NSA PRISM deepthroat VANISHES as pole-dance lover cries into keyboard Whistleblower Edward Snowden, who blew the lid off the US government's massive internet surveillance project PRISM, has vanished from his Hong Kong hideout. Word of his disappearance came as it emerged that the 29-year-old's girlfriend is apparently a pole-dancing blogger who yesterday wrote: "Sometimes life doesn’t afford …
I don't think disappearance was the right move for him.
It opens an opportunity for *someone* to disappear him forever and no one will ever know what has happened. A few strategically placed rumours about his probable sighting in Tibet every few month for a year or two and everyone will forget he ever existed...
"They are the ones that have put the asses on the line of those defending us form others seeking to do us harm", you mean.
PRISM is part of the vital defensive shield that protects the USA and her allies from enemies. Law abiding citizens have nothing to fear (and everything to gain) from such a system; they can go about their business totally unimpeded.
@AC - 12:43
Ok... so assuming you are a male AC and pretending you have a wife, she has decided that because her first boyfirend when she was nine kissed another girl she is therefore allowed and within her rights to, behind your back and under a veil of secrecy, check your phone calls, review your text message, scan your emails, search your Facebook / Twitter and whatever else she sees fit basically spy on you. Whether or not you have nothing to hide, how does that make you feel? Is that a wife you could be with?
And you mentioned a word there, that, surprisingly, no-one else has mentioned that I am aware of. Business. Is the government keeping tabs on all correspondence that happens between businesses? There's no software that will pre-emptively highight whether someone is going to suddenly become a terrorist (they can only show after the fact who the terrorist spoke to prior to whatever act they completed, and assumes the terrorists don't use PAYG phones, and change them often. But why would a terrorist do that?!?) but perhaps there is algorityhms that could be written to show how often companies are contacting one another and cross-referenced with rumour milss could strengthen when mergers are going to happen, when stock prices could change, yadda yadda yadda... That informaton could make someone a lot of money, whereas the opportunites for saving lives and protecting freedom are few.
I'm sure I'm mistaken but didn't I read somewhere that the lovely and virtuous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy
wife of the 42 prez, way before, made investment returns that were estimated by economists as 'lucky' to the chance of 1 in 31 trillion, there may be other possibilities? (Peter Wright alleged in Spycatcher that MI5/6 used to pay people off in the UK with a Premium Bond win). Total Information Awareness must either have a very tight ethical audit or as you say the possibility will be there for more financial abuse
ECHELON (before PRISM technologies) was variously rumored to have led to economic wins for US Trade against other bidding nations.... I think there are some papers on the economic distortions caused by NSA type activities? I'm not sure if this is relevant http://www.natowatch.org/sites/default/files/liftingthelid.pdf it seems mostly to say that the NSA doesn't pay tax?
You might not care for the AC's comment, but realistically he is correct. There are too many of us for them to keep tight tabs on all of us and make all of us miserable. By and large your email will transit without making a blip in the giant sucking recorder. When the DC sniper was on the loose people were all kinds of upset about how much they were risking their lives stopping to tank up their car. I was never that worried about it because statistically the odds of him getting me were about equal to me winning the big prize in the lottery.
That's not actually the point. The point is that they can bring that sort of power to bear on some of us. And they can now do it in a manner that we don't know is politically as opposed to morally motivated.
You don't understand how this works :) They won't need to keep tabs on all of us. They only need to make an example of a few, then the rest will fall in line. I have also experienced a police state. A true saying going around was something like "a moment of sincerity means one night at the secret police". Everyone was sincere only with the closest family.
Statistics have nothing to do with it. What is even scarier is that they have all your records about everything and then they can corroborate them, which means any of us can be an example. You downloaded torrented music at 14? You are a thief and a criminal. That's all it takes.
I am fed up with seeing uneducated comments like this.
A/C you really need to go read some history and open your eye's to which direction society is heading down. You don't suddenly wake up in a police state, it takes years before you find out you gave everything up years ago and by then its too late.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"
Benjamin Franklin
That shows how muc US changed in the past two centuries.... one day the Statue of Liberty will crush into the sea...
And believe me, you should try to live in a policed state. You wouldn't like it at all. Try to spend some time in one, North Korea or the like...
"I'd rather live in a policed state than a robber or terrorist state."
So thought my great grandfather. For a few f years while Soviet Russia transitioned from a robber state in the 1920-es to a policed state circa 1937.
After that Stalin personally ordered him shot. Just to make sure he enjoyed it fully, Stalin & Beria had the letters sent to my mother _ONE_ year before my great grand dad walked down the green painted corridor. He was alive, while everyone outside Lubianka thought he is dead, shot as an enemy of the state.
The minor and particularly significant differences were mostly around that it was called "The Trust", not Al Qaeda at that time.
"....After that Stalin personally ordered him shot....." The Stalin Purges by 1937 were all about Stalin removing those he considered to be in competition to be the top dog in Soviet Russia. To be on Stalin's personal naughty list meant your great grandfather was most likely a very active part of the repressive regime that murdered millions of Russians. I wouldn't waste time crying over him.
Technically true but the rest of the details put it in a different context. Stalin didn't target only those he thought were in direct competition to him. He cleared out great swaths of people. Sort of a, "Take anybody in government who is in the GS-11 to GS-14 rank and have them shot." And those were his friends. If you were a dissident at best it was Siberia for you.
".....Stalin didn't target only those he thought were in direct competition to him. He cleared out great swaths of people....." Beria didn't take a personal interest in everyone his people murdered, and Stalin definately did not. Once again, to get onto Stalin's list, to the point where he took a personal interest not only in making sure you died but also playing mindgames with your family, then you had to be a big cog in the Soviet machinery. As you say, probably one of Stalin's own friends.
Whilst people bang on about nothing to hide shite, remember that in the Uk it took local councils no time at all to pervert RIPA to spy on the general public for the heinous crime of walking their dogs (occasionally a person would allow their dog to foul the pavement without picking up the waste- woe betide them dog fouling terrorists).
If that wasn't overkill enough, they then started using their overbloated spying powers to determine if people claiming to be with school catchment areas actually were, or were just renting somewhere in addition to their normal home just to get their kids into a half-decent school. After all, Al-queda want to send their kids to good schools innit?
THESE FUCKERS ARE SIMPLY NOT TO BE TRUSTED WITH ALL THAT POWER.
Who watches the watchers eh?
"I'd rather live in a policed state than a robber or terrorist state.
You are the uneducated one, sir/madam."
It's obvious you are American, because you haven't have to suffer the many years of terrorism that we have in the UK, and so you follow - sheeplike - the hysteria whipped up by the governments to allow them to erode your rights.
"Law abiding citizens have nothing to fear (and everything to gain) from such a system"
Unless someone changes said law to include something totally outrageous (it wouldn't be the first time, esp. if you look at this from a world-wide scale) and then uses this system to enforce said law.
Now you're suddenly in trouble.
Actually that sort of thing typically fails big time, even if a significant portion of the population supports it as was the case for Prohibition. Which resulted in an EPIC FAIL.
The real problem is that without proper safeguards it can be used capriciously. Like the IRS audits that have finally made the news after 3 years of complaints.
Re: "PRISM is part of the vital defensive shield that protects the USA and her allies from enemies."
Seriously? The Constitution of the United States of America is the vital defensive shield that protects the people from "all enemies foreign and *domestic*". It starts out like this:
"We the people"...
The *ONLY* hope you have is to restore your republic by returning to the rule of law. That starts with upholding the Constitution.
Technically you are correct. The problem of course is that most people, probably including you, don't know what it means to uphold the Constitution.
The first thing that has to go is transfer payments the liberal/progressive/socialist wing of society has foisted upon us all. That's the means the polls use to bribe enough of us to maintain power. It also means things like fully supporting the 2nd amendment. And no limits on campaign spending from any source. All speech is supposed to be protected, but most especially political speech. Campaign finance laws in the name of good governance have turned that principle on its head and bounced it up and down on the pavement a few hundred times. And it means you can't even have race based goals let alone unspoken quotas.
Fix those things and other problems like PRISM get much easier to fix.
Re: "Law abiding citizens have nothing to fear "
You do not have 'law abiding citizens' because you have no rule of law. What you have stated can be reduced to the following empty tautology:
"Citizens with nothing to fear have nothing to fear."
Only a blinkered moron thinks they have nothing to fear from the current unlawful rogue regime ruling America and in charge of Armed Forces with a footprint on the ground everywhere on planet earth. Anybody can be labeled an 'enemy combatant'.
Grow a backbone.
There is no "vital defense shield" that can protect anyone, anywhere, from anyone. No amount of "intelligence" gained by PRISM will EVER be worth this disgusting degradation of our Constitutional rights.
Anyone who agrees with you needs re-education back into reality. You've been drinking too much of the MK Ultra Kool-Aid.
DHS, PRISM and ECHELON are simply security theater for the sole benefit of getting even more funding and power to corrupt even more politicians, police and military types.
Once you step over this line, you and yours have become the despotic tyrannical government that Jefferson and Franklin warned us about and are the specific reason why the 2nd Article of the Constitution exists.
Too bad that none of you know that YOU are the Enemy, not the People.
When will we ever learn that it is not possible to stop terrorism and get on with living life?
That is the best revenge against the Mullahs and Al Qaida types.
Vulnerable people need a strong government watching over them to feel safe.
Try not to think of yourselves. The government need everyone's data for the greater good so they can flag suspicious patterns in behavior. One day you won't be allowed to pontificate against the government under anonymous handles. You might as well submit now rather than pointlessly struggling against the inevitable.
I believe there is a deep difference between Manning and Snowden. The former just download data without ani criteria and passed them to Assange .- which published them without any criteria if they could actually harm someone or not. Snowden talked to a journalist about a system used to gather data - without releasing any data that could harm someone. Manning deserves a long time in a jail, because he's an arrogant moron, his care about human rights violations came only after he was sent to a prison...
That a patently false statement. The data have certainly stopped some attacks.* If we stop the collection of data those attacks which would otherwise have been stopped will succeed and those people will be quite dead.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't stop the mass collection of data. But I do insist that you be realistic in your assessment of what the consequences of not collecting it are. I for one want it stopped right now. There might be workable safeguards we can put on the collection of the data. If there are, I'm probably willing to allow it to be collected and analyzed again. But those protections have to be publicly defined and a super-majority of us need to approve it.
*It follows that if they disclose which attacks there is a measurable risk that the methods used to stop the attack can be compromised and therefore it is not advisable to make the disclosure.
A group plotting something illegal would secure their communications. A group forming and discussing ideas which although not illegal could lead to plotting something is who they are looking out for. This means watching everyone even though nothing illegal will be discussed openly. That's the problem, watching everyone as if they are up to no good.
Even if you can not read the traffic you can still see patterns in it. And that alone can be enough to get out a warning. I.e the RAF learned the hard way NOT to test the radios before a night trip to germany (or at least not ONLY before such a trip) since that was a nice invitation to the nightfighters. Grandpa loved the sight of burning Lancasters
Umm, some precision required.
Manning did a mass grab and passed that on without filtering. Ironically, this is also what the NSA is doing, and both activities share the same problem of collateral damage. Assange did SOME filtering, but certainly not enough, on account of not being at all concerned about collateral damage (or "harm to innocent people and informants" to escape the deliberate blandness of the "collateral damage" phrase). You cannot use their characters as an argument to jail them, because then I think Assange would have to be jailed by some distance before Manning (if they can find a jail large enough to hold that ego).
Snowden has been more precise in his revelations (which we could call properly whistle blowing), but should have first taken care of his own protection. The problem with whistle blowing is that it still starts with committing a crime (revealing information, in this case aggravated by the fact that it affects national security of a nation), with the fact that it reveals questionable activity offering whistle blower protection against a conviction, depending on the nature of the revelation and the laws of the nation this takes place in.
AFAIK, there is some protection in the US but a process has to be followed. Running away to the one nation that could take him in "protective custody" and pump him for classified information doesn't strike me as a very good move. Normally, even going near such nations means you may need debriefing post visit if you want to keep your clearance..
Agreed that Edward Snowden has put his ass on the line for free speech...but Bradley Manning? The two cases are in no way comparable. One was done by someone with sense and was targetted, clear and totally justified. The other was done by some flappy soldier who had no regard for anybody's safety and remains a traitor to this day. He didn't deserve the solitude and nakedness and the US looks very bad for that, but he does deserve what's coming to him in the courts.
"...it may be the guy in the bowels of the IT department because he has system-administrator privileges and because that person is also in a position to insert malware into your system to facilitate remote access,”
so, we can safely assume, in due course (rather sooner or later), such malware will have been found, and "all evidence" will point to the links with "the" guy. Who, as other evidence "strongly suggests", had, in the past, traveled to China. And enjoyed drinking Russian vodka , if some of the "general public" didn't get the first hint.
So...no actual evidence of any malware...not that anyone in IT would need it since IT usually has remote access to everything. It's like breaking into your own house...you don't need to, you already have access. Just chaff thrown in the air, to draw attention away from whatever the real problem probably is.
He seems like he may be a smart guy - I'll give him the benefit of the doubt - and stated he wanted to seek refuge in Iceland. So, given he told his boss he was taking two weeks off to get treatment for epilepsy, why didn't he fly there first before releasing the info? Surely your thoughts would be along the lines of "given the monumental shitstorm I'm about to stir up, where might I be safest?"
Re: "Can someone give me a link to a quality, in depth coverage of this event thus far?"
No probs. Here it is:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/
I think it may be illegal to read that copy in the United States, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.00. I wish I was kidding:
"The United States No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act), a federal law passed in 1997 in response to LaMacchia, provides for criminal prosecution of individuals who engage in copyright infringement under certain circumstances, even when there is no monetary profit or commercial benefit from the infringement. Maximum penalties can be five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines. "
...doesn't sit right with me here.
Dude is apparently smart.
Dude works for CIA (well, a CIA contractor anyway).
Dude flees to a country with an extradition treating with the USA? WTF? If he wanted sanctuary in Iceland, why not just fly there?
So is dude actually a patriotic whistle-blower, standing up for the all-American public?
Or a foreign agent? Or a fool? Or something else?
It just doesn't seem quite right...
There's no end to the confusion a fool causes in the world when he opens his mouth trying to blow the whistle of meaning. Shortest summary of the story: Snowden thought he knew heavy shit which was actually quite boring and legally complicated but creating Big Meaning for himself by starting playing in the Big Leak when he starting running with it. The Media however, always waiting for any juicy news confirming mass suspicion ran away with it distorting most of the actual facts thereby preventing any sensible discussion about traffic mining to occur in the foreseeable future.
Perhaps people with that kind of job expect to be watched very closely if they book a ticket to somewhere without an extradition treaty. Perhaps they expect to have an accident on the journey.
If you worked for the CIA or one of its contractors, what do you think your boss' reaction would be if they found you booking a ticket to Iceland?
If you've got a clearance above a certain level, yes there are certain procedures you have to go through when booking flight to foreign countries. They aren't necessarily difficult to fulfill. I know people who have traveled to countries I would have thought would have been on the "you can't travel there" list given what they do.
All that being said, if I were ranking other countries sequentially on that list, I'd expect Hong Kong would be much lower on it than Iceland (safest high, probably Canada).
>>"Perhaps people with that kind of job expect to be watched very closely if they book a ticket to somewhere without an extradition treaty. Perhaps they expect to have an accident on the journey."
So if he'd flown to somewhere in Europe first (maybe waiting for a legitimate holiday rather than faking sick leave), and then booked a last-minute flight to Iceland from there, what would 'they' have been likely to do?
Land black helicopters in the airport and snatch him?
Shoot down an airliner based on the possibility that he was about to talk to the media?
Bear in mind that unless he'd been sloppy and started looking at things he wasn't cleared to look at or otherwise left a suspicious trail of document access,'they' didn't know he was going to leak anything, which might have made it rather unattractive to do anything too over-the-top.
Had he actually been under suspicion by some overarching Big Brother, one might wonder why they would allow him to travel anywhere.
Not Dr Hutton.. I think they got the documentation mixed up at the office.. well come along soon have you sorted out..
What's the betting Snowdens found floating face down somewhere in a gannex mac.. or in some designer luggage..
You know Goering & Goebbels both said that in 100 years the Nazis would seem like heroes.. they were wrong it only took 68 years for the Gehaime Statzpolizei to look like the protectors of civil liberty..
Tis a shame they don't execute for treason these days.. parliament this was your life.. (cheaper and you don't have to repair the building afterwards...
>>"What's the betting Snowdens found floating face down somewhere in a gannex mac.. or in some designer luggage.."
I do wonder why a security service would want to draw public attention to someone's death if they were just trying to shut a generally obscure employee up?
Surely it can't be that hard to convincingly fake a normal accident?
" Investigators are still scratching their heads about how the $200,000-a-year staffer managed to access information on PRISM: speaking to the Washington Post Joel Brenner, a former NSA inspector general, said a probe into the leak should focus on how the techie “had access to such a startling range of information"."
Seems like he may be better at spying...and also smarter...than they are.
Found?!?!?!??!!!
More likely given. Granted they're supposed to know better, but some of the people and passwords I was expected to know when I was doing field work was downright scary. Our Sr. Tech knew the user name and password for the president of one of the banks we serviced!
His disappearance is probably due to the HK's warning of extradition. Why he chose HK over a number of other areas is beyond me. Actually, why he did this at all is beyond me, if only because the big reveal (the government is spying on electronic communications!) is yesterday's news. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to parse together the immunity clause for telecom companies along with the authorization for warrantless (but judicially-approved) gathering of call and email logs contained within the Patriot Act and come up with the basic outline of the PRISM program.
Examination of the contents of specific emails and calls, if you are a US Citizen, typically requires a warrant (though that's not much of a barrier with the "special" court"). The sheer amount of data means that actually logging the contents of every communique would result in a huge noise-to-signal ratio, so instead they log and triangulate the sender, destination, duration, frequency, etc and look for patterns. Obviously we don't know the utility of such actions, but the likes of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and others have been telling the market that such activities are huge moneymakers.
While I abhor the activities, until the Patriot Act is revised or trashed such things are legal. The actual legitimacy under the Constitution is both hard to determine (mainly, is this really unconstitutional search and seizure) and easy to dismiss (national security concern, no real mechanism within the Judicial branch to review such behavior or evaluate the national security claim).
To me the funniest part is that if he had gone to the right newspaper here in the US and stayed put, he'd probably be safer than he is running. If he needed an insurance policy, mail a separate copy to The Guardian the day before he meets the press over here. They can't actually send him to Gitmo. Yes, they could arrest him immediately, but since he's a civilian and a citizen, even with aiding and abetting an enemy charges, he still has to go to trial. A trial keeps him in the public eye. And the news media get to portray him as a genuine hero. Day after day after day of news about the abused patriot? The optics on that are horrible.
I'm a Sr. Help Desk tech in the DC area working as a contractor. I'm pulling between $60-65K a year. Scale up for being an actual government employee, that's at least another 20%. Scale up for a security clearance, that's easily another 30-50%. Scale up for system admin instead of Help Desk. That might not be 200K, but you're starting to get in the ballpark. Throw in a little disinformation or maybe a salary category instead of actual take home pay and you get $200K easy.
Not to say that surveillance hasn't gotten out of control, but what is the point in leaking a program which is 100% legal, with bipartisan support (not to mention the support of other governments), and has quite possibly saved lives?
It's not a scandal when it's legal. The scandal may have been allowing it in the first place (see the US PATRIOT acrt (spit)), but this is just bullshit, bordering on attention whoring.
But I live in the UK... and IT don't remember the names Bush & Obama being in the last general election..
If you Americans are happy living in the Fourth Reich then bully for you... but stay the hell away from us!
To slightly misquote “We won't take orders from you until you're waddling up Whitehall - and even then we won't listen..."
Here is the Webster (the story is about the US, right?) definition of "scandal": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scandal - nothing there deals with legality.
To illustrate the point, what the Soviet government did throughout its history was - barring infrequent exceptions, probably - 100% legal, and with the approval of the 100% of their elected parliament. If you woke up in the old USSR one bright morning as a Soviet citizen you might, I imagine, feel quite scandalized once the rules were explained to you. One thing that you would find out quickly would be that it was perfectly legal for the Soviet government not to let you go back to the UK or the US or wherever the deluded you thought you were actually from.
100% legal - if this is the case - means that no one in the NSA or in the Obama administration would have to go jail for a long time. It does not mean it is not, to pick one of Webster's definitions of "scandal", "an action that offends propriety or established moral conceptions or disgraces those associated with it".
To emphasize, I, for one, am not surprised at all. While a scandal is often accompanied by surprise, the two are not the same thing.
Buahahahaha.
Now please open the history books. Page 1: The legal system in the third Reich. Page 2: The legal foundation of Stalin's Russia. Page 3: Against the law: the foundation of the US.
Anything can be legal, it just depends on who makes the rules. In a democracy, it should be the people. Unless the rulers decide that they'd rather rule without pesky discussions and start to create a secret surveillance state without telling their populace about it.
When the ACLU sued to find out if certain people were on lists, SCOTUS dodged the central question by saying the plaintiffs had no evidence whatsoever that they were on such lists and therefore they could not show standing to sue. This potentially removes some of those litigation obstacles.
Confirming the extent of the surveillance does certainly help enemies in assessing and planning attacks against the US. Hence the need for secrecy. But secrecy is also where scandal breads. And given the already existing crop of scandals in the US at the moment...
And it is a scandal. There is an expectation under the 4th amendment to certain privacy rights. It is arguable that those privacy rights have been breached. It is also arguable they haven't. But the biggest problem of all is that given the other scandals, there is no trust that the information isn't being abused. If there were no AP and IRS scandals, this wouldn't be in the news, even if it is news.
" Investigators are still scratching their heads about how the $200,000-a-year staffer managed to access information on PRISM:"
Maybe because, far from the 'limited access' story that is being peddled to the public, in fact PRISM data was available to anyone in the NSA or partners who wanted a poke around in the data?
Joel Brenner, a former NSA inspector general, said a probe into the leak should focus on how the techie “had access to such a startling range of information".
I the good old times, we used to point the fingers at hapless Germans who didn't know about the unhealthy actions of their secretive but loud-mouthed government or didn't come forward or didn't blow up stuff to delay the Evil.
People are supposed to know these things, Mr. Brenner. People are supposed to know these things.
Don't be silly, his girlfriend is the only interesting bit of the whole sorry affair! I can guarantee you that within a few weeks the average techie will remember more about her than the "revelations" Snowden has made. Especially the bikini shots.
Everybody keeps questioning the sanity of going to Hong Kong.
Realize this: if you are in the position he is in, you do NOT want to send any red flares up. Going someplace with just enough of an extradition treaty that it won't cause too many alarms, vs, going directly to a place with no treaty and sounding alarms at Langley makes sense. Even more so when the place you are going has a LOT of trade - nice cargo ships with lots of places to hide and nice people to help you find them, the better to slip off to someplace with less of a trail.
If this guy was smart, he had all that in place before he gave the interviews, and is now sitting in a nice quiet cargo ship sailing to Iceland.
In that case - European Union and simply get lost in the 300+ million people. Most EU countries have no registration laws and the borders are wide open. And some are a tad "unorganized" as well
OTOH it is far away from the potential buyers of any stolen state secrets since the KGB<<<RSF is no longer that active.
What has really happened IMHO:
The guy tried to sell stuff to the ChiComs. They already HAD the stuff and didn't pay. OTOH he could not go back to the USA where he would go to jail for espionage. So he played "Whistleblower", got some money and now hopes to get a similar room arrangement as Lasagne.
IMHO he should get one similar to Manning. All expenses payed for the rest of his life. And deposit the key (together with Assange) on the main deck of HMAS Sydney.
"He's not a whistleblower, he's a traitor. He's also a massive douche." Well, technically I suppose he is a whistleblower, of the minor, egocentric kind. But to be a traitor doesn't he actually have to expose something actually important? As the article points out, it's all been massively hyped by the mee-juh (ahem, Potty) and the tinfoil-attired, but in reality it is not even worth the airtime, and probably not worth canning a $200k job in Hawaii and a pole dancer GF for. I suspect time will expose a bit more about Mr Snowden, and I suspect it will have a certain Walter Mitty character to it. He's not a massive douche, he's probably just a rather pitiful and minor douche with problems.
What do you call spying on your own Citizens then - a nice hug before bed...
What do you call spying on other countries citizens whom you have no rights over and then selling the info?
I tell you now its bloody lucky for the greater american reich that I and others like me are not in charge, mr anderson, because I would consider that an act of war... and if Tory Blur can get the UK to fight for you I'm sure enough crap can be made up to get them to want to clobber you..
Oh wait... we don't have to make it up its bloody true!
America and its government need to be careful, quite frankly I don't care what you do in your own back yard... but you are pissing in too many others right now.. let alone the multitudes you've already offended (massaging a fatwa ffs!).
To quote.. your government has dropped enough steaming turds around the world that the only way to get around it is shit flippers and a hazmat suit.. sod the terrorists and the pedogeddon.. American and its current government are more dangerous than either..
and please stop with innocent have nothing to fear crap. You just change the law till they do...
"until finally they came for me and I scrabbled for my car keys yelling 'bugger'..
And the copper (who looked a little like Bodie) said unto me 'where you're going mate that's not a swearword its a forecast...' and I was no longer unconcerned..
Here endeth the lesson..
That he has released that is bad other than the private companies we all have dealings with and have more data on us than our own families (and probably know us better) have unofficially allowed access to their large repository of crap, to the spy agencies. The patriot act, FISA and the Protect America act all had in their wonderful legalese ( the type of legalese that our reps should understand if they are going to vote on it) exactly what was allowed. It is a long known fact that most members of congress do not have even enough time to read the smallest of bills introduced (about ½ the time they are trying to raise funds for their next run) so now they are really upset that this guy said "hey look we (the govt.) has access to lots of stuff and it makes me uncomfortable, and everyone goes "YEAH IT DOES" and no one says "well we sort of allowed them to do it by who we voted in and not paying enough attention and voting with the best tag line or on our fears"
The guy himself, had to pass lots of background checks etc, top secret I think also requires family interviews, either way he was in a position of trust and privilege and should be caught and prosecuted and punished for undermining the trust afforded to him no matter how noble his cause was.
I think in part this is also an issue of consequences, he is of the generation where he believes that because his cause was "good" (depending on which side you are on) even though it was "bad" (see previous note) he should be ok to be free and possibly get some reward, or at least at the end of it let everyone be friends like on some Disney show, and maybe some ice cream or something. The fact is he broke the rules he knew the rules he broke them, and now needs to face his punishment whatever it be.
<<< the one with the government leash hanging from the pocket (and the other end stuck up my arse so far my breath smells of leather
Perhaps when examining the alleged misdeeds of so called "whistleblowers" once should look at both sides of the "Scales of Justice" so the crimes are considered with some small modicum of neutrality.
As far as I am concerned, those who conspire to violate the Constitution deserve a FAR greater penalty than those who let us know they did it.
Frankly, I don't give a rat's rectum about what bent and twisted law gives some alphabet soup agency the "right" to break the First and Fourth Amendment. What Snowden did is covered under those two amendments and is not illegal at all.
Read below and decide for yourselves who is the greater criminal!
Presidential Oath:
Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following
Oath or Affirmation:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of
President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Amendment 1
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition
the Government for a redress of grievances.
Amendment 4
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and
no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized.
Amendment 14
1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State
wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge
the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any
State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of
law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws.
Maybe, maybe not. This is a rare instance in which although I come down more on one side than the other, I COULD argue either side.
Here's the thing that bothers me: he ran. If you're a whistleblower in this age, you don't run. You blow the whistle and then you start your national press tour. If they arrest you, make sure it's in front of rolling tv cameras. Then you make your case to the American people, and stand trial defending what you did. If what you did was truly patriotic, I think you'll win in at least the court of public opinion. So even if you lose in the legal court, there are limits on the penalties they can impose.
What leads me more to the black helicopter belief on this one is the dislogic of it all: leak to The Guardian then run to Hong Kong? For a US centric story? About an intelligence gathering behemoth that can't be avoided? I just can't square the circle on this one.
I have to say I would run too. If he had stayed stateside he would have been locked up within minutes of the story breaking and plastered all over the news as a spy/traitor before everyone had time to get angry at the govt. Putting the info out to a foreign paper then waiting a few days on the other side of the planet gave him time to build some goodwill both domestically and overseas.
Who knows what he had going for him in Hong Kong. Maybe he's owed a favor by a guy with a jet who'll just fly him direct to Iceland. Maybe the first news reports were correct and he used to be a field agent with the CIA clandestine service and he knows exactly what he's doing. Maybe he just freaked out and Hong Kong sounded like a sexy place to hide. It is one of those situations you can plan for years then when it gets real nothing but the current instant matters. I do know I wouldn't trust the government, my own American people (look at some of the comments) or a guy with a press pass to keep me safe.
While a government tries to be noble about this, it is all a matter of "trust". While some "trust" the government to do the "right thing", governments (in general) just aren't trustworthy.
The problem is that this data scraped from every rough surface can be used for a variety of purposes. While one might be very "noble", many of the others are clearly NOT. This is the "big problem". Yes, I'm a nice (so I believe) lay abiding citizen, but given the data I shove around, if selectively presented, could be construed (like this message) as being "up to no good". So, yes, I allowed my parents (many years ago) to snoop on my room, I still kept things hidden from them (under my mattress, they were flat) so I would not be hung out to dry.
The same applies with a government that derives its power from the consent of the people. so, when you hear "trust me, I'm from the government", run like hell!
In the history of spying what is the breakdown by profession of those that compromise security whether out of conscience or for money. According to Snowdens' résumé he doesn't appear to be highly technical, more like a technical assistant, ie. he swaps the back-up tapes and changes the print cartridges.
Edward Snowden Video Interview 12m:34s
“The ex-CIA bod revealed that the NSA's snooping scheme PRISM allows spooks to request private and sensitive data from internet giants about their users' online activities”
'The PRISM program collects a wide range of data from nine companies, although the details vary by provider`.
'What you will Receive in Collection (Surveillance and Stored Comms)? It varies by provider. In general`:
• Chat - video, voice
• Videos
• Photos
• Stored data
• VoIP
• File transfers
• Video Conferencing
• Notifications of target activity - logins, etc.
• Online Social Network details
• Special Requests
"..doesn't sit right with me here.
Dude is apparently smart.
Dude works for CIA (well, a CIA contractor anyway).
Dude flees to a country with an extradition treating with the USA? WTF? If he wanted sanctuary in Iceland, why not just fly there?
So is dude actually a patriotic whistle-blower, standing up for the all-American public?
Or a foreign agent? Or a fool? Or something else?
It just doesn't seem quite right..."
I think it may be relatively easy to get lost in Hong Kong.
"Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do as we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!"
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