t the same thing.
How much did he make from his online presence? How much can he make from a legal settlement or GoFundMe campaign? Can he parlay these events into a bigger online presence and fame in the conspiracy sphere?
As unpleasant as the experience has been, it could prove to be beneficial to him in the longer term.
Most likely. As someone who was deep into the hacking and phreaking worlds when I was a kid, I've often thought that I would have had a better career if I'd been busted for some of the hundreds of crimes that I committed as a child.
US is so petty. They should have kept his stuff up and use it for their own intelligence. Now they don't know what the public knows about Area51 anymore. And what is being posted will be harder to track down..
The details of the warrant were not disclosed in this article, but it appears to have something to do with images of area 51 and the possible disclosure of classified information. A similar warrant, also involving possible mishandling of state secrets, was recently served on former president Donald Trump at Mar a Lago.
The differences between how these two warrants were carried out are staggering. The idea that the law treats everyone equally in the U.S. is so manifestly falsified by this that I don't see how anyone can continue to claim it with a straight face.
How is he being validated? He flew drones over restricted airspace.
This is like if I said the government had aliens in the white house, I jumped the fence, and then while getting arrested said "they are trying to stop me!"
I replied to this in another comment with a more sarcastic example. I thought that "around" means within an area. Like if I said I was "walking around the store" the assumption is that I'm moving within that area not walking around the perimeter of the area.
The court records are sealed so I couldn't find anymore details.
Anyone who will look at the clickbait and reads twitter version of a summary will immediately assume that he was raided, because whatever he put in there was true/accurate and government decided to shut him down.
And just in case it is not clear, it will be twitter summary if the person is a consummate consumer of today's media. A minority will skim the article. Even fewer people will actually read the whole thing. Even less will review for key words tracing bias and evaluating it in any given way.
Unless you are not familiar with Area 51 symbolic meaning in US culture, I am not sure how else I can explain it.
Do you have any proof he flew drones over restricted airspace? He urges people not to and also not to publish videos from it, based on that he likely is careful not to do so himself.
The article states ""videos taken from drones flown over places around Area 51"."
Which I took to mean above locations within Area 51. Like "I'm walking around Wal-Mart" or "I took some done footage over places around Disney World"
There's multiple definitions when it's used as a preposition
If you move around a place, you travel through it, going to most of its parts. If you look around a place, you look at every part of it.
OR
"To be positioned around a place or object means to surround it or be on all sides of it. To move around a place means to go along its edge, back to your starting point."
Streisand Effect 101. The website is still up, it actually looks rather tame, and I'm sure if it had actually classified documents or similar on it it would have been seized by the FBI.
If you're set on trying to uncover and release as much classified as you can glean, I'd say it's not surprising to end up getting an unpleasant visit. At the end of the day, if your passion involves actively degrading your country's competitive advantage by leaking every info you can to the wide world, I don't know.
One argument is that their discoveries set a floor for what a well equipped actual spy would be able to easily glean. The easy counter argument is that the actual spy should _also_ be investigated by the FBI in riot gear. Protecting classified information isn't just a defensive game of hoping no one will see and distribute the information. It also involves preventing people from doing so.
> if your passion involves actively degrading your country's competitive advantage by leaking every info you can to the wide world,
I don't like that mindset. The US Gov steals trillions of dollars a year from the public to fund all sorts of stuff. These black projects alone represent hundreds of billions of R&D dollars, that tech should *belong to the public*.
We pay for it, they work for us (don't they?), we should collectively benefit from it. Instead valuable advancements are locked away in secret hangars. Entire industries are left un-disrupted, all so we can have some edge for a hypothetical war we shouldn't even be fighting anyways.
I understand your position but I respectfully think it's unreasonable given that the world isn't aligned on your views, and as such there is competitive struggle between countries. In prior wars, these secretive and competitive advantages were decisive in determining the outcome.
As a US tax payer, would I rather the US use my tax money to keep a competitive edge against would-be competitors? I sure do. Particularly in a world where competitors are authoritarian dictators. If all the other world powers were pacifists and merely had gentlemen's disagreements over minor stuff, perhaps I'd share your views.
>I respectfully think it's unreasonable given that the world isn't aligned on your views, and as such there is competitive struggle between countries.
The argument here is essentially security through obscurity. If our countries defense is ultimately reliant on some info/tech never leaking then our military has failed us.
Our systems should be so strong, so robust that even if an enemy had the damn bluprints and operational knowledge it would still be foolish to attack us.
Here's an example, the navy has some really cool tech involving highly precise measurements of gravity vs known gravitational maps of the earth so that subs can navigate underwater without GPS. I don't expect the government to publish exactly how it works on some fancy nuclear submarine, but all the research and knowledge gained during R7D should be publicly available.
Plenty of good journalism that is critical of the government and “the establishment” happens in the US[0][1]. There are also cases where 100% legit journalism is unreasonably attacked and punished. Both of these things can be true; we don’t have to declare the US as either 100% perfect and free or 100% corrupt and authoritarian where every single instance of “real” journalism results in torture and murder.
> We don’t have to declare the US as either 100% perfect and free
We can still demand it. And if they only achieve 90%, we don't have to lower our expectations to 90%, or soon enough they'll be achieving 81% and so on.
Sure, great, I commend you. What does that have to do with the nonsensical claim that all real journalism in the US results in imprisonment, torture, and/or murder?
Also, Edward Snowden can always come back to the USA and have his day in court. (Though then again, they allowed Jeffrey Epstein to be murdered so maybe he's safer in Russia)
I think the major difference is you can post that kind of media, it's just not in the outlets owned by the billionaires donating to spacs. In china if you generate media that goes against the CCP you'll find yourself living with Jack Ma and Peng Shuai.
The FBI literally raided this guy's house and he will probably wind up in prison. Not to mention: Assange, Snowden, Manning.
One difference, which I will grant you, is if you don't have a wide audience the DHS will just tell sites to censor/ban you. Or they'll get folks like Taylor Lorens to dox you so your life is destroyed and you can never work again.
I don't live in the US and I only set foot in the country once in my life. Is it really an orwellian nightmare with a boot stomping in your face forever, or is it merely a threat that it could become this for everyone, with isolated incidents of different branches over-stepping and being held accountable later?
I think there's some truth in the old joke -- thank goodness the US system is so disorganized; it would be a frightening thing if were organized. One thing the Americans did get right was pluricentric power. Even their three letter agencies are constantly tripping each other up. And periodically providing oversight.
Really, if you go photographing near a military installation in any country you may bring the ire of the authorities down on you. "National security" gets overreactions everywhere. I wouldn't be too surprised if the RCMP showed up at my door here in Canada if I did a stunt like he's accused with the drone. Though I would expect to go free, in the end, if I actually complied with the laws.
Incidentally, I (not a Canadian citizen) once wandered into a Canadian military base without showing any ID or anything. The gate was open and the gate house was deserted. I think they expected the public to wander in though, because they had signs on the highway for the (very nice) museum located inside the base. At another Canadian military base I did get carded at the gate, and told to head directly to the museum.
It's definitely not like North Korea or anything crazy like that, but there is DEFINITELY a chilling effect on public discourse because even highly credentialed people get their lives destroyed if they make too much noise against the current narrative. Most people are blissfully unaware of this because they never heard from the censored people to begin with.
"A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public."
I am aware of the new trend that you can will things into and out of existence, but I do not subscribe to it.
I highly suspect the poster you were responding to was more likely upset with the concept of journalistic integrity and being unbiased, not a definition of the job. I don't think this is a very large leap to make given the context and generally popular narrative around this topic.
Many people think Assange "stopped being a journalist" when he seemingly sided with Hillary Clinton's opponent (after Hillary Clinton joked about murdering Assange.)
Anyway, anybody who expects a journalist to be unbiased is utterly clueless. And anybody who expects a journalist to like a politician who hates him is being willfully idiotic. If any politician wished you dead, you would be rationally compelled to oppose that politician no matter how shitty their opponent was.
> If any politician wished you dead, you would be rationally compelled to oppose that politician no matter how shitty their opponent was.
Selectively releasing information is what destroyed the goodwill he had with many.
Providing an opportunity for a dangerous legal precedent on top of being a royal asshole politically; I think that he has, very indirectly, taken on some Thomas Midgley-like qualities.
I'm not sure what you mean by "being a royal asshole politically". And yes, i'm pretty sure gp knows what destroyed his good-will with many, everyone knows, that doesn't mean it's his fault that the vultures are making an opportunity out of it.
If having a right as a journalist is only contingent on you not giving opportunities for those rights to be taken away you don't really have it.
I do wonder however how things would look if he leaked the other way around, especially now that the american left has been morphed into the same warhawks from the bush era and pretty much rolled back the entire public perception grounds gained regarding government surveillance after the NSA leaks. This whole misinformation hysteria has just given them an excuse to implement patriot act v2 lite, and worst of all it's being exported and done with a heavier hand internationally in places where you don't have the first amendment.
> I'm not sure what you mean by "being a royal asshole politically". And yes, i'm pretty sure gp knows what destroyed his good-will with many, everyone knows
He tried to sway a foreign election to help himself. Understandable, but it was irrespective of the policies - he is being given some onus for the outcomes of the administration he helped empower. He became a single-issue partisan - not going to a u.s. prison being the issue. After all he had done, it was sad to see. Stuck in the fricken embassy, he lost either perspective or integrity. Faulting him for creating an opportunity to criminalize whistleblowing is implying that he knew that that would be the outcome. Indignation won't save him, or the bob woodwards of the world either.
> do wonder however how things would look if he leaked the other way around
There is a continuity of government, so I think he would have been screwed. His only chance was hoping that the new administration would throw a wrench in the gears and the DOJ would be told to drop it by the AG.
> now that the american left has been morphed into the same warhawks from the bush era and pretty much rolled back the entire public perception grounds gained regarding government surveillance after the NSA leaks
There were gains? The public awareness was a gain at least.
> it's being exported and done with a heavier hand internationally in places where you don't have the first amendment.
These posts are all tangential to area 51, but what are you talking about?
> He tried to sway a foreign election to help himself.
In a free society, everybody is entitled to advocate for their own interests. Foreigners have every right to voice their opinion on American politics, particularly those foreigners who've been threatened with murder by American politicians. Would you get bent out of shape about Iraqi, Afghani, or Mexican journalists publicly advocating against another republican in the White House? You certainly shouldn't.
You obviously don't agree with Assange's priorities, but that doesn't mean he isn't a journalist. By that standard of journalism, only people who agree with you can be journalists. Obvious bullshit.
He wasn't lying, he wasn't scripting bots to impersonate Americans to astoturf a false consensus. He didn't do anything except publish information that embarrassed a politician who threatened to murder him. What he did was journalism, plain and simple. Journalists have no obligation to be politically neutral; journalists have been partisan from the very beginning. Benjamin Franklin founded partisan newspapers to push his political agenda before this country was even formed. Do you think he went out of his way to embarrass revolutionaries, just to be fair to the loyalists he opposed? Hell no.
You're not arguing with the op, I never said he wasn't a journalist. He obviously was, being a publisher. I said he lost goodwill and arguably integrity.
> Would you get bent out of shape..
Of course I wouldn't. I'm not bent out of shape about assange advocating. He prioritized his life, as is normal. He isn't a hero. He prioritized his principles as well. I'm bent out of shape about the doj precedent. Arguing over the true definition of journalism is beyond our postings, but if you put things in a journal you might be a journalist. That doesn't keep him from being a fulcrum that society will pivot over. Why are you so angry and who is it directed towards? Or am I misreading the tenor here?
> Selectively releasing information is what destroyed the goodwill he had with many.
No it's not, because it's entirely made up based on "if he had all that stuff on H. Clinton, he must have had a bunch of stuff on Trump" i.e. it's nothing but an after-the-fact rationalization of an opinion already held, based on evidence unseen. Even if the innuendos weren't based on and backed by nothing but sneers and recycled 5 year old twitter memes, they're morally vacant: the requirement of fairness from journalists is a new, and entirely authoritarian requirement.
He's no more of an asshole politically than the monsters these people worship. Since when has being a mild libertarian been extremely radical, controversial, and dangerous? Since Democrats have been trained that they have a patriotic duty to hate designated enemies, refuse to look at facts that might help those enemies, and to encourage attacks on civil liberties that might harm those enemies. That duty to be blind to government control and aggression, the duty to accumulate personal wealth and credentials, and the duty to repeat pieties on request are the only political duties left for left-liberals.
Asssange behaved nothing like other journalists by encouraging and participating in taking classified information and publishing it unfiltered in bulk. Whether he matches the legal definition of the press is a matter of judgement.
He was, in my opinion very reckless with information with minimal benefit to the public and many of his actions don’t deserve constitutional protection.
So you say that a person who publishes recording of a public figure taking a bribe is not a journalist because they did not process it -- the material itself was news-worthy already and so because they didn't have to do anything they can't label themselves a journalist?
I think if the material is news-worthy in its original form (like a recording of a public figure taking a bribe) you don't need to process it before publishing and certainly doing it is not a requirement.
Assange placed an encrypted dump on the internet. Luke Harding and The Guardian published the key to that dump in a book.
The dump contained information that placed individuals at risk; Assange made the information public as quickly as he could, so that affected individuals could take protective measures.
Luke Harding and The Guardian were responsible for exposing the data, not Assange. They betrayed him, and they still haven't admitted it. They were supposedly collaborating with him (also Spiegel and NYT).
I still don't know what happened at that time; MI5 came to the Guardian offices with Dremels and angle grinders to pulverize a laptop, in an obvious piece of theatre. Shortly after, the editor-in-chief (Alan Rusbridger) resigned and was replaced by a lightweight. The full truth will come out sooner or later.
Yes, some journalists processed his raw dumps of data, and posted the newsworthy parts. The part where he didn't do that is the part where he doesn't meet the above definition.
And we understand that's a vague definition, which is why in 2025 we will be issuing licenses for journalists, and ticketing people who report without a license.
But he didn't published anything, that's what so great about Snowden's story. He shared documents with journalists and let them chose if it was worth publishing, and moral to do so. He worked in the way the system was supposed to work.
You don't need some special government certification or corporate media job to be a journalist, do you? And why should 'responsible journalists' be the only ones who get to look at spuriously classified documents? We all know that over-classification with the goal of hiding corruption or incompetence is very common.
A journalist may need a reputation to be taken as a reliable source of information... but I don't believe WikiLeaks has had to retract any documents as fake, unlike say, the New York Times on the claims of Iraqi WMDs, or dozens of other examples over the years by 'leading corporate media outlets'.
Are you replying to the right comment? I have no idea what this is supposed to be an answer to or a comment on, and I have no idea what system you think is working, or who you think has the authority to assign journalists a "purpose."
The way the system is supposed to work is a desperate run from US authorities, ending up trapped in a country that the US is hostile to? Sounds like Snowden and Assange did it the same way.
The problem is that somebody half as clever as the development team, can guess a lot from little information, and be right in about 1/10 of the cases. Resulting in "Top Scret" Info guessed right by some poor sob. Which is then proven correct with a raid.
Espionage is a squishy word, term and action. Dislike some reality being publicly discussed - voila its espionage.
Some SciFi author, gamedev creates some fictional weapons system that looks like a real one and has the same capability. Espionage.
Except that's not what happens. Authors, movie prop designers and game developers have all been asked a lot of questions when their stuff rings a little too true. They don't get in trouble (although the FBI asking questions is some amount of trouble). But the FBI is trying to find who leaked stuff to them, and if they just had good imaginations and/or the government published too much stuff, it's not their fault.
It seems pretty clear-cut to me. "Guessing right" cannot be espionage, because you didn't gather any new information, just discussed existing publicly available information. Similarly, "publicly discussing reality" cannot be espionage unless the "reality" you're discussing includes information you obtained illicitly (e.g. by flying drones near government facilities and taking pictures of them in a concerted effort to obtain said information), or as a result of you having a security clearance.
It's sticky to "guess right", in the case where publicizing that guess would reveal technology "secrets". Those secrets are export controlled whether or not you know of a government program creating those secrets in parallel, even if nobody is working on it. Some capabilities are just automatically guarded from inception.
For example, if you "guess" that a certain type of lens would be better for certain types of infrared imaging, and publish this, you have potentially violated the US export control / international traffic in arms regulation (ITAR) by "exporting" that design to the wider public.
It's easy to complain about that, but widely publishing information on highly effective weaponry is (I hope) clearly a bad idea, lest some rogue actor start shooting down airliners for fun.
Pretty sure export control is a different thing. If you come up with original designs for an ICBM yourself by definition that's not espionage, but you might still get in trouble for sending those designs to a foreign country.
Fair point. I'm not a lawyer; this is just a combination of common sense and wishful thinking / public advocacy about how I believe things _should_ work. I have no idea how close my opinion here is to the current reality.
Yes, that's precisely my point. If you're going around actively gathering information about military secrets (such as the appearance or capabilities of aircraft in Area 51) and sending that information to the enemy via a public website, then that's espionage.
I think modern technology has made things a bit less clear-cut in some ways, because advances in technology have made a lot of things that were previously military secrets (e.g. troop movements) arguably not secret anymore (the enemy obviously already knows where that army is, it's clearly visible by their satellites). I think aircraft hidden in Area 51 definitely don't fall into that category though.
The United States is not at war with Russia. Still, Russians who come here under false pretenses for the purpose of reporting to the GRU on American business and academia - even from civilian positions with no access to classified information - are clearly spies.
The people at your link didn't have anything to do with Area 51. The guy in TFA doesn't have anything to do with Russians or any other war-media-appointed "enemies". We in USA ourselves have a long history of spying on (and interfering in the internal matters of) every other nation. We're not at war with anyone who could gain any advantage from information about Area 51. If we were to go to war with Russia, it would benefit no one but already-incredibly-wealthy USA armaments manufacturers. Also it would probably result in the extinction of humanity in nuclear war. "Plainly visible reality" is not secret, by definition.
Somehow you have claimed that a war we're not fighting with people who couldn't benefit from knowledge of information that isn't secret justifies charging this guy with espionage. One would marvel that anyone could be so incoherent, except this is the typical result of consuming American corporate war media content.
The global war on terror has been ongoing for 21 years and began on the 15th of September, 2001. It will end when there are no more terrorists or when voters decide to reclassify terrorism as a criminal issue again. In the interim, the government has granted itself additional war powers and suspended certain rights.
One struggles to imagine how "terrorists" will take advantage of grainy pictures of Area 51. Perhaps now that TFA has informed them of its existence, they'll leave an IED outside the front gate?
Unless he was trespassing on gov property i don't see how it can be espionage. If the gov flies a top secret plane or drone over you house and you happen to see it or even video it, i don't see how that's anyone's fault but theirs.
He doesn't have to trespass to break the law -- taking pictures from the outside is enough.
18 U.S. Code § 795(a) )Photographing and sketching defense installations): Whenever, in the interests of national defense, the President defines certain vital military and naval installations or equipment as requiring protection against the general dissemination of information relative thereto, it shall be unlawful to make any photograph, sketch, picture, drawing, map, or graphical representation of such vital military and naval installations or equipment without first obtaining permission of the commanding officer of the military or naval post, camp, or station, or naval vessels, military and naval aircraft, and any separate military or naval command concerned, or higher authority, and promptly submitting the product obtained to such commanding officer or higher authority for censorship or such other action as he may deem necessary.
I'm not sure whether protected airspace would count as an installation, but the military base itself certainly would. Per the article,
>> Dreamland Resort, at dreamlandresort.com, started by Arnu in 1999, features YouTube videos taken from drones flown over places around Area 51, satellite images of the base, a discussion forum with posts on the topic, articles on test flights, “black projects” and UFOs, and what it says are photos of new vehicles such as the so-called “super secret” Northrop Grumman RQ-180 unmanned stealth aircraft shown flying in 2021.
Which leaves open also the possibility that they are investigating someone else; eg, someone with clearance getting an ego boost by posting info on the forums, which isn't unprecedented.
I don't know the laws on this, but from a common sense point of view such activities could be espionage if done as part of an espionage mission but could also not be espionage is done for other purposes. For instance if you happen to record which naval ships are in a harbor, that's not espionage. If on the other hand you are sending that film to German intelligence in exchange for your income as a German spy the act of taking that film is probably espionage.
IANAL, but I think distributing classified information, even if you did not get it illegally, is still a crime. So if a secret thing flies over your house you are probably OK taking its picture, but if you share it with the world the feds may come for you.
In the US, classified information only legally binds people with security clearances, and people who are complicit/conspire with them to violate them. But otherwise, you can publish it. There is one legally untested exception, which is nuclear-related restricted data.
this is false, prior restraint is not a thing. It is forbidden to improperly distribute classified information that you have access to as a security clearance holder, but just think for a moment whether there have been any charges filed for any newsmedia organizations that reported on the snowden leaks, etc.
To further clarify, if the newspapers has anything to do with the act of giving them classified documents, they are guilty of a crime. So if you walk into the NYT and say " I have these secret documents, want them" they are fine and can publish them and (depending on how you got them) you get to spend a long time in jail. If a reporter comes to you and says "hey, can you sneak out classified documents" and you do, you both go to jail.
It's worth noting that news agencies will often give the government a chance to explain why they should not publish the files in truly important cases. If that's likely to be "if you publish the plans for D-Day, many people will die. So please don't"
If they're flying secret aircraft over the public it's a really, really high bar to think they can charge anyone with a crime in the US for taking a picture in 2022.
This is not the 1950s or something where 99% of the public didn't have a camera at all and someone would have had to make a big effort to go out of their way to photograph a secret aircraft... More like they are expecting to fly the craft over 1M+ cameras and think it's not going to be captured, which is astoundingly ridiculous.
Citizens have no right to privacy from being photographed in public in the US, the government should not have a double standard.
You’re trying to reduce both “I took a picture of a sunset and a top secret drone happened to zip by and appear in my picture” and “I routinely fly drones next to top secret military installations to photograph their goings on” to the same thing.
This theoretical double standard doesn't exist. In you follow aviation news circles closely, you'll see every couple months these days a photo go viral that someone has captured of actively classified aircraft operating in open areas. Nothing ever happens to these people because obviously what they're doing cannot be illegal.
The article doesn't really provide any information about what specific material on the site they took objection with, but it seems unlikely that it was just a photos of classified aircraft operating in the open, as that material exists in lots of places that don't get raided by the FBI.
Maybe seeing a secret government aircraft from private property makes that property into government property for as long as it takes to render the aircraft unseen.
It's documents that are classified, not information. If information could be classified, then you'd need a public register of classified topics, so that researchers would know what to avoid researching.
Forbidding drone overflight of military installations is another matter.
> If information could be classified, then you'd need a public register of classified topics, so that researchers would know what to avoid researching.
Two points: First, the general public has no duty to protect almost all classified data. If you've never had a clearance and signed the NDA, you can take TS/SCI material you found on the ground and publish it (you'd want to be real careful about not lending support to terrorists etc., because the gendarmes would likely be looking for anything to nail you on).
Second, we do have a public register of no-no topics (more accurately, topics you have an affirmative duty to protect even without a security clearance): the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981.
Thanks! I'm not from USA, and didn't know that, but I think it's much the same in the UK: if you sign Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act, I think you bind yourself to keep ALL official information secret FOREVER. I believe UK law supposes that if it isn't forbidden, then it's allowed. So if you don't sign, then it has to be the Espionage Act, which would be much harder to prosecute.
One exception: the UK has what's still colloquially known as a D-notice [0], which compels the recipient to not publish what they've got. The US doesn't have a direct equivalent.
The ACLU has (in)famously defended the kkk and other nationalists with terrible ideas. Hyperbole is useful for illustrating a point, but I don't know if that is warranted here.
>The ACLU has (in)famously defended the kkk and other nationalists with terrible ideas. Hyperbole is useful for illustrating a point, but I don't know if that is warranted here.
Are you naive or just being misleading on purpose? In lieu of the reality in the here and now your comment is just as hyperbolic as the one you are deriding for being hyperbolic.
The ACLU defended the KKK a generation ago. People have retired and been replaced. Organizational priorities have shifted. Things have changed. That's not the kind of hill that organization will risk dying on in 2022.
That said, the guy here is a lot less onerous than the KKK so maybe they will help him, but I sure wouldn't bet on it.
It may well be for the purposes of this discussion. The ACLU of the past five years or so is such a radical departure from its tradition of guarding civil liberties; you now have directors of the ACLU publicly stating a desire to suppress published books and so forth, because it goes against their new political ideology.
Regardless some guy who's schtick is "the government is up to wacky shit" is not going to have the modern ACLU banging on his door. They tend to pick cases where the government is more overtly in the wrong (basically cases where case law lags public sentiment) and where the person getting the shaft is more disadvantaged.
Double nope. Both collecting sensitive information and/or transferring sensitive information to a foreign nation are espionage. Further, the information need not be classified, the entity the information is transferred to need not be foreign, and foreign nations need not be adversaries. You hand over a document from the US military to a US newspaper - espionage. You draw a sketch in a notebook of a military base - espionage. Listening in on government frequencies to get information for a domestic terrorist group - espionage. A sketchy dude gives you a briefcase and tells you to hand it to another sketchy dude - potentially espionage.
Mishandling of classified documents you had clearance to see, or aiding a foreign adversary are related crimes.
Which you're free to so as long as you've never held a security clearance and/or signed the NDA.
The only exceptions are material covered under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which has never really been legally tried (it would probably fall apart — how is anyone supposed to know they have a duty to protect a document that says "Restricted Data"?), and the identities of undercover intelligence officers.
