[Kevin Gibson]

Than terrorism...yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it," Edward Snowden

Did anyone see the full Snowden interview? That's one smart kid. Very articulate, well prepared, and a good communicator. What's more, it's appalling what our government is doing to our own citizens. Not just that, it's what they're working on for the future that's really scary.

If you value our liberties, and you value what America is supposed to be; I sincerely hope you watch the interview with Edward Snowden: LiveLeak.com - German Television does first Edward Snowden Interview (ENGLISH)

 

[TommyGunn]

Somehow I just cannot believe that Snowdon is a hero. Perhaps if he hadn't landed in China or Russia but stayed here, and plastered what he knew across the front of The Washington Post and taken his lumps.
Now our enemies have a great insight into how we gather intel.

And yes the government has been chomping away at our freedoms.....it's been doing that for two hundred year.
Remember the Aliens & Sedition Act?
Remember Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus?
The "War against drugs?"
And of course the war against terrorism.......

Slightly offset from this but in a similar vein; a news report I heard a few days ago said that citizens in Brazil (IIRC) were rioting because they believed their government was spending far too much $$$ on some big new sporting venue that was being built.
I thought that, well, rioting isn't good .... but on the other hand I had to give those Brazilians some credit for actually caring about government expenditures and getting off their butts and doing .... something.
Look how much our government has spent .... and what are WE doing?

Watching reality TV shows .....

Do we care about our debt .... about our rights? What? What are we gonna do and when?

 

[Kevin Gibson]

Snowden is in Russia because that's the only place he can be. If you think it through, there really was no other way he could do it. Anything else lands him in prison for life. Whistleblowers ALWAYS get abused. The one's who are lucky have their lives completely destroyed for a decade or more before they're exonerated.

And I don't care a rats ass if our enemies have a greater insight into how we spy. What I care about is the fact that I've lost my RIGHT to privacy. I worry about domestic politicians FAR MORE than I worry about terrorists. Listen to the whole interview, he paints a good picture.

The man is a hero. Now it's up to us to demand our rights back and rule of law. Snowden could have sold secrets to the highest bidder and made millions; yet he didn't. He gave up everything, personally benefitted nothing. Think it through. He exposed that WE are getting the shaft; that's what he has done.

Now as for the foreign spying, he did expose one thing that is un-cool. Like he said in the interview, it's not whom their targeting, it's the collection of the data. For foreign nations, they are collecting everything from every citizen. Just like they're doing here. And it has netted us what? NOTHING!

Domestic spying hasn't prevented a single terrorist incident. Even a government judge has confirmed that.

What the government is doing is collecting data. They are working on a way to permanently store all electronic data forever; that's where they want this to go. Now stop and think about the power that gives the government over it's own citizens. They will know EVERYONE's secrets; forever. They're not there yet, but that's what they're working toward. And we all know if that's what they're working toward, that's what they'll do.

This isn't about terrorism, it really isn't. This is about government control of its citizens.

 

[Kevin Gibson]

And stop and think about it. What he has revealed about how we spy, we know that at least Al Queda has known this for a good decade. Maybe not the nuts and bolts. And even though we know more about the nuts and bolts, we really don't know the nuts and bolts. But Al Queda has operated as if they knew exactly what US capabilities are. It doesn't take a genius to know what our capabilities are. If you're the #2 or 3 man in Al Queda and you leave any electronic trail, you end up eating a Maverick. So while he did give slightly more insight into a little of the minutia, he really didn't expose anything that Al Queda didn't already know.

What he did expose is domestic spying, which is totally illegal....well it was before the Patriot act (the gift that keeps on giving).

I don't care about the foreign spying. If we tapped Angela Merkel's phone, that's HER problem, not mine. But my phone is my problem, and I'm freaking offended.

So I don't really care about the disposition of Snowden; that's a diversion from the issue. The issue is that the Republican and Democrat parties agree on a police state, where no one has secrets from the government. THAT I fear, not some foreign terrorist.

 

[phantom4570]

My real concern about the driftnet spying done by the NSA etc is when they are turned into political weapons. The IRS and FEC have already been weaponized and played a role in the last election. What happens when an unfettered intelligence community is run by Obama's hand picked lackeys?

 

[TommyGunn]

Anything else lands him in prison for life.

Sorry, he deserves it.
Is there an unwritten / written rule that heroes always get a tickertape parade or something?

we know that at least Al Queda has known this for a good decade. Maybe not the nuts and bolts.

Do we know that? Really? Maybe. No one has told me what AQ "knows."

Just to "pick a nit," "domestic" spying isn't "totally illegal." It has always been permissable against a specific target when you have a warrant.
The problem is of course that that is the total inverse of what's going on now -- and has been for 20+ years.

As for domestic spying, I think I agree with you like 99%. The only thing I'd ask is were you this concerned back when Echelon was revealed?
It was pretty similar, save we had the Brits doing the listening on us and we on them. Computors would keep track of millions of telephone conversations and record them; key "trigger" words would flag a particular converstion for human listening.

This kind of thing has been going on longer than most people recognize.

 

[Kevin Gibson]

my real concern about the driftnet spying done by the nsa etc is when they are turned into political weapons. The irs and fec have already been weaponized and played a role in the last election. What happens when an unfettered intelligence community is run by obama's hand picked lackeys?

exactly!!!

 

[Kevin Gibson]

Sorry, he deserves it.
Is there an unwritten / written rule that heroes always get a tickertape parade or something?

Do we know that? Really? Maybe. No one has told me what AQ "knows."

Just to "pick a nit," "domestic" spying isn't "totally illegal." It has always been permissable against a specific target when you have a warrant.
The problem is of course that that is the total inverse of what's going on now -- and has been for 20+ years.

As for domestic spying, I think I agree with you like 99%. The only thing I'd ask is were you this concerned back when Echelon was revealed?
It was pretty similar, save we had the Brits doing the listening on us and we on them. Computors would keep track of millions of telephone conversations and record them; key "trigger" words would flag a particular converstion for human listening.

This kind of thing has been going on longer than most people recognize.

Yes, I remember eschalon, carnivore and ther was one other the name of which I dont recall. Those were seeking out key words in real time. They were not wholesale collection of every electronic communication with the intent of eventually permanently storing such data.

And by the way, I raised 3 kinds of hell over the other programs, which were curtailed.

 

[Retmsgt.]

As for Al Queda, it's a known fact that they even knew when the Keyholes were going to be overhead and stayed inside. What all they knew was frightening in and of itself. Everybody thinks of AQ as a bunch of ragtag Nomads with IEDs, nothing could be further from the truth. They are very-well trained and have an extensive spy network themselves, both Humint and Electronic.

That bit of trivia aside, I'm as inflamed over the NSA as Kevin is. An honest Gov't does not spy on it's own people under any guise.

 

[TommyGunn]

Some of what AQ knew it gleaned through the media.
We were intercepting terrorist cellphone calls until the news media reported that we were intercepting the calls -- and AQ promptly altered their methods and we lost out.

When Tom Clancy wrote "The Hunt for Red October" he did a great deal of in depth research on it. When it was released it turned into a blockbuster and it also turned heads in the intel community. He'd written a pretty realistic book and many people felt he knew some things he ought not know.
You'd be surprised what type of info is available if you're clever enough to know where to access it. Tom Clancy had no access to submarine secrets, he'd merely done a thorough job of reading up on publicly available material you can find at any library or get from Amazon.com .
As a sidenote I'll point out that the U.S. Navy's "submarine service" is often refered to as the "silent service." The reason goes back to WW2 when a Navy officer was querried by our vaunted press about the success of American submarines against the Japanese Navy and their depth-charges, which up to then had been strikingly unsuccessful.
The officer said the Japanese were unable to hit American subs because they didn't set their depth charges to blow up deep enough to affect our subs.
The Japanese, unfortunatly, had a subscription to the paper and took quick action based on the information.
Japanese dept charges become .... strikingly .... successful, after that, and to the chagrin of the U.S. Navy.
We can be our worst enemy.

Sometimes we classify stuff we ought not classify or which makes no difference .... all in an effort to keep anything the enemy might find useful. They're not as dumb as we'd like 'em to be.......

 

[Kevin Gibson]

No they're not dumb. They didnt need the press to fugure out about the NSA's success. When its your people dying, you tend to connect the dots rather quickly.

Still, that's not what this is about.

This is about our government being completely out of control. And yet people still vote for the same two parties that are doing this. They say they cant afford for the other side to win, and then cite issues that are completely irrelevent in comparison to what's going on. Wake up people, the Republican party is EVERY BIT the enemy the Democrats are. What is it going to take for people to stop supporting these two parties?

 

[Diamondback]

Kevin, why do you think some of us are staging an insurgency against the GOP Establishment? They're a much easier target than the Obama and Clinton machines to take on without a party behind you... and besides, we're just doing to them what THEY did to us FIRST.

Granted, it means small-L libertarians like myself and Old-Line Traditional SoCons having to learn to at least set their differences aside for a bit, but...

Some links worth checking out:
http://www.unifiedpatriots.com/
Precinct Project | How to govern your party locally, nationally.
The Precinct Project's Blog | Want to really "do something?" Take back the Republican Party precinct by precinct from the ground up.

 

[Kevin Gibson]

While I disagree with the ultra simplistic libertarian views on economics, I do believe that the Libertarians really do have a clue about government tyrrany. And if our foreign policy was led by the Libertarians, both our military and intelligence organizations wouldnt need to be half the size they are now, and these abuses would be easy to curtail.

 

[DavidE]

I believe Snowden had a strong "Whistleblower" argument if he had only talked about the Government eavesdropping on US Citizens.

Going out of his way to blow up relations with other Countries and expose stuff we do overseas was a huge no-no in my book, however.

Lately he is saying we do Industrial espionage, but is not mentioning we are the biggest target of the same activity from other countries. He should end it at the water's edge.

 

[Kevin Gibson]

I think he's trying to paint a picture of exactly how powerful this government and the NSA have become. Only a fool would look at their capabilities in technology and not think they're using it for industrial espionage as well and any other type of espionage they can do. But many lack inagination, so he's painting the pucture.