<p>It would bother me if the word of any other single person wasn’t given the same skepticism.</p>
<p>If you are asking me, Halogen, I wonder about these things because there seem to be inconsistencies and outright lies in the story that he voluntarily gave the Guardian. He could have chosen to hand over the documents without a word about himself or his background. What he has chosen to say about his background is telling. He outright lied and stretched the truth about things that he didn’t need to mention at all. </p>
<p>This is not a lifelong, high level whistleblowing employee. This is a high school dropout, who didn’t complete even a certificate program at the CC he sporadically attended, who failed to complete army special service training. And yet he somehow has a security clearance and a job at both the CIA and NSA. I have questions. Maybe he is lying, or maybe the CIA and NSA are rushing high school dropouts through the security clearance process these days. However, in my admittedly limited experience, security clearances take months. And given the choice of hundreds of applicants who have finished college or have advanced degrees, why would this young man be working overseas for the CIA? Why would he have access to the things he claims he had access to? </p>
<p>My questions may be about Snowden, or they may be about how easily security clearances are bandied about lately, or they may be about the HR department at Booz Allen.</p>
<p>Edited: Calmom said it much better than I did.</p>
<p>Calmom: I appreciate your insights on the IT aspect of the PRISM software.</p>
<p>Re post #46: There is a thoughtful OpEd by Thomas Friedman in today’s NYT [url=]<a href=“Opinion | Blowing a Whistle - The New York Times”>Opinion | Blowing a Whistle - The New York Times; I found it interesting that Friedman quotes David Simon, producer of the award-winning HBO series “The Wire.” (The underlying premise of “The Wire”'is a police wiretap of drug dealers as part of the War on Drugs. One can draw parallels with the NSA data mining in the War on Terror.)</p>
<p>As Friedman points out, it is a fact that 9/11 occurred and that there are people in the world who wish us harm. It is also a fact that subsequent terrorist attacks were thwarted (the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, the Times Square bomber to name a few). It is a fact that there are people who would do considerable harm to us if given an opportunity. We as a people have asked our government to protect us. The question then becomes what price are we willing to pay for that security? This is an important dialogue for the American people to be having.</p>
<p>1) Should we be scanning data sources to guard against terrorists & prevent future acts of terrorism? Do we want a “safety net?” </p>
<p>2) How tightly woven do we want the “safety net” to be?</p>
<p>3) Who is watching the “watchers?” There is great potential for abuse. What are the safeguards for the system?</p>
<p>I think the greatest discomfort comes from #3 - the potential for abuse whenever we create a “safety net.” However Friedman cautions that if another 9/11-scale terrorist attack were to occur - especially one involving nuclear weapons - that we all stand to lose much, much more.</p>
<p>0) When terrorists communicate via channels that can be scanned, should their malice or their stupidity worry me more?
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<p>I actually read the Simon piece several days ago. </p>
<p>There’s a balance that needs to be struck. The law already provides for Congressional oversight and certainly it is appropriate to require more transparency, perhaps by declassifying more information that does not have direct bearing on current investigations. </p>
<p>You might find this article informative:
[Charting</a> 33 Years? of FISA Reports to Congress](<a href=“http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/charting-33-years-of-fisa-report-data/]Charting”>Charting 33 Years’ of FISA Reports to Congress – Outside the Beltway)</p>
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<p>"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. " – Benjamin Franklin</p>
<p>The Franklin quote is totally misapplied. We’re talking about the recording of information that’s already out there, not about restricting what people can do with their lives.</p>
<p>All the people who run our gov’t are smart, selfless and benign. These people always put the citizenry’s interest above their own financial, political, social self-interest. </p>
<p>Our gov’t would never do anything unethical or vindictive to its citizenry like: deliberately infect them w syphillus for a medical study, lock whole families up in concentration camps, or target them for IRS audits.</p>
<p>The Franklin quote always applies.</p>
<p>If I can’t expect privacy while sending communications through a wire, then how can we expect a letter in the mail to be private? Does it have to not be covered under the constitution, but from a different law. I can’t see the distinction between those two.</p>
<p>Gmt-they would never enslave a race, or come close to extermination of one either.</p>
<p>@raider, minor point of distinction:
Our enlightened gov’t did not regard the slaves as full citizens, but more like documented legal aliens…</p>
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The address on the outside of the envelope was never private. The mail carrier can see it, the mail sorters can see it. If you use Fed Ex or UPS and they choose to keep detailed logs and tracking numbers on every piece of mail, none of that is private. </p>
<p>That’s what the phone metadata is. It shows phone numbers and routing information. </p>
<p>That information is not legally considered to be yours; it is legally deemed to be a business record maintained by the carrier.</p>
<p>Just now, on MSNBC, Former director of NSA, General Michal Hayden:</p>
<p>“My plea to the press is, if you are going to do an expose, get it right. I think the most harmful aspect of this story, based upon Snowden, was how badly garbled the Guardian and the Washington Post got the story, especially the PRISM story. It has made it seem far more invasive than it really is. So if you are going to do this, if you are going to bring truth to the people, make sure you are dealing with truth.”</p>
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I hope you are not suggesting that I am a terrorist. My H is a survivor of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, so nothing could be farther from the truth. OTOH, I do not believe that communications need to be on public frequencies to be monitored. Terrorists are clever & highly creative people - they should not be underestimated because they will always seek to exploit weaknesses. That said, even the most meticulous terrorists can be careless on occasion.
I agree with this. Greater transparency is an important safeguard to preventing abuses and ensuring accountability within the system. And there is a great deal of information that is unnecessarily classified.</p>
<p>It is unrealistic to expect any kind of plaintext privacy in cyberspace. you can’t control the path your information takes and you can’t guarantee that no node is compromised even if the law forbids it. The NSA is taking advantage of an opportinity you gave them.</p>
<p>In cyberspace, routing information can be abstracted away from the identities and locations of the people communicating. Tor and I2P do that. They make it infeasible to associate a message with a physical start/endpoint pair. Check out Silk Road.</p>
<p>I’m not suggesting that anyone is a terrorist; I mean that in order for surveillance to be an ethical issue in the first place, we must assume we’re dealing with some pretty ignorant or careless terrorists. If they know what they’re doing and care about doing things right, they can’t be watched. Frequencies have nothing to do with it. They just need to encrypt their information properly.</p>
<p>^I agree. This program is too massive to be effective. They will invade privacy for not much benefit to justify it. Secrets breed corruption, too. As a side note,</p>
<p>[Did</a> Obama Just Destroy the Internet? | Daily Ticker - Yahoo! Finance](<a href=“Did Obama Just Destroy the Internet?”>Did Obama Just Destroy the Internet?)</p>
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<p>My many years of experience in the criminal justice field taught me that there are a lot of stupid, ignorant and careless criminals around. Some of the stupidity really leaves the lawyers and judges shaking our heads.</p>
<p>As the Boston bombing illustrates, “terrorist” is a broad category that doesn’t have much of a hierarchy and doesn’t seem all that selective about who gets to participate. So I would assume that there are many stupid terrorists, making a lot of stupid mistakes.</p>
<p>Given that any idiot can construct a bomb or (apparently) stick ricin in an envelope, I would assume that it’s fruitful to try to catch stupid, careless would-be terrorists as well as smart ones. Every once in awhile the mistakes of the stupid ones might even provide some leads as to how to catch the smart ones. Osama Bin Laden was careful never to use a cell phone and rely exclusively on couriers – but eventually one of the couriers made a call to a monitored number --and that was enough for the CIA to be able to locate the courier and start following him. Keep in mind that the geolocation data on a call or text message is often more important than the content. (Info re Bin Laden search here: [TRAIL</a> TO OSAMA BIN LADEN - World Topics | Facts and Details](<a href=“http://factsanddetails.com/world.php?itemid=2349]TRAIL”>http://factsanddetails.com/world.php?itemid=2349) )</p>
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<p>and how should I prove it??? let’s be real. Do you want me to magically post all of NSA’s data on CC for you to look through?</p>
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<p>Schokolade - details are important in the line of work NSA does. I suggest you try reading my first fact and the link again.</p>
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<p>True. Unless they happen to come across a U.S. citizen talking about an active terror plot. That said, do you realize that people are not employed by the NSA to listen to everyone’s phone calls? NSA would need literally MILLIONS of employees.</p>
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<p>what exactly, do you think the NSA does?</p>
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<p>yes… they have logs of what every single person is doing on the networks at all times (likely some companies do the same).</p>