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Gen. Keith Alexander On Metadata, Snowden, and the NSA: "We're At Greater Risk"
An anonymous reader writes with some snippets pulled from a lengthy Q&A session at The New Yorker with former NSA head Keith Alexander, in which Alexander defends the collection of metadata by U.S. spy agencies both abroad and within the United States: "The probability of an attack getting through to the United States, just based on the sheer numbers, from 2012 to 2013, that I gave you—look at the statistics. If you go from just eleven thousand to twenty thousand, what does that tell you? That's more. That's fair, right? [..] These aren't my stats. The University of Maryland does it for the State Department. [...] The probability is growing. What I saw at N.S.A. is that there is a lot more coming our way. Just as someone is revealing all the tools and the capabilities we have. What that tells me is we're at greater risk. I can't measure it. You can't say, Well, is that enough to get through? I don't know. It means that the intel community, the military community, and law enforcement are going to work harder."
why is this shithead talking of probabilities? let's talk about REAL attacks. Like the one where the government of an immigrant called our Homeland Security morons and actually warned us about someone. And our Homeland Security statsi did exactly nothing. Then, the person who was the subject of that call blew up the finish area of the Boston Marathon. For that matter, what about 9/11, our intelligence and national police watching those Saudi terrorists for years to see what they would do; well, we saw what they did.
Well worth the watch if you have the time, gives a very good overview of how the NSA amassed as much power as it has: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
If you go from just eleven thousand to twenty thousand, what does that tell you? That's more. That's fair, right?
Given who is speaking I had to do some fact checking before accepting it as truth.
Gen. Keith Alexander,
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/...
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
It means that the intel community, the military community, and law enforcement are going to work harder.
No. It means that your efforts are turning more and more people against the United States of America. It means that your actions have made people hate you more. Rather than putting more efforts into improving people's feelings towards America, you're turning more people against you.
And it should be noted that it's no longer just foreign individuals who are growing to hate you - your efforts are making more and more Americans hate you too.
Maybe - and this is just a wild idea here - you should stop being complete asses. You know, stop treating everyone in the damn world like the enemy. Maybe, just maybe, that might help make people hate you less which will probably help reduce the number of actions against you.
But, let's be honest here, that's not what the power brokers want. The power brokers want to clamp down a polio state upon America and the world at large and the only way to do that is to foster the hate and continue to make America the victim of increasing hostility from malicious interests. You're fostering the hatred because it makes it easier for you and your ilk to justify strengthening the police state that you so dearly want.
bleh.
There's like, a lot of numbers.. ya'know? that means stuff can happen. If stuff might happen, then stuff can happen because ... stuff!
A spymaster asserts spying is important! Details at 11.
If you own a clothing store and want to prevent theft by increasing security you can:
Add metal tags to clothing
Hire more security guards inside the store
Install cameras in the ceiling and watch shoppers
The NSA opts instead to
Ask shoppers to wear metal tags
Hire agents to follow them after they leave
Install video cameras in their homes
And now we call it "America"
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
There is also no question that spying on people will damage our society. Some innocent people will have their non-criminal secrets revealed, damaging their lives beyond reason. Some innocent people will be falsely accused of crimes they did not commit - perhaps even going to jail or being killed by a drone. Certain people will become accustomed to violating the law for valid reasons and will start to violate it for personal reasons - the cases where US intelligence agents spied on ex-lovers are just the start.
The question is, is the damage done greater than the damage prevented. From the huge and vast history of spying, we also know that we can not simply take the government's word. Even if they start good, they too often end up going too far.
So we set up a system that is supposed to not only prevent the worst damage done by spying, but to prevent even the APPEARANCE that that damage might be occurring.
General Keith Alexander's article talks a lot about the damage the spying prevents. It totally ignores the massive damage he and his ilk does.
As such it is not convincing at all. It's like a gold miner talking about how much gold they are going to get out of the mountain without even mentioning the massive amounts of toxic materials he is dumping directly into the town's reservoir.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"It means that the intel community, the military community, and law enforcement are going to work harder."
Yes, I agree. Good conclusion.
Source please.
If they are at greater risk, it is because of their own activities and decisions. Corruption and illegal activity should not be shielded by National Security. Or more simply put, their security is not national security.
Why is this guy still called a General, he's a fucking politician already, a political appointee and from his spintalk he's learning the DC shuffle pretty well. A real general would lead his troops into battle and kill the fucking enemy, not continually spy on the citizens or trample on the constitution he's sworn to protect. You have soliders to fight wars, not play political games and trying to color everything with spintalk.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I'd rather take my chances and live in a free society with some "risk" than in an oppressive nanny state that feels the need to increasingly monitor every aspect of my life.
That's what he's missing, the 'risk' he's talking of is the price to pay for living in a free society.
We are less likely to be attacked on our own soil right now than we were at any point in the preceding two centuries. That likelihood hit a plateau in the 1970s. The World Trade Center collapse was a statistical anomaly.
It looks even worse if you consider mortality generally not just the (admittedly emotionally salient; but still just another way of dying) flavor caused by overt enemy action. Even if you entirely disregard the corrosive effects of having a wildly unaccountable intelligence apparatus, which are massive, the NSA's case is pretty tepid even in purely financial terms. If you want to allocate a given dollar to reducing American morbidity and mortality, or increasing American prosperity, you have a pretty strong list of contenders ahead of the various black budgets.
I was surprised to see Gen. Alexander trotting out the "a life is a life. How many does it take to make it worth it?" fallacy. Amusingly, the General brings up the story of Enigma; it might have saved just one life with regards to the ethical question raised by the semi-apocrypal story of Coventry in WW2.
When we were up against the Russians, it was "better dead than Red." We were taught not that Communism was evil because it came from Russia, but because Communism requires a system of government that requires pervasive surveillance and monitoring of dissidents.
There was a time in which Russia and China had more prisoners per capita than America. I remember reading about it as part of a lesson on why parliamentary democracy and representative republics were better than communism.
There was a time in which the KGB and the Stasi (and their Maoist equivalents, and the events of Tienanmen Square, and even as recently as the Great Firewall of China) were held up to Americans as examples of what not to do.
"Better dead than Red" is overstating it, and to take such a principle on an absolutist basis would have resulted in MAD over Korea and/or Vietnam. But by that same token, an absolutist adherence to the fallacy of "because it just might save one life" is not an acceptable reason transform the land of the free and the home of the brave into a panopticon, General.
P.S. When we consider that a single attack that did about $1-2B in damages prompted us not only to disregard our civil liberties, but also to expend multiple trillions of dollars in order to defend against things as banal as plane crashes? A politician might make that tradeoff, because our underinformed electorate tends to fall for "if it saves just one life" at any cost - particularly when a successful attack might result in the loss of a politician's ability to get re-elected. For someone holding the rank of General, he completely fails to understand the principle behind asymettric warfare. And that is why, 13 years after 9/11, regardless of whether we won or lost the battles of Afghanistan and Iraq, we still lost the war.
Rather than taking actions that short cuts the Constitution of the United States and infringes the rights of the citizen populace you claim to want to protect. Guess what, if the people of the US have lost faith and trust in the Military, Judiciary, Executive, and Legislative branches, as well as in Law Enfiorcement there is a reason for it. It's not some mass hallucination or mob mis-perception. The US Government has undermined the trust of the populace and now it is reaping the consequences. Don't bitch that the job is now harder because of infringements caused by corruption and incompetance within the highest corridors of power within the U.S.
The three main weapons in the arsenal against freedom.
Guess what, everyone? The number of threats against the United States has likely been about the same from year to year for decades and decades now, they're just trotting out these 'independently gathered statistics' because they've been caught with both hands in the surveillance cookie jar and crumbs all over their faces, so now they trot out the FU&D to try to justify themselves. Them, them, fuck them, I say. Go back to traditional spycraft techniques and stop rummaging around in America's underwear drawer, you fucking creeps.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Cry me a river. I'm sure that we could reduce that possibility ten fold if we placed cameras and microphones inside everyone's house. Does that mean we should do it? Absolutely not.
But we already have voluntarily carried microphones and cameras into our houses, pockets, and purses. Does that mean the NSA should ignore them?
John
I propose that we put at least 2 cameras in every room. This way we can catch everyone committing a crime and reduce dramatically the risk of crime in the USA. I propose that the NSA, who has the expertise, would expand its role and electronically monitor the cameras. The computers would flag potential crimes happening for the NSA experts to look at. They would maintain the database and rules would be in place to prevent any abuse by the NSA professionals. Oversight of this NSA operation will be by a secret court that will punish those breaking the rules. All proceedings and transcripts of the court will remain secret to protect the work of the NSA and not increase the risk of crime.
Without the exaggeration of "at least 2 cameras in every room", I feel this is what is happening right now around the world. By upping the surveillance we would be safer but our quality of life would be less without any privacy, and the potential for abuse would be very great. There is no significant oversight and transparency happening at the NSA. This needs to change and people's rights (including non-Americans) need to be respected. Knowing human nature, abuse is happening and the database is being misused. The NSA needs to be reigned in and its operations limited. We may end up being at a very slight larger risk for a terrorist attack but people's lives and rights would be respected.
You know spies. Bunch of bitchy little girls.
Are you saying the WTC "attack" wasn't carried out by Silverstein, Bush, Cheney, et al?
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
What that tells me is we're at greater risk.
Risk of what exactly?
Because you're talking about taking away my constitutional freedoms. That's a big deal. You need to give me some idea of what I'm being protected from. A terrorist attack? Because, the chances of that are 1 in 9,138,785. I'm willing to take that risk if it means I get to remain free.
So wishing i had Mod points +10 well put.
"a life is a life. How many does it take to make it worth it?" then what about better AFFORDABLE healthcare, homes for the homeless , domestic abuse shelters and other things that can easily and demonstrably save lives.
Oh I forgot those dont keep put masters in power.
And yet despite his scaremongering, which coincidentally means he needs more money and resources, I'm more likely to die of a heart attack or get hit while riding my bike than to ever even SEE a terrorist.
We should take all their money and spend it on automobile safety and heart disease prevention....
Everytime some dude says "Death to America!" or something like that on the Internet, that's a credible threat. Oh look, there's another one. If you don't stop it, it'll be like nine eleven times a hundred!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Some people ask whether Edward Snowden can get a fair trial in the US. The real question is whether Keith Alexander can get a fair trial in the US. He was the head of an organization which was doing illegal things. Will he get a fair trial? Will he get a trial at all? No.
The government does a great job of keeping the conversation focused on "terrorism" and the inevitability of it.
They never allow the dialogue to shift to the causes of terrorism. We never see discussions about the specific foreign policy elements that generate the hatred and anger that leads to people getting to the point where they are willing to sacrifice their lives to inflict harm to the American economy and way of life.
Until people begin having real conversations about what we are doing, why we are doing it, what the benefits of doing it are, and what the risks associated with it are, this is going to continue.
Unfortunately it seems that any sort of multi-faceted conversation like that is not of interest to most of the population. Those who are interested in having those conversations have already had them, and decided that the benefits outweigh the risks. Money in their pockets is worth the cost of a few lives and civil liberties.
It all comes back to the 1%. There is a small portion of the population that is gambling with the lives of everyone else. Everyone else is too disorganized to remove the 1% from power.
Until people get to the point where they are willing to publicly stand up and say, "I am tired of living in fear for my life so that WE can make money at the expense of the rest of the world." Nothing is going to change. And that is the truth of it. On some level, all of us, ALL OF US, benefit from the current system and are too comfortable with it to do anything more than whine about it online.
There are more people in the world, therefore more bad people in the world with no respect for life, so yeah the 'chances of a single event over time increases'...even the number of people impacted will increase. Guess what, freedom means you are less safe...do NOT give up freedom for security.
Auto-correct (from police) I'm guessing ... but considering the recent outbreaks ... it may have been intentional.
The military officers I have known have at least been coherent.
Cold hard reality check: More than 95 percent of all actual threats originate in or have data collection endpoints in one of the following: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, or Afghanistan.
Individual warrants on directly (not indirectly) connected US citizens could be done within the context of the US Constitution.
The methods that ARE in use, regardless of what he's telling you, are, for the most part, in direct and certain violation of the US Constitution and in direct and certain violation of the Data treaties (which have the force of law and override Congressional Law and any MOUs) with both the EU and Canada.
Period.
Oh, and this has been going on a lot longer than they pretend. No, even longer than that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think when the A/C regains consciousness, it will not even remember its post.
...and start respecting other states' sovereignty. I mean for real, not just with words. Maybe then the number of attacks will start dropping...
Are you submitting yourself as a Test Subject?
I'd rather deal with a higher level of threat then accept extra legal NSA/CIA spying within the US.
The politically incorrect reality is that we've probably let too many bad people into the US and the western world at large. Say you want to keep radical elements out and they cite you for racism because the people trying this crap lately tend to not be white. That said, were they white, I'd have the same attitude about it so I don't see how race comes into it. Obviously, people shouldn't be excluded based on their race. BUT ideology might be fair game. I don't think being islamic should be enough to trigger a ban. But if you are then it is a risk factor. Sorry... it is. And that risk factor might trigger a deeper evaluation and that evaulation might find that a particular person is dangerous.
Regardless we can have two types of security. Internal security and external security.
I prefer the heavy handed stuff be kept external. Which means filtering visas more aggressively, securing the boarders, and dealing with foreign threats on foreign soil.
The alternative is that we turn the US into a police state with intelligence agencies scouring the nation looking for all the enemies the external filters didn't stop.
Choose. Its that or we just get bombed whenever they want. External security means I stay safe AND free.
Internal security means I MIGHT be safe but I lose my freedoms. Neither means I could easily lose both my freedoms and my security.
So... is there really more then one option here? Secure the border, be more careful with travel visas, and make a point of dealing with foreign threats on foreign soil.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Stop being imperialist, corporate dicks on the international stage (including propping up tin pots du jour just for stinking profits). This will never happen.
"Avoid foreign entanglements (including Israel)." -- George Washington
Just violate a basic human right of most humans in the planet, including foreing governments and normal citizens, and you will have a lot less friends. And that will be your fault, your actions, not theirs or Snowden's.
Dear Mr Alexander, fuck you. No, seriously, fuck you all to hell. At this point I would rather be attacked than be your slave. At least if I am attacked I will have an enemy that I can fight instead of some asshole trying to justify his own slimeball existence. Your fear mongering can go right back up your ass for all I care. I'm sure you can get the University of Maryland to do a study on that for you as well, so long as you pay them enough.
Sincerely, Bob
P.S. Fuck off.
Good points. Protecting lives is important, but Liberty is what we fight for, it is what generations have killed and died for, it is what, God willing, we leave to our children. When Lincoln talked over the freshly dug graves of Gettysburg he couldn't say they were fighting to save lives because that would have rung hollow amidst so much death and destruction. When he said "shall not perish from this Earth" he wasn't talking about his life or the lives of his fallen countrymen he was talking about the battle so that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
We can't have a government of the people, by the people or for the people if we have a government spying without warrant on all the people. Making a mockery of the rights enshrined in our constitution and the real abuses of government power that those constitutional rights are intended to prohibit.
Cry me a river. I'm sure that we could reduce that possibility ten fold if we placed cameras and microphones inside everyone's house. Does that mean we should do it? Absolutely not.
But, but...we have to destroy freedom in order to protect Freedom(tm)!
Why do you hate Freedom(tm) and America(tm)??
"Those who would give up essential liberties for..."
Ah, screw it! Apparently most people are fine with sacrificing any and all of their individual liberties and rights as long as the talking heads tell them it makes them more safe. Or, that changing this slide into totalitarianism in America is someone else's job.
There will always be the risk of people doing bad things in a free and open society. If there was not the ability for individuals and groups in a society to do bad things, then that society by definition would be neither free nor open.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
His first example in the New Yorker was how the NSA thwarted Basaaly Moalin.
Some background: Basaaly Moalin emailed Najibullah Zazi asking how to make a bomb. Zazi was already under FBI investigation. The NSA is scanning all email traffic, finds the word "bomb" in this email, and they foward this to the FBI, and they go forward from there. The two end up arrested.
This is a good turn of events. Bravo FBI for doing a good job. We are not saying that this is a bad thing, nor are we saying that these things should not be investigated.
What we want is for them to get a warrant before scanning all the email. The FBI was already investigating him for some reason. Would it have been that hard to ask a judge first? Someone sent a clear-text email to a person under investigation asking how to make a bomb. You don't need a complete dragnet of all the populaces communication to go find that terrorist. We have perfectly legal tools written into the bloody constitution about how you're supposed to go about this. USE THEM.
Around 9/11, we intercepted some of [the hijackers’] calls, but we couldn’t see where they came from. So guys like [Khalid al-]Mihdhar, [one of the 9/11 hijackers who was living] in California—we knew he was calling people connected to Al Qaeda in Yemen.
That sounds like a REAL EASY case to get a warrant for. "Hey judge, there's this guy calling Al Qaeda. We intercepted his phone call going from point A to point B and we'd like to ask the phone companies where those points are. You know, so we can keep tabs on where the terrorist cells are calling from. Just might be coming from within the states. ... Yeah, I know right? Just like that scene 'the call is coming from inside the house!'. That'd be funny if we weren't talking about thousands of dead people. So mother-may-I-gimme a warrant already."
And they’re going to say, Well, you eliminated all the tools to catch the terrorists!
We want to remind you that the tools need to require you to jump through a hoop, just like the RAS you described in your example. You need your tools. But you must jump through the legal hoop.
We saw what happened when Edgar Hoover had his dragnet on everyone. It didn't turn out well. And we certainly can't trust you with similar power.
Using global statistics isn't relevant to US operations. So, the relevant question would be how do US deaths due to terrorists acts compare before and after. Sandy Hook, Boston Marathon, and the Aurora Shooting would arguably all fit the bill of terrorism in the US and are less than a year before Snowden's leaks, and the death toll exceeds what we've had in the time since then.
So, General Alexander, you are cordially invited to shut the hell up.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Does it matter if some random citizen is killed by a criminal or terrorist? They are dead by malevolent hands either way.
We have a situation where a 9/11 number of people are killing each other in a more or less statistically predictable fashion every quarter decade over decade. It happened this quarter, it will happen the next and the one after that...yet nobody at NSA seems to be talking or otherwise giving two shits about that.
I think we should be looking at ALL risks and reallocate funds away from NSA,TSA,CIA military industrial machine toward endeavors which in the real world stand most chance of providing highest ROIs based on objective evidence rather than current environment of allocation based on fear and politics.
After all list of attacks actually prevented by these agencies appears quite pathetic commensurate with expenditures.
Quite stunning not one of these goons have been able to articulate how collection of everyone's phone records is necessary to conduct a specific authorized investigation while continuing to publically seek retroactive authorization.
The "intelligence community" breaks the law and knowingly enabled wars directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands based on information they knew at the time to be factually deficient. "Traitors" seems too kind.
I also like how he points out that we let people die to keep the secret of the cracked Enigma machine. So saving a life makes it worth it, unless letting them die is more worth it.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Are you saying the WTC "attack" wasn't carried out by Silverstein, Bush, Cheney, et al?
Shel Silverstein was responsible for 9/11? I knew he was a slimebag. Those literary types are all alike!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Cry me a river. I'm sure that we could reduce that possibility ten fold if we placed cameras and microphones inside everyone's house. Does that mean we should do it? Absolutely not.
But, but...we have to destroy freedom in order to protect Freedom(tm)!
Why do you hate Freedom(tm) and America(tm)??
"Those who would give up essential liberties for..."
Ah, screw it! Apparently most people are fine with sacrificing any and all of their individual liberties and rights as long as the talking heads tell them it makes them more safe. Or, that changing this slide into totalitarianism in America is someone else's job.
There will always be the risk of people doing bad things in a free and open society. If there was not the ability for individuals and groups in a society to do bad things, then that society by definition would be neither free nor open.
Strat
I find it interesting (as some others have also pointed out) that we are spending enormous (we don't even know the full extent) amounts of money on the surveillance state, ostensibly to "protect" us from terror attacks. The probabilities say that you are many times more likely to die in or by an automobile than by a terrorist attack. They also say that you're more likely to die getting hit by lightning, or in your bathtub, let alone from heart disease. If "protecting" us is so important, why aren't we spending money in proportion to the probabilities? I'll leave the answer as an exercise for the /.er.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
By putting back doors in our communications infrastructure, the NSA is creating an attack vector for enemies to use.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Do the phone companies and internet companies get ordered to hand over our meta-data? Or are they volunteering the information of their own free will? The answer to this question will determine our plan of attack on fixing this situation. Do we need to punish the corporations for selling us out, or do we need to crucify our politicians for selling us out? We have limited resources, we can't effectively do both.
Um...what
The job of the NSA in broad terms is to collect data (whether that be from cellphone companies, ISPs, web companies or wherever else) and then feed that to analysts who will take that data, sift through it and pull out useful pieces of information.
The problem the NSA has right now is that they seem to want to collect ever greater amounts of data (with no effort made to target the data that is most likely to contain useful information) yet the number of analysts they have turning that data into information is nowhere near what it needs to be to handle that data.
They should stop trying to collect every piece of digital data in the known universe and instead go on a recruitment drive to hire A.Experts who can help the NSA figure out which bits of data are most likely to contain the useful information so they can target those specifically and B.Expert analysts who can help them to turn that data into useful information.
It was almost as if the USA was already imploding and just needed a nudge...
Authoritarians have weaknesses. And the USA is an authoritarian society. People living a culture are also limited in their ability to self-reflect; in addition, Americans live in a bubble already (it's so bad that it's pretty much a global impression of Americans. The stereotype is not unfounded. )
No leader realizes they are too authoritarian; many tricks to manipulate their character flaws works on societies as well. Maintaining control (aka "Order" or even a custom definition of "Peace") is of the up most importance to the authoritarian. Ultimately, it is their own insecurity that they can not handle which causes them to go to great lengths to compensate by attempting to control as much as they can. The psychology is not unknown. You can manipulate these types based upon their flaws. Add to their fear of insecurity etc; the more their core flaw is hit the greater the defensive mechanisms will be.
You can probably think of people who on their own little scale fit some of this. It's not unlike many psychological flaws where people show their flaws by their over compensation for them. Like a gay man in denial can be extremely anti-gay, having to try as hard as their doubt/fear -- the more fearful, the stronger the compensation. You can make them stand out by seeding doubts in their mind and they will respond with more defensive behaviors until they stand out from normal people as an extremist or even as somebody in self-denial. For a control freak, this isn't hard to do - if they are not already illustrating the traits clearly for people to pick up on... You just have to make them see how much is out of order and how much that is a threat to their feeling of security.
When you have a SOCIETY which is authoritarian and as a result their leaders are also (usually worse than the population) a lot of the same tactics work. A general may not start out with the flaws, they will develop them from their experience/job. These are mental conditions, not genetic diseases. Generals foster the well known stereotype of them being paranoid because their environment produces it, not to mention it also tends to filter out the type of people least susceptible by the process they are hired/created. Leaders have a high susceptibility as well; although, I would guess a statesman politician would be one of the least susceptible types of people... So it's more a function of the environment; of which culture plays a really big role.
This is why when you have an amendment for free peaceful assembly which is every bit as strongly worded as free speech, the society allows it to be trampled upon in the name of "order" far more than it does free speech, which has less impact on the insecurity weakness. (But it can push buttons so you use speech to decide who to spy on and monitor... and it's not so much the crazies actually shooting and bombing, it's the ones saying things that actually could change the culture towards more chaos.. )
Chaos, the ultimate threat... eventually, democracy is too chaotic and it has to be controlled or forbidden. If you've been paying attention, that has already been done.
No, I'm not an anarchist. I don't read their stuff; but I'm sure the articulate ones do a great job pointing these things out. You need to listen to the intelligent people saying things that are uncomfortable, that is where you'll find the truth - one person simply lacks perspective to grasp reality.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It's too common, perhaps even universal, a cognitive bias to describe it as insanity; but it's still unfortunate. One can only imagine the improvement if we put our resources where our desires actually suggest they should go, rather than where we feel that they need to be.
There are still several other top causes of death to tackle. Cancer (#2) is a good one, and it's only barely behind heart disease.
For comparison, 9/11 would have to happen once a month to crack the top 10 and weekly to hit the top 5.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The thing that puts us at risk is our own damned selves. We butt into everyone else's business, give billions in aid to other nations when we're already broke, and we warmonger. If we didn't do all that shit we wouldn't be running into problems.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The NSA let this random guy Snowden walk away with all of their secrets. Snowden isn't some genius mastermind; if he could do it, I'll bet there are other people who did it too. Only they didn't go public, they just sold the information to China or Russia or al Qaeda (assuming they weren't spies to begin with).
So it doesn't matter what Snowden announced to the world, because chances are the people we're most worried about already knew about it.
If the bloody National SECURITY Agency can't secure itself, we can't rely on it to secure anything else.
Their cavemen! Most "terrorists" are just mentally unstable children, but we need a multi-trillion dollar defense structure to deal with it? We've given up how many rights? How about just sending in some freakin social workers and stop pissing them off? Then the problem could go away and our taxes could be cut! Please find another political topic and way for defense contractors to collect profits, this is boring already... Thanks.