Are you drunk? You want them all to come over and form a ring around the Sears Tower or something?
Yeah, well, stories of Saudi Arabian police arresting suspects in the United States are surprisingly hard to come by. I’m not sure why that might be.
Here’s a map of terrorist attacks with more than 100 victims since the beginning of the 20th century. There are, by my count, about 28 of them in the Middle East.
So, yeah, I think they’re familiar with the experience.
False, completely false, demonstrably false, and just plain, yanno, false.
Are you aware that Afghanistan was not “behind 9/11” either?
Yanno, it’s been fun, I suppose, but you are quite clearly not here to have a discussion, my friend. I’ll let someone else try to elicit a meaningful response from you.
I’ve said where I was. Where were you? In one of the buildings? You seem more traumatized by the events on that day than the people I work with who were directly across the street from the WTC.
As the OP’er, I have been as guilty as anyone in straying off topic in this thread.
Can we get back on track and focus on one aspect of what Snowden has done?
Specifically, was he justified in revealing information about NSA’s foreign intelligence activities (which were/are secret and legal)?
I think that he was not at all justified in doing so and, in fact, should be prosecuted for his crimes in that regard (should the occasion ever arise where he can be held accountable).
Please do not conflate his revelations concerning NSA’s domestic surveillance activities with those pertaining their foreign operations. Even if you think he was justified in ‘exposing’ the former, what business did he have in disseminating information about the latter? Again, I think he had none. I think his actions with respect to foreign intelligence gathering were either ‘collateral damage’ that he couldn’t care less about, or he deliberately leaked them in order to (in his mind) cast the NSA in a less than glowing light.
I suppose if you feel that people living in our ally nations occupy some lesser rung of the evolutionary ladder or something.
Also, revealing international spying on our allies makes those allies slightly less likely to grab him and turn him over to the US for brownie points.
Did he actually do the leaking himself, or did he give the information over to the guy from the Guardian to determine what should be and what shouldn’t be leaked?
Anyway, I’m not fully aware of all of the foreign operations that he revealed. I think revealing that the NSA monitored Merkel’s phone was a good thing to leak – we really shouldn’t be monitoring our allies. Revealing the no-wifi hacking trick was a bad leak.
Where would you put the weakening of the random number generator thing that the NSA did – domestic or international? It was good that he leaked that.
What other international things did I miss?
levdrakon and RitterSport: I don’t know the extent of his foreign intelligence activities leaks. But even leaking info about the QUANTUM program alone (see links in my OP) is inexcusable. Why was there a need to divulge legal and secret operations?
You say that the US (and presumably all other nations) has (have) no right to spy on others (i.e. in your little screed about “lesser rung of the evolutionary ladder or something”). That mode of thinking, and the intelligence-gathering passivity it reflects, is a recipe for disaster. Well, for surprise, then disaster. Do you really think that the US is alone in its foreign intelligence activities? Would you rather it take some passive moral high ground while other nations, its enemies, merrily spy on it? Seriously?
No, there wasn’t. Are you asking me whether that negates all the good he did (in my mind)? In my opinion, no, that disclosure does not negate all the good disclosure and, in balance, he has done much more good than harm.
…What? This is barely coherent, and it’s contrary to the facts and good sense anyway.
But some of the domestic activity was also legal - at least insofar as the FISA courts rubber-stamped it. There’s always room for debate on how we want the government to act in our names.
I never said we have no right to spy on others. Fire up Google and analyse other country’s economies and politics. Knock yourself out. Everyone does. Snowden hasn’t revealed anything I couldn’t have told you 30 years ago, except acknowledging yeah, we really are doing it. That’s apparently news to people like etv78, not the world’s governments and terrorist orgs.
And Snowden said the same today.
The “shut up, the government doesn’t care about your stupid emails” question can also be turned on its head: if most of our online activity is mundane and has no intelligence value, why does the government need to collect and sift through it all? The NSA and these other agencies have much more precise tools at their disposal, so let them use those. There is no evidence they are getting anything of value from these mass violations of everybody’s privacy.
Those people have a government whose responsible for protecting them. And yeah, the reason we attacked Afghanistan is because they were impotent to control the people within their borders.
Tell that to the prosecutor of my necrophilia case! :mad:
Because you can’t copy an email after it’s been deleted. Archiving everything now means you can go back and look at it later if you need to.
And at least according to Google, there’s no expectation of privacy in email correspondence, so there’s no violation of privacy occurring.
Google is the moral and legal authority that gets to decide when we should have an expectation of privacy now, is it? :rolleyes:
Uh huh. And I suppose when a car thief tells you that they have a legitimate right to steal your car, you take their word for it too?
And before you say something retarded, no, this is not like Snowden. You are insinuating that Google’s position is correct for no other reason than because Google is making it. We agree with Snowden based on the content of his argument, not because he’s some former computer specialist we had never heard of before.
Geez, even your hero (judging from your general attitude on these issues) Ollie North found out otherwise.
What they need to do is look at actual relevant information from actual suspicious targets, and focus on those to the exclusion of shiny-object distractions. The results of the current policy of drowning signals in noise are on your head.
No, Oliver North was a criminal, much like Edward Snowden.
They caught the guys who did it, didn’t they?