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German Intelligence Agency Planning To Follow Big NSA Brother On Shoestring
An anonymous reader, tongue in cheek, writes"Facebook, Twitter, et al are tools for terrorists planning to do whatever terrorists do, Germany's BND has discovered. Inevitably, real-time monitoring of these sites is necessary and urgently required [original, in German], not least because that Snowden chap has shown we're running behind the U.S. and UK. And Spain. And Italy. In short, it's a national emergency — 300 million euros, presto please — and if we do this smartly, we could even get a sense of what the population outside Germany thinks. And while we're at it, why not throw in automated enemy face recognition too — and biometry and-and a program to deform the faces of our own spies' selfies, so the enemy cannot google them. Time to invest in national security startups."
German intelligence wants to know what people are thinking? It sounds like they are doing this for the security of the state, "Staatssicherheit".
Again.
... would result in technocratic tyranny where robots and automated identification run rampant as the clueless masses entertain themselves to death in a stupor after the hours of stress at work.
It's urgent to spend more money on collecting more data than we can analyze. The KGB won the spy war hands down, yet USSR lost the cold war hands down. That's how important spies are to national security.
...is that Germany is much closer to being a true and functioning democracy. I don't see how this would come through the Bundestag, the German parliament, without being at least watered down, viz. being quietly forced into starvation as soon as a left-leaning government comes into power.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
25 years too late, his wet dream coming true.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Facebook, Twitter, et al are tools for terrorists planning to do whatever terrorists do
Sounds eerily like the same thing that dictators have been saying for years when citizens organise themselves on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Heck, it was just two short years ago that we were hailing the ability for the common folk in Arab countries to organise themselves on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, outside the watchful eye of state agencies, and plot the often violent overthrow of an unpopular government.
Surely if organising violent protest action on social networks was good for the Arab Spring, it should be good for the European Spring
So... what has changed... have the roosters come home to roost!?
If you are going to make the claim that terrorism happens on facebook and twitter, how about showing posts that this happens, because I have a hard time believing that anyone but the most incompetent terrorists would do so, and we can catch incompetent terrorists without sacrificing civil liberties.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Snowden showed that all of the big European governments went along with the U.S. as it rolled out its secret total surveillance of electronic communications. Of course there are the really close co-operators (Britain, Australia and some others), but they all went along with it. Of course Europe had trains blowing up etc. to push them along.
From what has been shown, not a single big government didn't run with the U.S. down that path to where their govts can know everything about the general population - just like East Germany wanted.
This was one of the goals of Bin Laden, destroying the freedoms inherent in the west...he succeeded here. The sad thing is not a single government realized having a total surveillance state is incompatible with have a true Democracy (mid to longer term) where privacy and freedom are required. Europe has the best chance of turning over this garbage.
So is knowledge, so lets ban books. So are vocal cords and eyes...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... the rich and powerful elite behind todays governments and therefore also the secret services will learn hopefully soon enough, that their wealth and power is worth nothing, absolutely nothing if you face a large turnaround in society regarding civil rights and privacy rights. Good luck.
You seem to be under the impression the same laws apply to the rich elites as apply to the working class.