If you actually read my post the only thing it says about Jews besides Netanyahu is that a lot of the American ones agree with me that's he's aggressive to the point of being untrustworthy. I suspect that if every Jew in America trusted Bibi's judgement on Israeli security 100% Obama would not have won the Jewish vote by 30 points twice, despite the fact that both times Bibi strongly supported the Republican.
You could extrapolate my "Israelis who think like this" to a statement about multiple Jews, because Israel is 80% Jews, and Bibi's support is even more Jewish, so the borderline genocidal maniacs I describe are probably 90-95% Jewish. But I respectfully submit that if you can name a country without borderline genocidal maniacs that's probably because the genocide happened yesterday and the maniacs haven't picked new victims yet.
Posts like yours are actually the reason I distrust Netanyahu so much. Rather then defend Netanyahu's record, his partisans prefer to assume any attack on him is an attack on every Jew who has ever lived. A post that implies most American Jews think Netanyahu is insane is considered code for "All Jews are insane like Netanyahu." You're trying to change the subject from whether Bibi is trustworthy to whether I am Anti-Semitic.
That's just not the kind of thing you do if you're defending someone who deserves to be defended.
I didn't mean to imply there weren't other, better reasons for funding the NSA. Most of the stuff they do is not only legal, it's necessary.
I just meant that the nature of DC agencies is such that they will put random shit that's not really relevant on their Powerpoint slides asking Congress for more money in the forlorn hope it will get them more money. So if the NSA helped some American company decades before Powerpoint was invented one would still expect "Industrial Espionage" to appear as a Powerpoint bullet justifying it's budget. In other words, just because the NSA claims to do industrial espionage that does not prove it does so as routinely as the Chinese do.
After this post somebody mentioned that the NSA had outed a bribe in one of those numerous competitions between Airbus and Boeing, which forced the government involved to re-start the bidding process. Boeing ended up winning. That would technically be industrial espionage, but it wouldn;t be reported in the context of this scandal because that would be pro-NSA.
It gets really complicated with this case because a lot of what sets governments off is not the mass-surveillence, it's actual spying. Merkel isn't justifying her opposition to the NSA solely by claiming a duty to protect German's privacy, she's unhappy her personal phone got tapped. Rousseff isn't setting up a national email system all Brazilians can use to avoid the NSA, she's setting up a secure email system so her cabinet can't be spied upon.
In general I'd prefer if the media would refer to spying on private individuals with a word like "snooping" so I can tell whether the article's about stuff the NSA is supposed to do or stuff it's doing under a quewstionable warrant, but that ain't happening. I don't think "mass surveillance" works. It's too fucking long for headlines.
The French are the last people on earth who can lecture anyone on protecting privacy. The first time France organized a protest like this Le Monde reported that the French government was worse then the US on the next god-damn day. Literally. Only July 3rd the French protested US PRISM, and on the 4th Le Monde reported they were worse.
The notion that some agency is above the law and secretly so is a worriesome reinforced breeding ground for psychopatic behaviour. The return is complete population control, culling strategies, predictive manipulative simulator, what if-analysis and total loss of individuality except for the grossly incompetent and adolescent behaviour outlet.
Captcha: finely
Apparently you haven't read anything on this issue.
The NSA is not claiming to be above the law. They have a legal warrant, signed by the appropriate Judge, for everything they do. The EFF is arguing the warrant is BS and FISA Court is an unconstitutional rubber-stamp. But it's not like the NSA is ignoring it's Constitutional duty to get a warrant.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that collecting data like this is a core function of government.
We want the government to have enough data on it's people to tell which ones are breaking the law, which means they need a lot of phone metadata. There are no courts that would say that phone metadata is so private it can't be used in investigations. There are plenty that say you shouldn't have a database with everyone's metadata in it just because some of people will turn out to be criminals, but collecting data like this is in many ways the entire reason we have governments.
The NSA program is technically signed into law. There's a warrant signed by the proper authority (the FISA Court).
It is fucking secret, which might be what you meant, but it is technically within the letter of US Law. Whether the FISA Court was supposed to grant that warrant is a totally different issue.
BTW, I actually suspect that the next set of leaks will reveal that a) the Swedes and Brits are the only ones who did not lie through their teeth to this committee, and b) that most of the European nations use NSA data a lot in tracking terrorists.
The word "sheeple" more than adequately describes the actions of citizens who do nothing.
America, look in the mirror and you will see the embodiment of the word "sheeple". Correcting the ills of your country will take action, not talk, nor worrying, nor hand-wringing, nor anything else that prevents you from getting off your collective asses and _doing_ something about what's been forced on you while you've been distracted by the myriad unimportant distractions you call living.
The first step is to stop using the word "sheeple."
So?
This is a democracy. This means the majority tends to get it's way. If you go around comparing the people to sheep the majority will not like your dumb ass, and will vote against you.
I suspect that's actually what you want. As a non-sheeple person you can construct elaborate castles in the sky with no risk of those castles becoming reality. You can then argue whenever anything goes wrong that it's because those ovine idiots in the majority didn't listen to your brilliance. If anything goes right you can argue that a) it hasn't gone right, and b) it would have been better if those morons only agreed with you. Since nobody ever tries the shit you propose there is no chance that it will ever be proven to be stupid.
We will never find out whether you are the IQ 105 semi-smart dork with no common sense or an IQ 150 super-genius with a deep grasp of policy because you have managed to manipulate it so that nobody will ever try your ideas. Which means that in your own mind you can remain the IQ 150 super-genius.
Your problem seems to be you don't understand how the US works.
The Tea Parties were never actually Libertarian. They were George Bush Conservatives who could not admit that in the months after Iraq went kablooie, the finance system collapsed, etc. Rand Paul is kinda-sorta Libertarian in the 2007 definition of fiscal conservative/social liberal. But all the other leading Tea Party pols use "libertarian" to mean "social conservative who really cares about fiscal conservatism."
Occupy failed because it was consensus based. It depended entirely on millions of people always agreeing on the proper course action, and always following through. That does not work in the long-term because millions of people mean millions of independent minds, and they will inevitably disagree at some point.
To influence policy you need an organization. That usually means a 501(c)4, with a President and a Board. It means a budget because without a budget you are totally dependent on the unemployed guy who really likes doing graphics staying unemployed. It means being useful to the stupid sons-of-bitches who currently hold power, because if you aren't they will ignore you and you will not be able to do anything about it. It means working within the parties because they are the only two organizations who have been able to assemble a winning coalition nation-wide in the past 150+ years, and idealistic dudes with great ideas stymied by the parties are a dime a dozen. The NRA ain't gonna start voting for O('_')O_Bush party just because you have one good idea, or make one good speech. That would make the GOP lose the next election, which would allow those mythical gun-grabbers to gran guns, and the NRA would cease to be politically relevant.
Always remember: Americans are small-c-conservatives, so you don't change things fast on them without controversy. Just look at ObamaCare, BTW. It's a lot less huge then the implementation of Canadian Medicare in the 60s, or the NHS in the UK in the 40s, or Thatcher's reforms in the 80s, yet it created more opposition then all those things combined because this is the US and we really fucking hate change.
You also need to understand that your opponents are not demonic-Fascists intent on stealing your freedom. The NSA doesn't collect your data because it seemed like the thing to do when they got high, they collect it because it's really useful for all kinds of things the government is supposed to do and Congress passed multiple laws saying they, specifically, were the ones who should do it. If you can find a way for the government to replace NSA data with something less objectionable they will work with you. You're probably not gonna convince them that not having this data is superior to having it, but if you aren't willing to sit at the table and talk about the possibilities with them you get pigeon-holed as Extremist-Crusader-Crazy-Eyes-Techno-Libertarian and you get nowhere. Pols will show every two years to remind you which party you hate more, but they will never try to change things to appease you because as far as they're concerned you're the guy who cannot be appeased.
The question I have is, if 'everyone' (almost) is doing it, when do us sheeple get to say 'no' and have it count for something?
I ask this question, and nothing seems to change. I vote for people I see as less persecuting, and the problems get worse. My fellow compatriots get angry, protest and demonstrate, try to keep the issue in the light, and we are largely ignored. Fellows that whistleblow are retaliated against, persecuted, and no positive action taken.
As long as you live in a different country then everyone else the two countries will try to get info on each-other, and the people trying to get that info will try to operate below the RADAR; which means that if they do something you think of as unethical you won't know it. In other words you shouldn't be voting for an ethical President of the US, PM of the UK, or whomever, you should be voting for candidates who want to abolish the US/UK/whomever even if they are incredibly unethical.
Moreover I'm not sure you are considering all of your interests. There is no magical way for the NSA to tell your phone belongs to someone who isn't about to blow up a subway in your home country, therefore if your home country wants phone-call data on who the person who just blew up the subway the NSA needs your personal record. This means an ethical candidate who promises to make sure nobody can collect this data is not going to be able to deliver.
The ethical pol's got to think these things through. He might be able to convince the US to put the data in the hands of some organization you trust more then the NSA. He might be able to get a bit more openness in the process. He might be able to pass a law saying NSA data can't be used, but we both know that law will not actually work. The police need the data to prevent follow-up attacks and investigate the initial attack, the NSA is willing to hand over the data; and odds are your ethical politician would prefer looking the other way to protecting the suicide bombers privacy rights.
In other words what you're trying to do is analogous to demanding your military operate without ranks. In theory you can do that (and several Communist countries tried), in practice that doesn't work. In this case the government needs to be able to learn things about bad people, which means it needs a database including everyone, which means your demands for maximalist privacy rights basically means politicians have a free way to pander to you without doing anything.
Yeah, but if you're an officer of a foreign government you don't get the death penalty. You get sent home with a really testy note. Which means the NSA guys are fine, can't be executed, and since they're already home all that can happen is the testy note bit. The people who'd get shot would be the humans who told the NSA info, which is nobody because the NSA doesn't spy by asking people questions (Human Intelligence or HumInt), it spies by listening in to people's electronic conversations (Signals Intelligence or SigInt).
This officer of a foreign government thing is really important. In the US Civil War out-of-uniform scouts would be hanged for spying. This didn't stop anyone from sending out such scouts, but it did mean they all kept an element of their official uniform near-to-hand so that if they got caught they could surrender and be Prisoners of War. And if you're a 10-man Confederate patrol, and only three of you are put on butternut hats in time, seven of your buddies hang.
Don't worry about Iraq War criticism. Everybody criticized that war, including Obama. Moreover I doubt they have mechanisms to a) figure out you criticized the war and b) do anything to you.
The only case I can think of where the US government had personal data on a large group of people analogous to Iraq War critics, and actually managed to get it's act together enough to use it on them was Japanese Internment. And in practical terms being interned was probably a better alternative then being left at the mercy of the residents of California. There probably would have been lynchings, state laws against the Japanese, pogrom-style riots, etc. That doesn't come close to justifying the Internship policy morally, but it does illustrate that you should not worry about the Feds using your personal data to hurt you.
There is no treaty that says governments give up the sovereign right to spy on each-other. AFAIK there are no national statutes banning spying on governmental authorities by other governments. Spying on governments is a right governments have, kinda like Bolivia has the right to have a Navy despite the fact it hasn't had a coastline since 1883. Which means that Germany probably does not have a law that could be used against the NSA.
OTOH it does have strong privacy laws, and those could possibly be used against the NSA because there's no inherent sovereign right to spy on random chick's phone calls. I doubt they will use those laws -- the French and Brits would probably insist the sovereign right to spy includes the right to spy on anyone, because historically that's what both countries have done -- but they could conceivably make an anti-NSA case in their courts for ordinary people. OTOH they cannot make a case on behalf of the Chancellor.
Spying was never legal. This is the main mistake you make in your assertion. Only your own spies had some legal cover in your own country. But in every other country, your spies are criminals.
NSA spies can't be charged under any countries laws. They are officers of their country's government, engaged in actions against other countries governments. Those other countries new the US had an NSA when they recognized us, and they knew it was engaged in SigInt.
If they were using some German national to give them info on Merkel that guy could be charged, but actual officers of a sovereign government recognized by every government, spying on members of that government, are perfectly within their rights.
There's a reason that within the entire history of the CIA only one CIA agent has ever been convicted of anything, despite the CIA engaging in escapades a lot more escapadish then sitting at a computer reading files.
Now the Euros might charge some NSA guys for massive data surveillance on people who have nothing to do with any governments, but they ain't gonna do it for merely spying on the Chancellor of Germany.
How could you have a relationship with Israel, at any level, without spying? The Israelis have an explicit policy of not telling anyone which hair-raising schemes they are involved in in the Middle East, so you have no way of knowing whether their latest proposal to you is an honest proposal and not a Byzantine Scheme against some Lebanese terrorist without spies.
How can the Baltic states, allied with the West, trust they are truly protected from Russia without spies? So we don't like Putin. Hitler hated Stalin so much that the first person gassed was Stalin's son, and Hitler still traded them to Russia.
How can the US know that France isn't about to turn over the latest F-35 data to Russia in exchange for Renault getting a contract without spies?
How can you arrange a relationship with Finland without spies? They were forced (due to geography) to spend the entire Cold War pretending to be Soviet Allies. Why couldn't Putin bully them into giving up those F-35 specs?
To an extent I get how you can argue the Danes, Norwegians, etc. have earned the right not to be spied on. But the world is not tiny little Scandinavian monarchies which refuse to do anything anywhere, and therefore have not done anything wrong to anyone since the 19th century. It's everyone. And of the everyone's I've mentioned, the only country I actually think would be wrong to betray it's US Allies in the way I mentioned is probably France. It's not like the Finns asked to live right next door to 150 million people who think a political leader isn't doing his job if you can't use his name to scare the children.
Apparently you have read a lot more dystopian sci-fi then US history.
In the US it's typically low-level groups several tiers below the NSA that do oppressing. In Michigan recently we has something called a "Grosse Pointe System," where real estate agents with no legal powers would keep blacks/Jews/Italians/etc. out of Grosse Pointe simply by utilizing their free speech rights to lie. "I'm sortry Mr. Cohen, there simply are no homes in Grosse Pointe that suit your needs, let's try the West Side." Slavery was enforced by US citizens with no governmental power over Americans who were not allowed to be US Citizens on the technicality they were black. The Fugitive Slave Sct was Federal Law, but it was enforced by Sheriff's in the tier below the tier below the Feds. Japanese internment was Federal, but if it hadn't happened the state or California would have Done Something, and in that era States Doing Something about non-white minorities generally involved a lot of ignoring genocide on the legal basis that nobody credible (ie: white) would testify.
Even in Europe the central state has lost a lot of power in the past few decades. Some of it has gone to the EU, which (like the US Federal government), probably won't engage in massive campaigns of repression because it's Democrat and it's unlikely Swedes and Greeks will ever Democratically agree on who should be oppressed. Other elements have simply faded away. During WW2, for example, most European states had huge militaries containing a full 10% of the population. Since they were almost all-male, that works out to 20% of the men, and probably more like 50% of the men who were physically capable of fighting. Very few European countries could do that today, largely because they don't have the tax-base and they don't have authorization from the EU to borrow money.
I, for one, hope that the US is spying on Israel and that the information gathered has prevented them from pulling us into a war with Iran.
Interesting point, but don't you think there are ways to achieve that without spying on Israel? Intelligence on Iran, added to shared knowledge with Israel, should be enough. Really, one could figure out that it would be silly to go to war with Iran, based on publicly available information alone.
Depends on how much you trust Netanyahu.
I don't trust him one bit. I suspect that if the IDF told him they could save one Jew by leveling a building where 100 innocent gentiles live the only reason he'd hesitate is PR (note that the US is actually better than this, the point of using drones is you can wait until the one bad guy in the building is in the car with his innocent, but not-that-innocent family members and only kill three or four instead of 100). I further suspect that he believes Israel was more secure in the 60s, when it didn't have an official US Alliance, and therefore did not have to tow the American line on anything.
I can't tell you whether I'm right about Netanyahu. I can tell you that the Israelis who will admit to thinking always vote for him; and moreover much of America, including a much larger proportion of American Jews then Bibi would like, share my suspicions. The only way to reduce those suspicions, and maintain a relationship of any sort with Israel is for the NSA top spy on every damn thing Netanyahu does.
Given how the NSA has been caught passing info to US companies I think we can say that the US and China are in the same league. We know we only see the tip of the US industrial espionage iceberg and I postulate it's because they're better at it than the Chinese. I don't actually care which one is ahead. It's a light-hearted comment about pots and kettles.
I've seen this allegation like fourty times, and nobody has actually substantiated it. They have claimed that the NSA has vague claims to have done industrial espionage in Snowden's docs. But the docs don;t explain what the NSA means when they say that. Everyone assumes it's that Apple gets detailed specs on every Samsung prototype the way Chinese defense contractors get the schematics for US warplanes, but you don't do that kind of shit without being caught. Which is why everyone knows that France and China do it, despite the fact neither has a Snowden.
I suspect that the NSA is actually blowing smoke up Congress' ass. They intercepted a communication that somebody found oil in Saudi Arabia back in the 40s, and sent it to Shell, and they've been justifying their budget with the intelligence committee on the basis of "Industrial Espionage" every year since then.
But historically the French have been the most enthusiastic industrial spies because it's pretty hard to figure out where major French Companies (ie: the "National Champions") start and the state ends. But the French are doing ok in economic terms. The country doing the best economically over the past decade (the Chinese) engage in industrial espionage on such a massive scale that most businesses won't let you take your normal employee laptop to China. They figure someone will sneak into your hotel room and install spyware, so they better not use the machine their network trusts.
In other words industrial espionage seems a lot like taxes. Businesses bitch about both, but they still do more business in spy and tax-happy areas then outside of them.
This is America. Voices of reason are not allowed. Everything is either a) the only reason the country will make it through the next week, or b) the thing that will kill everyone within the next week. And nobody agrees on how to tell whether something is a) or b). That's why our news media only reports on one story at a time, while giving it literal 24-7 coverage on three national cable networks.
, one would expect ObamaCare's poll numbers to be dropping. They aren't.
This is a fascinating point. His approval rating is actually increasing. Maybe most people aren't aware of how bad the situation i yet.
My best guess on Obama's number is pretty simple: People don't actually care about ObamaCare that much. It's a change to health insurance, which worries them, and Republicans they trust just enough to give 48% of their votes have been bitching about it for years, but it hasn't actually hurt them (or anyone they know) yet.
OTOH those silly Republicans just shutdown the government to stop it, which did hurt them. According Matty Yglesias a lot of people he met blamed the websites failure on the shutdown, which isn't true but makes sense in a weird sort of way. The GOP shutdown the government on pretty much the exact day the website failed to launch claiming that the program the website represents was the reason they were shutting the government down. I can see how a reasonable person, paying a normal amount of attention to politics, would reach that conclusion.
If this website, or a workaround, doesn't work soon Obama's gonna lose in the polls. Probably not much. Dems will mostly blame the failure of the website on a GOP refusal to support the law, in this case a) by forcing the national exchange to exist by refusing to set up the state-level exchanges they were supposed to set up, and b) by funding a national-website that's supposed to serve 15 million customers in tqo months in an ultra-secure way with $100-$300 million a year. But he'll start to lose even the most fanatical if he can't report on major progress come Nov. 1.
I suspect he'll have something to report. As I mentioned there are multiple state-level exchanges already working. Some of them are for pretty big states like Cali. So in theory all this ZIents guy has to do is get permission to use Cali's software on the hardware he's already got, and then get it configured. I doubt he can pull that shit off in 5 weeks, but I also doubt it will take three months.
1) They have lots of servers, presumably enough for the load. What they don't have is software. California has software that's working. I don't know how easy it will be to port Cali's exchange to the Feds, but I do know this is a lot easier then the media are making it out to be. I will be surprised if they make their November date, but I won't be surprised at they get it done pretty close to that.
2) The legal argument is BS.
Even if it wasn't, how long do you think Bobby Jindall will remain Governor of Louisiana if half of Louisiana knows the only reason they aren't getting cheap health insurance is that Bobby didn't pass a law? He's up for re-election next November.
You do realize your contradictions contradict themselves? If you don't have to buy until you get sick then young people aren't forced to buy either. What's really going on is there's a tax fine if you don't buy, so both you and your young people can choose between being uninsured (and paying the fine), or being insured.
If your first two points were actually valid, as opposed to conservatives talking themselves into a lather, one would expect ObamaCare's poll numbers to be dropping. They aren't.
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Name a single intelligence officer executed by the country he's spying on during peacetime.
For convicted there is a guy, but he wasn't convicted of spying, he was convicted of kidnapping.
If you actually read my post the only thing it says about Jews besides Netanyahu is that a lot of the American ones agree with me that's he's aggressive to the point of being untrustworthy. I suspect that if every Jew in America trusted Bibi's judgement on Israeli security 100% Obama would not have won the Jewish vote by 30 points twice, despite the fact that both times Bibi strongly supported the Republican.
You could extrapolate my "Israelis who think like this" to a statement about multiple Jews, because Israel is 80% Jews, and Bibi's support is even more Jewish, so the borderline genocidal maniacs I describe are probably 90-95% Jewish. But I respectfully submit that if you can name a country without borderline genocidal maniacs that's probably because the genocide happened yesterday and the maniacs haven't picked new victims yet.
Posts like yours are actually the reason I distrust Netanyahu so much. Rather then defend Netanyahu's record, his partisans prefer to assume any attack on him is an attack on every Jew who has ever lived. A post that implies most American Jews think Netanyahu is insane is considered code for "All Jews are insane like Netanyahu." You're trying to change the subject from whether Bibi is trustworthy to whether I am Anti-Semitic.
That's just not the kind of thing you do if you're defending someone who deserves to be defended.
I didn't mean to imply there weren't other, better reasons for funding the NSA. Most of the stuff they do is not only legal, it's necessary.
I just meant that the nature of DC agencies is such that they will put random shit that's not really relevant on their Powerpoint slides asking Congress for more money in the forlorn hope it will get them more money. So if the NSA helped some American company decades before Powerpoint was invented one would still expect "Industrial Espionage" to appear as a Powerpoint bullet justifying it's budget. In other words, just because the NSA claims to do industrial espionage that does not prove it does so as routinely as the Chinese do.
After this post somebody mentioned that the NSA had outed a bribe in one of those numerous competitions between Airbus and Boeing, which forced the government involved to re-start the bidding process. Boeing ended up winning. That would technically be industrial espionage, but it wouldn;t be reported in the context of this scandal because that would be pro-NSA.
It gets really complicated with this case because a lot of what sets governments off is not the mass-surveillence, it's actual spying. Merkel isn't justifying her opposition to the NSA solely by claiming a duty to protect German's privacy, she's unhappy her personal phone got tapped. Rousseff isn't setting up a national email system all Brazilians can use to avoid the NSA, she's setting up a secure email system so her cabinet can't be spied upon.
In general I'd prefer if the media would refer to spying on private individuals with a word like "snooping" so I can tell whether the article's about stuff the NSA is supposed to do or stuff it's doing under a quewstionable warrant, but that ain't happening. I don't think "mass surveillance" works. It's too fucking long for headlines.
Of course they're ignoring the French protest.
The French are the last people on earth who can lecture anyone on protecting privacy. The first time France organized a protest like this Le Monde reported that the French government was worse then the US on the next god-damn day. Literally. Only July 3rd the French protested US PRISM, and on the 4th Le Monde reported they were worse.
Here's a couple links because the October bitch-session has overwhelmed the July bitch-session in Google:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-lindorff/50398/public-support-grows-for-snowden-in-europe-germany-and-france-should-offer-nsa-whistleblower-asylum
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23178284
The notion that some agency is above the law and secretly so is a worriesome reinforced breeding ground for psychopatic behaviour.
The return is complete population control, culling strategies, predictive manipulative simulator, what if-analysis and total loss of individuality except for the grossly incompetent and adolescent behaviour outlet.
Captcha: finely
Apparently you haven't read anything on this issue.
The NSA is not claiming to be above the law. They have a legal warrant, signed by the appropriate Judge, for everything they do. The EFF is arguing the warrant is BS and FISA Court is an unconstitutional rubber-stamp. But it's not like the NSA is ignoring it's Constitutional duty to get a warrant.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that collecting data like this is a core function of government.
We want the government to have enough data on it's people to tell which ones are breaking the law, which means they need a lot of phone metadata. There are no courts that would say that phone metadata is so private it can't be used in investigations. There are plenty that say you shouldn't have a database with everyone's metadata in it just because some of people will turn out to be criminals, but collecting data like this is in many ways the entire reason we have governments.
The NSA program is technically signed into law. There's a warrant signed by the proper authority (the FISA Court).
It is fucking secret, which might be what you meant, but it is technically within the letter of US Law. Whether the FISA Court was supposed to grant that warrant is a totally different issue.
BTW, I actually suspect that the next set of leaks will reveal that a) the Swedes and Brits are the only ones who did not lie through their teeth to this committee, and b) that most of the European nations use NSA data a lot in tracking terrorists.
So if you're American you like the NSA because it does it's best to not spy on Americans. If you're not you hate it.
Do I have that right?
The word "sheeple" more than adequately describes the actions of citizens who do nothing.
America, look in the mirror and you will see the embodiment of the word "sheeple". Correcting the ills of your country will take action, not talk, nor worrying, nor hand-wringing, nor anything else that prevents you from getting off your collective asses and _doing_ something about what's been forced on you while you've been distracted by the myriad unimportant distractions you call living.
The first step is to stop using the word "sheeple."
So?
This is a democracy. This means the majority tends to get it's way. If you go around comparing the people to sheep the majority will not like your dumb ass, and will vote against you.
I suspect that's actually what you want. As a non-sheeple person you can construct elaborate castles in the sky with no risk of those castles becoming reality. You can then argue whenever anything goes wrong that it's because those ovine idiots in the majority didn't listen to your brilliance. If anything goes right you can argue that a) it hasn't gone right, and b) it would have been better if those morons only agreed with you. Since nobody ever tries the shit you propose there is no chance that it will ever be proven to be stupid.
We will never find out whether you are the IQ 105 semi-smart dork with no common sense or an IQ 150 super-genius with a deep grasp of policy because you have managed to manipulate it so that nobody will ever try your ideas. Which means that in your own mind you can remain the IQ 150 super-genius.
Your problem seems to be you don't understand how the US works.
The Tea Parties were never actually Libertarian. They were George Bush Conservatives who could not admit that in the months after Iraq went kablooie, the finance system collapsed, etc. Rand Paul is kinda-sorta Libertarian in the 2007 definition of fiscal conservative/social liberal. But all the other leading Tea Party pols use "libertarian" to mean "social conservative who really cares about fiscal conservatism."
Occupy failed because it was consensus based. It depended entirely on millions of people always agreeing on the proper course action, and always following through. That does not work in the long-term because millions of people mean millions of independent minds, and they will inevitably disagree at some point.
To influence policy you need an organization. That usually means a 501(c)4, with a President and a Board. It means a budget because without a budget you are totally dependent on the unemployed guy who really likes doing graphics staying unemployed. It means being useful to the stupid sons-of-bitches who currently hold power, because if you aren't they will ignore you and you will not be able to do anything about it. It means working within the parties because they are the only two organizations who have been able to assemble a winning coalition nation-wide in the past 150+ years, and idealistic dudes with great ideas stymied by the parties are a dime a dozen. The NRA ain't gonna start voting for O('_')O_Bush party just because you have one good idea, or make one good speech. That would make the GOP lose the next election, which would allow those mythical gun-grabbers to gran guns, and the NRA would cease to be politically relevant.
Always remember: Americans are small-c-conservatives, so you don't change things fast on them without controversy. Just look at ObamaCare, BTW. It's a lot less huge then the implementation of Canadian Medicare in the 60s, or the NHS in the UK in the 40s, or Thatcher's reforms in the 80s, yet it created more opposition then all those things combined because this is the US and we really fucking hate change.
You also need to understand that your opponents are not demonic-Fascists intent on stealing your freedom. The NSA doesn't collect your data because it seemed like the thing to do when they got high, they collect it because it's really useful for all kinds of things the government is supposed to do and Congress passed multiple laws saying they, specifically, were the ones who should do it. If you can find a way for the government to replace NSA data with something less objectionable they will work with you. You're probably not gonna convince them that not having this data is superior to having it, but if you aren't willing to sit at the table and talk about the possibilities with them you get pigeon-holed as Extremist-Crusader-Crazy-Eyes-Techno-Libertarian and you get nowhere. Pols will show every two years to remind you which party you hate more, but they will never try to change things to appease you because as far as they're concerned you're the guy who cannot be appeased.
The question I have is, if 'everyone' (almost) is doing it, when do us sheeple get to say 'no' and have it count for something?
I ask this question, and nothing seems to change. I vote for people I see as less persecuting, and the problems get worse. My fellow compatriots get angry, protest and demonstrate, try to keep the issue in the light, and we are largely ignored. Fellows that whistleblow are retaliated against, persecuted, and no positive action taken.
As long as you live in a different country then everyone else the two countries will try to get info on each-other, and the people trying to get that info will try to operate below the RADAR; which means that if they do something you think of as unethical you won't know it. In other words you shouldn't be voting for an ethical President of the US, PM of the UK, or whomever, you should be voting for candidates who want to abolish the US/UK/whomever even if they are incredibly unethical.
Moreover I'm not sure you are considering all of your interests. There is no magical way for the NSA to tell your phone belongs to someone who isn't about to blow up a subway in your home country, therefore if your home country wants phone-call data on who the person who just blew up the subway the NSA needs your personal record. This means an ethical candidate who promises to make sure nobody can collect this data is not going to be able to deliver.
The ethical pol's got to think these things through. He might be able to convince the US to put the data in the hands of some organization you trust more then the NSA. He might be able to get a bit more openness in the process. He might be able to pass a law saying NSA data can't be used, but we both know that law will not actually work. The police need the data to prevent follow-up attacks and investigate the initial attack, the NSA is willing to hand over the data; and odds are your ethical politician would prefer looking the other way to protecting the suicide bombers privacy rights.
In other words what you're trying to do is analogous to demanding your military operate without ranks. In theory you can do that (and several Communist countries tried), in practice that doesn't work. In this case the government needs to be able to learn things about bad people, which means it needs a database including everyone, which means your demands for maximalist privacy rights basically means politicians have a free way to pander to you without doing anything.
Yeah, but if you're an officer of a foreign government you don't get the death penalty. You get sent home with a really testy note. Which means the NSA guys are fine, can't be executed, and since they're already home all that can happen is the testy note bit. The people who'd get shot would be the humans who told the NSA info, which is nobody because the NSA doesn't spy by asking people questions (Human Intelligence or HumInt), it spies by listening in to people's electronic conversations (Signals Intelligence or SigInt).
This officer of a foreign government thing is really important. In the US Civil War out-of-uniform scouts would be hanged for spying. This didn't stop anyone from sending out such scouts, but it did mean they all kept an element of their official uniform near-to-hand so that if they got caught they could surrender and be Prisoners of War. And if you're a 10-man Confederate patrol, and only three of you are put on butternut hats in time, seven of your buddies hang.
Don't worry about Iraq War criticism. Everybody criticized that war, including Obama. Moreover I doubt they have mechanisms to a) figure out you criticized the war and b) do anything to you.
The only case I can think of where the US government had personal data on a large group of people analogous to Iraq War critics, and actually managed to get it's act together enough to use it on them was Japanese Internment. And in practical terms being interned was probably a better alternative then being left at the mercy of the residents of California. There probably would have been lynchings, state laws against the Japanese, pogrom-style riots, etc. That doesn't come close to justifying the Internship policy morally, but it does illustrate that you should not worry about the Feds using your personal data to hurt you.
There's a definite legal distinction here.
There is no treaty that says governments give up the sovereign right to spy on each-other. AFAIK there are no national statutes banning spying on governmental authorities by other governments. Spying on governments is a right governments have, kinda like Bolivia has the right to have a Navy despite the fact it hasn't had a coastline since 1883. Which means that Germany probably does not have a law that could be used against the NSA.
OTOH it does have strong privacy laws, and those could possibly be used against the NSA because there's no inherent sovereign right to spy on random chick's phone calls. I doubt they will use those laws -- the French and Brits would probably insist the sovereign right to spy includes the right to spy on anyone, because historically that's what both countries have done -- but they could conceivably make an anti-NSA case in their courts for ordinary people. OTOH they cannot make a case on behalf of the Chancellor.
Spying was never legal. This is the main mistake you make in your assertion. Only your own spies had some legal cover in your own country. But in every other country, your spies are criminals.
NSA spies can't be charged under any countries laws. They are officers of their country's government, engaged in actions against other countries governments. Those other countries new the US had an NSA when they recognized us, and they knew it was engaged in SigInt.
If they were using some German national to give them info on Merkel that guy could be charged, but actual officers of a sovereign government recognized by every government, spying on members of that government, are perfectly within their rights.
There's a reason that within the entire history of the CIA only one CIA agent has ever been convicted of anything, despite the CIA engaging in escapades a lot more escapadish then sitting at a computer reading files.
Now the Euros might charge some NSA guys for massive data surveillance on people who have nothing to do with any governments, but they ain't gonna do it for merely spying on the Chancellor of Germany.
People are incredibly naive.
How could you have a relationship with Israel, at any level, without spying? The Israelis have an explicit policy of not telling anyone which hair-raising schemes they are involved in in the Middle East, so you have no way of knowing whether their latest proposal to you is an honest proposal and not a Byzantine Scheme against some Lebanese terrorist without spies.
How can the Baltic states, allied with the West, trust they are truly protected from Russia without spies? So we don't like Putin. Hitler hated Stalin so much that the first person gassed was Stalin's son, and Hitler still traded them to Russia.
How can the US know that France isn't about to turn over the latest F-35 data to Russia in exchange for Renault getting a contract without spies?
How can you arrange a relationship with Finland without spies? They were forced (due to geography) to spend the entire Cold War pretending to be Soviet Allies. Why couldn't Putin bully them into giving up those F-35 specs?
To an extent I get how you can argue the Danes, Norwegians, etc. have earned the right not to be spied on. But the world is not tiny little Scandinavian monarchies which refuse to do anything anywhere, and therefore have not done anything wrong to anyone since the 19th century. It's everyone. And of the everyone's I've mentioned, the only country I actually think would be wrong to betray it's US Allies in the way I mentioned is probably France. It's not like the Finns asked to live right next door to 150 million people who think a political leader isn't doing his job if you can't use his name to scare the children.
Apparently you have read a lot more dystopian sci-fi then US history.
In the US it's typically low-level groups several tiers below the NSA that do oppressing. In Michigan recently we has something called a "Grosse Pointe System," where real estate agents with no legal powers would keep blacks/Jews/Italians/etc. out of Grosse Pointe simply by utilizing their free speech rights to lie. "I'm sortry Mr. Cohen, there simply are no homes in Grosse Pointe that suit your needs, let's try the West Side." Slavery was enforced by US citizens with no governmental power over Americans who were not allowed to be US Citizens on the technicality they were black. The Fugitive Slave Sct was Federal Law, but it was enforced by Sheriff's in the tier below the tier below the Feds. Japanese internment was Federal, but if it hadn't happened the state or California would have Done Something, and in that era States Doing Something about non-white minorities generally involved a lot of ignoring genocide on the legal basis that nobody credible (ie: white) would testify.
Even in Europe the central state has lost a lot of power in the past few decades. Some of it has gone to the EU, which (like the US Federal government), probably won't engage in massive campaigns of repression because it's Democrat and it's unlikely Swedes and Greeks will ever Democratically agree on who should be oppressed. Other elements have simply faded away. During WW2, for example, most European states had huge militaries containing a full 10% of the population. Since they were almost all-male, that works out to 20% of the men, and probably more like 50% of the men who were physically capable of fighting. Very few European countries could do that today, largely because they don't have the tax-base and they don't have authorization from the EU to borrow money.
I, for one, hope that the US is spying on Israel and that the information gathered has prevented them from pulling us into a war with Iran.
Interesting point, but don't you think there are ways to achieve that without spying on Israel? Intelligence on Iran, added to shared knowledge with Israel, should be enough. Really, one could figure out that it would be silly to go to war with Iran, based on publicly available information alone.
Depends on how much you trust Netanyahu.
I don't trust him one bit. I suspect that if the IDF told him they could save one Jew by leveling a building where 100 innocent gentiles live the only reason he'd hesitate is PR (note that the US is actually better than this, the point of using drones is you can wait until the one bad guy in the building is in the car with his innocent, but not-that-innocent family members and only kill three or four instead of 100). I further suspect that he believes Israel was more secure in the 60s, when it didn't have an official US Alliance, and therefore did not have to tow the American line on anything.
I can't tell you whether I'm right about Netanyahu. I can tell you that the Israelis who will admit to thinking always vote for him; and moreover much of America, including a much larger proportion of American Jews then Bibi would like, share my suspicions. The only way to reduce those suspicions, and maintain a relationship of any sort with Israel is for the NSA top spy on every damn thing Netanyahu does.
Given how the NSA has been caught passing info to US companies I think we can say that the US and China are in the same league. We know we only see the tip of the US industrial espionage iceberg and I postulate it's because they're better at it than the Chinese. I don't actually care which one is ahead. It's a light-hearted comment about pots and kettles.
I've seen this allegation like fourty times, and nobody has actually substantiated it. They have claimed that the NSA has vague claims to have done industrial espionage in Snowden's docs. But the docs don;t explain what the NSA means when they say that. Everyone assumes it's that Apple gets detailed specs on every Samsung prototype the way Chinese defense contractors get the schematics for US warplanes, but you don't do that kind of shit without being caught. Which is why everyone knows that France and China do it, despite the fact neither has a Snowden.
I suspect that the NSA is actually blowing smoke up Congress' ass. They intercepted a communication that somebody found oil in Saudi Arabia back in the 40s, and sent it to Shell, and they've been justifying their budget with the intelligence committee on the basis of "Industrial Espionage" every year since then.
That makes intuitive sense.
But historically the French have been the most enthusiastic industrial spies because it's pretty hard to figure out where major French Companies (ie: the "National Champions") start and the state ends. But the French are doing ok in economic terms. The country doing the best economically over the past decade (the Chinese) engage in industrial espionage on such a massive scale that most businesses won't let you take your normal employee laptop to China. They figure someone will sneak into your hotel room and install spyware, so they better not use the machine their network trusts.
In other words industrial espionage seems a lot like taxes. Businesses bitch about both, but they still do more business in spy and tax-happy areas then outside of them.
Shut up!
This is America. Voices of reason are not allowed. Everything is either a) the only reason the country will make it through the next week, or b) the thing that will kill everyone within the next week. And nobody agrees on how to tell whether something is a) or b). That's why our news media only reports on one story at a time, while giving it literal 24-7 coverage on three national cable networks.
, one would expect ObamaCare's poll numbers to be dropping. They aren't.
This is a fascinating point. His approval rating is actually increasing. Maybe most people aren't aware of how bad the situation i yet.
My best guess on Obama's number is pretty simple:
People don't actually care about ObamaCare that much. It's a change to health insurance, which worries them, and Republicans they trust just enough to give 48% of their votes have been bitching about it for years, but it hasn't actually hurt them (or anyone they know) yet.
OTOH those silly Republicans just shutdown the government to stop it, which did hurt them. According Matty Yglesias a lot of people he met blamed the websites failure on the shutdown, which isn't true but makes sense in a weird sort of way. The GOP shutdown the government on pretty much the exact day the website failed to launch claiming that the program the website represents was the reason they were shutting the government down. I can see how a reasonable person, paying a normal amount of attention to politics, would reach that conclusion.
If this website, or a workaround, doesn't work soon Obama's gonna lose in the polls. Probably not much. Dems will mostly blame the failure of the website on a GOP refusal to support the law, in this case a) by forcing the national exchange to exist by refusing to set up the state-level exchanges they were supposed to set up, and b) by funding a national-website that's supposed to serve 15 million customers in tqo months in an ultra-secure way with $100-$300 million a year. But he'll start to lose even the most fanatical if he can't report on major progress come Nov. 1.
I suspect he'll have something to report. As I mentioned there are multiple state-level exchanges already working. Some of them are for pretty big states like Cali. So in theory all this ZIents guy has to do is get permission to use Cali's software on the hardware he's already got, and then get it configured. I doubt he can pull that shit off in 5 weeks, but I also doubt it will take three months.
Two points:
1) They have lots of servers, presumably enough for the load. What they don't have is software. California has software that's working. I don't know how easy it will be to port Cali's exchange to the Feds, but I do know this is a lot easier then the media are making it out to be. I will be surprised if they make their November date, but I won't be surprised at they get it done pretty close to that.
2) The legal argument is BS.
Even if it wasn't, how long do you think Bobby Jindall will remain Governor of Louisiana if half of Louisiana knows the only reason they aren't getting cheap health insurance is that Bobby didn't pass a law? He's up for re-election next November.
You do realize your contradictions contradict themselves? If you don't have to buy until you get sick then young people aren't forced to buy either. What's really going on is there's a tax fine if you don't buy, so both you and your young people can choose between being uninsured (and paying the fine), or being insured.
If your first two points were actually valid, as opposed to conservatives talking themselves into a lather, one would expect ObamaCare's poll numbers to be dropping. They aren't.