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Snowden Documents: CSE Tracks Millions of Downloads Daily
Advocatus Diaboli writes Canada's electronic spy agency sifts through millions of videos and documents downloaded online every day by people around the world, as part of a sweeping bid to find extremist plots and suspects, CBC News has learned. Details of the Communications Security Establishment project dubbed 'Levitation' are revealed in a document obtained by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and recently released to CBC News. Under Levitation, analysts with the electronic eavesdropping service can access information on about 10 to 15 million uploads and downloads of files from free websites each day, the document says.
... and they lied.
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Not in Harper's Canada.
How USA of them
Table-ized A.I.
... given the attack at Parliament in Ottawa.
How long until our favorite corporations the RIAA/MPAA try and subpoena the download records from the government on the grounds the government knows which IP addresses downloaded copywrong material and therefore should stop hiding the criminals?
You said:
Actually their target is further than that
...
To illustrate what I mean, let's look at what TFA says
Are they truly looking for "extremist plots and suspects"?
No
Then what they are looking for?
They are looking for potential targets that they deem "dangerous". No, not terrorists but those amongst the people who are NOT sheeples!
You see, those fascists (to put them in a milder term will be an injustice, they are fascists afterall) are not afraid of sheeples. In fact, they WANT all the people to become sheeples so that they can get absolute control over them
What the fascists are afraid, very afraid of, is those amongst us who steadfastly REFUSE to become a sheeple, who instead will use our own brain to think, rather than delegate the thinking to "somebody else", ie, the authority
That is what makes those fucking fascists antsy --- they can't have that, but current laws still do not allow them to pull out all the non-sheeples to the street and shoot them
So they do the next best ... to identify the non-sheeples so that, when it comes the day they can pull people out to the street and carry out summary execution, they would know who to shoot
That is ultimately WHAT they are doing today ... identifying us, closely monitoring us, categorizing us, ... and ultimately, know who they need to eliminate, and where to get those 'trouble makers'
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Dipshit. He turned over everything to journalists long ago. They're going through FSM only knows how many terrabytes of information and releasing stories as they put it together. Snowden isn't releasing anything anymore.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
They keep the shrinking number of interested voting citizens involved in the political process, but set them at each other's throats in a no-win, us versus them bickering match.
Since both sides are evil, and the contestants takes turns winning every few years, the ruling class stays in power as you pretend your side is somehow different and better.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I think you're overthinking it. Look at what the FBI does. They find some dumb disillusioned guy down on his luck, maybe an ex-con or something but nothing serious, and try to ram bomb making components down his throat until he acquiesces and follows the plan they give him to fill a truck full of fertilizer to blow up city hall. The guy makes the purchase and parks the fake bomb, and when he gets out of the truck he's arrested and sent to prison... not because he would have blown up a building, but because he was so stupid that he didn't know not to trust the guys trying to set him up by badgering the hell out of him until he gives in. Counter-terrorism task force adds a notch to their belt, the President has a talking point about another averted attack, and the poor schmuck who was effectively harmless already because of his stupidity gets to die in prison
Do they actually FIND anyone this way? No. How do you find terrorists? The old fashioned way... You monitor a known terrorist and see who he talks to. You tap his phone, read his mail, etc. You do it the old fashioned way. You also get a warrant...
Dear Sir,
I may have been thinking too much. In fact, you may even say that I am paranoid - but at the stage that we are in today, that the blanket snooping activities into almost everything that we do online and off, we do need to question why the authority's need to do it, rather than accept what they are telling us by default
Yes, they tell us they are 'looking for terrorists' but is that true?
I mean, if they are 'looking for terrorists' the obvious target for those 'terrorists' are those from a particular religion (that peaceful one, to boot)
But is the authority looking into that group only?
Far from that. They are snooping in on ALL OF US, on our email, on our surfing pattern, on the site we go to, on what we download, on our phone conversation, on everything everybody is doing
Then why are they doing it?
Surely the 'looking for terrorists' excuse ain't gonna cut it no more, there gotta be more than what they are telling us
Yes, I am paranoid, I admit it. But you can't blame me from being paranoid
I am from China, a country which is being ruled by some really despicable regime. At the point when I left China the entire society was in turmoil. People were being pulled out on to the street and beaten, sometimes killed, just because they were labeled as 'anti-revolutionary'
I have had that kind of experiences. Most of you do not. I know what the authority is capable of doing, and what they will do to maintain their control over us, the peons
The more I look at what's happening in the so-called "Western countries" the more it resembles that despicable regime that is controlling China
Yes, I am have been 'overthinking', as you put it, but I rather be paranoid and right and be well prepared (as well as knowing what preventive actions to take before the shit hits the fan), than be totally unprepared and suffered the consequences
But it's all up to you guys. What I am telling you is what I, and many millions of older generation of Chinese had gone through --- we do not trust the authority, we do not trust anyone but ourselves
If you guys insist that the authority is to be trusted, that they are doing what they are doing for 'the good of the people', then that's your right to do what ever you want to do
But when the shit hits the fan (which I fervently hope it will never come true) don't blame me for not forewarning you guys
It happened in China, it could happen, and I repeat, it could happen elsewhere, including the Western countries
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
And neither did the people who did the killing in China. The idea, inherited from Lenin, was to have a small vanguard of professional revolutionaries guarding the masses - in your terminology, "sheeples" - under absolute authority of the Party. Mao and Stalin then took this idea to its logical conclusion.
What I'm saying is that calling people "sheeples" is inherently anti-democratic. You can't trust sheeples, after all. Also, no society can survive unless the majority of its members stay put most of the time, which seems to be the going definition of "sheeple". And so you can at most let them play at ruling themselves when nothing's at stake - but as soon as there's trouble on the horizon, it's time for the shepherds to take control. Which they did in China, and are trying to do in the US. The results speak for themselves.
It's a fine example of how cultural memes perpetuate themselves, even when it'd be better they didn't. Much as you might hate the Chinese government, you still carry its - for a lack of better word - spirit with you. And there's no easy way to get rid of it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
See also, for an old German example: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/... ..This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ... To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measure"â(TM) that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. ..."
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
That said, every country is different, with different strengths and weaknesses in different situations. It is not clear how it all will play out in the USA. Like Howard Zinn wrote in 2004, on "The Optimism of Uncertainty":
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Sir,
I do agree with you that we do need hope, but we must *NOT* forget the fact that 'hoping' ain't gonna do us, or anybody else, any good, especially when what is happening now, from top down (well, the governments are *ON THE TOP* of the people, no matter which government, no matter which nation)
Nowadays governments treat their citizens with contemp
They suspect their citizens so much that they actually take steps to ensure that every single thing their own citizen does must be checked, categorized, and actions must be taken on whoever they suspect (for whatever reason)
Hope in itself is no longer sufficient to fight those fascist, my friend
We no longer live in the 1960's, Sir
We no longer live in a world where the government listens to the people
No man. We are living in the world where the governments DEMAND to be respected, or else
That's the reality all of us are living in, no matter if you live in Canada or China or Saudi Arabia or America or Great Britain, it's all the same --- you, a citizen, better be a sheeple, or we will mark you, we will follow you, we will watch your every single move
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Canadians keep telling us how morally and intellectually superior they are! So, this story can't be true!