Archive for the ‘stupid’ Category

FBI : The Ultimate in High-Tech Clownschoolery

Monday, January 18th, 2010

I’ve always suspected that the resistance to transparency for intelligence agencies comes from their total incompetence rather than any great threat to national security that would be incurred. There is rich proof for this thesis. The CIA missed all the big terror actions, but they did do a good job arresting people of ‘Middle-Eastern appearance’ on what turned out to be ficticious charges. They were involved with applying the ‘enhanced’ interrorgation (*1) techniques to hapless prisoners who were mostly innocent civilians and petty criminals. Then, they managed to NOT get the guy with explosives in his budgie smugglers (*2) arrested after his dad told authorities his son had gone cookoo.

It’s pretty plain that the CIA should not have changed their main page back when a hacker changed it to read “Central Stupidity Agency” (*3) all those years ago.

That’s all the CIA though. The FBI, supposedly, was not utterly incompetent and morally corrupt. To be fair to the FBI, the news that their newest ‘high-tech’ Bin Ladin composite picture that was released to help catch Binny was actually just a Bin Ladin picture with the facial features of a Spanish Communist politician pasted on only confirms the incompetence of the Federal Bureau of Idiots. I do have to admit I LOVE how they managed to get anti-Leftist hysteria in on the action.

Think about it for a moment. Here you have a secretive agency that only deals with the public on a very narrow front, through items such as this composite picture. That’s the scope of their screw-up potential. They release a composite picture of their Most Wanted Criminal. The guy they’re most serious about catching IN THE WHOLE WORLD. And what do they do? They decide to clown around and put a filthy commie’s face on Osama. Did the guy add “Lolz, check this out. It’s Osama Bin Lenin” to the subject line when he sent it off to get circulated world-wide?

There we have it, folks. Reality really is funnier than fiction, and the U.S national security apparat really is less competent than any conceivable sarcastic portrayal of it. We are surveyed and intimately probed by the most well-funded Clown School on earth. Doesn’t that make us all sleep a little bit better at night?

*1 (misspelling is intentional)
*2 (budgie smugglers: Australian for figure-hugging underwear)
*3 (I’m sure there’s a great reason for why the hacker didn’t go with the more obvious acronym translation)

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Much ado about much ado about nothing

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

I couldn’t help but get frustrated after reading this SMH article. To summarize, Microsoft made a cute little addition to their MSN Messenger chat application that allowed kids to IM Santa, who would then respond live.

When reading the article, one gets the impression that Santa was hijacked by a foul-mouthed prankster intent on making all the kiddies cry.

However, if you read it again and know a little bit about computing and the simplest of artificial intelligence (chatbots) you’ll realize all this innocent little Santa program was doing was cutting out parts of the message it received and posting them back in its response. It didn’t “understand” that parts of the incoming message were rude. The “offended” party was intentionally trying approaches to get a “rude” response. It wasn’t the writer’s “repeated invitations to eat pizza” that made Santa go nasty, but a precisely structured message that included all the rude bits that Santa responded with. You might as well record yourself swearing, then call up Sony to complain your voice recorder is being rude.

So why does this frustrate me? In itself it’s not a particularly dangerous piece of misreporting (even though it got poor innocent Microsoft Santa put on ice) but it’s just another example of a style of journalism very popular today; the (often intentional) misreporting and underreporting of facts to cause an emotional response in the reader who is usually not informed about all details of the case or not equipped with the technical skills to make a full assessment. It’s the kind of faux tabloid journalism that has found its way from the mouths of shock-jocks and right and left-wing hacks to mainstream news. Just watch O’Reilly (Fox news) and you’ll spot countless examples.

So let Santa live (and lest we forget, Knut the cuddly polar bear was never in danger) by becoming ever more questioning. We have an unjustified faith in journalism; that it is held to a higher standard, it is more honest than politicians or even our friends and neighbors. It’s not true. Often, news gets sold with the biggest half-truths of all.

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