Big Brother is Watching You

[bannination]

George Takei, an actor who had experienced Japanese American internment, said that due to his memories of the internment, he felt concern towards the NSA surveillance programs that had been revealed.[72] Political critic Noam Chomsky argued, "Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population"[73] In regards to PRISM and other NSA surveillance programs, Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple Computers, said to FayerWayer, a Spanish technology website, "All these things about the constitution, that made us so good as people – they are kind of nothing."[74]

Actors, political activists, techies.... all warning this is *bad*.

[Stinger]

Wow, you're actually still citing a 6/8 article that's been debunked by a 6/20 article from the same source. How stupid is that?

PRISM and content monitoring are clearly linked, but let's follow your stupid belief otherwise. As you finally admitted: "They can monitor everything on the forum, identify all participants, tap our phones, and send people to watch us." Only you are so stupid as to think I or anyone else cares a bit what acronym it's done under. This is where your deliberate ignoring of and editing out of the central point has gotten you - debating names with yourself when it's always been the effect on our privacy, rights and freedom that everyone else has been talking about.

Wow. At least I quoted and cited my source. Can't say the same for you. You can't debunk anything if you show no proof. You can just claim victory in kind of a Partisan62-ish kind of way.

And you're not responsible for your own actions. That is to be expected.

You foolish putz, of course I looked at IP addresses. It's your contention that doing so is infringing upon civil liberties or intimidation that's so ignorant. Your English and Civics teachers should be ashamed.

Not looking at them, you foolish putz -- publishing them.

But it’s also true that if someone has your I.P. address, it makes it much easier to gather the additional information needed to identify you.

New York Times

If you don't think publishing personal information that helps to identify what should be an anonymous person is wrong -- not to mention using it to try to gain the upper hand in an argument -- is wrong, and an invasion of someone's privacy, your English and civics teachers and your parents should be ashamed.

I guess bannination made a rule stopping your actions because they were okay.

.

No one said you "can't do that" you paranoid fool. All I've done is point out that you were ignoring the forest for your inaccurate (as the Guardian now tells you) trees, and that you edited out the forest that I and everyone but you (have you noticed?) are discussing when it contradicts your desperation to defend Obama and this NSA that is somehow magically different from all its predecessors.

In other words, I can't do that, you disingenuous fool. I, unlike you, am not allowed to pick out and discuss a particular point of a post and discuss it. And stick with that topic when you and I start discussing that exact topic.

After 9 of your posts about PRISM content, you mentioned civil liberties, and I replied

Civil liberties wasn't part of the discussion here. We were discussing whether or not the NSA was mining data or listening/looking in.

That's a pretty clear indication of what I was discussing. You mentioned that civil liberties were part of the discussion. I missed the memo that you could tell me what I was to discuss.

It's unavoidably clear that I was discussing our original topic the whole time, so your playing the victim card and whining about "You deceived me. We were talking about civil liberties" is a crock of the usual.

Best you could do, I guess.

"Edited out the forest"? That's just frickin' hilarious.


By the way, I posted what the Guardian said. Haven't seen jackshit from you.

...By the way, I posted what the Guardian said. Haven't seen jackshit from you.

...By the way, I posted what the Guardian said. Haven't seen jackshit from you.

...By the way, I posted what the Guardian said. Haven't seen jackshit from you.

Lies, again. Page 21 and 22 Guardian article quotes from me linking PRISM and content. Are we going to have another several pages where you make a fool of yourself not seeing what's there? I'll start the tally now since you make a fool of yourself doubting the number of your screw ups - 4.

That's funny. You can repeat stupid stuff endlessly and think you're making some kind of point, but when I mock you, it's apparently a bad thing. More double standards.

As I pointed out, that was not news, since the FISA court had actually published a decision on that very topic 5 years ago.

AND, as I pointed out, those articles were about the warrantless wiretapping program -- which is not part of PRISM.

Try to keep up.

So back to "We were discussing PRISM and content vs. PRISM and data, and you claim the Guardian and the Times said content, but I proved you wrong. I posted my evidence from the Guardian and the NYT stating that PRISM is data collection, and you still haven't published jackshit from either saying that PRISM is content monitoring ... despite claiming that you did." Something like that.

I guess I could go of on a rant and start saying you lied again. Sounds like something you'd do.

Lie, again, it's an article posted today responding to "FBI Director Robert Mueller's Congressional hearing this week". Shrub has nothing to do with it. You just can't help yourself, can you?

Man, you screwed that one up too, didn't you? Bannination's sources for listening to content were c-net and wiki. Both were talking about the warrantless wiretap program, not PRISM.

Now, here's the really, really funny part. That techdirt article that you said Bannination had rebutted me too.

Mr. Mueller addressed a proposal to require telephone companies to retain calling logs for five years — the period the N.S.A. is keeping them — for investigators to consult, rather than allowing the government to collect and store them all.

You know what calling logs are? Data, not content.

Guess he really didn't rebut me after all, did he? And I didn't lie, did I?

You are correct that the article is about call logs not content - point you. See how easy that is? You should grow a pair and try it sometime. For example, you screwed up in saying that testimony this week was about "Bush's warrantless wiretapping". Be a big boy and admit what your own citation proves, try.

Better go double check. I might have left off something irrelevant again, and you can play the victim card and cry foul again.

While you're claiming superiority over the Chicago Manual of Style because of your psychic abilities to detect my thoughts from 500 miles away, you probably shouldn't try to lecture anyone about growing a pair. It's too hypocritical.

...Still can't explain how the second part of the sentence magically changes the meaning of the first part of the sentence.

Lie, again. I never said it changed the meaning. I said it eliminated the forest that everyone but you is discussing because you're obsessing about a tree.

Poor, poor delusional Vrede. Thanks for finally making my point for me. I was discussing PRISM as data mining. You claimed the NYT said PRISM was content monitoring. I quoted a sentence that proved you wrong.

Rather than just admit it (See how easy that is?), you come unhinged and start squawking about deceptively leaving off the end of a sentence that was vaguely similar to some petition that you quoted some three pages earlier.

Which makes absolutely no sense. We had been discussing PRISM as content vs. data for three pages. You mentioned civil liberties once or twice. I said that the discussion was about PRISM as content vs. data, since that was what I started talking about, what I stated I was talking about, what you responded to and discussed repeatedly, and the only thing I ever discussed.

To try to pull a rabbit out of the hat and claim that I did something deceptively when it was exactly what I had been doing -- discussing PRISM, and only PRISM, as data collection, is just desperation theater.

It doesn't really matter what everyone else was discussing, does it? It only matters what we were discussing?

But carry on with the "editing out the forest." That's priceless.

All your paranoid ranting about "moved" a sentence when I merely inserted my own comment is ignored, for good. Even you know that it's your childish attempt at recovery from having thought 18 times that I deleted something and that no one sane thinks that the mechanism by which I responded to your selective sourcing hurt you or your point a bit. Quit being such a crybaby about it.

You moved it and denied it. Repeately. You can insert a comment without moving the rest down. We don't, usually, but your comment ridiculing my take on that ThinkProgress article is effective only if you leave off my valid statement of why that article was shoddy. It doesn't work if you put the derisive comment after a perfectly good explanation.

Regardless, I didn't see it. That's why I missed it. I shouldn't have, but I did. You told me and I didn't look thoroughly enough. Double-dumbass on me. Embarrassing.

Still doesn't change anything about you falsely claiming I deceptively did something when I didn't, or that the rest of that sentence has anything to do with PRISM as content vs. data.

You didn't like my point, you didn't like admitting that it was part of the very first post of mine you referred to, you didn't like that I kept returning to it, you didn't like that the sentence bolstered it and, yes you are stupid in thinking that "content", which you got wrong (see post above) or any other aspect of this travesty can be discussed absent civil liberties, and stupid in thinking you could get away with it, and really stupid in continuing to remind us.

...Lie again. It wasn't part of the very first quote.

Drug war, reference to an earlier post on the same page about the drug war, NSA and civil liberties - it's all there along with a reference to "an educated guess above about the NSA and our failed drug war". Not my problem if you lost track from the get-go.

Duh. What did I bring up about your post to start the discussion?

I excerpted part of your post and commented about PRISM is data collection: "PRISM collects records from internet companies, not content."

You responded about, and only about, PRISM as content: "PRISM is all about content and who posted what."

I responded about, and only about, PRISM, pointing out that your source said, "The program doesn't let the U.S. listen to people's calls, but only includes information like call length and telephone numbers dialed."

You replied back about PRISM: "About PRISM it says: "...the intelligence analysts search PRISM data using terms intended to identify suspicious communications..." (You did mention warrantless wiretapping, but not anything about civil liberties.)

I replied back solely about PRISM and how they searched metadata.

You replied with a comment on the Eichenwald articles, which were about, and only about PRISM.

And a couple of pages later, when I prove you wrong on the NYT, you cry foul and start claiming the discussion was about civil liberties. And now you're doubling down on you losing track of the discussion.

It's all there along with multiple responses, back and forth, to "PRISM as content vs. data". Not my problem if you lost track three pages later when you got shot down again.

You didn't quote the New York Times.

I didn't say I did. Are you high?

No, I did. That was my point. You falsely claimed you had a point that you kept returning to (Mentioned once in a dozen posts -- I told you what I was talking about. Sorry you couldn't keep up). You falsely claimed that my leaving off the end of the NYT sentence was deliberate because it made "your point" (Mentioned once in a dozen posts -- I told you what I was talking about. Sorry you couldn't keep up).

I quoted the New York Times because the first part of the sentence proved what I said I was talking about and talked about in EVERY SINGLE post (not in just one). Your desperate delusion in claiming that I did it intentionally to negate a topic I never discussed is hilarious. Not as funny as some of the stuff on here, but still really, really funny.

You quoted a petition drive.

And Alternet and Reuters (page 12). Nice try, again.

Gee. I never discussed either one, did I? Come to think of it, neither did we.

Thanks for playing. Please try again.

And I never read that part of your quote until just now.

Lie, again, but your 10 page ignorance about something you've been arguing about is not my problem. You (page 13, 2nd post down) and I have both quoted the post that you ignored the gist of.

Opps. I forgot about your psycho powers. You can tell from 500 miles away what I'm thinking and reading, and you can righteously call me a liar because you know exactly what I have and haven't read because of your psycho powers. (Do you ever realize how ludicrous some of your shit is?)

Just because I quoted it doesn't mean I read it. And I never read your alternet article either. Still haven't. Don't need to. Don't have to.

And I never discussed it

Where did yo quote it? Did you quote it before you went off the deep end about the end of the sentence?

That's sad claiming that similar wording in a frickin petition drive means anything.

And Alternet and Reuters and, most importantly, my point - the broader civil liberties one you've been dodging while hugging that single tree that you still got wrong.

Psycho rides again. From 500 miles away, you can tell what I'm dodging. And you get to decide the topics we must discuss.

And I didn't get it wrong. At least, not by anything you've posted. But keep trying.

Do you even realize that you've been screeching for 10 pages now without opining on whether what the NSA is doing is good for us or not - the very thing that everyone else in the country and on this forum cares about - and how silly and irrelevant that makes you?

Damn. I forgot that you get to determine what we can discuss. I forgot that you can excerpt on point from someone's post and take them to task for it, but I can't question one point from one of your posts. I forgot that, even though you discussed PRISM as monitoring post after post after post, it's somehow my fault for discussing the topic.

Old age, I guess.

Do you even realize that you were screeching right along beside, and are still screeching, without any evidence that I've seen, the PRISM is all about monitoring. Do you even realize that you keep confusing warrantless wiretapping with PRISM, something I warned about back on page 8? LINK

How silly and irrelevant does all that make you?

Try to keep up, that it's a petition is irrelevant, that I was always discussing the NSA and civil liberties isn't.


I kept up with everything I said, which was always about PRISM. I even told you that. You obviously can't keep up with what I said.

Always? I kept up with you mentioning it once in 12 posts while mentioning PRISM as content in the other 11.

Maybe you should try keeping up ... with what you're saying.

...We had never discussed government abuse or violations of poverty.

"poverty"?

privacy -- don't know if that's an autocorrect or brain fart typo.

The only thing we discussed was PRISM, content vs.data.

You have never discussed government abuse or violations of privacy, everyone else, everyone, has. You're the wingnut off in your own special little world here.

I'm not off in my own little world. You've been right here with me, every step of the way, Oh Guiltless One.

The PRISM program is one of the greatest violations of privacy ever committed by a government.

vs.

fundamentally alters the relationship between individuals and their government.

The second one is part of the first one? The first one's from your petition drive and the second one's from the article I cited in the New York Times.

Literally part of - of course not. Part of the same topic that you're dodging and deleting - of course. Are you really to thick to get that?

Oh, you're using those psycho powers again. I'm starting to catch on.

No, what I'm doing is sticking with the same topic I've always been talking about -- something I've watched you do countless times.

I just forgot I wasn't allowed to do what you do.

[/quote]

[Stinger]

Yep, as my page 21 & 22 quotes from the Guardian - the ones Stinger denied are there 4 times because it debunks his goofy claim that PRISM and content are unrelated - makes clear, the NSA snooping can be passed on to any other agency if any supposed crime is detected.

Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America

Snowden's whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is tantamount to an 'executive coup' against the US constitution

-- Daniel Ellsberg

Poor little Vrede. Still confused. And after so many explanations. I didn't deny you had quotes from the Guardian. You can get thousands of quotes from the Guardian if it makes you feel any better. You can even start your own Guardian thread.

What I said was that you haven't posted anything from the Guardian that refutes my earlier Guardian article stating that PRISM is data mining, not content collecting ... even though you claimed it did.

[bannination]

NSA: If Your Data Is Encrypted, You Might Be Evil, So We'll Keep It Until We're Sure

I bet their having a lot of fun with my instant messages/email and dropbox accounts then!

[Stinger]

Lying, again.

By the way, I posted what the Guardian said. Haven't seen jackshit from you.

...By the way, I posted what the Guardian said. Haven't seen jackshit from you.

...By the way, I posted what the Guardian said. Haven't seen jackshit from you.

...By the way, I posted what the Guardian said. Haven't seen jackshit from you.

Lies, again. Page 21 and 22 Guardian article quotes from me linking PRISM and content. Are we going to have another several pages where you make a fool of yourself not seeing what's there? I'll start the tally now since you make a fool of yourself doubting the number of your screw ups - 4.

Make it 5 "mistakes".

Lie again. Self-duped or illiterate might be better.

Top-secret documents show Fisa judges have signed off on broad orders allowing the NSA to make use of information 'inadvertently' collected from domestic US communications without a warrant

Gee. That would make it the warrantless wiretapping that I've mentioned several times.

Not once is PRISM, the government's computer system for analyzing metadata, mentioned in that entire piece.

Not once is PRISM mentioned in the second piece Vrede cites on page 21.

So, again, I posted the article from the Guardian that backed my claim that PRISM was about data analysis, not content monitoring, but, despite repeatedly claiming (lying?) that she did, Vrede has yet to post anything from the Guardian that says that PRISM is content monitoring. Instead, she confuses and conflates information about warrantless wiretapping with PRISM, a computer system for analyzing metadata, thereby causing even further embarrassment to her esteemed self.

By the way, I posted what the Guardian says that supports my contention about PRISM. Haven't seen jackshit from you that supports your contention about PRISM.

[bannination]

... I don't know if it was already mentioned, but they only need a 51% probability that you're foreign. So flip a coin and you're a foreign target.

[Stinger]

1) I did quote the Guardian, something you denied 4 times.

Try to get it right this time.

Step 1. You claim the Guardian says PRISM is content.

Step 2. I show you article in Guardian that Guardian says is intended to deal with the misinformation floating about. That article says PRISM is data.

Step 3. You try to claim that my poor old 6/8 article stating PRISM is data is superseded by your 6/20 articles that are all about content.

The problem is, they're not about PRISM. They're about warrantless wiretapping.

Step 4. So, I quoted the Guardian article that stated PRISM is about data and said that I haven't heard jackshit from you about the Guardian saying PRISM is about content. Until you post from the Guardian where it says PRISM is content, you're just flapping your gums.

Step 5. You go back to your Guardian articles, which are all about warrantless wiretapping, which is totally separate from PRISM, and you find one mention of PRISM ... AND it's in the same paragraph with the word content ... AND you post it. There you go. You finally said jackshit about the Guardian saying PRISM is about content. One mention of PRISM as a vague reference in the article about wireless wiretapping.

Update:

Step 6. The Guardian is still saying PRISM is about data.

At which point the thought uppermost in one's mind is: what kind of idiots do they take us for? Of course there's no content involved, for the simple reason that content is a pain in the butt from the point of view of modern surveillance. First, you have to listen to the damned recordings, and that requires people (because even today, computers are not great at understanding everyday conversation) and time. And although Senator Feinstein let slip that the FBI already employs 10,000 people "doing intelligence on counter-terrorism", even that Stasi-scale mob isn't a match for the torrent of voice recordings that Verizon and co could cough up daily for the spooks.

So in this business at least, content isn't king. It's the metadata – the call logs showing who called whom, from which location and for how long – that you want. Why? Because that's the stuff that is machine-readable, and therefore searchable. Imagine, for a moment, that you're an NSA operative in Fort Meade, Maryland. You have a telephone number of someone you regard as potentially "interesting". Type the number into a search box and up comes a list of every handset that has ever called, or been called by, it. After that, it's a matter of seconds before you have a network graph of second-, third- or fourth-degree connections to that original number. Map those on to electronic directories to get names and addresses, obtain a secret authorisation from the Fisa court (which has 11 federal judges so that it can sit round the clock, seven days a week), then dispatch a Prism subpoena to Facebook and co and make some coffee while waiting for the results. Repeat the process with the resulting email contact lists and – bingo! – you have a mass surveillance programme as good as anything Vladimir Putin could put together. And you've never had to sully your hands – or your conscience – with that precious "content" that civil libertarians get so worked up about.

Guardian -- 6/21

Step 6. Just in case the Guardian articles and the NYT article and all the other articles saying PRISM is data analysis aren't good enough, there's always NPR. I don't know about Vrede, but I find NPR's work is thorough and goes deep into the subject matter.

Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president's daily briefing. Prism makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.

NPR



2) "5 years ago" is irrelevant, it's a current article about current practices, whatever their origin.

And it's still not news. It's been known for five years that NSA can do warrantless wiretapping "legally" because the FISA court, for some unknown reason, decided to make the results of this one court hearing public.

3) As I posted on page 22:[/color]

Wrong, again. As I quoted on page 21 it's way more than suspected spies or terrorists and refers to much more than phones. I did not quote:

...The broad nature of the court's oversight role, and the discretion given to NSA analysts, sheds light on responses from the administration and internet companies to the Guardian's disclosure of the PRISM program. They have stated that the content of online communications is turned over to the NSA only pursuant to a court order. But except when a US citizen is specifically targeted, the court orders used by the NSA to obtain that information as part of Prism are these general FAA orders, not individualized warrants specific to any individual...

No doubt Stinger will declare his former source non-credible now.

No doubt I would, if I found evidence of shoddy journalism like I did in the ThinkProgress article. No doubt you'll continue to try to use snark in place of rational thought.

Poor little Vrede. Still confused and stumbling around, unable to figure out that the rejection of one shoddy article is not a rejection of every article. Kind of like finding one rotten tree in your forest is not indicative of all the trees in your forest being rotten.

But I'm confident you're going to get this one day. Or not.

No matter, as he's done for so many pages now, in his desperation to defend the program

More Vrede hyperbole in lieu of rational thought. Best you can do, I guess.

The only desperation I've seen is you changing your argument and squawking BS about editing our your forest when your sources began to fail you.

and Obama he again tries to inaccurately split hairs over an inconsequential detail

You sure spent a lot of time trying to inaccurately split those same hairs over an inconsequential detail. Hypocrisy rides again. Or just more of the "No one else can do what the Great and Powerful Vrede of Oz does."

when the fact of what they are doing to us and how bad it is gets cited in virtually every source either of us use.

Get that? PRISM and "content" in the same paragraph. Nah, it'll never sink in. Or, on the outside chance that it does, Stinger will never, ever admit that he's been debunked by ThinkProgress, the WaPo, 2 SIC Senators and the Guardian. He'll either reject his own sources, again, or he'll blame me for his screw-up, again.

Yes, I saw it. Pages of information about the warrantless wiretapping program, and there is the a mention of PRISM in the one paragraph, and content happens to be in that same paragraph.

Since the Guardian later said (6/21) again that PRISM was data analysis, I wonder if that was a well-written paragraph. I mean, the Guardian has articles, both before and after that one article, stating unequivocally that PRISM is data analysis, while the one article has pages of information about warrantless wiretapping and just the mention of PRISM in that one paragraph.

Plus, when you hover over that single mention of prison, the Guardian's drop-down definition reads

PRISM An internal NSA codename for a program involving collection of data from major internet companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple. Done under the auspices of the FISA Amendment Act.

Lying, again.

Make it 5 "mistakes".

(6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15)

(16) (16) (17)
(18) (19) (20) (21) (22) (23) (24) (25) (26)

Oh, look at all the pretty little numbers. This is what you get when you combine acute OCD with Partisan62-like delusion that his self-declared triumphs are valid. I wonder at the amount of ego involved in you believing your every little delusional claim is somehow valid.

Oh you poor stupid and illiterate thing. What part of, "Page 21 and 22" was unclear to you? Is it that you're struggling with 2-digit numbers or single syllable words? Same article, 2 quotes with the second one linking PRISM and "content". Not only did you fail to read or understand the article, but you failed to read or understand the quote from it I handed you on page 22.

26 "mistakes" now, plus the hundreds before where you've denied the PRISM-content link.

But, it's not like it matters. Once again, you are obsessing inaccurately about an inconsequential detail. As you finally admitted: "They can monitor everything on the forum, identify all participants, tap our phones, and send people to watch us."

I didn't "finally admit" it. I never denied it. I always knew they had that power. I just said that it wasn't PRISM that did it. Sorry you haven't been able to figure that one out after talking with me about it for 12 pages. You had to go and make a stupid statement like that.

That's what everyone else besides you on this forum is discussing the security and civil liberties implications of. Even if you were correct about PRISM (now debunked by the Guardian on pages 21-23), no one would give a rat's ass about it.

You sure seem to give a rat's ass about it. You've been babbling on for 10 pages now, putting cute little numbers all over the place. You do that when you don't give a rat's ass. I'd really hate to see what you'd do if you did give a rat's ass. Impressive.

(note: since much of Stinger's post is defending the stupid notion that any detail of all this can be discussed isolated from civil liberties,

Oh, the Great and Powerful Vrede of Oz has decreed that you can't discuss one aspect of a topic by itself. We can't discuss one tree. We must discuss the whole forest ... regardless of how many times it's been done by the Great and Powerful Vrede of Oz before. The Great and Powerful Vrede of Oz has spoken.

Ignore the illogical hypocrite behind the curtain.

or that I ever was doing so,

Just for those 12 posts or so where you were arguing about the one aspect of the topic. And I said that that was all I was arguing about. Yeah, that.

I'm not bothering to quote and reply. His new excuse that he never read the original post he replied to is hilarious, though. Stinger trumps Det.Thorn in sheer word count if not also stupidity and illiteracy)

So, using your Great and Powerful Vrede of Oz superpowers, you are now, after the fact, definitively able to say that I just had to read your complete post in order to respond to one sentence? You have the power to tell what people are thinking, tell retroactively what they thought in the past, demand they do as you say in the present and future. Damn, I'm glad I don't have that kind of superpower. I'd probably let it go to my head ... kind of like you have.

Start talking about the issue. Being opinion, you're less likely to make the utter fool of yourself that you are on an inaccurate fact that nobody cares about, anyhow.

Well, I've been un-debunked by the Guardian now, haven't I? But it sure is nice of you to claim I'm inaccurate when I've posted the more clearly written, unequivocal sources that PRISM is a system of analyzing all the data the NSA collects. Must be that ego thing I mentioned.

Just a thought. The next time you post an article about something like warrantless wiretapping with the brief, single mention of PRISM buried way down the article, and you want someone to know it's from the Guardian, write frickin' Guardian somewhere. When you write papers, you use endnotes, you don't try to show everyone how clever you are buy burying your endnote in the text. The object is clarity.

In case you haven't been paying attention, I have been talking about the issue ... the only issue I've talked about since we started. [/quote]

[Dryer Vent]

Sting, I wouldn't waste any more time on this one. Some people just get set in their ways, and they can't open mind up enough to see other points of view. Pity.

[rstrong]

"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
- Article 12 Universal Declaration of Human Rights

(BS) "You cannot trust an encryption algorithm designed by someone who had not 'earned their bones' by first spending a lot of time cracking codes."
(PRZ) "...Practically no one in the commercial world of cryptography qualified under this criterion!"
(BS) "Yes, and that makes our job at the NSA so much easier"
- Conversation between Philip Zimmermann and Brian Snow, a senior cryptographer with the NSA.

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."
- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas 1952, Public Utilities Commission v Pollak

"When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal."
- Richard M. Nixon in an interview with David Frost, 19th May, 1977.

"By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture"
- Condoleezza Rice, on her administration's torture program

"Even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry me as much as totalitarian governments. It's been a long century, and we've had enough of them."
- Bruce Sterling, on cryptography and privacy

"I've always thought this was a treasonous act. I hope Hong Kong's government will take him (Snowden) into custody and extradite him to the U.S."
- Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, Senate Armed Services Committee

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
- Voltaire

[Stinger]

Has anyone mentioned the other group that is spying on us and actually is interested in every bit of personal information it can get on every single person?

Here's a quote that should probably scare you:

"We are all in these Big Data business models."

Why scary? Because the "we" in this case is Silicon Valley and the American intelligence community. As James Risen and Nick Wingfield reported yesterday in the New York Times, the interests of tech companies and the NSA have been converging over the past decade in two ways. The first way is fairly prosaic: Lots of Silicon Valley companies are in the business of selling stuff to the NSA: storage hardware, sophisticated communications equipment, data analytics software, and more. But while this may have increased recently, it's not fundamentally new. It's just the latest high-tech twist on the good old military-industrial complex.

But there's a second way that the interests of Fort Meade and Santa Clara County have converged: These days, they're fundamentally in the same business. The NSA calls it surveillance, and all the rest of us just call it spying. Silicon Valley, conversely, wouldn't be caught dead calling it that. They call it "targeted advertising" or "monetizing the social network." But it's pretty much the same thing.

...

Online, of course, similar things are happening. High-tech marketing firms are busily figuring out ways to merge data from lots of different sources to build a profile of you that would probably put your own mother to shame. Why? Because it's worth a lot of money. Advertisers are willing to pay huge amounts of money to be able to target the 1 percent of prospects who are actually likely to buy their wares, instead of simply blasting their message out to everyone. Target, for example, figured out the shopping habits of pregnant women and used that to create highly effective marketing campaigns aimed at expectant mothers. That's a lucrative market.

Combine that with Facebook likes, Google searches, phone records, pharmacy records, and every other digital trail that all of us leave behind us, and what can't you predict? We don't know yet, but there are sure plenty of people beavering away to find out.

...

We can all decide for ourselves whether we think the NSA should have access to all our phone records. But the surveillance state doesn't end there. Keep in mind that DARPA's first crack at this stuff in the wake of 9/11 was called Total Information Awareness, and its goal was precisely what the name implied: a wide-ranging database that included personal emails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, shopping records, travel data, and anything else that the marriage of high tech and modern marketing made possible. TIA got killed after public outcry, but it never really went away. How could it? The merger of public and private spying is just too powerful to ignore.

So even if you're not too worried about NSA's collection of phone records, you'd do well to think about where this is likely to go. There will be other terrorist attacks, and in their aftermath the public will be less likely to object to things like TIA than they were the first time around. After all, we're all used to Facebook spying on us these days. (There's no need to mince words about what they do, is there?) So as scary as a surveillance state may be, it's not the worst thing that could happen. That's because the private sector spies on us too, and they do it so charmingly that not only don't we object, we practically beg them to do more. Instead of a military-industrial complex, we're rapidly moving toward a marriage so perfect that eHarmony could only dream of it: the surveillance-marketing complex.

Mother Jones

An Austrian student, Max Schrems, requested a copy of his personal data file from Facebook. He got a CD with a 1200-page PDF. Most of it was metadata -- log in, log out, etc.

I'm betting Facebook and Google have far more information about me than the NSA does. Which one should I mistrust more, big gummint or big bidness?

[bannination]

I'm betting Facebook and Google have far more information about me than the NSA does. Which one should I mistrust more, big gummint or big bidness?

Is there a difference between the two? If a corporation has data on you it's automatically the governments.

[rstrong]

I'm betting Facebook and Google have far more information about me than the NSA does. Which one should I mistrust more, big gummint or big bidness?

There are some big differences:

One is that Google has its own database. FaceBook has its own database. The grocery store chains have their own database. The cell phone company has its own database. They're separate. You can't click a mouse and get a complete profile of someone, as you can with the NSA's grand unified database.

Another is that most people are smart enough not to post personal information on FaceBook or Google Plus. Phone calls and email on the other hand have been considered private. Protected by law.

Another is that FaceBook, Google, the grocery store chains and the cell phone company can't throw me in jail if the data is incorrect or simply interpreted incorrectly. The government is perfectly capable of doing that, and has a long record of doing so. And claiming "state secrets" when asked what evidence they have. As Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him." The government is collecting millions of lines on you.

Another is that the government is connecting the dots between you and many people you've never met - but have talked to someone you know, or have visited your FaceBook page, or had their computer hijacked to send you spam from China. Recently, people have been kidnapped from western countries, beaten and tortured by the American government, then released with an "er, never mind" - not because of anything they said or did or wrote, but because of a long chain of dots to someone suspicious.

Another is that that government's power has a long record of being used against people for political purposes. A long history of IRS political profiling controversies for example. Or people like Ralph Nader and members of the Green Party and Greenpeace who have found themselves on the USA no-fly list. Or anyone associated with Bill Clinton when Ken Starr was jailing people - and worse - when they didn't tell him what he wanted to hear. You can sue Google or FaceBook for that sort of thing; the government has many ways to grant itself immunity.

Another is that "terrorism" is only the key that unlocks the door.

The TIA needs to identify dangerous people before they get on aircraft.
The FBI needs to identify potential serial killers.
The SEC needs to identify potential investment fraudsters.
The IRS needs to identify potential tax evaders.
The DEA needs to identify potential drug dealers.
The ATF needs to identify potential illegal firearm buyers and sellers.
The USFS needs to identify who might be cutting firewood without a permit.
The CDC needs to identify people who might be carrying diseases.
The HHS needs to identify people who buy their prescriptions in Mexico or Canada.

There's also illegal immigration, election fraud and countless other reasons to have access to that database.

And finally, voters are waking up to corporations' power to collect personal information. Many countries are passing laws preventing corporations from retaining personal data, especially in Europe. There's little sign of this in the US, but no doubt Americans will eventually wake up too. Saying "But corporations are doing it!!!" means that we need to crack down on corporations, not give away our privacy to the government.

[bannination]

There's little sign of this in the US, but no doubt Americans will eventually wake up too. Saying "But corporations are doing it!!!" means that we need to crack down on corporations, not give away our privacy to the government.

I'm not holding my breath.

[bannination]

Former US president Bill Clinton has said Americans need to be "on guard for abuses" of power by the US government through its secret interception of emails and phone calls in the name of national security.

....

"You can destroy freedom with false claims that you have to do it to make everybody secure, but usually when somebody's doing it, they don't give a rip about security, they're just trying to get more power.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ju ... and-speech


.... Why can't you be president again?!

[Stinger]

I'm betting Facebook and Google have far more information about me than the NSA does. Which one should I mistrust more, big gummint or big bidness?

Is there a difference between the two? If a corporation has data on you it's automatically the governments.

More information. Less data. Big bidness is interested in who I am, what I buy, whether I'm pregnant or not, what I like, etc. They gather all the personal information they can, plus the metadata, which is most of the file. They drop cookies and tracking cookies, like Blue Ridge Debate does. The NSA just gets tons of metadata that it stores for years, not all the warm and fuzzy stuff.

Now, if the NSA takes some sort of personal interest in me, all bets are off.

Obama's last campaign and the PAC or whatever that he's building now does the same thing. The Pubs will start work on one soon. We know what they'll use that for -- to figure out how they can manipulated us into voting for their candidate. Can you see the Pubs with all the information that suggests what fear buttons to push for each person?

I'm betting Google and Facebook have far more personal information about me, even though NSA has far more bytes of data.

[Stinger]

One is that Google has its own database. FaceBook has its own database. The grocery store chains have their own database. The cell phone company has its own database. They're separate. You can't click a mouse and get a complete profile of someone, as you can with the NSA's grand unified database.

For 99.?%, all that grand unified database has is call received, location, time, recipient, email sent, subject line, time, recipient, log on, time, etc. Corporations have whatever of that they have access to, plus what you looked at, what you like, who your friends are, hobbies, etc.

Another is that most people are smart enough not to post personal information on FaceBook or Google Plus.

You mean like how old you are, whether you're in a relationship or single, where you work, what organizations you belong to, where you went to school, who your friends are, what hobbies you have, your interests, the books and movies and art you like, what online groups you have? Or what you searched for on Google, the publications you read, the articles you read, that radical forum you belong to, the porno you checked out, the bomb instructions you looked for to see if it was really that easy? And there's Google mail.

That's what I mean by having a much better picture of who I am. NSA's just got. Logged on Facebook x:xx a.m.. Logged off Facebook y:yy a.m.. Called xxx-xxx-xxxx, x:xx a.m.


Phone calls and email on the other hand have been considered private. Protected by law.

Not if you work for any sort of gummint agency. Freedom of Information Act.

Saying "But corporations are doing it!!!" means that we need to crack down on corporations, not give away our privacy to the government.

It's not a "But corporations are doing it!!!" article. It's a warning that there's another wolf at the door that everyone's overlooking, that the two are similar and growing closer, and that the next big terrorist attack will make people forget about the right to privacy. Bad scenario.

And the Citizens United decision's just icing on the cake.

Sometimes I think we're already too far down the road to that machine vs. man, Terminator society.

[rstrong]

One is that Google has its own database. FaceBook has its own database. The grocery store chains have their own database. The cell phone company has its own database. They're separate. You can't click a mouse and get a complete profile of someone, as you can with the NSA's grand unified database.

For 99.?%, all that grand unified database has is call received, location, time, recipient, email sent, subject line, time, recipient, log on, time, etc.

Our friends at the NSA aren't building a sprawling data center in Utah capable of storing zetabytes of information - and similar datacenters elsewhere. They don't need that much storage to store just metadata. They're storing everything. Legal or otherwise, they have the power to use that information.

The chances of the government using that data in violation of Americans' privacy, illegally, is about.... say.... the same as them using the TSA databases to put Ralph Nader and members of the Green Party and Greenpeace USA no-fly list, or using the IRS - repeatedly over the last few decades - to harass political enemies.

Not that they need to break the law. Notice that there's no limits - none whatsoever - on recording conversations of citizens of allied countries. Likewise nothing stops Britain or Canada from listening to YOUR calls. And the US and it's allies have a history of spying on each others' citizens and then sharing that data with the source country.

Corporations have whatever of that they have access to, plus what you looked at, what you like, who your friends are, hobbies, etc.

See below.

Another is that most people are smart enough not to post personal information on FaceBook or Google Plus.

You mean like how old you are, whether you're in a relationship or single, where you work, what organizations you belong to, where you went to school, who your friends are, what hobbies you have, your interests, the books and movies and art you like, what online groups you have? Or what you searched for on Google, the publications you read, the articles you read, that radical forum you belong to, the porno you checked out, the bomb instructions you looked for to see if it was really that easy? And there's Google mail.

That's what I mean by having a much better picture of who I am. NSA's just got. Logged on Facebook x:xx a.m.. Logged off Facebook y:yy a.m.. Called xxx-xxx-xxxx, x:xx a.m.

Except that for the majority of us, they don't have that information. Even when I had a Facebook account, I did not fill in where I went to school, my hobbies, my interests, books, movies or arts. It was simple common sense not to fill in personal information that could be used for identity theft. I was not part of any online groups. They knew about a few of my friends, but that was all.

Phone calls and email on the other hand have been considered private. Protected by law.

Not if you work for any sort of gummint agency. Freedom of Information Act.

a) Most people don't work for a gummint agency.

b) Even if you do, you still have your privacy. The Freedom of Information Act doesn't allow anyone access to calls from your home phone or private cell phone or private email.

Saying "But corporations are doing it!!!" means that we need to crack down on corporations, not give away our privacy to the government.

It's not a "But corporations are doing it!!!" article. It's a warning that there's another wolf at the door that everyone's overlooking, that the two are similar and growing closer,

Except that they're not. There's a big crackdown in progress, laws being passed to prevent corporations from keeping personal information. Maybe not in the US, but in most other western countries. It'll only take one good scandal for similar laws to be passed in the US.

and that the next big terrorist attack will make people forget about the right to privacy.

Likewise the next big terrorist attack won't prevent laws forbidding corporate data collection.

As for government, where the next big terrorist attack will make people forget about the right to privacy, the next big privacy scandal - like the illegal NSA mass wiretapping in the 2000s being leaked and then being made retroactively legal - will make people remember their rights.

[rstrong]

BTW, I do have a new FaceBook account. I've put in only enough information (an otherwise unused email address and my city) to link it to me. I have made one (1) initial status update; otherwise not a single post to my or anyone else's FaceBook page

What I HAVE done, is sign up for several dozen FaceBook-linked online contests. That usually means clicking on a button - supplied by FaceBook - allowing them permission not just to view my account, but to post through it.

That was last year. Now dozens of corporations are happily posting away in my account about the latest cars, rum, cruises, resorts and cell phones. I can even spot posts that target the interests expressed in other posts.

I'm sure that a number of corporations are using this to build up a detailed profile of me. And it's entirely inaccurate.

[Stinger]

Our friends at the NSA aren't building a sprawling data center in Utah capable of storing zetabytes of information - and similar datacenters elsewhere. They don't need that much storage to store just metadata. They're storing everything. Legal or otherwise, they have the power to use that information.

The size of the campus doesn't denote that storing your emails is the purpose. Bluffdale will have mountains of long-stored data from foreign governments -- encrypted data that the NSA can't break. A large part of the center is intended for the rapidly expanding cryptoanalysis section (that breaks down your encrypted files). They've gotten really good at that. The estimate is that a head-on computer attack to break 128-bit encryption would take longer than the age of the universe. They now have their super computer at Oak Ridge. They need the room at Bluffdale. If they succeed, they tackle that mountain of backlogged data, and it will probably be foreign data, not your emails.

Also, it would be really stupid to spend that much money on a building and have to build a new one in five or ten years. By 2015, global internet traffic is supposed to reach about a thousand exabytes a year. Internet users grow by almost a billion from 2011 to 2015. Aside from the internet traffic, they get the metadata from billions of phone calls a day. They get flight departures and arrivals. They get government and pentagon traffic. They get security camera videos.

It's big and it has to store lots of data, just not necessarily the data you think.

The chances of the government using that data in violation of Americans' privacy, illegally, is about.... say.... the same as them using the TSA databases to put Ralph Nader and members of the Green Party and Greenpeace USA no-fly list, or using the IRS - repeatedly over the last few decades - to harass political enemies.

No doubt. Bill Clinton said, "if ... probably when ...." What do you estimate the chances of terrorists getting a dirty bomb or a suitcase nuke?




Except that for the majority of us, they don't have that information. Even when I had a Facebook account, I did not fill in where I went to school, my hobbies, my interests, books, movies or arts. It was simple common sense not to fill in personal information that could be used for identity theft. I was not part of any online groups. They knew about a few of my friends, but that was all.

I don't know who you think the majority of us is. Facebook has 150 million users in the U.S. Over a billion worldwide. The majority of computer users aren't as careful as you.

Except that they're not. There's a big crackdown in progress, laws being passed to prevent corporations from keeping personal information. Maybe not in the US, but in most other western countries. It'll only take one good scandal for similar laws to be passed in the US.

That's a good start.


Likewise the next big terrorist attack won't prevent laws forbidding corporate data collection.

As for government, where the next big terrorist attack will make people forget about the right to privacy, the next big privacy scandal - like the illegal NSA mass wiretapping in the 2000s being leaked and then being made retroactively legal - will make people remember their rights.

I don't think they ever did make it retroactively legal. The FISA court ruled (August 2008, I think) that a specific, current use of warrantless wiretapping was legal. That did not include Shrub's warrantless wiretapping.

[Stinger]

BTW, I do have a new FaceBook account. I've put in only enough information (an otherwise unused email address and my city) to link it to me. I have made one (1) initial status update; otherwise not a single post to my or anyone else's FaceBook page

What I HAVE done, is sign up for several dozen FaceBook-linked online contests. That usually means clicking on a button - supplied by FaceBook - allowing them permission not just to view my account, but to post through it.

That was last year. Now dozens of corporations are happily posting away in my account about the latest cars, rum, cruises, resorts and cell phones. I can even spot posts that target the interests expressed in other posts.

I'm sure that a number of corporations are using this to build up a detailed profile of me. And it's entirely inaccurate.

I need to do that. There are a number of contests I want to enter and places where I want to leave comments, but they want access to my email, my friends list, etc. so I don't do that.

What's funny is that when my Obama-hating friend posts unhinged wingnut stuff, I visit the site and leave derogatory comments. The companies don't know what my comments were, so conservative shit starts popping up. Then I visit all the progressive sites to see what my other friends have posted. I imagine my profile's a little jumbled.