I haven’t heard about the U.S. granting citizenships to the people of the countries *it *occupies.
LOL.
I’m pretty sure the consensus almost everywhere is the same.
Defending the actions of the NSA seems to point to a level of indoctrination most of us won’t have experienced, and hopefully never will.
Take care to describe comments as stupid (if you must) without ever even accidentally suggesting you think the person posting them is stupid.
Moving this thread to Great Debates from Cafe Society, where the other threads exactly like this one go.
I appreciate that hyperbole (NSA=STASI) makes for dramatic argument but it is not indoctrination (much less defense) to point out that while the NSA’s methods do not make for the kind of free society Americans imagined themselves to be living in (until recently), it is not anywhere near the oppressive regimes of former communist block countries.
Merkel’s memory of her time in East Germany is curiously poor, so I wouldn’t put too much stock into her views on the subject.
Except according to every government of Israel since Judea and Samaria(West Bank) aren’t occupied but are part of Israel.
Also, I think plenty of Arab Israelis would question the idea that the government doesn’t mess with their lives.
Whenever Snowden is mentioned, I will repeat this until I’m blue in the face…
Do y remember the 1998 film Enemy of the State starring Will Smith, Gene Hackman, and Jon Voight. If you watched that film and didn’t already assume the government could get their hands into ANYTHING, then you’re an idiot.
That’s how I feel about Time Cop.
An omnipotent government would have stopped Van Damme from making any more films after about 1986. Well, a benevolent one.
So, who watched the broadcast? No, not the Gene Hackman movie.
I think that he raised some interesting points. On some level, privacy is vanishing. What’s worse is that we are voluntarily giving it up. How many people have gone to a party where a bunch of pictures are immediately put on Facebook and tagged? How many people go somewhere and immediately check in on Foursquare? I think that Snowden had a point in that privacy as we knew it is gone.
The CBS 60 minutes show about the NSA brought up the fact that Snowden, as reported by his girlfriend, would put up a barrier around his computer and wear a hooded sweat shirt with a sheet around all of that to use his computer.
He must have known something about invasion of privacy or he is a wacko with paranoid thoughts based on his employment by the NSA of course, but then again could he have been trained by another intelligence group while still a teenager before he was even employed by the NSA?
Perhaps Snowden was a planned mole to embarrass the USA … seed thought that must have already come up in someone’s boardroom don’t you think?
So when does James Clapper go to jail for perjury?
How dare you come into threads about Snowden and post a reasoned response.
It’s interesting in the sense Clapper has, de facto, been ‘pardoned’ or been given an ‘amnesty’ for his Contempt of Congress. Similarly, the Justice Dept lawyers who lied to FISA judges were in Contempt of Court.
In neither case did the Contempt serve the interests of the people. Contrast with Snowden
This is probably not the right place to get into this, but that didn’t come from his girlfriend. It came because they were able to secretly turn on his webcam and watch him at home. So the NSA is simultaneously accusing Snowden of being careless with classified information and calling him a crazy paranoid who did weird things to keep his work secret while it spied on him.
There’s no evidence for that, or for many of the other things people are saying about the guy. This is the kind of thing speculation that needs to be backed up by evidence.
This is true except for the ‘even worse’ part. I think it’s more complicated than that. I’m not sure the world a lot of us have chosen to live in is possible with privacy in the old sense - the sense that information belongs to you and you alone - and there are some cool components to that world (otherwise nobody would participate in social networks). But it’s complicated and I am not sure we’ve fully reckoned with what it means. And in the NSA story we can see that sharing information with companies and with the government are not the same thing. The old view, at least as it pertains to phone data, is that once your information belongs to a company, it’s OK for the government to see it because it’s no longer yours and no longer private. Justice Sotomayor wrote an opinion about that a few years ago, and I think maybe we need that view to be more widely adopted.
Says the guy who thinks Obama shut down the Occupy movement.
I agree that social networking does have positive benefits and I use it to, but in a sense I worry that my kids won’t have the same opportunities in life to start over socially that I did. When I went to college, it was starting from a clean slate. Is that really possible now when your social media history is out there, not just on your page but also on your friend’s page. There was Justine Sacco’s stupid tweet which has probably cost her career. It seems like a fleeting moment of stupidity and insensitivity can live forever and that troubles me somewhat.
Getting back to the governmental aspect of it, I hope that Justice Sotomayor’s opinion that this all needs to be revisited takes hold, because the amount of information out there is staggering. I don’t think that anyone has the resources to harness it all yet, but I don’t think that the day when it becomes possible is all that far off.
Power? They have incredile information-gathering, but what can they do with this information? What actions have they taken with this information (beyond fucking with RSA, which RSA agreed to), what could they do? They have the power to gather a lot of information. What can they do with this information? Someone help me out, I just don’t get it.