Snowden

I'm guessing MP's gets lots of rants so try treating them like an intelligent adult and it might get through.
bit-tech would lend a hand.

 

^^^ This. Don't sound like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. Stay away from the politics, stick to the technology. Sound rational and knowledgeable.

 

I don't know where to go for level, dispassionate and reasoned debate any more. Bit-Tech is the most intelligent, untrollish internet community I know of, and we failed within 25 posts.

I'm starting to suspect that the friendly debate is a philosophy professor's pipe dream.

 

Oh I intend to...however I'm not completely sold on staying away from the politics. Don't forget I'm from Northern Ireland, and we have many, many examples of government misinformation and abuses to point to.

 

I'm sure of that, but you don't want to come across as having a particular political exe to grind. It's all about the government's lack of understanding of the technology and how it could be abused by anybody.

 

The MP in Question is Naomi Long, who received death threats from loyalist paramilitaries (her own constituents) earlier in the year.

So, the plan is to ask probing questions to determine a plausible way that her office may gain access to the information (Perhaps to assess threats from schedule meetings with her constituents so she no longer needs requires 24-hour police protection) Then go on to explain how access to that information gives her office a massive advantage over her political opponents - I anticipate a defensive political reassurance that "I Would Never Do That™" - to which I would reply "And can you say the same for your Sinn Fein, SDLP, DUP or UUP opponents?"

 

The NSA Scandal As Told By The Big Lebowski

 

Well, does anyone have a clue about what this guy is describing? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/21/nsa-illegally-collected-thousands-emails-court

 

"Wholly domestic" in this seems to mean communication solely between US citizens. If one of the participants is not a citizen and not resident in the US then its fair game.

The NSA collects 250 million internet communications per year. Of those 56,000 have turned out to have been "domestic" and many of these were not accidental.

There's not a single mention in there of the privacy rights of foreign citizens

 

The question I would love to ask the persecuting government representatives, which nobody has happened to ask them yet, is this: if what Snowden did was a felony and an act of betrayal, what exactly is a responsible citizen supposed to do when they find out that their own government is violating laws and civil rights? What more responsible, legal approach should he have employed? Written a strongly-worded letter to congress? Held an interview with Rolling Stone? Voiced his concerns to his supervisor?

They're keen to focus on the illegality of his whistleblowing/defection (and they seem to have successfully diverted mainstream media discussion away from the PRISM issue itself and onto the question of Snowden's crimes with depressing ease) but they don't describe any alternative path that he might have taken. Assuming just for the sake of argument that what he'd discovered was utterly immoral and illegal (because nobody can agree on whether or not PRISM is these things) - what was he supposed to do?

 

The US has been systematically destroying whistleblower's rights for a long time. According to US law, he was supposed to do nothing, as they're the government and therefore automatically right.

 

I think this is a very good point. Abuse of power/priviledge cuts both ways, but how do we as members of the general public make sure we are acting for the public good when it involves a breach of legality/trust and what can we possibly do to minimise the potential damage?

 

Who needs secrets when you have a nuclear weapons in storage that could blow up the earth 10 times over.

World peace won't be seen in our lifetimes that's for sure. Snowden has not helped or hindered that process

 

Well I hope the launch codes for those nuclear weapons would be kept secret.

 

With the Americans who knows. Uk and USA will be in Syria come Tuesday to deal with chemical weapon attacks.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security

 

If that can be proven in court, I wonder how many criminal convictions will be overturned?

 

None. What possible convictions might this have an impact on? People hacking information online? It's neither here nor there whether governments already do this - they have an exemption under regulations that allow them to do things that aren't normally legal if they can justifiy it being in the national interest. I should imagine that everything GCHQ does can be construed in this manner. However, it doesn't justify a random John Smith doing the same thing.

There are some regulations that allow random passers-by to do things if it's seen to be in the greater good that wouldn't normally be allowed, e.g. entering a property to protect human life. Such legal defences would have already been employed if they applied, in the person's defence. The fact that similar things are done in the name of national security is irrelevant.

 

Zero. No one would ever use information gleaned from these secret sources in a criminal trial. That would revel the sources and the methods. With in one month, the NSA could identify every single source and storage point of child pornography world wide. But you'd lose the ability to spy on everyone/thing since you'd have to reveal the totality of your network penetration to bring them all to court. Even saying to a police agency; "look into this guy" means a defense attorney can question why the warrant was asked for, where probable cause came from (using the US as an example).

It's the classic double edged sword of intelligence gathering. Acting on it means admitting you have it, which tells the other guy you have it and usually how you got it.

 

It look like we may get our day in the courts...
UK citizen sues Microsoft over Prism private data leak to NSA.