Now I'm just making up stuff in order to keep arguing. 8^)
Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 07/25/2013 12:04 PM:
My only disagreement is that I meant compartmentalized as a situation in which there is only one point of vulnerability, one relevant person. I didn't mean "generally operating autonomously", I meant "bullet proof and air tight".
OK. But before you said: Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 07/25/2013 11:24 AM:> On 7/25/13 10:49 AM, glen wrote:
I would say that legislation can be robust to crime or lapses in individual ethics. Legislation is a qualitatively different thing from ethical decisions that govern individual behavior. The lie above [infidel husband at wife's deathbed] as described is compartmentalized and does not impact anyone else.
And:
The public secret (the thing people know but put out of their minds) is not at all compartmentalized.
Legislation and individual ethics do compare nicely because _some_ people know the "public secret" while others do not, in the same way that the infidel husband's secretary might know of his infidelity (as well as the person with whom he had the affair), even though his wife does not know. The point being that both cases, the public secret and the infidel husband, are compartmentalized in the same way. The one's who notice the _potential_ are "in on" the public secret, whereas the oblivious ones are not. I can't tell you how many California and Oregon hicks thought I was "one of them" when they learned that I suspected the government was attempting to build a database for tracking every phone call, text messages, and e-mail. I can count 5 such hicks right off the bat (though I don't know the names of 2 of them that I met at dive bars). But putting paranoia aside, the self-described "nerds" who know lots of flat technology would write off my suspicions until/unless I (and they) took the time to dig in a little deeper. Those people, the non-paranoid "middle tier" civilian, were not in on this particular public secret any more than the guys who played golf with the infidel husband might not have been in on the secret of his infidelity, whereas his secretary might have been. Such an ethical case should _not_ scale like this, but it does. It would not scale, if we spent more time curating our classified materials and/or more time curating our legislation. Agencies like the NSA SHOULD have the most sophisticated classification methods on the planet. But they don't, probably because there's too little budget for understanding how to classify and too much budget for ... oh, I don't know, building data centers in Utah. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella I heard you think I miss it, you'd bet I'd kiss it
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