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Citizen Eavesdrops On Former NSA Director Michael Hayden's Phone Call
McGruber writes "The Washington Post has the news that former head of the NSA Michael Hayden took a call while on the Acela train between D.C. and Boston. Hayden was talking to a journalist 'on background', which means the reporter is not allowed to cite Hayden by name. Unfortunately for Hayden, another train passenger overhead the call and live-tweeted it. 'Mattzie continued to livetweet Hayden’s conversations slamming the Obama administration, all the while insisting that he be referred to only on background. The conversation also seemed to touch on Hayden’s time as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President George W. Bush as well. "Hayden was bragging about rendition and black sites a minute ago," Mattzie wrote. Hayden has in the past defended the use of waterboarding against detainees held in various sites around the world, and dismissed torture as a "legal term."'"
That's basically what I came to expect from Bush officials like him. I sometimes forget how bad things were.
Information warfare.
This might help the situation. If government officials were subjected to the same scruitny and privacy violations the rest of the have-nots suffer, we might be able to straighten this train wreck of a country out.
I bet it'll change his outlook.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Including US citizens.
But he doesn't waterboard them. Woo hoo.
Of course, it would be worth a lot more if we got more than someone's probably biased interpretation of one side of a phone call. Like, actual quotes would be a lot better. Even then, who knows what the questions were.
but that doesn't make its referent any less barbaric or useless. Also, the irony of this article is pretty.
Even took a picture with him afterwards.
NOW!
That'll IMPROVE his advocacy!
Oh, and BTW:
Thanks, Obama! Thanks for the CHANGE!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is exactly what is required. We all need to out these people, all of them who work for the NSA and CIA, and subject them to constant surveillance, harassment, and ostracism. Perhaps an open source project to map and publicize the personnel of these agencies, as an exercise in democratic resistance to creeping tyranny. Heck, we can even enlist the assistance of kindly freedom-loving people around the world to ensure it will be impossible to shut down. The American government needs to understand the American people are onto them and deem them the enemies of freedom they are. Whether further, more stringent measures are required remains to be seen.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Okay sure... it's not illegal, but really
And while I know that sometimes you can't help but overhear stuff that's happening in a nearby conversation, that still doesn't mean you have to pay enough attention to what you heard to actually do something about it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How the heck does a former NSA director come to be talking about such things in public?
It's like fight club, you don't talk about it in front of other people.
I should think sitting on a train conducting this interview would be an epic breach of both his secrecy agreements, and his common sense.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We bid you a fond farewell, fellow citizen, and will remember you long after you have been disappeared.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
From what I understand of your political system you'd need a lot of money to buy the lobbyists needed for this kind of change. Perhaps use one of those crowdfunded sites to get the funding?
It is shocking that this incompetent boob was in charge of anything at the CIA.
The passenger should have recorded it and then Hayden could have been prosecuted for leaking.
So far the only CIA employee prosecuted for leaks is the whistle blower who leaked about waterboarding.
Reporting on how our government ignores our Rights under all the amendments in the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions.
Everyone is a reporter now.
Everyone.
Hit Record.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think we are moving toward a transparent society where privacy for all is minimal. Right now it is pretty one sided but I think openness and transparency for the government and large corporations will also happen. Technology will force them to open up. David Brin wrote a book called The Transparent Society that talks about this.
His approval of waterboarding is specific to a context. It is done to enemies of his government, generally ones who are not themselves aristocrats.
He is vehemently opposed to government officials being waterboarded (his for sure, and probably rival governments as well). He would consider that an egregious offence against propriety to do such a thing.
Waterboarding him will not change his position one bit. He knows it is horrible, and that is exactly what he likes about it. That is also why he thinks it is appropriate for them but not us.
If he was suddenly stripped of power, permanently, and put in a position where he might be randomly water boarded by the authority above him, you can bet your bottom dollar he would advocate against it. But THAT will never happen, so his position will never change.
Killing (without a trial), sure. Indefinitely detaining (without a trial), sure. Stalking to the ends of the Earth and forcing them to seek political asylum with countries not really known for their own human rights records, sure.
But torturing? Goodness no! How barbaric!
Are we not allowed to think all of those are terrible, or do you just take exception to people thinking torture is a special kind of evil on par with rape?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
What's the big deal, Mr. Hayden? "If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide," right? You aren't suddenly uncomfortable with this perpetual retort to privacy advocates, are you?
In drama, when you wish to EMPHASIS the foul and depraved nature of a regime, you show the regime loyalists doing and saying whatever they like in public, while ordinary members of that regime's citizenry act as if they notice nothing.
It was a MAJOR plank of Tony Blair's project to bring overt abuse of power into the open, telling allies and members of his team that it was SHAMEFUL to hide their evil. Blair told everyone he sought to influence that powerful people PROVE their power over the sheeple by acting openly. Blair, of course, is the main advocate for the use of torture, and successfully persuaded the USA to widely adopt this practise once again (the USA had previously been built on a foundation of legally justified torture, as that practise was falling out of fashion in West Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries).
Now, Blair loyalists are in absolute power in every significant nation. Sure, lower ranking idiots like this Hayden consider the politics of internal decision making, just as middle-ranking Nazis in Hitler's Germany would have been constantly bitching about some other department getting better funding than theirs, while all still being part of the same team.
Here's ALL you Americans need to know. Your war machine is growing at an ever accelerating rate. Your war machine is being deployed across ever increasing areas of our planet. You war machine planners are following a master plan unmodified in its ultimate goals since the rise of the 'neocons' during the late 20th Century. The USA is OVERTLY destroying stable, popular regimes like Syriaand Libya, purely to try to create a road to genocidal war with Iran.
Your masters want you to see the 'trees', NOT the 'forest'. That is why they have your mainstream media ENCOURAGES you to 'zoom' in on trivial issues of interplay between the much lesser monsters like Hayden, to maintain the illusion of a 'left' force in constant battle with a 'right' force.
The NSA full surveillance project has reading the 'mind' of the masses as its main goal, so that propaganda campaigns in the mainstream media (and George Soros controlled fake independent 'liberal' media) can be honed in near real-time. When you 'chatter' online, you reveal what you 'think' about current 'issues' in the press, and this allows the monsters that rule you to discover how successful their manipulation is currently proving to be.
Obama gave total and complete immunity to ALL law breakers (including those involved in the most depraved forms of torture) that were connected in ANY way to previous US administrations. Such moral crimes against Humanity are hardly unique in recent US history. When the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, it can EVERYONE associated with the invasion, including ALL mercenary forces, complete and total immunity against prosecution. Obviously, military courts were still entitled WHEN THEY WISHED to prosecute any US soldier for any act against regulation in these nations, but these (vanishingly rare) prosecutions mirrored those the Nazis inflicted on handfuls of their own forces in nations the Nazis completely raped and pillaged.
It is notable, since mercenaries fall OUTSIDE the remit of military courts, that not one mercenary operating under US leadership in Iraq has EVER been tried and convicted for war-crimes, even though American mercenaries recorded themselves raping, torturing and murdering Iraqi civilians on thousands of occasions. When Obama came to power, there were SOME public-placating fake prosecuting efforts against some of the most heinous crimes carried out by Blackwater, but Obama once again reiterated that all mercenaries operating in Iraq were above both local and International Law, and ended even the pretence of prosecutions.
The mercenaries Obama sends into Syria makes the horrors that operated in Iraq look like saints by comparison (and one of the earliest mercenaries to be killed in Iraq was the worst racist torturer that the White Apartheid regime of South Africa employed during its suppression of the black p
Wait, no it isn't. This could be nothing but complete bullshit, but you idiots believe anything, don't you?
an ex senior NSA guy is talking in public to a hack FFS how did this guy get any job at the NSA with such a poor gasp of security 101 - and you dont do an OTR briefing in public for flips sake.
OBSERVATION: When given the means and opportunity to make an actual audio recording of Mr. I-Listen-To-You that would have been admissibly real, capable of rendering into a complete transcript, with real historical value... instead choosing to tap out 3rd party observations.
CONCLUSION: Twitter causes brain damage.
The jury is still out on Slashdot.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
How much do you guys want to bet that Mattzie ends up dead? They could use the shellfish toxin that took out Breitbart, or maybe just hack his Mercedes and induce an accident like was done to that Michael Hastings chap. Or maybe one of those classic home invasion "robberies" where nothing was taken. Heck, we could always see a Worldcom type suicide where he shoots himself in the head, twice, from ten feet away!
Any way you slice it, our yellow media will probably get the word not to report on it.
The mainstream media had (IMHO thankfully) a bit of a hate-on for Bush, so every little thing his administration did wrong was broadcast loud and clear.
Exactly what do you think the media reported on that was out of proportion to the actions taken by Bush and his administration? Under his watch we saw two unjustified wars started, illegal and immoral kidnappings and torturing and even worse arguing that these crimes were somehow justified, squandering of the first budget surplus in decades, an utterly incompetent response to a major natural disaster, and (though arguably not the administration's direct fault) the worst economic crisis in 80 years. If anything the media was WAY too nice to Bush and the rest of them.
They don't seem to have the same diligence towards the current administration
In case you didn't notice the media gave the Bush administration basically a free pass for a good long while after 9/11. Hell, they were positive enough that the guy got re-elected. Furthermore you an alternative explanation for the media's behavior is that there simply is less bad behavior to report on. While the Obama administration is FAR from innocent (they've done some pretty evil things too) they don't have anywhere near the track record of abuse and incompetence of their predecessors. That might be damning with faint praise but it's a better explanation that media ennui.
If the Bush administration handled, say, the whole Benghazi incident exactly the same way our current administration had, would there or would there not be calls for impeachment from the likes of CNBC
Probably not - at least not any more than we hear it from FOX news these days about the Obama administration. The Bush administration did things that were FAR worse than Benghazi and suffered little for the trouble.
How perfect for Obama & Co. This half whit just set himself up as the quintessential disgruntled employee, leaking "sensitive" information, no less.
This gives the administration the perfect opportunity to fire the "bad apple" and foist the blame and resentment of the NSA onto the outgoing individual. All the while, the NSA continues with business as usual, but without the furor.
What a perfect scapegoat! The White House probably wet themselves with excitement.
Therefore there's nothing for him to release them from. They aren't prisoners.
Look, on the freakin' Acela train you've got zero expectation of privacy. Come on.
Are you sure that the USA does not torture children? Consider the scenario: The CIA has captured a terrorist involved in a bomb plot. He knows when and where the bomb will hit. He is a tough bastard, trained by Al Qaeda to resist insipid American torture methods. This guy will take a long time to break. But wait, he has a 7 year old daughter who he clearly loves very much, She was captured with him and she is very frightened. He has been doing his best to protect her. Do you really think that the CIA would not torture her in front of him? That is the road you go down when you start torturing because the ends justify the means. A dozen innocent Americans are worth more than a little pain and suffering to the daughter of a filthy murdering terrorist. Right?
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
Why is it that every time someone who is actually guilty of these crimes is in the spotlight, all you Obama haters still manage to peg everything on him? It's the same thing as all the Bush haters. Guess what guys... most of these atrocities are performed by people outside the executive branch. Educate yourself and shut the hell up.