Do you think they are reading your emails? Let me ask you this in regards to emails.. For example, say in a data sweep, they notice that someone has been sending child porn. Under the current laws and the way this is regulated, they are not allowed to pass this on to the police and must ignore it. Do you think they should be allowed to report it to the police? Now child pornography is obviously a very big extreme and one that is designed to stir your emotions. But think about it for a moment. If they can't act on child porn, what do you think they are going to act on in your emails? Unless of course you are planning a terrorist attack in the US or abroad or you have knowledge of an impending attack, etc.. Why would they be reading your email and what do you think they are doing with what they are getting out of your emails? They would more likely be reading the emails of the "Asshats", if they were inclined. Not to mention if they were actually reading all the emails and listening in on all those calls, then they would have have more than half of the country's population working for them. Just saying.. What I am curious about is how Snowden was able to pull this off. How was he able to get a hold of all this information. How did he, a high school drop out who started work for the NSA as a security guard not that long ago, come to have access to this kind of information? The one question to which I keep returning is how Snowden could have gotten hold of all this information. Could he really have done it all himself given his place in the natsec food chain? CIA officials are confused too: For instance, Snowden said he did not have a high school diploma. One former CIA official said that it was extremely unusual for the agency to have hired someone with such thin academic credentials, particularly for a technical job, and that the terms Snowden used to describe his agency positions did not match internal job descriptions. Snowden’s claim to have been placed under diplomatic cover for a position in Switzerland after an apparently brief stint at the CIA as a systems administrator also raised suspicion. “I just have never heard of anyone being hired with so little academic credentials,” the former CIA official said. The agency does employ technical specialists in overseas stations, the former official said, “but their breadth of experience is huge, and they tend not to start out as systems administrators.” A former senior U.S. intelligence official cited other puzzling aspects of Snowden’s account, questioning why a contractor for Booz Allen at an NSA facility in Hawaii would have access to something as sensitive as a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “I don’t know why he would have had access to those . . . orders out in Hawaii,” the former official said. And the article goes on to point out something even more bizarre: Exit question one: A guy with access to one of the NSA’s most sensitive tools tells them he needs a few weeks off to get treatment for his epilepsy, then hops a plane to Hong Kong(!) — and no one at the agency suspects anything until it’s too late? A point oft-repeated on Twitter yesterday after he outed himself is that the fact that he was able to pull this off at all kinda sorta explodes the NSA’s rationale for massive data-mining in the first place. Exit question two: Can we safely assume that, if we’re bugging more or less the entire Internet, we’re not in fact at China’s mercy when it comes to cyberespionage? Every week brings a new story about Beijing rifling through American businesses’ records; last week came news that the Obama and McCain campaigns were hacked by China in 2008. Why are they able to do that if the feds are so far ahead technologically that they can track a person’s movements virtually moment to moment from their data footprint? I realize the technology in data mining and hacker defense is different, but it’s weird to think the feds have all but mastered the former and yet trail in the latter to an almost catastrophic degree. Obviously not Snowden. He says he was granted broad “wiretapping” authorities. In a video interview with The Guardian, Snowden claims to have had incredibly broad authority to wiretap Americans, saying “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal e-mail.” He also told WaPo reporter Bart Gellman that national intelligence wouldn’t stop at killing a reporter in the name of protecting especially sensitive information. Is that crazy? I hope so. I think so, simply because reporters who break big national-security stories aren’t known to disappear or meet with accidents. But I don’t know. Keep in mind, he started working for the NSA as a security guard. Oh, how he has grown and how far he has come in such a short time...
Personally, I think Snowden's a fake. And he's also a little nuts. As an employee of a contractor, he somehow managed to move up (transfered?) from his lowly security guard job to an actual NSA position with some limited degree of operational access. And as a result of having that position, he would have been able to read various procedural manuals that described some of NSA's operational goals. But I figure his *own* active role was very limited as far as eavesdropping tasks go. So, in his desire for attention, he started from there and dreamed up everything else as he went along. <shrug>
I bloody don't - this is the AP we're talking about here. Why the AP? They could never reproduce it. Maybe. They claim they've already stopped a few attacks with it, which could be, though I don't know which body it is stepping in, or which attacks these are meant to be. But what's your angle about that? Weeelll, I think it quite likely that it could be used to spy on domestic elected or lay political opponents a la the IRS scandal. Did I suspect this was going on before? ... I guess so. But Watergate was quite a big thing. I think, in all honesty, I couldn't imagine an action against political enemies of the presidency on the scale of CREEP before now. But maybe I was naive, assuming that's actually what it really all is. So not quite delusion, but not quite conspiracy. It's possible. But then again, the stuff being emitted from the NSA now is... from the NSA. They're an intelligence organization. Lying is what they do. Is the CIA somehow more believable? Like all American politics, stance is premeditated on political support, which translates into supposition in the public sphere. "I support the Democratic party, ergo all this is nonsense," and the reverse. It's all perception, which flips back and forth for reasons of expediency and philosophy: the CIA know everything, the CIA is incompetent, and back and forth as the situation fits. Because they're not likely to send him back. Well, the Chinese are protecting him now, or so I understood. If something happened to him, it would then be more likely to be something they did, or something the Americans did. Sure - or even if he just defected, really. I'm not sure he actually has that info. We know what he's claimed, but is he lying? Right, but then if you're drawing this connection, doesn't that mean that you think it's a Chinese plot to deflect negative international perception? He did before. I don't think he should, but he's drawn a line here. Perhaps it's the fact of the Russians on the other side of that line - see the news this week - or perhaps it's accessibility (if it's war by the sea, peacekeepers we shall be). Shipped a lot of arms to the slightly redneck Brotherhood regime in Egypt. Yup. Well, there's always a chunk of the population that doesn't pay attention to these things. But the collection of journalists' phone records is a little concerning. The present administration appears to engage in the intimidation of some journalists. And there's also the issue of informed consent. You have Clapper lying on TV - and I mean, sure, we should expect that. But the Americans have this thing about informed consent, where they don't like being lied to. It's the domestic thing - yes, lie to other people, but not about spying on us. Makes a certain sense. Actually I think the NSA chief did specify they were going to throw the book at him already.
Would you have been less offended if it had been Al Jazeera? My point is they went after the records of a few journalists, did they not? Could it be those journalists were identified as having called a 'dirty number' in the course of their work? That this is just a moral panic. This moral panic, about something that was well known to all with more than 2 active brain cells, seems more in line with the belief that Obama is 'commin fer our wimmin and children'.. If that was the case, then a black President would never have been elected and the Tea Party would have been decimated after Obama took office. Unless of course Palin's muffin recipe is that good. The reality is that it could be used to spy on everyone. However it is clearly not being used to spy on everyone. So our muffin recipe's are safe. Oh, I think the incompetence should stem more from how a guy went from being a high school drop out security guard to apparently having access to this kind of information. Someone is lying and it is quite possible that Snowden is lying. He hasn't released anything that people did not already know about. He has made claims about being able to hack into even Obama's desktop in the White House to the US hacking Chinese citizens and all that went inbetween, from Hong Kong, which is a part of China... If it serves their interest to send him back, they would send him back. Well he his hiding from everyone now. Between the illusion of the US sending armed Chinese gangs after him to his 'hope that the Chinese do not arrest him and confiscate his computer', his whereabouts are unknown. What I find interesting though is that the US haven't even charged him... Do you think he is? The comments he has made about how the US would kill journalists, etc.. No journalists have gone missing or been killed in the past or present, when they were on the cusp of giving a scoop, have they? That and other claims he has made.. To be honest, it is very Bourneish.. I mean journalists were killed in Bourne movies.. They aren't in real life by the West.. So why is he saying the US will kill journalists who report on these kind of scoops? I mean hell, even Assange is still alive. Personally I think he is full of it. But that's just me. He seems to be gasping for attention and he is getting it with spectacular claims about things everyone knew was going on, the fact he worked as a contractor to the NSA makes his story more 'boggle worthy' and he hasn't really given anything of substance, just alluded to a lot of things, made bizarre claims and then kept everyone hanging by saying there is more to come.. And I have to agree with the quote I gave in my previous post.. How is it possible that a guy who works as a contractor as a system's admin for the NSA in Hawaii could have access to this kind of information and the details he has claimed he has gotten - then fooled the NSA by apparently taking all of this information and putting it on his laptop and told them that he has to go to Hong Kong for epilepsy treatment.. This isn't the spectacular document dump that we saw from Wikileaks. As I said before, he's given a huge bump to the Paul camp... The irony is that some in the Right of politics in the US are demanding that the opposition be armed and supported by the US. Certainly if the Syrian Government used chemical or biological weapons, then the UN must react swiftly. But we shouldn't be arming the opposition. Whatever the case may be, this should be something that peacekeepers with more powers than were given to those in Rwanda (for example - ie they are allowed to shoot to protect instead of being forced to sit and do nothing) should be utilised sooner rather than later. I don't think the US should be going in as the liberating force. I do think it is time for the UN to act, but not to arm one side against the other. I don't think journalists felt intimidated by this Administration. Quite the contrary. Considering the amount of crap some have gotten away with saying about this current President.. And yet, he still hasn't been charged yet...
Most of the US public doesn't know about it still. If you describe even what the NSA has admitted to doing, accurately, most people in the US will label you a purveyor of conspiracy and biased accusation. I do think foreigners have a difficult time comprehending the nature or extent of the US public's simple ignorance, the degree to which the average citizen of the US is living in a make believe world unsupported by memory of event and impervious to the influence of information historical or current. We have alternating posts right here, in which first Snowdon is held to be an inventive fake or con making wild shit up, and then held to be some kind of plant hyping mundane familiarities for distraction or cover. The first is an American from the bubble; the second is a foreigner trying to make sense of the fuss. To those foreigners puzzled by their memory of the exposure of W&Co's installation of the phone surveillance gear capable of all this stuff, completely without warrant and in flat defiance of the US Constitution, be it known: that whole program was denied, deflected, misdescribed, buried; as of now in most Americans's view of things it not only wasn't continued and handed over to Obama, it never happened at all. That's on even numbered weeks. On odd numbered weeks, it's been going on since the telephone was invented, a routine tool of law enforcement.
The NSA and other governments have been doing it for years. I'm surprised nobody's mention Carnivore or [/b]Echelon[/b], You get some mention of "Prism" and suddenly it's all very real. Ever since "Terrorism" showed it's face the rights of everybody have slowly been eroded away (There were a whole bunch of data laws passed in 2003 one of them being "the legal right to snoop emails"). The problem with those rights getting overlooked or undermined is that it starts to make people question if "Terrorism" wasn't something manipulated and made-up just to undermine their rights. One day people will see sense and just start ignoring those that call themselves government, as if they get ignored, they'll fade away.
I do not know. But I dont want them to, even though there is nothing in them. No plots, no conspiracies, nothing nefarious. But Its still None of their Business. I dont want anyone to analyze my habits. Not my grocery lists, not what kind of laundry soap I use, not my video preferences, not my bookmarks. Nothing. No clues so they can change their lip service. I dont like being manipulated. They will find out how I feel when I vote. Depends on which 'they' you speak of. Prism is FBI. I do not believe the above is true. As an example, A friend has a neighbor that is DEA. They dont mess around with less than 5 lbs of weed. They pass that info along to locals. And a bit of background on FBI and child porn. http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/FBI-shared-child-porn-to-nab-pedophiles-4552044.php So I would guess the FBI anti-terrorism task force would pass child porn info over to the FBI task force on Child porn/exploitation. I posted links to other examples of people in authority using the technology for their own purposes. DNR, police, police going after reporters. If the data is there, someone will access it without reason or for personal gain/curiosity. Each and every year locally we read about another person with access getting fired for doing such things whether is DMV people looking up addresses of football players to medical persons accessing notables. Truth be told nobody gets fired for doing it a couple of times. They only fire those who do it in the hundreds/thousands. And plenty of them are selling the info. A$$hat extraordinaire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_email_hack GED. In most places, employers have to treat that as equal to a high school diploma. His parents. Fed hiring law gives precedence to spouse/children of federal employees. Not puzzling at all. User groups Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Micro$oft. Hackers (anonymous comes to mind) routinely hack into high profile accounts without particular sophistication. I can only imagine how sophisticated these various cracker softwares have become (with plenty of gov funding). People kill each other all the time. Good way to try to ensure your not among the dead. http://rense.com/general62/list.htm
Americans have forgotten about William Binney, who first exposed the extent of the NSA's actions (which is pretty much everything Snowden has just a said, only with an air of greater mystery from Hong Kong and the whole cloak and dagger BS he is running with..)? I mean the whole sinister Government killing journalist routine he has going there.. It's ridiculous. As one pundit posted above, journalists haven't disappeared into the night or met with untimely deaths when they exposed Government secrets in the past. I think we'd know about it by now if they started to disappear each time they had a scoop. They have forgotten or ignored the big story the New York Times gave of the story back when Bush was in power? Perhaps I am looking at this with too much skepticism. Or perhaps I am naive in assuming that Americans cannot be that gullible or that stupid. Perhaps I am wrong about that. But it does sell papers. I am curious as to why the Washington Post held back a bit on the story, since he had apparently contacted them first. And thus, here it is: To effect his plan, Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would publish — within 72 hours — the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants. He also asked that The Post publish online a cryptographic key that he could use to prove to a foreign embassy that he was the document’s source. I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we published or when. (The Post broke the story two weeks later, on Thursday. The Post sought the views of government officials about the potential harm to national security prior to publication and decided to reproduce only four of the 41 slides.) Snowden replied succinctly, “I regret that we weren’t able to keep this project unilateral.” Shortly afterward he made contact with Glenn Greenwald of the British newspaper the Guardian. We continued our correspondence. He was capable of melodrama but wrote with some eloquence about his beliefs. This is of course after he prattled on about how they (US Government) would kill Barton Gellman if they (US Government) knew that Gellman had possession of the information he (Snowden) had a hold of (which even Gellman expressed disbelief over). No, really.. It's like the cloak and dagger BS from a cheesy spy movie. And the whole name he chose for himself "Verax".. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! My favourite line from his interview with Gellman: Comedy gold. I'm sorry, it probably isn't funny to Americans, but really.. really? Well at least it sells the papers and he might get a book deal out of it...
In the UK, newspapers have been warned not to do any more reporting on this "old news" MoD serves news outlets with D notice over surveillance leaks BBC and other media groups issued with D notice to limit publication of information that could 'jeopardise national security' http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/defence-d-bbc-media-censor-surveillance-security
They never heard of him. Of course. That was liberal media crap from years ago - they paid little attention then, none now. Hmmm. Although avoidance of melodrama is usually a good rule of thumb, it is true that the heart attack, plane crash, car accident, and general suicide/untimely event rate among whistleblowers - along with the character flaw revelation, drug OD and rehab, arrest for reputation-destroying crime or credibility damaging behavior, etc - is pretty high. We are not talking about an established journalist, here - someone with an established reputation and identity. We are talking about a low level whistleblower, with all the psychiatric and personal vulnerabilities that implies, who is now a target of systematic character assassination and reputation destruction by the best in the world at that. For mulling: another rule of thumb is that the fascistic faction of American politics is and has been doing or attempting whatever evil they attribute to their targets on flimsy evidence. That's not actually a joke or psychiatric observation, but a reasonable presumption borne out over many decades of experience now. Examples: electoral fraud, calculated information leaks that damage intelligence ooperations. Among those accusatory claims has been, pretty consistently, the rigging of suicides and accidents and drug ODs and heart attacks and the like.
Despite the D-Notice, the Guardian is carrying a front page spread on GCHQ tomorrow. British spies have secretly accessed fibre-optic cables carrying huge numbers of emails, Facebook messages and other communications, according to The Guardian. Documents given to the newspaper by whistleblower Edward Snowden suggest eavesdropping agency GCHQ can analyse data from the network of cables that carry global phone calls and internet traffic under an operation codenamed Tempora. The newspaper said data had been shared with the organisation's US counterpart, the National Security Agency. GCHQ, in Cheltenham, refuses to comment on intelligence matters but insisted it was "scrupulous" in complying with the law. http://news.sky.com/story/1106813/gchq-spies-tap-fibre-optic-cables-for-data Ignoring a D-Notice is not something done casually. Usually papers do not even report that they have received one.
True Dat! And I will add this link: http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/20...ove-for-evidence-in-murder-divorce-cases?lite Really? Then how do they know whether a call originates and terminates inside/outside the usa?
From today's Guardian. The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America. This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as "intercept partners". The papers seen by the Guardian suggest some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa Communication surveillance needs legislation so that it is within reasonable parameters, and is externally monitored. This cannot be done if bulk information is passed between countries. It is too powerful as a potential tool for repression and corruption.
By the actual phone numbers in the calling information. I suppose you don't make any international calls. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! They require a country and (most times) a city code in addition to the familiar exchange and line numbers used internally in the U.S.
The government was just panicking about the potential of subsequent re-emergence fire extinguisher throwing students. It's not just the potential of the threat of "anti-social behaviour" but the fact that it would likely be an armament picked up from the Conservative office hurled at police officers acting under the fascist regime. (In short they didn't want a repeat of London's Riots) As for further reportage of Snowden, there are various points that currently aren't brought into question, for instance: People query how a person could get a job like he did so young, well the simplest answer is he likely had a squeaky clean background, he probably never did drugs (probably didn't condone them), probably had a family with a credible history and likely had a very strong morale upbringing. In essence he's likely a guy that wanted to do the right thing, probably too intelligent for a standard police force and too limited in skills initially to go work for other crime related units. His background of joining the military for a short spell likely gained him the recruiting potential of gaining an entry level as a security guard, as a security guard he likely gained elevations in clearance (after all how can you patrol if you can access where you need to patrol?). This security elevation is likely what led to him being able to change jobs to I.T. The problem is the job's that he eventually was alotted didn't necessarily apply a Psych Evaluation, as if they had they would of likely seen that his morale backgrounding, his need for things to be possibly OCD "Right" is the reason why he's become the latest whistleblower. In essence they've put someone that wants the law to be clear and followed correctly in a place where "sociopath's" don't just manipulate but dominate, it's the preverbial "throwing water on a petrol fire", all it would lead to is Snowden acting as a fracture and blowing a whistle. Now this brings the point of the actual "spying" problem, on the face of it you can say a legal parameter for any "spying" requires judges to deliberate on whether such an act should be committed on a private individual or group. This was supposedly done, however "Was it actually stated in the documents that Snowden handled that High Court Judges order a warrant?". If it wasn't then it would of ran a flag with Snowden because of his archetype, the problem is who can you tell of a potential political Faux Pas, does the NSA have it's own "Internal affairs"? and if they did, does registering a concern or complaint get the problem resolved or the person that launched it reprimanded? Ideally they need their own IA and it needs to be independent of what the NSA/CIA does, as a decent IA could generate a far greater way of limited damage control before it spirals out of control and without entrapping people into legal or espionage disputes.
Military requires high school diploma/GED. They will help you get your GED if you havent already. When he says he is not a high school grad, that does not exclude GED. It has been confirmed by the military, his claims of entering special forces training is true. During the 1st phase of training, recruits undergo psych profiles.
And it's still true. No offense intended but it's obvious you've no idea what's involved in the telephone switching networks.
Well the bird has flown the coop and is now apparently in Russia. Whether this is a stop over or not, no one really knows. Interesting developments.
