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NSA Spying Wins Another Rubber Stamp
schwit1 sends this report from the National Journal:
A federal court has again renewed an order allowing the National Security Agency to continue its bulk collection of Americans' phone records, a decision that comes more than a year after President Obama pledged to end the controversial program. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved this week a government request to keep the NSA's mass surveillance of U.S. phone metadata operating until June 1, coinciding with when the legal authority for the program is set to expire in Congress. The extension is the fifth of its kind since Obama said he would effectively end the Snowden-exposed program as it currently exists during a major policy speech in January 2014. Obama and senior administration officials have repeatedly insisted that they will not act alone to end the program without Congress.
Wasn't that Senator Obama?!?!?!
"If you like your plan, you can keep it."
Singing do-wa-didi-didi-de-da-di-uh-dum
And got stopped and frisked
- to block oil pipeline construction
- to import millions of new immigrants to compete with you for jobs
- to have the IRS harass his political opponents
- to spy on the press
- to send troops to Iraq
- to postpone nearly every legal deadline in Obamacare
- to approve the Comcast -Time Warner merger
- to impose new taxes on your internet service in the name of net neutrality
But when he's using the NSA to spy on you, he blames Congress.
Seriously though... now what?
I'm getting sick of people telling me I'm a "lazy, apathetic american" for letting this happen.
Right... like there's something I, or any of us, could've actually done to prevent any of this. Secret courts, laws that aren't actually laws, and judges that continue to pull sh!t like this?? Tell me, honestly... what do you REALLY think we can do? And if you do have a great idea, please let us know while it's still legal.
It's worth remember at this stage, that PRISM, NSA's bulk mass collection program is a list of company NAMES, not software products or databases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#mediaviewer/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg
So it is not a hack of Microsoft or Google, and it is not that 'MSN Messager' was decrypted, it lists COMPANIES, it is Microsoft not a product within Microsoft.
So you need to realize that these companies provide data feeds to the NSA for their customers, not limited to terrorists or suspicion, bulk data feeds to fill up Utah and the other 5 mega data centers they're building.
And it only covers the data feeds up to 2012 when Apple was added. After that there's been a massive increase in the surveillance, courtesy of Android.
All those permissions you have those messaging apps, your financial stuff, your taxi/ride-sharing app that tracks your every move, all that crapware installed on Android that gets all the rights it can and takes all the data it can.
It's far beyond the meta data on the telephone calls. That wouldn't even fill the tiniest corner of one of those data centers.
and the various governments (this is not about the US, its about the new trend, or rather the new-found ability in mankind to truly neutralize all privacy and secret communications) are all addicted to this drug.
they can't give it up. they have a monkey on their back.
the stingrays are the gateway drug; and it soon is not enough and you want more. you want ALL the wireless and wired datacomms traffic.
we should shift our war-on-drugs effort to the real drug that is invading everyone's lives, though due to no fault of their own.
and again, this is not about the US or its agencies. do you really believe your own government is not wanting or having the ability to do this, as well?
this is about mankind and one of his worst weaknesses.
we should make a 'teaching moment' from this and disallow ourselves this ability. just like we really can't handle the responsibility of nukes, as a people, we can't handle THIS much power, either.
no one should have it. and yes, I truly mean NO ONE. you give it to one, and the rest want it (both good guys and bad guys).
will we use this as a teaching moment and make some change for the better?
well, I'm over 50 and have no hope left for us, as a species. we have proven we can't handle this level of responsibility. I don't expect change, but I do expect people to at least SEE what's going on and to try to work around it without giving up, entirely.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Not in JAN 2014 it wasn't. Or did you think he was elected President late last year?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
More like
"if you don't like NSA spying, you can keep it"
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Not in JAN 2014 it wasn't. Or did you think he was elected President late last year?
Senator and Candidate Obama railed against "warrantless wiretapping" and pledged he'd end such activities were he elected.
Seven and eight years ago.
He's had six fucking years as President to do what he as a Senator and candidate said he'd do.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Obama seems to have fooled YOU for seven years running.
Our government overlords are increasingly enslaving us for the benefit of the ultra rich puppet masters. And we ask for this more and more: "keep us safe"! Well we will be safer and we can look forward government dispensaries of soma so the mandatory daily thought scannings won't feel offensive either.
More than a year's worth of efforts to reform the NSA stalled last year, as the Senate came two votes short of advancing the USA Freedom Act in November. The measure failed to overcome a filibuster by Republicans, many of whom warned any limitation imposed on the NSA could bolster terrorist groups like the Islamic State.
The Islamic State is not a threat is you or me. And never has been.
The peoples of the Middle East are more than capable of handling them (we sold them the weapons!) and in the Post's article
It has become the consensus view in Washington that the militants are poised to bulldoze through America’s Middle East allies, destabilize global oil supplies and attack the U.S. homeland.
is total bullshit. The IS WISHES they were that powerful.
All we the USA are doing is fucking things up more and are the recruiting arm for the IS.
Goddamn! Washington is stupid! And everyone who believes the ignorant TV and radio pundits who are making such a big deal out of this.
The wrongness of this spying is not an issue. The issue is that the people who are most harmed by it (middle class and below) don't care enough about it to apply enough force to stop it. The people who benefit the most from it (wealthy elite) will never bend to morality, they will only respond to political force.
We expressed annoyance when Snowden confirmed our suspicions, so the government did a song and dance in response. We didn't apply political force to the problem's resolution, so a few reassuring lies is all we got, and all we ever will get.
Why do these assholes even take an oath of office these days? The fourth amendment isn't ambiguous, and the failure of the courts to enforce it doesn't change what it says. The NSA is committing billions of felonies.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Is there are reason that we haven't heard about the Clinton's FBI's Carnivore (or descendants of carnivore) lately?
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad we're hearing about Obama's continuation of Bush's domestic spying. But just wondering why we aren't hearing about Obama continuing Clinton's domestic spying.
I'd say its more like "too big to expose".
Suppose a court opened this up to legal challenge. Then the court would reveal all the data feeds from Corporate America to the NSA. Those in turn would cause a massive collapse in US exports, and a massive political backlash inside the US.
And those countries that spied on their own citizens for the NSA? Who wants to hand their countries secrets to the USA? Only traitors and spies! They would face the backlash, and like Stasi, are in too deep and need to defend themselves by defending their actions.
So a judge will be told of the consequences of him making the wrong decision, and he's cannot do the right thing. He can only do the less damaging thing. It's too big a program to expose to public legal and political scrutiny. It's bigger than the democracy.
Jon Lovitz had nooo idea what he was starting..
Politicians are all card carrying members of the Pathological Liars Anonymous club...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAQlsS9diBs
Why don't we use this system to set up an open scam reporting feature like whitehouse.gov. I was told by Verizon that they don't even have a way to escalate numbers used by scammers that are trying to rip people off. The NSA could use their massive database to put an end to scammers and actually help the public and serve public interest.
... it's that there are not a WHOLE lot more Mannings and Snowdens.
Leak that shit both from the US and UK.
Secrets are a bitch when 1.) you get caught with one and 2.) it's no longer a secret.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
President Dronestrike is powerless against an agency that reports directly to him.
Relax, turbo. Nobody gives a shit about your phone calls / what you have to say. The NSA just doesn't care. Sorry :( I know that can be hard to hear.
1. It will be renewed, probably in such a way that makes it even worse. Mainly because not enough citizens care.
2. If by some chance #1 doesn't happen it will continue anyway because who's really going to stop them? It surely will not be this administration, nor I suspect any future one.
Senator and Candidate Obama railed against "warrantless wiretapping" and pledged he'd end such activities were he elected.
"Wiretapping" - Definition: Listening to the actual conversation being made, not looking up who called who and when, which has always been subject to judicial subpoenas without the need for a warrant. Hell, in that old 1995 movie "Clueless", Alicia Silverstone's character is shown helping her lawyer dad go through call sheets of who called who in a civil lawsuit. This sort of stuff always has been so common that it was put in a rom-com.
Here's the thing. Law is very much like coding. The specifics matter.
President Barack Hussein Obama
We get it. Dude has a funny sounding middle name. HE MUST NOT BE MURRICAN DERPADERP.
Rome is already in decline, our fall is inevitable
Is this why when I tell corporations that the nsa can listen to everything they have on us servers that they think "Hey, I don't care"
This is your argument?
Obama is not spying on people. What does he care. He would never use the government to hurt people. And since a Republican will never be elected again we have nothing to worry about.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
Here's the thing. Law is very much like coding. The specifics matter.
Right, which is why we have such broad interpretations of laws.
Wait...
WORD MEAN THINGS. Communism is the seizure of capital by labor, followed in theory by a dictatorship of the proletariat which serves to organizes labor and resources "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" and in practice by a dictatorship of kleptocrats who slowly run the place into the ground.
Now we can argue until the cows come home about who the first president to run the USA into the ground was (I vote Thomas Jefferson because he signed the Alien and Sedition acts) and whether Obama and Dubya are kleptocrats who are running the US into the ground but it is a very simple objective fact that neither of them is remotely communist: There has been no action what ever by either of them to seize the means of production, to reorganize the United States into a centrally planned economy, or to abolish class.
Christ, do you even see how utterly stupid it is to accuse George W. Bush, a member of one of the richest, most influential, east coast blue blood families in the entire United States, of being Communist? Just as stupid as it is to so accuse Franklin Roosevelt and for the exact same reasons.
Obama, and Dubya, are both a lot of things. They're both guity of a lot of bad things too, but being Communist is not one of them. As I said before, words mean things. Communists are economic-left authoritarians. The perjorative you're looking for to describe Obama and Bush is "Fascist" which are economic-right authoritarians. Even then they're hardly actual Hitler/Mussolini fascists, but unlike Karl's manifesto they do check off enough of the boxes on the well-known 14 point "is it a fascist" checklist to be worrying.
I don't like supporting a candidate who then proceeds to renege on virtually every
promise he made.
I know, they all do it. That doesn't excuse this current bs though.
Next election, I am voting Republican, and I have never ever done that before.
It is a measure of how deeply I am disgusted. I don't give a shit if Bozo The Clown
and Sarah Palin are on the ticket, I am voting for them.
I actually look forward to a white male WASP Republican in the White House. At least
I'll know from the outset I can't trust the fucker.
Sad to see the court continue it, but not unexpected. I would expect we'll continue to hear how at risk we are from (insert name of Islamic fanactical group here - ISIS currently) etc. by the intelligence establishment in a building crescendo to the renewal date (as a justification, even though it didn't help a whit with Boston or prior events) - cause here's the thing, IMHO, 95% of U.S. politicians are cowards and the cowardly view on this is the following: If I vote against renewing mass surveillance and then some attack happens (cause of all this ISIS stuff I keep hearing about), there goes my next re-election - standing up for privacy of the citizens I "represent" isn't worth it...
The issue is that the people who are most harmed by it (middle class and below) ...
Can you supply a link that shows the harm to this particular group?
Thanks.
The full spectrum of harm won't be apparent in a single day. A person with some intelligence who also has the ability to
extrapolate can fill in the blanks by looking at the history of other regimes in the past ( Nazi Germany, USSR, GDR, Argentina, are
a few examples ) and it's not difficult to see that the implications of this stuff are probably going to be much worse than even a
tinfoil hat user might guess.
Here are a couple of examples for you, all of which could easily happen with no requirement for new tech : in the year 2017, you discussed a little creative accounting for tax purposes with a friend, in the comfort of your own home. Later that same year you receive a letter from tax authorities
which makes it clear they are aware of your scheme and that you will be assessed various penalties.
In the year 2018 you drive home from work, late at night, exceeding the speed limit by a wide margin. The very next week your license is
revoked, along with your license plates. You see, a drone followed you that night when you were speeding, and the authorities have video of your
car AND video of you driving, courtesy of your in-car smartphone's camera which they activated remotely.
I could go on. But I have better things to do. If you are unable to grasp that life is going to become unpleasant thanks to pervasive surveillance,
frankly you are just plain stupid.
/
Obama should be ashamed. The whole damn country should be ashamed.
The NSA needs to be stopped. It may already be too late, but it is nenver too late to try.
Of course they do! Who would NOT want to have this godlike access? If not for pure (endless) entertainment value , Sorry :( I know this is hard for you to believe
Where is that Dave Schroeder shill that was telling us earlier this week that this doesn't exist. Here it is in black and white, Shill Schroeder.
Not even close since 9/11 (think of the children!) https://www.aclu.org/national-...
There is no source of who in government requested the extension. Stop the banter. Who did what?
If they didn't care then they wouldn't be spying.
You're about as smart as a box of hair.
I guess people will take their e-commerce business elsewhere. No point in supporting the playground bully. Other hubs will surface, hegemony won't last.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
For your future reference, do not trust any member of the political class, regardless of party.
Exactly correct. Every policy President Obama railed against as Senator Obama (though voted for in most cases!) he has continued and extended as President Obama.
And the response you will hear is that you are a racist.