A high profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the group, called ShinyHunters, told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone number, and information on their spouse.
The data breach could be massively significant and may have all sorts of national security and counterintelligence implications. Criminals from the same ecosystem as ShinyHunters have previously used hacked data like phone records to track, intimidate, and harass the FBI agents investigating them. The highly sensitive data could also be a boon to foreign intelligence agencies who want to better understand how one of the most important law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the U.S. operates. And if the data fell into the hands of more criminals, FBI agents and their spouses could face serious threats to their safety.
“We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the representative of the group told 404 Media.
The representative provided 404 Media with a sample appearing to contain the personal data of 5,000 FBI employees. That data included an alleged address, phone number, date of birth, and in some cases details on their spouse.
It is syntactically two independent clauses (or a compound sentence) joined by an em dash rather than a single, indivisible thought. Each half contains its own subject and verb structure. Punctuation does not equate to inseparability. You assume second half acts as a pivot (“setup for a ‘but’”). But look at the actual words: there is no “but” or ideological reversal present. They were expressing two distinct emotional stances: a political/institutional cynicism (“I don’t care if they target a government agency I don’t like”) followed by a cynical motive attribution (“they’re just another bunch of assholes out to make a profit”).
You’re mistaking syntactical shape for semantic content. Independent clauses can still have context-dependent meaning. In fact, that’s the norm for sentences placed together. By being in sequence, all three statements are implicitly connected.
What’s more, the dash explicitly signals that the thoughts are connected. That’s a common use of dashes: juxtaposition of opposed thoughts. They’re dependent both by the implicit context-dependency and by virtue of being marked as dependent.
Figuring out how the distinct statements are connected and how these dependencies shape them is a fundamental linguistic puzzle. You didn’t find the solution, which isn’t a bit deal, but even when you had the solution explained to you, you keep insisting there is none.
“They hit someone I don’t like” is something you’d expect people to approve of, but in this context, it’s juxtaposed against both the preceding and succeeding statements of disapproval of their actions and motives respectively, which creates a contradiction: If they target someone you don’t like, aren’t you happy about that?
That contradiction is preemptively resolved by “I don’t care if … – …”. If you’re looking for words to pin the pivot to, those are the closest you’ll get. They express the semantic connection between the facts “they targeted someone I don’t like” and “I disapprove of their actions”: the former has no bearing on the latter.
I see your confusion here: “I don’t care if” isn’t actually part of the fact being presented. It’s not a distinct emotional stance, but rather part of the linguistic construct linking the independent statement “they target a government agency I don’t like” to the one following it. If anything, it’s the negation of an expected emotional stance.
I completely disagree. The two statements are completely clear. You can take one or the other independently and they maintain their original meaning. Like I said, the second statement bears no impact on the first no matter how you try to bend the rules. Have a nice day.
The statements aren’t the ones you claim though.
“I don’t care if it’s raining. I’m going for a walk.” doesn’t mean I never care about rain at all. It means that the fact that it’s raining has no bearing on my decision to go for a walk. I could join them with a dash to make their connection clear, but even if I don’t, the composite meaning is obvious.
“I don’t care if …” is the construct joining the two clauses into a full sentence, indicating that the first statement (“they target something I don’t like”) has no bearing on the second (“they’re still assholes”). The second part doesn’t itself have a bearing on the first, but the sentence as a whole and the disqualifying particle in particular do.
You split the sentence wrong, altering the meaning of the first clause by prepending a part that doesn’t belong to it.