ok delete if nesacary. i found a thread on the winamp forums that shows total intolerance of anybody elese belifs that fall outside the group, i would like your opinions on it. http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=93498&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
Windude is quite paranoid. Let me break it down into simple terms for you. Why in the f___ would the government give a damn about _you_. There are billions and trillions of people on earth, do you really think the government can monitor all of them? Sure, your phone conversations might be getting recorded somewhere, you might be constantly triangulated (position) via your cell phone, but to be honest, nobody in their right mind is actually paying attention to _you_. You start talking about bomb threats to everybody and thier mother, you get flagged by the FBI via an anonymous tip or something of the likeness, then you might want to worry about your communications being tapped. Just keep in mind how the law works, if they obtain information illegally, it does not stand in court, it gets thrown out. I'm sure there will be some more paranoid people replying how the "government can do anything it wants, it does not have to follow the law" and so on, but after working in the government, I can tell you the government operates like a chicken with its head cut off. Soo much political hogwash and so forth, nothing ever gets accomplished. Just don't go around making bomb threats to all of your neighbors and you should be ok. Cheers.
Whenever someone is paranoid about the government watching them, I tell them a fact from Steven Wrights (?), ex MI5 scientist, novel....... In 1965 (at the hight of the cold war), over 300 Russian diplomats working for the Soviets in the UK, were watched by D branch, a team of at the time 11 people. The 300 Sovs includes only the legitimate diplomats allowed to work in the Soviet consulates and embassies.........not including the other spies, which the Brits didnt know about. MI5 is larger now, but so is the UKs population...you judge how much closer MI5 and GCHQ will be watching us these days. It cant be so much closer for their budget hasnt increased massively in comparison with inflation. monolith sums it up totally: Its the same this side of the pond as well!
Yes, it is illegal for the man to monitor communications without just cause (and anyone in the UK without their head in their ass will have heard about recent efforts by the government to give far more freedom to their agencies). But they get through this with a simple legal loophole. US bases watch UK traffic and vice versa. Menworth hill, and it's giant golf balls are a prime example. People scoff at this stuff because they use words like bomd and terrorist all the time, but never get arrested. That aint how it works! Certain words in certain combinations set off red flags, which mean the conversation gets recorded. Then an agent will later review that recording and decide if it warrants further attention.
OH MY GOOD GOD!! I just read the rest of the thread rather than just get the gist of it. Although I would say my minds not made up completely, the impression I have now of the guys on the Winamp forum is that rarely have I seen such a group of sharp tounged bigots. Most of the theories he raised do have actual proof out there to support them (maybe not prove them beyond doubt). But rather than enter a debate, it turned into the whole board against this one guy! Who happened to have a different opinion to the majority. Sheesh, won't be joining that board in any hurry.
i believe they do sift thru all communications ... although not necessarily all internal communications, afaik the US sifts all external communications as far as it can and as bradford cites they only do something if its deemed serious enough. Idly talking about flying 747s into new york may get you 'flagged' but nothing would come of it because of the context i'm writing it in and because i am not suspected of being able to do anything of the sort... infact their monitoring is probably sophisitcated enough to pick up some extent of the context in this and it probably wouldn't even warrant a human inspection. It prolly works a bit like the swearfilter did towards the end of #bit's life... Scanning everytthing... when someone said something naughty it'd log it and notify the moderator's room for human interpretation and intervention. Quite frankly i don't actually see the 'point' of these monitoring stations anymore... most 'hardened' terrorist or criminals with any nous would use encrypted communications, which may of course set more alarm bells ringing for the monkeys in the box at GCHQ but would probably be secure as there is no key escrow system at present and the kind of encryption available is as far as we know too secure to be broken in any feasible amount of time by the scanning devices or security agencys. So why do it? For a start because of the illegality or bad publicity that would arise you never see these siftings as admissable evidence in trials of ppl... maybe thats because they dispense with ppl by bonking them on the head instead of putting them in somewhere like camp xray or whatever that place in cuba is. So surely they must only use it as a first trigger at which point they can apply for a legal tapping of your communications or surveillance on you... but on the whole as most ppl are law obidding these things are just totally useless measures slowing our pings down damnit incidentally i expect i will have triggered 10 flags in that above post... and to be quite honest i couldn't careless
