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WA Post Publishes 4 More Slides On Data Collection From Google, Et Al
anagama writes "Lots of new program names, flowcharts, and detail in four previously unreleased PRISM slides published by the Washington Post today. These slides provide some additional detail about PRISM and outline how the NSA gets information from those nine well known internet companies. Apparently, the collection is done by the FBI using its own equipment on the various companies' premises and then passed to the NSA where it is filtered and sorted."
I've already quit Google. Now how about you?
Google et al. said something, IIRC, like 'we do not collect and pass on any info to the NSA'. Technically true, but also completely irrelevant to whether or not the NSA was actually collecting data.
Asking corps or government about what they do and don't collect is like asking a genie for a wish: one must phrase the question perfectly, or they'll twist it any way they can in order to answer what you asked, but not what you really wanted to know.
Misinformation? This is the first information we have gotten in years!
Actually, I'm glad they're leaking these a bit at a time - in some cases, it's exposing the denials as BS. For example, we've known about the FBI CALEA infrastructure for years. The fact that it's being used to wholesale grab information and pass it to the NSA shows the hair splitting that's going on in the denials.
And actually, the FBI probably does have some CALEA hooks into providers. Google Voice and Skype are almost certainly set up to handle requests, even as the FBI is attempting to get CALEA formally expanded. That's likely not being handled at the ISP level. Further evidence of that? Microsoft wanted to provide statistics about how many requests they get for each service, and the government said "no". The "unnamed sources" complaint from inside Microsoft is that the government doesn't want people to know the extent to which Skype is being targeted.
The third slide has this annotation:
So who should I believe -- the government's own claims or that of an AC?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This is an unconstitutional power that the USA federal government usurped from the people, it doesn't actually matter how they grab most of it, however what does matter is that they do and it looks like it's not going to stop until the system crashes and there is no more money to run it.
Encrypt your communications, encrypt everything you can. Use self signed certificates, by the way, avoid Certificate Authorities, AFAIC they only make it easier to create a MITM attack, not harder. They can confirm to your device that a certificate is valid even if it is not the certificate that you want to use. Of-course if you use CAs do not let them generate your keys for you.
At this point the behaviour of browsers to treat self-signed certificates as worse than plain text should be suspect to everybody, there is no rational explanation to that sort of attitude except: we don't want you to use certificates that authorities can't revoke and replace.
You can't handle the truth.
Quoted company may have or may not have used weasel words. We await conformation of this rolling news headline.
Well, if it's not enough to make a good understanding of the situation it still isn't enough.
Lame self reply, but look at the "Content Type" box of slide 3 -- what does "OSN" mean in that context? Online Service Network? eg: "H: OSN Messaging (photos, wallposts, activity, etc)"
This implies to me that the provider of the info is not the ISP, though the ISP does stand in the middle so it would be technically capable of intercepting and passing this on.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
We do the only thing we can do - we trust the Washington Post have done the one thing that they're supposed to be doing, which is check their sources.
They are making a big deal out of Snowden. Do you think they would do that for a bunch of BS? The guy is stuck in a Russian airport with a revoked US passport and charged with espionage. Would they do that over fake powerpoint slides?
That would explain why Biden called Correa for a personal chat, the White House is orchestrating a smear campaign directed not at the content, but at Snowden and Greenwald, and it's pursing Snowden to the ends of the earth to bring him back for "trial" (he has been indicted you know). That all points to the obvious conclusion that Snowden photoshopped some slides? Are you daft?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
... and to the person that said the devices were in ISPs, it's unlikely because of the prevalence of SSL. The equipment would need to be behind the company firewalls.
So is the box inside Microsoft that's scanning all Skype-pasted URLs after the fact actually the FBI's collection box? That's one filter that may be easy to implement - redirect all traffic from that box to a honeypot or /dev/null it.
Lies, Facebook in particular lied about this, even as Obama was confirming it and claiming a [non-existent] warrant is needed to access this data:
"The search request, known as a “tasking,” can be sent to multiple sources — for example, to a private company and to an NSA access point that taps into the Internet’s main gateway switches. A tasking for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and other providers is routed to equipment installed at each company. This equipment, maintained by the FBI, passes the NSA request to a private company’s system. Depending on the company, a tasking may return e-mails, attachments, address books, calendars, files stored in the cloud, text or audio or video chats and “metadata” that identify the locations, devices used and other information about a target."
I don't care about the pathetic protections put in place for Americams, I'm not American. I care that these services hand my data to a military structure that works against me. Worse they inevitably turn America into a dictatorship.
"Before an analyst may conduct live surveillance using PRISM, a second analyst in his subject area must concur. "
So any boss that oversees 2 analysts can spy on Americans, simply because he can order 2 of them to concur. And the big boss, General Alexander can even waive this, because its HIS policy not law, i.e. no protections at all.
You want to fix this? Well try running for President and sacking the NSA chief. He'll have record of every mistake you've made, detailed knowledge of who backs you, the campaign team, private communications, strategies, everything. They've made a dictator and people like Dianne Feinstein are so stupid and incompetent they can't see why they've done so much damage.
Completely flipping the system in secret, the system that's kept the US a democracy for the longest time any democracy has survived so far. Those little shits just threw it away.
Dan Rather showed what he knew to be a fake memo to smear Bush during an election. Even with overwhelming evidence that he lied Rather continued to state that the memo was true. He finally lost his job due to this.
NBC doctored audio to show Gerorge Zimmerman is a racist, once the full audio came out their trick was shown to be an outright lie.
The CNN woman that moderated the debate between Romney and Obama outright lied in the middle of the debate to protect Obama, a week later she admitted to lying, she was congratulated as a hero in CNN.
This week, MSNBC did a story how the "star witness" in the Zimmerman trial did a great job and it was such a slam dunk that Zimmerman will obviously be found guilty, this should be confusing to anyone that listened to what that witness said because the opposite is true.
ABC for their top story a week ago told about thunderstorms in DC, the same time as the NSA information was coming out and heraings about it were going on in the Senate, but the important story was a storm in DC.
Not sure why you would assume any mainstream media would be honest at any time anymore. There is no news outlets in the USA anymore, if you think there are you are biased and found one that only reports stories you think are true.
They are technically correct. The best kind of correct. The FBI is the one doing the collection and passing on.
So, by statute the NSA is not allowed to spy on American citizens on American soil (since that's the FBI's job). But because of all the Intelligence-sharing laws that passed in the early and mid 2000s, that's been totally neutered. It's an offshoot of the outsourcing mindset - we're not allowed to do it, but we can ask someone else who IS allowed to and share the results.
And sometimes, like when you ask if they "collect any information on millions of Americans," they just lie.
Oh, that's so harsh. It's just that you need to get them to precisely define the words "collect", "any", "information", "millions", and "Americans". I'm sure that if you did, you'd reach a point where you thought "oh, 'no' doesn't mean what I thought it meant". (The words "on" and "of" are probably safe, though you never know). It's like how the word "sex" can mean different things depending on who's talking.
I'm just a dumb Canadian... Is WA ever used for Washington DC?
It would be pretty easy to create PowerPoint with the requisite markings, logos, etc, on it and then peddle it to various newspapers.
because the response the gov. took about them... they started arguing about how it is necessary for them to do this. that's how we know.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
We know we're being watched isnt that enough? Who cares what they call all their programs and who they belong to. They have access to our personal computers, to every chat or email you send. Who cares about semantics?
It would be pretty easy to create PowerPoint with the requisite markings, logos, etc, on it and then peddle it to various newspapers.
That is true. I think you've got to use how the government is reacting as an indicator. If this was just some loon who'd made up a few bogus powerpoint slides, would Joe Biden be calling Ecuador to suggest that they shouldn't let him in? I guess maybe if it was a major disinformation campaign on the part of the government, but it's hard to think of why they'd do that. And now they've got the EU pissed off, too.
And how do we know that Snowden didn't construct these slides precisely to become "Assange-like" in the hope that he could create enough of a public following to become "untouchable", while actually delivering the real stuff to his handler?
In other words, making a huge public fuss was his back up plan when he got caught.
Google is correct. They do not pass data to the NSA, the FBI does it for them. Everybody in the spy industry is just playing silly buggers and thinks that all citizens are morons.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
But you have to be a true artist to design a powerpoint deck that horrible. Only Government types invest that kind of effort.
Oh, be fair. These infamous 9 have a lot of data centers, and you can't expect the CEO to know which equipment from whom is in every corner there? I mean, just walk up to one of their data centers with a router in your hand, and tell them that you need an Internet connection. I'm sure that they'll let you waltz in and connect wherever equipment you want . . .
. . . when monkeys fly out of my ass.
The FBI probably has technical offices and agents in each data center, to maintain all this stuff. Ask them about that!
To give them the benefit of the doubt, they could claim that the FBI installed the stuff clandestinely. You know, a rack in a corner, with a note taped to it: "Do NOT touch. This rack does something important!" Of course, these companies might perform audits once in a blue moon on their data centers . . . but, naw, why bother . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Because Assange has it so good? This whole think will be a case study in how not to react to leaked information. It would be funny if it didn't feel so real. Keystone cops government reaction. Yeah, they are fake slides, whatever helps you sleep at night.
Personally, I think the declassification date is a nice touch.
The FBI equipment is for CALEA and is on site in ISP's, not content providers such as google and yahoo.
You are making an unwarranted assumption here. Even during the "Room 641A" controversy, the claim was made that the FBI has black rooms directly on premises with multiple content providers.
The classified slides that are being leaked show something different. Assuming those interception points are CALEA-related doesn't really make sense - do you really think, with regards to CALEA, the FBI only started slurping Apple traffic in October 2012?
#DeleteChrome
Google et al. said something, IIRC, like 'we do not collect and pass on any info to the NSA'. Technically true, but also completely irrelevant to whether or not the NSA was actually collecting data.
They didn't mention the NSA: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html That post is unequivocal, and is in direct contradiction to statements by the post like:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not review any individual collection request.
and
The FBI uses government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company
Which directly contradicts a statement here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/google-uses-secure-ftp-to-feds/ Unfortunately, all such statements in the Post's article aren't on the slides; they are the Post's annotations on the slides, and the author doesn't provide any evidence to support them. Take from that what you will.
You're totally wrong.
We've SUSPECTED spying. It was even reasonable to suspect that, though you could still be called a foil hatter.
Now we KNOW.
It is like the difference between an untested hypothesis you strongly suspect is true, and experimental results that confirm the hypothesis. The confirmation allows a next step to taken on a fully informed basis rather than belief.
So you are totally wrong -- this is NOT nothing. This is confirmation and if we don't do something about it now, it will be seen as a free pass to do this and more. That's why you should care -- apathy now absolutely ensures a deteriorating future.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
"OSN is probably online social network."
That sounds more plausible than my guess.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I can say with absolute certainty, that the NSA workers were never collecting information while sitting ON millions of Americans. Number one, they sit on chairs, not people. Number two, some of them may be chubby but nobody is fat enough to sit ON even 1000 Americans at once, let alone millions.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Because the NSA couldn't possibly have their private keys...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
If you think Assange is "untouchable" then the past 100 years of fascist history, and even the vaguest grasp of what your government has done and is doing, have passed you by.
you had me at #!
Right. Like the government has prosecuted people who claim the moon landing was false or that the face on mars was built just so it could protect its good name from conspiracy nuts.
All the government does to those people, is laugh along with everyone else.
The fact that it is prosecuting Snowden, rather letting have a silly foil hat rant, shows it isn't a foil hat rant.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Google may not even have been aware that the FBI was passing information on to the NSA.
Correct.
And the Republicans, for once, are in complete agreement. It seems the only bipartisan issue that exists today is propping up the NSA.
The Democrats won't allow anything negative to blow back on Obama, (not that they needed another reason to justify snooping and oversight of the unwashed masses, since their normal world view is that you need government to take care of yourself.
But the Republican party is passing up this opportunity to pin this on the democratic administration because much of this started under their watch.
Its a giant Cover Our Asses clusterfuck with not a single one of them (well maybe a couple) looking out for our interests.
Remember this at election time. They were all briefed about this months ago and never said a word or uttered a single objection.
Every one of them, no matter how dear to your political leanings, has to be thrown out.
And DON'T BE THAT GUY, the useful idiot that parrots the nonsense about needing this to prevent terrorism. Look at the Boston Marathon, and ask yourself how well this morass of spying did at protecting us from that, even after the RUSSIANS handed us those guys well in advance.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I honestly don't know, but I thought it was illegal for the FBI to spy on U.S. citizens as well?
"To stop the terrorists."
WA is the abbreviation typically associated with Washington State, not the city of Washington, D.C.
Wash. Post is the more commonly accepted abbreviation of the newspaper based in Washington, D.C.
We know those are legit because they're ugly as hell. Seriously, whoever did these slides has zero artistic abilities.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Very few people actually read the test groups. There's so much kiddeporn on today's news that a few slashbots posting encrypted messages to alt.test won't make a substantial difference.
Also, note that there'a big difference between a cipher and a code. A cipher replaces a number with another in such a way that it's difficult to get that first number back, but it does so by a fixed set of rules. The best way to crack the best ciphers is brute force, but if it's not the best cipher, there may be an easier way such as chosen plaintext.
Consider that the US won the World War II battle of Midway by convincing the Japanese Navy to send some ciphertext whose plaintext was chosen by the US:
"Please use our weakest cipher to encrypt a message to the Pentagon to let them know our desalination plant is broken, so we need a new one."
"But admiral, our desalinization plant is working just fine!"
"That's a direct order son."
"SIR YES SIR!"
You see we had cracked the Japanese Naval cipher but we did not know the Japanese Naval code. All we knew was that they were about to attack an island in the Pacific but we did not know which one, as they used a codeword for that. After they intercepted the above message, they themselves then sent a message back to Tokyo that said something like "CowboyNeal's desalination plant is broken. They asked for another one." Now you know "CowboyNeal" means "Midway Island".
The best thing to do is to combine codes and ciphers, so that if the cipher is cracked, they still won't know the code unless they can get the codebook. That's what CIA "Black Bag Jobs" are for, you know when they sneak into an embassy, find the codebook then photograph it.
I expect that lots of cyber-espionage on the part of everyone is looking for codebooks, secret keys from key pairs, as well as planting keystroke recorders so you can get passphrases.
I only vote third party anymore. If there is no third party candidate, I vote for my cat.
In 2008 I voted 3d party based on my skepticism of Obama, but I was still hopeful he would reverse the abuses of the GWB administration, and I voted for Democrats running in other races.
Obama's extension and expansion of the GWB abuses, which began within months of his election, coupled with the absolute silence from Democrats about this crap, soured me beyond any possibility of returning to the fold. The Democrats could run Gandalf, and I'd be suspicious. At this point, anyone running under a GOP or New GOP (AKA, DNC) label will not get my vote under any circumstance, because even if the candidate is an angel, his or her party is corrupt beyond redemption and that person will not even get on the ticket without compromising his or her morals.
So I vote for my cat and any third parties. I don't even care what third parties. I'm jewish and I'd vote for a nazi candidate before I'd vote for a Dem. or Repub.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Sometimes I have to wonder if this lack of concern isn't all our fault.
Before Snowden:
Wild-haired man: The gub'ment be spying on us! The NSA, the CIA, the FBI; they all are reading our emails, monitoring our online chat and seeing all the websites we go to! And all of them telecom and internet companiers are involved too!
Common citizen: Oh, you wacky nutcase; you've been going on for years about this. Where's your proof of this great conspiracy, huh? They aren't spying on us! This is America and that sort of thing doesn't happen here!
After Snowden: /somebody/ a while ago. Anyway, it's been going on forever and the only thing different now is that its out in the open, so why make a fuss about it now?
Wild-haired man: The gub'ment be spying on us! They see everything you do online, everything! And the big internet and telecom companies are in cahoots with them! And look, now I got irrefutable proof!
Common citizen: Well, of course they were spying on us. Hasn't this been known for years? I remember hearing about it from
It's sort of like crying wolf, except the warnings were always true. Instead of making people disregard you, it instead acclimatizes them to the threat to the point where it doesn't seem dangerous anymore (also seen in sci-fi movies where the aliens use conspiracy theories to make people ignore the threat of a coming alien invasion).
Perhaps we should dub this tactic "Snowden's Law"?
They don't pass it along to the NSA they pass it to the FBI who passes it to the NSA.... So while technically correct was a part of the big lie that the NSA is not spying on Americans...
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
At least GWB had 9/11 to "justify" the excesses of that time.
What does Obama have to justify his failure to roll back those excesses as he promised to do? What does he have to justify all of the new excesses of spying put in place since he took office. Look at the last slide in the linked article. All but one of these took place under Obama.
Everyone knew Obama would never fulfill his promises. Even Democrats knew this. Third party may be the answer, but I suspect they would be co-opted immediately upon their unlikely election.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
With each new iteration it is clear that the NSA is bullshitting congress (partly under oath), and congress is bullshitting the public by well-chosen weasel-wording.
What those criminals don't understand is that stating technical truths with the explicit intent of causing false beliefs in the recipient is lying. The intent to deceive and mislead is not ameliorated by some technical truth to a statement.
What is intended to convey wrong information is a lie. The bitter truth is that the NSA is trying to test with how little truthful information they can get away with congress and public, and congress and government are trying to test with how little truthful information they can get away with the citizens.
As long as their is no intention to actually and truthfully communicate, the respective entities need to get dissolved. They are out of control, and they like being out of control.
No, a whistleblower revealed that AT&T gave a room in their main switchboard building to the feds back in 2007. It just wasn't reported with much fervor back then. In those days, news orgs were afraid of being labeled "unpatriotic" for reporting all the bad things our government was doing.
I've only seen it a few times -- on Poynter.org, who report on journalism, and they seem to have standards on how they form abbreviations. I don't know that I've seen it in other places -- most people reporting try to cater to a wide audience and don't tend to slip in jargon.
And when I've seen it on Poynter, I've always seen it as mixed case 'WaPo' not "WAPO'. I've also seen it abbrreviated 'WashPost', but this is the first that I've ever seen it as 'WA Post'. (and I don't think I might've over looked it previously ... it was so glaringly bad that my first response was to check the comments to see if anyone else thought it was completely horrible).
Oh ... and I've lived in the DC metro area for 30+ years. And just because Google knows enough to expand jargon doesn't mean that it's good to use if you want people to actually understand you.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
And you are making the opposite assumption. There is no conclusion, and it is not obvious.
All it takes is the appearance of legitimacy, and the NSA has to pursue Snowden. It can't confirm some parts and say the rest are lies, because everything so far has been at least a half-truth, even to Congress. It can't disclaim everything because some are corroborated by NSA statements. If it says nothing is true, Congress is going to start asking, then what is true?
NSA has no choice but to discredit the source, so it doesn't have to defend anything released so far. So there is no conclusion. It could be made up, and it could be completely true.
And, Snowden started this off by saying he stole stuff, and then traveled to China. That's an automatic espionage charge right there, regardless of whether anything is true.
Snowden puts the government logos on some slides, and that makes it completely true? Are you daft? No of course not, but you are not leaving any room for an open mind, to evaluate each bit of information as being *potentially* true. We will never know if these were implemented, or are just plans that were scrapped.
No one will make the government confess, and to change course will be an admission of wrongdoing. It won't take anything less than a supreme court decision to make this stop, at least in its current form. So unless you have standing to sue in some fashion, taking these at face value gains you nothing.
I am not making the claim that these *were* fabricated, or modified. I am only pointing out that your reply jumps to a conclusion, probably a sort of confirmation bias. To disregard another *possibility* because it does not match your understanding of the world is deliberate ignorance.
Actually in this context a self signed cert would maybe be more safe, although not really. If the proxy device has a root signing cert it can just sign one for the sight it is proxiing to on the fly and then re-encrypt chances are you would never notice.
Having a copy of the private key doesn't help you when using Perfect Forward Secrecy through ephemeral Diffie-Hellman session keys.
Though I suppose that if you disable everything but the EDH and DHE ciphers in your browser, many sites will not work.
I think it's pretty clear that the US government simply does not have the manpower to read every single online communication in the world and if they can't read it it is useless. So is there some way we can fuck up their automated filters? It would be great if Snowden had information on the actual keywords that PRISM searches for to bump the communication over to a human.
How about an application that intentionally comes up with suspicous sounding emails that spam all of the NSA keywords. If each of us ran such a program and sent hundreds of such decoys per day their system would become useless for anything practical. Unfortunately this doesn't really work for voice communication.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Number two, some of them may be chubby but nobody is fat enough to sit ON even 1000 Americans at once, let alone millions.
Roseanne Barr comes pretty close.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Its not about what hes said so much, as what he may say... i bet you theres A LOT more the government doesnt want you to know, that he has access to/copies of
I agree with you, though it might take a few election cycles. Even if true though, there is something to be said for vengeful voting if it gets the old lot of corrupt hacks to lose their jobs. Then you just have to keep on vengefully voting till they figure out that if they want job security, they have to consider themselves beholden to the public. Wishful thinking I'm sure, but I would really like to see some vengeful voting anyway.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
That's unmitigated bullshit.
What started this was the administration officials who committed perjury to direct questions about the scope of the program.
When we're in that circumstance, there is no other option but for a leaker to come forward and give us our ability to engage in the democratic process of electing leaders who respect the law, and chucking those who don't (hopefully into prison). There is no debate without a leaker when Obama and his cronies lie. There is no ability to meaningfully engage in the democratic process, when the voters are lied to.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
One thing Steve Gibson of TWiT Network's "Security Now" mentioned was that the NSA essentially tapped critical points in the Internet backbone to get all the data--they don't need to be directly accessing the servers of Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and so on to get all the data from these companies. And I bet every intelligence agency worldwide has done this a long time ago.
In short, blame the Tier 1 backbone providers for allowing such free access to the Internet by the government intelligence agencies.
Perfect example: Economist and professional snob Tyler Cowen: 'I'd heard about this for years, from "nuts," and always assumed it was true,'
Bullshit. How come there's no record of him giving any credence to such claims before then?
Same thing when Climategate broke out.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I have never seen Washington Post referred to as 'WA Post' before. Mainly because there are 2 Washingtons in the USA - both very very far away from each other. WA is Washington State which is where Seattle & Redmond are. The Washington which Washington Post is based of is Washington, DC.
So either Washington Post or WaPo or Wa Post - but surely not WA Post.
I doubt anyone on this forum will have the balls to say it and stand by my statement. But I honestly believe that the world is living in a time of great evil not unlike just prior to WW1. It's spooky. And not all the geeky technology in the world is going to save us from our own wrath and oppression.
Life is not for the lazy.
But is she an NSA employee or just a contractor?
The CNN woman that moderated the debate between Romney and Obama outright lied in the middle of the debate to protect Obama, a week later she admitted to lying, she was congratulated as a hero in CNN.
Or are you lying or mistaken? From CNN:
ROMNEY: I -- I think interesting the president just said something which -- which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror. [..] I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.
[..]
CROWLEY: He -- he did call it an act of terror. It did as well take -- it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that.
[..]
And here is the transcript from Obama's Rose Garden remarks on September 12, the day after the attack:
"Our country is only as strong as the character of our people and the service of those both civilian and military who represent us around the globe," he said. "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done."
[..]
But, as to the original accusation from the conservative critics that Obama never mentioned "acts of terror" until weeks after the attack, they were wrong. Crowley was right.
Would you become an exile from your birth country and risk spending the rest of your life in prison in order to publish fake information? I wouldn't either. Pretty much no one would. It would be insane and very, very stupid. So, yes, he automatically gets some credibility from the fact that, at 30, his life is completely fucked. I'm sorry, but nothing is worth that. Certainly no cheap attempt at making some sort of political statement via photoshop.
Best case he'll be spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, living in a third world country trying to survive off whatever savings he managed to accumulate and put somewhere where the US government can't get at it. Is it possible he's lying? Sure, but it is just so highly unlikely. It's also possible that the reason no one has seen him in Moscow is because he has been abducted by aliens. Maybe he is an alien himself and he flew away in a starship. You can't rule it out so, as you say, "there is no conclusion" that can be reached about whether or not Snowden is an alien or is right now accelerating away from this star system.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I though WA stood for Washington state, not Washington DC. (I'm Australian, so I could be wrong.)
Or did someone get confused by "WaPo", a common abbreviation for The Washington Post?
This is not America It really isn't. At one time we actually stood for something. A principle. An ideal. To live free or die trying. 1984 was never intended as an instruction manual.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Exactly! Every time I read about this story, the worst parts of the surveillance is not supported by the evidence shown either on the slides, and look like sloppy, extraordinary claims. I'd love to see the evidence that supports the claims that FISC doesn't review individual collection requests, which could mean each incident of collection (event) or "I"ndividual collection requests, meaning that a FISA warrant could grab a group of people based on FISC approved criteria.
I really do want to see this evidence, but the more I read of this story the more I think that most of the claims that the Post and Guardian are making are a misunderstanding of what their sources are actually telling them.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Saying the third party (probably LP) would be the same is just skirting blame that you voted for one of the two parties in place. "It be no different if I voted third party."
Its the most common answer I get when I debate someone and I point a lie/flaw in their candidate. It exposes their lack of research into their candidate and blissful ignorance they continue to shield themselves with.
"They're all corrupt." No they're not, just the ones you're pulling the lever for
I honestly don't know, but I thought it was illegal for the FBI to spy on U.S. citizens as well?
Depends on the case law - but basically the 4th Amendment was supposed to protect everyone from this sort of thing - every gov't entity is supposed to get a warrant before spying. The fact that every gov't entity isn't disavowing this program, but instead saying "we get a warrant to look at the results" is really disingenuous. They shouldn't be collecting the information in the first place.
It is never called "The WA Post." It's "The Washington Post." WA is a state on the Pacific coast.
Kriston