Slashdot Mirror
Americans Not Bothered by NSA Spying
Snap E Tom writes "According to a Washington Post poll, a majority (63%) of Americans 'said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism.' A slightly higher majority would not be bothered if the NSA collected personal calls that they made. Even though the program has received bi-partisan criticism from Congress, it appears that the public values security over privacy."
Let me guess, these polls were done by phone?
... how do you feel about that? ... you mean they can record transcripts of phone calls? ... we do use AT&T.
Washington Post: Hello, do you have a minute to take a survey?
Citizen: Of course I do!
Washington Post: Great! We were just wondering whether you're concerned with the recent news of the NSA?
Citizen: You mean the fact that they are collecting the phone call records made and recieved by each citizen of the United States?
Washington Post: Yes, probably even this very phone call right now
Citizen: I'm fuckin' pissed!
Washington Post: So you're conncerned? You know, on our last poll about the NSA, the one where we covered them routing and recording phone calls, people sure answered differently.
Citizen: Wait a second
Washington Post: Yes, probably even this very phone call right now
Citizen: Ah, I've changed my mine. I am completely fine with this acceptable form of combating terrorism. Sic Heil Bush & all that jazz. I love my country and would sacrifice every bit of privacy for it. Goodbye!
My work here is dung.
Then they'll have neither.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
...A slightly higher majority would not be bothered if the NSA collected personal calls that they made...
Just so long as they spoke dirty and pretended to be a girl
"Hi my name is Agent Sexbitch and I'm not wearing my regulation black suit. I'm a naughty agent...."
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
This Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone May 11, 2006 among 502 randomly selected adults.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
"It's might be OK for the NSA to use who you call to establish close ties to a terrorist."
You just said its OK for the government to consider ALL CITIZENS as potential terrorists AT ALL TIMES.
Are you SURE thats "might be OK"?
You just threw presumprion of innocence out the window, without even realising what you did, didn't you?
In other news, a survey found that the majority of Americans don't understand why the rest of the world view them as dumb, mindless sheep.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Scaring Americans into giving up their privacy is really getting old. A large scale terrorism attack is still very much possible today. Mistake after mistake has shown this. It's a dog and pony show. The presentation has changed, but gaping holes still exist. Amercians somehow believe losing their rights is helping terrorism, but in reality its not. Before 9/11 terrorism was almost non-existant in America. After 9/11 it's almost non-existant. Looking at raw numbers, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of things you should be more worried about killing you than a terrorist. Statistically I'd be more worried about being killed by a shark in the US.
And I can't believe people are actually fooled into thinking somehow terrorism is a major threat. If you want to save the most amount of lives with the least amount of effort, fight obesity. It accounts for most of the top killers in America today.
But obesity isn't patriotic. You can't hang a flag outside your house supporting the war on fat.
Get a fucking clue people. Terrorism isn't a threat to your daily lives. If you actually think it is, then you've been emotionally manipulated by people who want your money and/or votes.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Okay, the NSA is just making correlations between calls. However, if any actor can be tied to Kevin Bacon in 6 steps, and any person to the President in 6 steps, doesn't this mean the NSA can tie any phone user to a terrorist at will in 6 steps or less?
"I called my auto mechanic, who called a customer, who once called a lawyer friend, who represented a terrorist. So now I'm flagged as 'communicating with a terrorist'".
Worse, the only way to weed out such 'spurious connections' is, of course, to get more detailed records of exactly who was called, and why, and what was said. So the concept is inherently flawed and can only be fixed by further privacy violations.
A.
As we all know "terrorism" is the root password to the Constitution. This question asks only about terrorism. I wonder what their answers would be if the question was:
"Do you find the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate drug use?"
or
"Do you find the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate copyright infringment?"
We all know these programs will not be used for only terrorism, but for everyday crimes. Will people care then?
Americans who have given up on caring about anything truthful being discussed in today's world are not bothered by NSA spying.
Seriously, if the NSA will not give security clearances (thereby stopping the investigation) to the Federal Prosecutors trying to investigate this alleged spying on Americans, does the US actually have ANY checks and balances on uncontrolled power?
More importantly, does anyone even care?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I've come up with a way to reduce—perhaps even eliminate—our dependence on foreign oil as an energy source.
As more and more civil liberties are trampled upon, faster and faster will the Founding Fathers spin in their respective graves.
If we attach magnets to each Founding Father, then wrap copper wire around each of them, we should have a potentially unlimited energy source. Well, at least until the Libertarians get elected in significant numbers—so yeah, come to think of it, it truly is unlimited.
The AC frequency, of course, might be unpredictable. In fact, I'd suspect it will be ever-increasing, which could create some technical issues to overcome. But we're smart people, I'm sure we can figure it out.
What do you all say? Shall we write up a grant proposal?
Well, I think that Franklin implied something in that statement: you have to be willing to die to protect your freedoms. Don't forget he signed the declaration of independence and that was essentially the same as signing his own death warrant. After all, it made him essentially a traitor to the power-in-place at that moment.
His quote has to be seen in that context. These days nobody seems to want to die for freedom anymore and hence the freedom is taken away piecemeal...
Look, I'm not even American, but I do think I understand the historical context. I think that Benjamin Franklin was indeed a wise man and I am only a pinko-commie-euro-bastard.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Benjamin Franklin
When you don't teach people about the importance of civil liberties, it's no wonder they don't defend them. Bring back civics classes!
Many times more people die from car wrecks, preventable heart attacks, etc than die from terrorism. 20,000 people in the US alone die every year from influenza and influenza related pneumonia(1), that is about seven times as many as died in the worst terrorist attack this country has ever suffered. (2) Don't misunderstand, I think radical Islam is a developing problem, but I don't think rooting out terrorists will really stop the problem. The way to stop the problem is to basically do the opposite of what we've done in the Middle East, not spy on every citizen in this country building a giant database of phone calls, emails, and snail mail packages. While the average person doesn't care about this now because they think the "terrists is gonna get me" if the same sort of monitoring was proposed in the mid-90s they would be pretty upset. This database is being built using the MOMENTUM of terrorism, not FOR terrorism. While they might actually catch a terrorist using this database, that doesn't make it worth it. If police came to everyone's house every day and searched them for weapons or plans, there would be virtually no violence in this country, there also would be no freedom, no independence, no innovation, and eventually no money. There is a fine line between protecting one's rights and preventing violence, that line shifts depending on the immediate threat. Terrorism doesn't constitute enough of a threat to justify this sort of action. What America really needs is a good "McCarthyism red scare" like event to take place for us to take back our government, my only fear of that is with a big enough database it might be fairly easy to link ANYONE to a terrorist organization...especially when THEY get to define what is a terrorist.
w ww.nfid.org/library/influenza/acknowledgements/inf luenza.pdf+influenza+deaths+2001+united+states&hl= en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3t tacks
1. http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:rbUOIN2Yy8sJ:
2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_a
What you are missing here is the basic concept of our government. The Executive Branch (President) enforces the laws, the Legistative Branch (Congress) makes the laws and the Judicial Branch (Supreme Court) intreprets the laws.
Equal, but Separate. Checks and Balances. Remember those terms from grade school? What you have here is an Executive Branch that has set itself above all the others. We call that a Dictatorship.
Is it beyond redemption? Absolutely not. All that is needed is for Congress to get a spine and conduct some oversight like they are supposed to. Which, unfortunately, will never happen as long as the Party Line is more important than the Nation. I hate to say "I told you so", but the moment the GOP made public their "Contract For America", I could see that the GOP would no longer be able to vote their conscience, but will be required to vote according to some hidden GOP agenda.
In other words, they would no longer be Our Representatives , as was intended.
"I drank what?" - Socrates
Statistics from 2002: * Heart Disease: 696,947
* Cancer: 557,271
* Stroke: 162,672
* Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,816
* Accidents (unintentional injuries): 106,742
* Diabetes: 73,249
* Influenza/pneumonia: 65,681
* Alzheimer's disease: 58,866
* Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 40,974
* Septicemia: 33,865
* Suicide: 30,622
* Murder: 16,110
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that our "war on terrorism" has costed us more than we spend on all of these other problems combined... maybe even by an order of magnitude. There's a difference between "We were attacked! Let's do nothing." and "We were attacked! Let's get our intelligence agencies to talk to start talking to each other and let's increase airline security." And there's a huge difference between the latter and "We were attacked! Let's spend close to a trillion dollars on wars and homeland security and allow the government to do unlimited search and seizures without warrants, force protesters into Free Speech Zones because they're (supposedly) a security risk, allow indefinite imprisonment without trial, allow the government to strip anyone of their USA citizenship without trial, and allow the NSA to monitor every single USA citizen when none of the terrorists on 9/11 were actually USA citizens.
You want a definitive change that will make America safer vs. terrorists? Here ya go, this is the only one that will work: switch to biodiesel/ethenol/hydrogen (with a trillion dollars of spending, we COULD make this happen) and tell Israel they're on their own (sucks to be them, but I would have no sympathy for someone who founded a nation in the Antartic and complained when their toes started falling off... similarly, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the all-too-predictable holy war Israel has been drawn into.)
Or, you and the rest of America can grow some fucking balls and realize that freedom isn't free. The price we pay isn't measured in dollars or even in the lives of our soldiers--it's measured by the lives of you, me, and every other civilian. Every day we put our lives on the line, even though our risk vs. terrorism and murder could be lessened if the government took draconian measures such as tagging us, putting cameras in our houses, and monitoring every single call we make. But that's not a fair tradeoff, not when murder and terrorism represent such a tiny tiny percent of our country's problem. We should not be monitored in any way without a warrant, and you're a damn fool for not seeing how this could be abused.
You want a rational argument: The information the NSA is getting is illegal. There is a very specific legal process for obtaining wiretaps, and they aren't using it. If they want to be able to do this, they should use the existing legal procedures, or the law should be changed to accomodate the new ones. If they can't obtain this ability through legitimate legislation, why should they be able to do it? Of course there is some degree of tradeoff between privacy and security, but large-scale wiretaps have not turned the tide in the war on terror, and they are illegal.
You seem to be convinced they're okay because stupid people are opposing them, which seems strange to me since there are plenty of stupid people in any large group, which includes both sides of most political debates, and often stupid arguments get the most airtime (and/or their proponents are the most vocal). For examples of stupid arguments in favor of the wiretapping, how about the government officials who keep insisting that their actions are not illegal? I don't know if you can call it "stupid" when it's just a blatant and easily checked falsehood, but come on. This is the best they can do?
There are checks and balances built into our system for a reason. The executive branch should not be able to disregard that in the name of security, because it is illegal, and any legitimate trade-off between privacy and security should be made in full view of the public and according to a democratic process. Why are we so insistent on spreading democracy to the rest of the world if we're so willing to bypass it ourselves when it's expedient?
I am the man with no sig!
The masses almost always value security over freedom until they have so little of either a revolution is born.
This is probably the best phrase I've ever seen. I hadn't thought about this until now, I was just wondering how (since societies apparently eventually seem to self-regulate and converge to some point) it is possible that so many freedoms are continuously chipped away from the people. Now I realise freedom is not a graph that converges somewhere, but one that lowers enough to pass the tolerance threshold, where a revolution brings it back way up, only to get it chipped at again in time.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson
To make this like a meeting and have an action item to leave with, this translates into
1) Openly speak out. Yes, Bush should be impeached. Removed from office? Dunno, but impeachment is the first step to figure this stuff out.
2) Join the NRA and learn how to protect yourself and your family _AND_ buy at least 20-30,000 rounds of ammo.
Americans have become such lazy pussies over the years, I guess because they don't think too much, and times have been good for a while, but that is changing, and we need to change in turn.
We need to be outraged about the BS this government is doing nowadays. No, its not OK to tap my phone. Worried about terrorism, protect our borders thank you. You have the personnel and equipment, now go do your job. With the millions of people walking into our country every year, and the tons of "illegal" goods coming by boat, airplane, tunnels, car, and tractor trailer, its trivial to do a substitute on the cargo for "terrorist" goods and services.
We run this country, not the government. The government works for us, remember?
The "Psyops" the government has waged against people in the US and abroad has worked very well on the weak minded people. These manipulations of the government by citing the "War on terror" and the "Save the children" campaigns are clever, and have worked for a while on stupid people, but those days are over.
Also every time this wiretap nonsense gets mentioned, remember that al Queda (according to the 9/11/01 report) got away with the attacks because _they did NOT use any electronic form of communication_.
Tapping phones and all of the other illegal shit the government is doing is only a form of terrorism against the people of this country. None of these current efforts will affect the "bad guys".
Honestly, I never dreamt that I'd be brought back to those scary, communist days. In the US of all places.
The CNN Online poll tells different story. It all depends who you ask: http://edition.cnn.com/POLLSERVER/results/24900.co ntent.html