Meanwhile Ireland which likes to style itself an independent country is completely dependent on its neighbors for defense against Russia which is now routinely flying sea-launched drones over Irish territorial waters and airspace. The aggression spiked during President Zelensky's recent visit to Ireland where at least 4 military grade suspected Russian drones flew near the President's aircraft.

Ireland pretends it is what Israel actually is, an independent sovereign state participating in the global technology and trade economy without entangling alliances like NATO. In reality, Ireland is effectively protectorate of its own former colonial empire, the UK and the USA and because it is not a member of NATO, the Russians see it as an obvious target of military escalation that Russia could attack but not trigger NATO Article 5.

It's become a pretty common tactic, particularly with Qatari state-run and Hamas supporting media outlet Al-Jazeera to preface everything the state of Israel does with "illegal." Meanwhile Qatar is an absolute monarchy with a citizen population of only about 300k people, of which half are women who have virtually no legal rights, and the state holds about 2M mostly South Asian enslaved workers for most of the low level and domestic labor. Qatari media lecturing Israel on civil rights is beyond absurd.

Israel is a sovereign state. It decides what is legal to do with the data it collects via its intelligence and police services. Now it is fine if cloud providers operating outside of Israel don't want their business but Microsoft and Amazon have contracts with the Israeli govt for a variety of cloud infrastructure projects including an Israeli version of similar government-owned cloud partitions including some hosted physically inside Israel.

The Guardian fails to explain adequately but the court in question is likely the US Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act court (FISA) that approves warrants either for US persons (citizens anywhere or residents domestically) or for foreign assets on US soil like an Israeli partition in AWS. Those court orders often have gag orders attached that prevent service providers from disclosing them to the targets of the warrant.

There is also quite a bit of lawfare going on lately by a group called the Hind Rajab foundation with ties to Hezbollah in Europe that has been abusing courts in several countries by making evidence-free complaints against random Israelis, alleging war crimes without actually specifying any particular crime, mostly just part of their insane hatred of Jews.

That's apparently what this NIMBUS contract was about. The cloud providers would help Israel build out that private cloud on Israeli soil.

Most of the infrastructure in question under this NIMBUS contract, are in an Israeli govt data center operating as a private partition in AWS/Gcloud. This is similar to US Govt contracts with cloud providers. The idea is to use the cloud's interface to build up govt IT worker skill sets so they are more portable and to make hiring out of the private sector easier. The exception apparently is the AI infrastructure which is in high demand and very expensive if you can even get your order filled plus US govt export restrictions like those recently waived for the UAE.

  The Guardian is almost a self-parody when it comes to their conspiratorial tone when writing about Israel. The court orders or other legal processes that might be used to gain Israeli govt data are more likely to be FISA Court orders in the US or similarly in Europe, secret spy courts, basically. Allies do spy on each other. The Guardian uses a conspiratorial framing to seem like there is some World Police out there with the right to violate the sovereignty of one particular country that they don't like.

Letâ(TM)s not pretend that self serving interests were not all over the US Constitution.

We still havenâ(TM)t removed all the parts that protected slave owner interests above all others, like the US Senate and Electoral College.

US States with robust direct democracy options at least have a steam valve to bypass gerrymandered legislatures and corrupt Senators. A federal referendum process would be amazing.

Paul may be protected by the speech and debate clause but there are two big reasons why no social media should be helping this.

1. It is clearly intended to harass and threaten the whistleblower and anyone else who these trolls might choose to claim is the whistleblower.

2. What is known is that the whistleblower is an intelligence officer, that the source of the leaks of the person's name had to have come from a person who had signed an NDA to keep government secrets and vis a vis Valerie Plame, it is a Federal crime for someone with that knowledge to reveal the identity of the an intelligence officer in some situations.

Social media sites should not facilitate either of these crimes.

Plus, you could buy a new Japanese attack submarine and still have $200m for decorating.

Just give the FTC drone strike authority and problem solved.

Yes, I would imagine the idea is to make the administrative/orchestration interface look just like AWS while actually being on the classified network. That way they can hire engineers who have AWS experience and just have them spin up servers the same way. They can also take their orchestration tools and ansible script.

This could potentially increase security by limiting the obnoxious roadblocks that provide the frustration incentive to break the rules on these systems in the first place. If everything on the classified system works almost the same way it does in the rest of the IT world, you make hiring easier, you make government more efficient, you reduce job frustration.

The Obama administration did push through an update to the Federal overtime regulations to make the majority of blue collar workers, especially retail/restaurant managers eligible for OT again, because they mostly get salaries around $24k/yr whereas a $12/hr worker would get OT without question, but its been blocked in court and the Trump administration is trying to kill it.

Yes. This is the fundamental problem. The only way crypto-currency gains traction is if the transaction fees and other "friction" drops below other convenient methods. This is probably why a lot of companies are developing private block chain systems and consortiums for special purposes so they can make the transaction fees essentially at cost (of operating their computing hardware)

Its still just a ton of speculation until some killer apps arrive. IMHO the real blockchain value is in the distributed cryptographically secure ledger, not the "scrip" they want to call money.

Government doesn't actually have to set the price. They just cap the availability and an auction process sets the price. Cap and trade ends up being more flexible and responsive to market conditions than a flat rate pollution tax.

The government can manipulate the auction results via supply or reserve tranches of credits, (effectively at cheaper prices) for some nationally important industries or exempt small emitters (like you and your car) while requiring large emitters like an airline or rail conglomerate or a electrical utility to purchase the credits each year.

You are confusing voter fraud (voting multiple times or for other people) with election fraud (miscounting the votes or manipulating how inconvenient it is to vote) .

Realistically voter fraud is meaningless outside of the occasional small local off-year race where a few extra votes will matter.

What the EC does is make the votes of the vast majority of the country meaningless and hands it to a few voters in a few states. The EC is a relic that should have gone away decades ago.

This is now the second time in 5 cycles where this has happened. National Popular Vote will actually make the two (or more) candidates campaign for every vote instead of trying to strategize about what counties in swing states will matter.

There are several other structural changes we ought to consider but eliminating the EC is an easy one and would be broadly popular.