Both major parties are 100% in favor of this stuff. Voting one way or the other would have changed nothing. Voting for a third party candidate would not have changed anything either for obvious reasons.
Nice to know the details, but how is that not crippling it? The whole point of encryption is to keep private data private. If the bad guys can read it without actually cracking it then it seems pretty useless.
Even if you are not shocked because you were already wearing your tin foil hat you should still be angry about your government violating the human rights of not only Americans but every other person on the planet who uses email, instant messaging, telephones, or text messaging. Unless of course you are actually in favor of a 1984-ish government who watches every move you make and every breath you take. Is that really how you want to live?
But you do realize that there are computers which are not laptops, right? The Xbox One is a gaming machine. The vast majority of laptops are not gaming machines and are certainly not well suited to play modern high performance games. So the only fair comparison would be to a desktop machine and those do not necessarily have webcams or microphones and if they do have them you can just unplug them.
That isn't what the article is about. It is about Microsoft intentionally using a crippled encryption system to encourage a false sense of security and about some further specifics about Microsoft's cooperation with the PRISM blanket surveillance system. Basically more details about how Microsoft completely fucks over their customers and essentially acts as a branch of the NSA.
Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant,
They don't have to target anyone because they simply record all communications. Thus neatly bypassing the need for warrants etc. The NSA has been caught lying about this stuff already. I see no reason to believe their denials now.
I wonder how well the search. MicroSD cards are pretty small and they can hold quite a bit of data. Obviously not the entire database, but a decent amount of compressed text.
So much for do no evil. From a user perspective Google servers are indistinguishable from NSA servers. Google webmail is really NSA webmail. Google's relatively recent privacy policy changes and mandatory account unification were likely dictated by the NSA.
You are also an extremist, cold fjord. You and the rest of your pro-authoritarian friends. Should we come after you as well? Surely you have commited the very same thoughtcrime as the most likely innocent muslims you call terrorists. The rest of us would prefer not to live in a police state. Not in the US. Not in the UK. Not anywhere. Liberty is far more important than any terrorist attacks.
Maybe you are deathly afraid of teh terrierists, but it appears to me that even venomous snakes are more of a menace. The number of people who die each year from terrorist attacks in the US or anywhere else is pretty close to zero. If there are terrorists everywhere as you seem to think then they are awfully lazy.
Huh? An honest person is the last person the NSA would want. Most honest people are not honest because they are afraid of getting caught in a lie. They are honest because they believe that lying is wrong. That is, they have a strong sense of right and wrong. If your organization routinely engages in obviously unethical behavior that harms innocent people what you want is a sociopath, not a principled ethical person. The NSA should really be hiring people straight out of prison. People who were prosecuted for violent crimes would be perfect. The kind of person who does not care about anyone else but themselves. They were fools to allow someone with principles and a mind of their own to get anywhere near their incriminating data.
Here are a few ideas: 1. Video cameras with 100% coverage of any room with computers with sensitive data. Live monitoring of said cameras.
2. Securely locked computer cases. Since I haven't seen any computer cases that allow for truly secure padlocks this may require making your own computer cases out of say 1/4" steel and with thick case hardened hasps designed with large padlocks in mind.
Or alternatively you could design a case by permanently welding the case closed. If something goes wrong inside you simply melt the whole thing down. A custom designed case will also allow you to bury any of the absolutely necessary external connections like for a keyboard and mouse inside the locked or welded case. Any data would need to be backed up through the internet or other network connection, which again is buried inside the secure case.
3. Checkpoints with metal detectors set to their highest sensitivity for all personnel entering or leaving, but this will only work if it is sensitive enough to detect a single microSD card. Strip searches and cavity searches for all departing personnel with access to sensitive data.
4. You could lock your employees into a secure facility and never allow them to leave. If they try to quit you kill them and melt their body in a large dedicated acid bath.
Of course this would have to be combined with severing all contact with the outside world. Internet connections or any kind of telephone would be forbidden. Also make certain that no computer has wifi capability and/or make the rooms with the computers with sensitive data into Faraday cages to prevent any wireless data transfer.
5. A water lock. In order to exit your facility your employees must swim through a tube filled with water. The problem with this is that a microSD card could be protected by wrapping it in plastic or something. You could also use salt water and run a nonlethal current through it.
6. Do not allow employees anywhere to put a data storage device. Do not allow any clothes or bags of any kind inside. They would store all of their belongings including their clothes in a locker before they entered the facility proper. Combined with cavity searches this could be quite effective even without any of the other measures. To help with employee retention make sure that the searchers are very, very attractive and that sexual preferences are observed at all times.
So the purpose of this is what? To reassure us that the NSA is telling the truth and that they really do only view metadata? I think at this point it is quite safe to assume that any official announcement from the NSA is a lie. If MIT really wants to simulate seeing what the NSA can see then they should give you a view of every form of online communication plus any voice communication. The content. Not just the fucking metadata.
Ah yes and probably ovulaion as well. I'd forgotten about the whole menstrual cycle thing. Been a while since I've played with kitty. After 20 years you start to forget stuff like that. Well maybe fuzzy logic? Training a neural network based on a wide range of scents?
The scent fingerprint may not be as invariant as actual fingerprints or retinal scans, but it is still something you are (I suppose) which does seem to be unique based on my admittedly limited experience. Actually I just realized that a quick finger insert might convert something you are to something you have. So maybe not so ideal. OTOH you can never have too many methods of authentication. And yes it would only work for women, but that's still 50% of the population.
You could have just googled my sig. Have you never watched Blade Runner? If you live in the US you are a slave for at least a third of your life, and if you are not afraid of the power of the regime it is either because you are part of the repression machine or are just ignorant and whistling in the dark.
As for responding to the post you mention. I did read it. I'm still not convinced that you have mind reading abiliities. And I am well aware that Stalin was not a nice guy and that the USSR was not a nice place to live. I don't need to watch those videos. Speaking of videos, have you seen the BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares, by Adam Curtis? It seems the evidence that Al Qaeda ever existed except as an invention of the US is rather limited. I'm certainly not denying 9/11 or that some Saudis were responsible for it, but after having watched that documentary the official US story of Al Qaeda seems highly questionable.
Let me ask you this, are you more afraid of government workers, who have had extensive background investigations and have a lot to lose if we ever do something stupid and lose our clearance, or a guy making $15/hr at AT&T?
There is a very important difference between private surveillance and government surveillance. First, real surveillance is expensive and time consuming. At some point you have to switch from computer programs to actual human beings. That costs money. Aside from possible blackmail there just isn't that much profit in it. I can hardly imagine the kind of storage requirements PRISM has. Even with hundreds of thousands or even millions of 4 TB hard drives and superb text compression and decent voice compression, storing every communication in the entire world is just beyond imagining. AT&T might have the money to do it, but they just don't have the motivation. That isn't to say that they might not try to sell as much info about us as they can to advertisers but generally the only result of that is some additional targeted advertising, not being thrown in jail or put on a no fly list or terrorist watch list. Corporations do have power, too much power IMO, but they don't have the power to throw you in jail or send you to gitmo or lock you up in a cage for the rest of your life.
I agree with everything you said. The difference between the US and a police state like this is the NSA (and prolly CIA) makes us go through a lot of ethics classes every year to drive home the legal ramifications of our powers. Every time a phone is tapped, that operator's next 3-5 supervisors are notified. The systems we use are set up for extensive logging and notifications so in the case some idiot wants to stalk his ex girlfriend, he will be in jail by lunchtime.
If you were me, would you believe you? What you are describing sounds more like the way I would expect law enforcement like local police or the FBI to do things. First you have a suspect. Someone you suspect of having committed a specific crime. Only then do you start putting them under surveillance. I don't think most of us have a problem with that. Particularly if they have to get a warrant from a judge in order to do it.
That isn't the picture that I am getting from Snowden's revelations. The kind of picture that many of us are starting to get is of an almost unimaginably large fishing expedition hoping to find criminals before they actually commit a crime. Blanket surveillance of all communications on the planet. The US being just one part of that. Of course speech has also been criminalized in the U.S. Saying certain things, even as an obvious joke, now lands you in prison. That is new and quite scary.
The bottom line is that some of us don't believe that any good is worth monitoring communications from everyone on the planet or even just everyone in the US. We don't care whether it makes us safer or not. Or whether it helps catch some genuinely bad people or save the lives of innocent people. It simply is not worth it. And government programs, especially secret ones, don't tend to shrink. Like all government they have a tendency to grow at least until they run out of money.
Terrorism simply is not a serious problem in the US. Or nowadays really anywhere except maybe Israel. The so called War on Terror is not worth the money spent on it. It's not worth the loss of civil liberties. It's not worth the innocent people who will inevitably be targeted and whose lives may be destroyed because of it. It is not worth sacrificing what was once the freest country in the world in order to defeat a boogeyman that can barely even be said to exist.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed," bin Laden said as the U.S. war on terrorism raged in Afghanistan. "The U.S. government will lead the American people -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
The whole point would be to isolate the scent from the source. With this tech maybe it could be proven which panties are fraudulent and which came from real vag. A tuna smell usually means she needs a course of antibiotics. A tuna smell isn't that bad. It's the garbage smell that really makes a body want to hurl. Either way the answer is doxycycline. Or a better girlfriend.
What would be far more interesting is a vag scent fingerprint with this tech. Hell, you could probably even use it for ID. Instead of logging into their computer they could just stick a probe in for authentication. Would that be something you have or something you are? Needless to say you could also sell the scents of particular women. Analyze a girlfriend and forever after you can have a scent that will bring back sweet memories even as an old man in your rocking chair. A brave new world and all that.
All joking aside, can any of us trust their patches now that it has been comfirmed that Microsoft is effectively a branch of the NSA? What percentage of these updates were sponsored and ordered by the NSA? Are only 30% of the changes for the benefit of the NSA? 70%? There is no way to know.
As someone who is a NSA contractor, I would retort that we do a lot more good than bad, but due to the nature of our work many of us will never receive the full accolades we should from countless lives we save daily.
It's not the "good" that we worry about, although I would be curious about what kind of situations those might be, It's the bad that we are concerned about. You know, the whole Orwellian dystopia where everyone is constantly watched by their government?
Totalitarian surveillance police states tend to have very, very low crime. So if you only look at the good things while ignoring or underestimating the bad you can find good in almost any system. If safety and catching criminals is the only measure of good then there is no limit to what a government would be allowed to do. Audio/video surveillence in every room of every home? Arresting anyone who seems like they might commit a crime? Safer. Requiring a permit to leave your house or do anything that breaks with your normal routine? Again, safer. The society portrayed in 1984 would be very safe indeed in real life.
And if you secure the data properly you'll just get a whistle blower in charge of doing that. The problem is you have human beings doing all of this stuff. Individuals with opinions and emotions of their own. When they discover things like that collateral murder video or the fact that the NSA has made the US into an Orwellian dystopia it's pretty hard to stop people from leaking that info. Everyone with a bit of courage and a conscience is a suspect. I suppose you could try to test people for sociopathy and only allow vetted sociopaths to be exposed to classified informaton, but that would be a lot of work and probably wouldn't be completely reliable.
I would really like to know why all those who have been hyperventilating over this thinks the government or anyone else for that matter gives a shit who you call or e-mail.
Because we are all potential terrorists and criminals. I suspect it's just a matter of keywords. If you mention the word NSA or terrorist or the name of any middle eastern country or allah or whatever the automated system kicks the conversation over to some poor SOB right out of college who gets to listen to or read all of our boring conversations. Since we don't really know the keywords we cannot really be sure when a human is monitoring us or just a computer. At this point it seems pretty obvious that at least a computer monitors EVERYTHING. Something I would have considered paranoid before Snowden let us know what is really going on.
What I wonder about is whether keywords that affect law enforcement are also included. Does mention of the word "weed" or "marijuana" send a transcript of the conversation over to the DEA? If that doesn't happen already you can be damn sure that it is only a matter of time before the government figures out the utility of that. Especially now that the cat is out of the bag anyway.
Let's be straight: The president is NOT offering asylum to Snowden because of deeply held beliefs, he's doing it as a "fuck you" to the US.
Have any proof of that? That is pure 100% speculation. I think it more likely that many countries would like to help Snowden from a humanitarian perspective as they would any dissident who applied for asylum in their country and faces life in prison or death if they are returned, but only a handful are brave enough to go up against one of the most powerful, evil, and corrupt governments in the world. Venezuela, Bolivia, and maybe Nicaragua are merely brave enough to do that. Iceland oes not seem to be. Ecuador is also too afraid of the US. God knows what the vice president told Correa in their little chat. The US does not have any sort of ethical limits to its actions and is very powerful. That makes us a very scary foe to defy in any way. That is why when we tell Europe to jump their only response is a polite, "How high?"
That's my point, exactly. Look at the ruckus it caused. Would the US really try that again?
I think they would. They could even get the Europeans involved to take the blame again and not explicitly even mention them. The only thing they might do differently is double check their intelligence info next time. All the US has to do is quietly ask the Europeans to do it and ask them not to admit that they were the ones who asked. They cannot be officially blamed without proof and there won't be any.
The ideal situation for Snowden would be to somehow get a flight to one of the countries that have offered him asylum without the press finding out which one. It would be even better if the asylum country were willing to let him change his name. Snowden has several asylum offers now, but that may not be enough to save his life.
Keeping the CIA guessing about his location may be at least as important as the asylum itself. If he can manage to stay hidden somewhere for the first year that may be enough for the CIA to give up on the case. Unfortunately I doubt the asylum country would be willing to keep Snowden's arrival a secret.
This case is dramatic and many of us are rooting for Snowden like we might for a character in a film who is being chased. Hell, someone like Michael Mann or David Fincher could probably make a great movie out of it. But I'm hoping that we never really find out where he chose to settle. If we know then so will the CIA.
Slashdot Mirror
Both major parties are 100% in favor of this stuff. Voting one way or the other would have changed nothing. Voting for a third party candidate would not have changed anything either for obvious reasons.
Nice to know the details, but how is that not crippling it? The whole point of encryption is to keep private data private. If the bad guys can read it without actually cracking it then it seems pretty useless.
Even if you are not shocked because you were already wearing your tin foil hat you should still be angry about your government violating the human rights of not only Americans but every other person on the planet who uses email, instant messaging, telephones, or text messaging. Unless of course you are actually in favor of a 1984-ish government who watches every move you make and every breath you take. Is that really how you want to live?
But you do realize that there are computers which are not laptops, right? The Xbox One is a gaming machine. The vast majority of laptops are not gaming machines and are certainly not well suited to play modern high performance games. So the only fair comparison would be to a desktop machine and those do not necessarily have webcams or microphones and if they do have them you can just unplug them.
That isn't what the article is about. It is about Microsoft intentionally using a crippled encryption system to encourage a false sense of security and about some further specifics about Microsoft's cooperation with the PRISM blanket surveillance system. Basically more details about how Microsoft completely fucks over their customers and essentially acts as a branch of the NSA.
Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant,
They don't have to target anyone because they simply record all communications. Thus neatly bypassing the need for warrants etc. The NSA has been caught lying about this stuff already. I see no reason to believe their denials now.
I wonder how well the search. MicroSD cards are pretty small and they can hold quite a bit of data. Obviously not the entire database, but a decent amount of compressed text.
So much for do no evil. From a user perspective Google servers are indistinguishable from NSA servers. Google webmail is really NSA webmail. Google's relatively recent privacy policy changes and mandatory account unification were likely dictated by the NSA.
You are also an extremist, cold fjord. You and the rest of your pro-authoritarian friends. Should we come after you as well? Surely you have commited the very same thoughtcrime as the most likely innocent muslims you call terrorists. The rest of us would prefer not to live in a police state. Not in the US. Not in the UK. Not anywhere. Liberty is far more important than any terrorist attacks.
Maybe you are deathly afraid of teh terrierists, but it appears to me that even venomous snakes are more of a menace. The number of people who die each year from terrorist attacks in the US or anywhere else is pretty close to zero. If there are terrorists everywhere as you seem to think then they are awfully lazy.
Huh? An honest person is the last person the NSA would want. Most honest people are not honest because they are afraid of getting caught in a lie. They are honest because they believe that lying is wrong. That is, they have a strong sense of right and wrong. If your organization routinely engages in obviously unethical behavior that harms innocent people what you want is a sociopath, not a principled ethical person. The NSA should really be hiring people straight out of prison. People who were prosecuted for violent crimes would be perfect. The kind of person who does not care about anyone else but themselves. They were fools to allow someone with principles and a mind of their own to get anywhere near their incriminating data.
Here are a few ideas:
1. Video cameras with 100% coverage of any room with computers with sensitive data. Live monitoring of said cameras.
2. Securely locked computer cases. Since I haven't seen any computer cases that allow for truly secure padlocks this may require making your own computer cases out of say 1/4" steel and with thick case hardened hasps designed with large padlocks in mind.
Or alternatively you could design a case by permanently welding the case closed. If something goes wrong inside you simply melt the whole thing down. A custom designed case will also allow you to bury any of the absolutely necessary external connections like for a keyboard and mouse inside the locked or welded case. Any data would need to be backed up through the internet or other network connection, which again is buried inside the secure case.
3. Checkpoints with metal detectors set to their highest sensitivity for all personnel entering or leaving, but this will only work if it is sensitive enough to detect a single microSD card. Strip searches and cavity searches for all departing personnel with access to sensitive data.
4. You could lock your employees into a secure facility and never allow them to leave. If they try to quit you kill them and melt their body in a large dedicated acid bath.
Of course this would have to be combined with severing all contact with the outside world. Internet connections or any kind of telephone would be forbidden. Also make certain that no computer has wifi capability and/or make the rooms with the computers with sensitive data into Faraday cages to prevent any wireless data transfer.
5. A water lock. In order to exit your facility your employees must swim through a tube filled with water. The problem with this is that a microSD card could be protected by wrapping it in plastic or something. You could also use salt water and run a nonlethal current through it.
6. Do not allow employees anywhere to put a data storage device. Do not allow any clothes or bags of any kind inside. They would store all of their belongings including their clothes in a locker before they entered the facility proper. Combined with cavity searches this could be quite effective even without any of the other measures. To help with employee retention make sure that the searchers are very, very attractive and that sexual preferences are observed at all times.
So the purpose of this is what? To reassure us that the NSA is telling the truth and that they really do only view metadata? I think at this point it is quite safe to assume that any official announcement from the NSA is a lie. If MIT really wants to simulate seeing what the NSA can see then they should give you a view of every form of online communication plus any voice communication. The content. Not just the fucking metadata.
Ah yes and probably ovulaion as well. I'd forgotten about the whole menstrual cycle thing. Been a while since I've played with kitty. After 20 years you start to forget stuff like that. Well maybe fuzzy logic? Training a neural network based on a wide range of scents?
The scent fingerprint may not be as invariant as actual fingerprints or retinal scans, but it is still something you are (I suppose) which does seem to be unique based on my admittedly limited experience. Actually I just realized that a quick finger insert might convert something you are to something you have. So maybe not so ideal. OTOH you can never have too many methods of authentication. And yes it would only work for women, but that's still 50% of the population.
You could have just googled my sig. Have you never watched Blade Runner? If you live in the US you are a slave for at least a third of your life, and if you are not afraid of the power of the regime it is either because you are part of the repression machine or are just ignorant and whistling in the dark.
As for responding to the post you mention. I did read it. I'm still not convinced that you have mind reading abiliities. And I am well aware that Stalin was not a nice guy and that the USSR was not a nice place to live. I don't need to watch those videos. Speaking of videos, have you seen the BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares, by Adam Curtis? It seems the evidence that Al Qaeda ever existed except as an invention of the US is rather limited. I'm certainly not denying 9/11 or that some Saudis were responsible for it, but after having watched that documentary the official US story of Al Qaeda seems highly questionable.
Let me ask you this, are you more afraid of government workers, who have had extensive background investigations and have a lot to lose if we ever do something stupid and lose our clearance, or a guy making $15/hr at AT&T?
There is a very important difference between private surveillance and government surveillance. First, real surveillance is expensive and time consuming. At some point you have to switch from computer programs to actual human beings. That costs money. Aside from possible blackmail there just isn't that much profit in it. I can hardly imagine the kind of storage requirements PRISM has. Even with hundreds of thousands or even millions of 4 TB hard drives and superb text compression and decent voice compression, storing every communication in the entire world is just beyond imagining. AT&T might have the money to do it, but they just don't have the motivation. That isn't to say that they might not try to sell as much info about us as they can to advertisers but generally the only result of that is some additional targeted advertising, not being thrown in jail or put on a no fly list or terrorist watch list. Corporations do have power, too much power IMO, but they don't have the power to throw you in jail or send you to gitmo or lock you up in a cage for the rest of your life.
I agree with everything you said. The difference between the US and a police state like this is the NSA (and prolly CIA) makes us go through a lot of ethics classes every year to drive home the legal ramifications of our powers. Every time a phone is tapped, that operator's next 3-5 supervisors are notified. The systems we use are set up for extensive logging and notifications so in the case some idiot wants to stalk his ex girlfriend, he will be in jail by lunchtime.
If you were me, would you believe you? What you are describing sounds more like the way I would expect law enforcement like local police or the FBI to do things. First you have a suspect. Someone you suspect of having committed a specific crime. Only then do you start putting them under surveillance. I don't think most of us have a problem with that. Particularly if they have to get a warrant from a judge in order to do it.
That isn't the picture that I am getting from Snowden's revelations. The kind of picture that many of us are starting to get is of an almost unimaginably large fishing expedition hoping to find criminals before they actually commit a crime. Blanket surveillance of all communications on the planet. The US being just one part of that. Of course speech has also been criminalized in the U.S. Saying certain things, even as an obvious joke, now lands you in prison. That is new and quite scary.
The bottom line is that some of us don't believe that any good is worth monitoring communications from everyone on the planet or even just everyone in the US. We don't care whether it makes us safer or not. Or whether it helps catch some genuinely bad people or save the lives of innocent people. It simply is not worth it. And government programs, especially secret ones, don't tend to shrink. Like all government they have a tendency to grow at least until they run out of money.
Terrorism simply is not a serious problem in the US. Or nowadays really anywhere except maybe Israel. The so called War on Terror is not worth the money spent on it. It's not worth the loss of civil liberties. It's not worth the innocent people who will inevitably be targeted and whose lives may be destroyed because of it. It is not worth sacrificing what was once the freest country in the world in order to defeat a boogeyman that can barely even be said to exist.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed," bin Laden said as the U.S. war on terrorism raged in Afghanistan. "The U.S. government will lead the American people -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/01/31/gen.binladen.interview/
The whole point would be to isolate the scent from the source. With this tech maybe it could be proven which panties are fraudulent and which came from real vag.
A tuna smell usually means she needs a course of antibiotics. A tuna smell isn't that bad. It's the garbage smell that really makes a body want to hurl. Either way the answer is doxycycline. Or a better girlfriend.
What would be far more interesting is a vag scent fingerprint with this tech. Hell, you could probably even use it for ID. Instead of logging into their computer they could just stick a probe in for authentication. Would that be something you have or something you are? Needless to say you could also sell the scents of particular women. Analyze a girlfriend and forever after you can have a scent that will bring back sweet memories even as an old man in your rocking chair. A brave new world and all that.
All joking aside, can any of us trust their patches now that it has been comfirmed that Microsoft is effectively a branch of the NSA? What percentage of these updates were sponsored and ordered by the NSA? Are only 30% of the changes for the benefit of the NSA? 70%? There is no way to know.
As someone who is a NSA contractor, I would retort that we do a lot more good than bad, but due to the nature of our work many of us will never receive the full accolades we should from countless lives we save daily.
It's not the "good" that we worry about, although I would be curious about what kind of situations those might be, It's the bad that we are concerned about. You know, the whole Orwellian dystopia where everyone is constantly watched by their government?
Totalitarian surveillance police states tend to have very, very low crime. So if you only look at the good things while ignoring or underestimating the bad you can find good in almost any system. If safety and catching criminals is the only measure of good then there is no limit to what a government would be allowed to do. Audio/video surveillence in every room of every home? Arresting anyone who seems like they might commit a crime? Safer. Requiring a permit to leave your house or do anything that breaks with your normal routine? Again, safer. The society portrayed in 1984 would be very safe indeed in real life.
Short of overthrowing the government there is not much we can do about it. Encryption and Tor-like routing are the best we can do.
And if you secure the data properly you'll just get a whistle blower in charge of doing that. The problem is you have human beings doing all of this stuff. Individuals with opinions and emotions of their own. When they discover things like that collateral murder video or the fact that the NSA has made the US into an Orwellian dystopia it's pretty hard to stop people from leaking that info. Everyone with a bit of courage and a conscience is a suspect. I suppose you could try to test people for sociopathy and only allow vetted sociopaths to be exposed to classified informaton, but that would be a lot of work and probably wouldn't be completely reliable.
I would really like to know why all those who have been hyperventilating over this thinks the government or anyone else for that matter gives a shit who you call or e-mail.
Because we are all potential terrorists and criminals. I suspect it's just a matter of keywords. If you mention the word NSA or terrorist or the name of any middle eastern country or allah or whatever the automated system kicks the conversation over to some poor SOB right out of college who gets to listen to or read all of our boring conversations. Since we don't really know the keywords we cannot really be sure when a human is monitoring us or just a computer. At this point it seems pretty obvious that at least a computer monitors EVERYTHING. Something I would have considered paranoid before Snowden let us know what is really going on.
What I wonder about is whether keywords that affect law enforcement are also included. Does mention of the word "weed" or "marijuana" send a transcript of the conversation over to the DEA? If that doesn't happen already you can be damn sure that it is only a matter of time before the government figures out the utility of that. Especially now that the cat is out of the bag anyway.
Let's be straight: The president is NOT offering asylum to Snowden because of deeply held beliefs, he's doing it as a "fuck you" to the US.
Have any proof of that? That is pure 100% speculation. I think it more likely that many countries would like to help Snowden from a humanitarian perspective as they would any dissident who applied for asylum in their country and faces life in prison or death if they are returned, but only a handful are brave enough to go up against one of the most powerful, evil, and corrupt governments in the world. Venezuela, Bolivia, and maybe Nicaragua are merely brave enough to do that. Iceland oes not seem to be. Ecuador is also too afraid of the US. God knows what the vice president told Correa in their little chat. The US does not have any sort of ethical limits to its actions and is very powerful. That makes us a very scary foe to defy in any way. That is why when we tell Europe to jump their only response is a polite, "How high?"
That's my point, exactly. Look at the ruckus it caused. Would the US really try that again?
I think they would. They could even get the Europeans involved to take the blame again and not explicitly even mention them. The only thing they might do differently is double check their intelligence info next time. All the US has to do is quietly ask the Europeans to do it and ask them not to admit that they were the ones who asked. They cannot be officially blamed without proof and there won't be any.
The countries denying airspace also admitted the US did not request any such action.
Do you have a link for that or are you just making shit up like the rest of your post?
The ideal situation for Snowden would be to somehow get a flight to one of the countries that have offered him asylum without the press finding out which one. It would be even better if the asylum country were willing to let him change his name. Snowden has several asylum offers now, but that may not be enough to save his life.
Keeping the CIA guessing about his location may be at least as important as the asylum itself. If he can manage to stay hidden somewhere for the first year that may be enough for the CIA to give up on the case. Unfortunately I doubt the asylum country would be willing to keep Snowden's arrival a secret.
This case is dramatic and many of us are rooting for Snowden like we might for a character in a film who is being chased. Hell, someone like Michael Mann or David Fincher could probably make a great movie out of it. But I'm hoping that we never really find out where he chose to settle. If we know then so will the CIA.