Yeah, I agree. I really don’t get the fuss over all of this stuff over the last few months.
Remember that time your parents called for a pizza delivery back in 1972? You probably don’t.
Even back then the Soviet Union likely had computers that heard that call.
Those computers probably didn’t place enough importance on that call for it to be heard by an actual human, unless your parents ordered a pizza “with pepperoni, no anchovies, and kill the politburo”, but surveillance technology is hardly a new thing.
I remember a time when we felt sorry for those poor people behind the Iron Curtain.
How horrible it must be to constantly feel spied upon!
What a superior society we had in the west…
Well, that’s a nice piece of goalpost shifting then.
The US is spying on our country!
Ok, well that’s to be expected, but the US is spying on individual citizens!
Ok, well that’s also to be expected, but the US looks like an amateur when it does it! (Of course, this ignores that it still took a whistleblower to reveal it - that’s not too shoddy, all things considered)
It would be nice if we could get a little consensus on exactly what we’re to be outraged about - the fact of the spying? Spying on individual citizens? Or the level of professionalism and expertise in the spying? It seems like there’s just a desire to generally bash the US. I can get behind that, but people should own up to it. There are limits to schadenfreude, after all.
It’s not as though MI6 is really composed of people who can take down bad guys with comically small pistols and seduce dozens of countesses, all without dirtying their tuxedos.
No, not goalpost shifting, it is all of the above and more. And I’m not outraged, I just think it is hilarious.
Everybody loves it when the world politician gets caught inflagrante delicto. If you do go around claiming to be the “land of the free” and other such self-aggrandising statements then you have to expect a far bigger backlash than when others are found to do the same.
Countries do spy on each other. I agree that objectively it might not be very nice.
Countries that spy on each other are in turn spied upon. Objectively it is neither “nice” nor “not nice” - it just is. I know you won’t believe me, Marley. Even now. Maybe you’ll believe Morgan Freeman, though. Tomorrow on the Science Channel, he will be hosting an episode of Through The Wormhole With Morgan Freeman - “Can Our Minds Be Hacked?”
Because, as I found out to my dismay, it is a habit of posters on the SDMB to ridicule the OP.
I will defend the OP against ridicule. Today in The New York Times, in an interesting self-referential comment regarding intelligence agencies, President Obama said, “Here’s one thing that they’re going to be doing: they’re going to be trying to understand the world better and what’s going on in world capitals around the world, from sources that aren’t available through The New York Times or NBC News.” I Made French Toast For You - if there is one critical thinker besides me and the OP, I hope it is you. So I ask you: What did the President mean by that and why did he put it that way?
I have to be critical of myself too. I read The New York Times every day. What the hell could I know?
As a side note, BBC TV is reporting the Bolivian president’s plane was just forced down in Austria awhile ago, in the notion that Snowden might be on board. He wasn’t.
Friendly nations spy on each other all of the time, mommy and daddy have sex with each other, Sandy Claws, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy aren’t real, you AREN’T hot stuff with the ladies.
I bet that if it was revealed that the french had bugged U.S offices in Paris the stupid americans would already be asking for France to be Nuked.
(i’m only calling americans stupid because you said stupid french.I think this type of name calling is really silly)