Snowden

I have no idea why that took so long to sink in

 

This is very tricky for me to respond to...


I'll just say that he is somewhat of an idiot. He gave up everything to tell the world what they have already known but haven't publicly acknowledged. America spy's on everyone(except innocent US citizens). "I had no idea...." Pull your head out of the sand.
And you think other countries aren't "spying" on America? Don't be stupid, they are. Even our Allies.

I wouldn't call him a hero. Or a whistleblower. You can't "blow your whistle" over something that's legal. I'm not saying it's morally right. But as far as I can tell the government is standing inside the boundaries of the law.

Don't like the law? Protest it. Let's get it changed.

Finally, the tricky part... The US isn't "spying" on innocent US citizens. They don't care about your weird fetish porn. Or that you have beiber fever when no one's looking.

I've seen first-hand people drug out of work and arrested for violating the privacy of innocent United States Citizens. Look at it this way. The ocean is full of fish(some of them US citizens). Some fish are illegal to catch(US Citizens) while others are fair game. That doesn't mean that some people aren't going to try and catch the illegal fish. In those instances, these people are always found out, and dealt with according to the law. There is zero tolerance when it comes to innocent US Citizens.

You're not going to believe me, but they really do follow the law.

 

********. lol. If you really believe this, then you are a greater danger to the rights of Americans then any terrorist ever will be.

You are the problem. Just because the last 2 administrations have taken to secret interpretations of secret laws in secret courts that we can't contest does not make them legal or right. It just means that citizens haven't given them the consent of the governed. Which is exactly what this is about. The very core of our nation.

Edit: Here is a another, more nuanced, look at why all this is a danger to everything we hold dear.

 

Let me re-iterate the last part of my post:

You're not going to believe me, but they really do follow the LAW.

What exactly are you calling ******** to?

I take offense to calling me a great danger to the rights of Americans.

I have served in arms to protect those rights.

Before I go any further I want to know exactly what I said you're calling ******** to.

 

Of course you can blow your whistle over something legal. I point you to Jeffrey Wigand.

How can you protest a practice you have no evidence of existing?

What if they don't want it for the purposes of law enforcement?

What if they want it for political purposes?

Google and Facebook two of the most valuable companies in the world. Facebook, for example, shattered tech industry records with it's IPO. Both these company's products are our data. The reason this data is so valuable is that it gives advertisers greater insight to effectively market their products....and when I say "effectively market" I mean "persuade and manipulate you in to buying".

So what value does that data have to a political party. Well, their policies are their essentially products, and political campaigns have all the properties of advertising campaigns.

Data analysis techniques are becoming more sophisticated every day. Indeed, Web 3.0 will be the 'semantic web', where computers can interpret the nuances of language. So imagine a government who knows exactly how to shape their language and narrative to statistically appeal to the most people....Or as Chomsky would have put it, manufacture consent.

Such as the constitution?

 

As you're in the USA you might not be aware of how this is working here in the UK and why so many people are pissed?
It alleged that GCHQ, the UK's eavesdropping and security agency, had access to Prism since at least May 2010, since the revelations, neither GCHQ nor any government minister has denied the agency had access to material gathered by the program, which appears to have given the NSA ways of retrieving information from companies such as Google, Skype, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple.

UK ministers have also not attempted to explain why GCHQ would need to access information from Prism, rather than going through the normal legal protocol when seeking information from an internet company based in another country. This involves making a formal request to the US department of justice, which would make the approach to the firm on the UK's behalf.

In short it's alleged that GCHQ has circumvented UK laws by accessing information on UK citizens directly from Prism, GCHQ is bound by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to seek approval for intercepting material from telecoms and UK-based internet companies.

UK law requires that any directed surveillance is focused on a specific individual or premises. There is a clear concern that the collection of the relevant information was not collected as part of a directed operation, and if that has happened the legality of obtaining the information is far from clear.

Nope, I don't believe you and I sure don't believe them.

Right, I'm sure they will listen to us and change the laws if we don't like them, just like they changed all those other laws people didn't like and protested against, although I can't actually think of too many laws that have been changed especially when a government says it's all in the name of national security. Good luck with that one.

 

Miller:
So I get that the UK is pissed because their government is using a US program to spy on their citizens unchecked by their laws. That sucks and is very backhanded. Something that hasn't been conveyed on this side of the pond.

And you guys are jumping down my throat(As I expected). I never said I agreed with all of the surveillance. Just that so far it is within the confines of current laws(which i dont really agree with).

I'm all for change. And I certainly don't like how hard it is to change what's already been put into place. Power is with the people. But, it seems to me like most people don't really care(which is sad in and of itself).

I probably should have kept my mouth shut. Which is what took me so long to reply to the OP in the first place. This is a hard topic for me to "defend" even if I'm not really arguing for or against surveillance.

TLDR:
I'm 100% against keeping tabs on the American population. Mass surveillance is a very slippery slope.

Now ignore what I've just said and keep jumping to conclusions.

 

Just that. A few get caught, sure. But given the sweeping nature of the USA Patriot Act, you're going to tell me no FBI agents ever looked up an ex? or their daughter's new boyfriend? That a rubber stamp wiretap never got mis used? That there haven't been people surveilled due to politics rather then threat assessment? That's crap because of the very nature of the laws prevent any realistic oversight. Now the idea of the NSA "just" collecting information on verified tagets is ludicrous given the nature of the meta surveillance that has emerged. Because a life time of being exposed to this sort of thing has told me that for every time we see a glimpse of this, it's only the tip of the iceberg. The two programs that were exposed by Snowden are already outdated if not by their exposure then by the rapid nature of such program's mutation as new technology comes online. Given the history of comments and programs that the current head of the NSA has launched, I know that they are surveilling by far more then they are letting on to. What else do they need that facility in Utah for? Besides, even the meta data has realistic impacts on Americans due to signal and network analysis. So this idea of secret courts being rigorous and due process being followed is naive in the extreme.

As for your service, that's nice. Unlike most Amercians, I grew in the military and know you volunteered and got paid. It was your job. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing I have seen in the last 20 years has convinced me that the deployment of our armed forces had anything to do with the defense of our nation or the rights in the constitution. Certainly the last 10 years were a farce of the highest order and as a nation we lost by far more then we gained, because we gained nothing. You would have been better off serving your country as a high school teacher; at least then the grammar in this country wouldn't be so disastrous.

The men that took up muskets to fight for at the start of this country did not do it for safety, the did it for freedom. Blindly believing that gutting the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments is a good thing for the over all safety IS FUD and is very dangerous. It basically allows us to slowly become exactly what the government tells us to fear. That is a very real danger.

Let's face it, if you actually had access to any of the classified surveillance programs, you wouldn't be posting here. If you actually worked actively in the intelligence field, you wouldn't be posting here. The feed back I get from friends in cross over fields tells me a lot more then what I read in the press, and there is more at stake here then Meta surveillance.

 

So government agencies spy!

Hardly breaking news there.

 

No it's not, but its the way it's being done by allegedly circumventing UK laws by accessing information on UK citizens directly from Prism, as I said before.

 

Ok, I have have been a bit un kind in my last post.

If you really believe this, please, how do you feel your service has concretely protected the rights of Americans? Let's say any deployment after the end of the Vietnam conflict. Any deployment that you think actively defended this nation and the rights of it's citizens rather then enforce, an often times dismal, foreign policy.

 

Sorry, government agencies spy on their own citizens illegally. Still not breaking news exactly.
I don't think most would expect anything less in all honesty.

 

I think that's just it, we know we are being spied on but we hope it's within the legal guidelines and protocols and we may have suspected we were being spied on in other less legal ways but how do we prove it?

Snowden has provided the evidence that this has been happening and on a much lager scale than most people would ever have imagined, that's what has annoyed the governments so much because they can get away with it and deny it when we can't prove it, then along comes Snowden.

 

What Snowden did was wrong, he broke the law and revealed secrets (I use the term lightly). Whether you believe that was the morally right thing to do or not, that's up to you, I still don't really know what to think about it.

The problem is, what happens now? The story has already started to die down in the media and France seems like its the only country in the EU that wants to take a stand. They threatened to delay trade talks with the US (but this is unlikely to ever happen). If we believe this is wrong, should we do anything about it? It may well be legal, but that doesn't stop you from standing up and saying "This is wrong."

I do understand the risk of terrorism and I completely agree that we need spies and spy programs to protect us from that, but spying on everyone? It widens the net to allow more potential targets to be identified, but thereby branding everyone as guilty.

 

This is where you'd be wrong. And why I wont debate this any further.

And feel free to question my service to the United States. But, I know for a fact that I have directly helped kill terrorists and save the lives of American Soldiers. I didn't start or agree with the wars. But I did my part to make the best of a bad situation. What have you done?

mikeyandrewb summed up what I was basically trying to say pretty well:

Which is why I said he was an idiot. He essentially gained nothing, revealed very little, and lost just about everything. Sounds pretty idiotic in my book.

 

I would disagree with "revealed very little", my guess is the vast majority of the populace think spying is something from the bygone era of the cold war. So he has pushed the question of giving up personal freedom for the sake of better security into the public consciousness.

 

I'm telling you that you're wrong. There is a very stringent process in place to prevent individuals from abusing systems. And those that do abuse the systems are punished. Not to mention, they/we don't hire Wal-Mart(no offense) employee's. These are very trustworthy individuals. People who have shown for a long time they can be trusted with very sensitive missions. Not to mention all the Polygraph testing that is done. Why do you think those who leak information are really few and far between?

Now you're just being rude. It's called a Deterrent Force. A Deterrent Force does it's part in protecting rights/freedoms of the American People. Hense why I never said that I faught to protect our rights/freedoms. Don't be naive. You know damn well that if the United States didn't have an adequate armed force that any number of other nations would be more than happy to move on in, oppress the American people, and squander our resources.

 

Unfortunately how the media and people are portraying the revealed information is quite far from the truth. Which is what people in charge have been trying to say.

Everyone seems to be taking the "can't trust anyone", "the government isn't telling us the truth" route on this too. Yet, taking what Snowden says as absolute fact w/o really knowing.

I fully agree that people within the government have an infamous track record of not telling the truth... Before everyone starts to assume that I just believe everything the government tells me. Just saying that you can't take everything Snowden is saying as absolute truths.

 

And there in lies the problem, no one knows the truth because there is no accountability.

- Thomas Paine

 

There is accountability. The problem is, you can't make public the accountability for stuff that "doesn't exist". Kind of a catch 22. All I'm really trying to say is that it's not a big free for all with politicians tracking their oponents and scorned men tracking their wives. People are held accountable.

And we can't just go around giving out secrets because Joe the plumber wants to know. Well, so does Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and any number of other's that don't play very nice with America or the rest of the world. "Terrorism" completely aside.