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Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind revelations of NSA surveillance

FISA is corrupted, I agree.

But more importantly the legislation upon which it is founded is specious and illegitimate, especially the most recent enhancements to the basic statute.

Cops enforcing bad law will never look good, and judges enforcing bad law are in the same boat.

You know when they passed the Patriot Act and sold as I described above, I was on the fence about it, but decided to except the explanation of a narrow focus. And the Left .....well their heads were exploding at the time................and now..... that the surveillance is ten orders of magnitude higher.... *crickets*.
 
Progressive obviously have difficulty recognizing facts.

It's never Conservatives "fault"..............Even when they come up with bad laws, the laws only become bad because Democrats found a loophole................Talk about being in denial...................
 
"illegal", yes. It's not a bureaucrat's position to decide what is dishonest, or wrong.

Ultimately the Supreme Court will decide. But unless the information is made public there can be no lawsuits or court case. People have previously tried to obtain the information via FOIA rules and sued over these practices, but the suits were blocked because of lack of documentation. Since the programs were kept secret, someone releasing this info was necessary for the courts and the people to decide whether we should let the government disregard the constitutional restrictions of searches.
 
You know when they passed the Patriot Act and sold as I described above, I was on the fence about it, but decided to except the explanation of a narrow focus. And the Left .....well their heads were exploding at the time................and now..... that the surveillance is ten orders of magnitude higher.... *crickets*.

Accepting the explanations of politicians is rather like buying into a magician's act, eh?
 
It's never Conservatives "fault"..............Even when they come up with bad laws, the laws only become bad because Democrats found a loophole................Talk about being in denial...................

I think my recollection is pretty accurate. They didn't just find a loophole, they found a black hole.
 
These people aren't heroes, that's for damn sure. It's the new age of espionage, just dump restricted info onto the public domain where it's easily accessible to the enemy and call it "whistleblowing". What a ****ing joke. Hang them, and see how many still think treason is just another jolly pass-time with no consequences, because they obviously don't care about the people leaked intel kills.

I consider it treasonous to knowingly allow the government to violate the Bill of Rights without speaking out. If it doesn't respect the Bill of Rights our government is not worth protecting.

The information he released does not reveal the identity of any agents (per the press accounts) it is about the blanket searches of telephone and internet company records that has been happening.
 
It's never Conservatives "fault"..............Even when they come up with bad laws, the laws only become bad because Democrats found a loophole................Talk about being in denial...................

Listen and learn. Senator Barack Obama. 2007
"I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are.
Obama also declared that "the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers":
"We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary."
 
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I think my recollection is pretty accurate. They didn't just find a loophole, they found a black hole.

Many conservatives here have stated something along the lines of "it was "understood" originally that any focus would be narrow.......................Which was exactly why the law was criticized to begin with, because it was open to several versions of "understanding"..................
 
aren't the companys who took part in the this also responsible for violating the constitution.

They probably have language in in the fine print of their agreements with customers that protects them.
 
Listen and learn. Senator Barack Obama. 2007
"I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are.
Obama also declared that "the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers":
"We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary."


I was expecting Obama to get rid of the Patriot Act. You don't have a problem with the Patriot Act, you have a problem with the Dark Ages being over.........................
 
I think your interpretation of the quote is a bit too simplistic. Franklin's meaning is that any minor level of security you gain from any freedom surrendered is undeserved.
That doesn't change anything.

Again: There is always a tradeoff between privacy and law enforcement. Is it feasible to get rid of the police? Wiretaps? Police searches? Should we say that the police are completely barred from stopping citizens and asking questions? Should the police be barred from entering an apartment when actively chasing a subject?

We cannot choose "freedom" exclusively, as then we would have no law enforcement capabilities whatsoever. That's simply not an option. We need to make reasonable and deliberate choices about the trade-offs between security and liberty.


In the case of the NSA dragnet the system takes away everyone's right to privacy in order to save us each from a terrorist threat that, on an individual basis, is very small.
Americans have spent the past decade demanding more and more protections from terrorists. The Patriot Act was not passed in secret. The Patriot Act was not renewed in secret. The phone surveillance is far from new -- we've known about it for a few years now. Public outcry at the time was... muted.

We don't know a lot about PRISM yet. What we do know is that the NSA has been building a mammoth facility in a Utah desert. We also know that the Internet was not designed with security in mind, that email and HTTP are completely unsecured in transit, and that the companies who provide us all these wonderful services at no cost have long since shredded our privacy. Scott McNeally didn't intend it as a warning, but was telling us that we had no privacy on the Internet back in 1999.

To me, the shocking part is that people don't realize that the NSA has been tracking everything they can suck up into their databases. (As have Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon and pretty much every major technology and social media company.)

On a side note, the US does not have any real privacy protections. It has no explicit protections in our Constitution, and our legislators don't take it very seriously. In contrast, the EU has much stricter privacy protections and regulations.

We have the option to get serious about reining in government. We shouldn't need a military contractor violating espionage laws to tell us to get serious.


History as shown Franklin to be wise since most dictatorships are built on an incremental abdication of freedom in order to combat some perceived enemy.
No, actually, it hasn't.

Lots of dictatorships and totalitarian states rise to power fairly quickly, and clamp down afterwards. E.g. Iran went from the Shah's government collapsing, to Islamic hard-liners taking control, in 6-8 months, and it was after they took power that they clamped down. The Nazis suspended a whole bunch of civil liberties in 1933, pretty much in a matter of months. When the PRC took over, they didn't wait around to set up a police state; neither did the Japanese when they invaded Manchuria.

A coup, by definition, is not an incremental process. And plenty of authoritarian governments gained power in coups.

It can also take long histories and traditions of authoritarianism to produce a political environment conducive to authoritarian control. Europe, for example, had centuries of monarchical and feudal rule, and relatively short periods of electoral rule before the paroxysms of totalitarianism in the 30s and 40s.

We've also seen plenty of instances of electoral governments going back and forth on intrusive policies. McCarthy became increasingly authoritarian in his pursuit of anti-Communism, and after a few years of hysteria the nation pulled back from that brink. Domestic spying was curtailed (though not stopped completely) for a few decades, when COINTELPRO was shut down. The US is slowly relaxing its intense desire to suspend every civil liberty in the name of fighting terrorism.

Basically, it's not valid to oppose every policy on the grounds that it "might" be an incremental step towards totalitarianism. That rhetorical flourish could be -- no, is -- used to oppose such a wide variety of policies, that it detracts from formulating more precise guidelines about what should or should not be acceptable.
 
I was expecting Obama to get rid of the Patriot Act. You don't have a problem with the Patriot Act, you have a problem with the Dark Ages being over.........................

Well, Obama not only did not get rid of it, he expanded it 10-fold beyond both its intent and according to Rep Sensenbrenner, who wrote it, the letter of it as well.

I got a big ****ing problem with it all, and you sure s **** do not speak for me.
 
Well, Obama not only did not get rid of it, he expanded it 10-fold beyond both its intent and according to Rep Sensenbrenner, who wrote it, the letter of it as well.

I got a big ****ing problem with it all, and you sure s **** do not speak for me.

Sensenbrenner is CA's Michele Bachman.........................
 
LOL .. you beat me to it. However, it would appear we are debating one with less than a full deck .............. :roll:

Right. Because mixing up 2 people is a crime against nature, right ?...........................Do you want to cut off my foot ?..................
 
LOL .. you beat me to it. However, it would appear we are debating one with less than a full deck .............. :roll:

nah i just pay attention to politics.

the only california congress members mentioned in the news these days is Darrel Issa and Nancy pelosi, and nether of them are getting good press.

at least my congresswoman eshoo has not done anything stupid enough to earn scorn.
 
Right. Because mixing up 2 people is a crime against nature, right ?...........................Do you want to cut off my foot ?..................

LOL ... no, but when one goes to make a smarmy comparison, in this case to paste Sensenbrenner, while at the same time accidentally indicating that they do not know who the man is, it is funny to the rest of us. Not to mention that if you had just tried to keep up with the thread, I had mentioned him in a post a couple hours ago, if that, where I spoke of his tenure, and that he was R-WI.
 
LOL ... no, but when one goes to make a smarmy comparison, in this case to paste Sensenbrenner, while at the same time accidentally indicating that they do not know who the man is, it is funny to the rest of us. Not to mention that if you had just tried to keep up with the thread, I had mentioned him in a post a couple hours ago, if that, where I spoke of his tenure, and that he was R-WI.

I knew that.................lol.....................
 
Gah. Guess we'd better pull all those police off the streets, then. Did you know that they observe massive numbers of Americans on a regular, daily basis? :eek:

The police are not allowed to just walk into our homes or peep into our windows without a warrant. Out on the streets we have no reasonable expectation of privacy. It is reasonable to expect that your phone calls and e-mail are private.
 
Read more @: Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind revelations of NSA surveillance | World news | guardian.co.uk

And he is out. The man who revealed this **** storm. A hero and a great man that was not afraid to tell the truth and reveal something he thought was wrong. Whistle blowing is not a crime! [/FONT][/COLOR]

An excerpt from the DNI's public statement today:
"As our nation faces the most diverse set of threats I've seen in my 50 years in intelligence, the unauthorized disclosure of two important surveillance programs has inflicted potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to those threats. As news coverage of these unauthorized disclosures continues, we need to press on with our mission and not let these disclosures distract us from our intelligence efforts.

"The articles published in conjunction with these leaks contain numerous inaccuracies, both in describing the purpose of our efforts and in the way they characterize the work that we do. They omit key information regarding how these classified intelligence collection programs are used to prevent terrorist attacks and the numerous safeguards Congress, the FISA Court and the Intelligence Community have put in place to protect privacy and civil liberties." :2usflag:
 
An excerpt from the DNI's public statement today:
"As our nation faces the most diverse set of threats I've seen in my 50 years in intelligence, the unauthorized disclosure of two important surveillance programs has inflicted potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to those threats. As news coverage of these unauthorized disclosures continues, we need to press on with our mission and not let these disclosures distract us from our intelligence efforts.

"The articles published in conjunction with these leaks contain numerous inaccuracies, both in describing the purpose of our efforts and in the way they characterize the work that we do. They omit key information regarding how these classified intelligence collection programs are used to prevent terrorist attacks and the numerous safeguards Congress, the FISA Court and the Intelligence Community have put in place to protect privacy and civil liberties." :2usflag:

I'm impressed, and rifling through the phone calls and emails of ordinary citizens is how they're doing it. Just like strip searching Grandma at the airport, they're just taking precautions. I agreed to a narrow focus of known terrorists contacting potential cells inside the US, not wholesale scanning of everyone's phone calls and emails.
 
I'm impressed, and rifling through the phone calls and emails of ordinary citizens is how they're doing it. Just like strip searching Grandma at the airport, they're just taking precautions. I agreed to a narrow focus of known terrorists contacting potential cells inside the US, not wholesale scanning of everyone's phone calls and emails.

"The articles published in conjunction with these leaks contain numerous inaccuracies, both in describing the purpose of our efforts and in the way they characterize the work that we do.":2usflag:
 
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