Watching this reminded me of a scene in V for Vendeta:
[youtube:28hhs9gx]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jK_VaxqFDU[/youtube:28hhs9gx]
[youtube:28hhs9gx]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu_30-8ZlmQ[/youtube:28hhs9gx]
Asshats
"The ends always justify the means"
The slogan for authoritarians everywhere throughout history.
Quote from: "NeoLogic26""The ends always justify the means"
The slogan for authoritarians everywhere throughout history.
Indeed.
"Th ends always justify the means... so long as I am the one making sure the ends line up to my liking, otherwise that is absolutely terrible!"
If the title of this thread is even remotely accurate, then tap away. The possibility of someone hearing me talking goofy with the woman down the block is a small price to pay for sleeping better at night and walking easier during the day.
Besides, as I mentioned in another thread...the U.S. has been surveilling its citizens since King George's men were spot-searching the Post Road courier in 1750. So lets stop pretending that hasn't, doesn't and will not continue to be a tool of government well into the future and will encompass every new technology that is introduced.
The NSA is just doing it's fucking job. That's what we pay them for. They can listen to my conversations whenever they want.
The Five Asks: How Can We Believe That NSA Has Stopped Terror Attacks, Won't Abuse Power?
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/the-five-ask ... use-power/ (http://www.mediaite.com/tv/the-five-asks-how-can-we-believe-that-nsa-has-stopped-terror-attacks-wont-abuse-power/)
QuoteAfter a week of heated debate over the NSA surveillance programs, the hosts of The Five finally got to hear from President Obama and NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander today. But that doesn't mean they are accepting the defense and justification from the government at face value. On Tuesday's show they asked if Americans can really believe what they're being told.
Bob Beckel, who has been severely skeptical of the programs since they first leaked, said that after listening to Alexander's testimony, "I felt absolutely no more comfortable at the end than at the beginning." He said "it was a violation of Fourth Amendment before, it is a violation of Fourth Amendment now."
QuoteAnd Dana Perino tended to hew closer to Gutfeld than she did to Beckel and Bolling. She said she had "no reason to believe [Alexander] would lie that there were 50 plots" plots stopped by the NSA.
After an Easy Hearing, the NSA and FBI are Ready for a Drink
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics ... deo/66360/ (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/06/nsa-friggin-beer-video/66360/)
QuoteIf you were wondering how the NSA and FBI felt about the very friendly hearing the House Intelligence Committee invited them to today, a hot mic has your answer. "Tell your boss," NSA Director Keith Alexander told the FBI deputy director, "I owe him another friggin' beer."
Ben Doernberg caught the exchange, which we've clipped below. Alexander, being photographed at bottom center, is speaking with FBI deputy director Sean Joyce, to his left.
Throughout the hearing the two worked together, with Alexander frequently setting up topics upon which Joyce expounded. When Alexander said that the government's surveillance tools had stopped over 50 terror attacks, Joyce described four of them. And so on. Over the course of three hours, the two faced little in the way of critique.
Hrm, just a bunch of chummy chums just telling the public exactly what they want to hear? That violating Americans basic rights are making them more safe and free? Oh, yeah, I
totally buy that!!
Why Americans Don't Fear the NSA
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... fight.html (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/06/nsa_domestic_surveillance_american_voters_trust_the_government_to_fight.html)
QuoteIn processing news developments in Obama's second term, the most useful sorting technique for the last few weeks has been to ask: Is this a scandal, a controversy, or merely a flap? The substantive answer in this case is that these revelations about U.S. spy efforts deserve real attention. When officials in the executive branch are given this kind of power, they usually abuse it. That is our history. That's human nature. That is particularly true when there are weak or nonexistent mechanisms to restrain that abuse. The political answer about how important these revelations may be is different. We are simultaneously in the season of high scandal and high fake scandal, but at the moment the political risks seem slim for the president and anyone who supports the National Security Agency's snooping power. For that to change, voters would have to stop giving the executive branch a pass whenever a possible government overreach is done for the sake of fighting terrorism.
I find it so odd that many people have this kind of doublethink in their heads. "Oh, we totally know the government lies to us and keeps secrets. We know the government abuses power and treats people terribly. But I totally trust them with THIS specific (illegal) thing."
I don't even
Get used to it kiddies. The government really could care less you're engaging in heavy breathing exercises over the phone, but if you are engaging in terroristic activities I hope the men in black bash your front door in..
Why 'I Have Nothing to Hide' Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/06/wh ... veillance/ (http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance/)
QuoteIf the federal government had access to every email you've ever written and every phone call you've ever made, it's almost certain that they could find something you've done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don't know it yet.
APA, do you condone the police illegally searching your car or home? Then in their warrantless, illegal search they find, let's say, some marijuana, and they lock you up for it? You're okay with that? Because what you're saying is that the 4th Amendment just doesn't fucking matter, anymore. "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide!" I'm sure there are a few people here who do some illegal things....why not just bust down everyone's door and clean house, eh? It's for safety, citizen!
So, where does it end? Do we stop at "terrorism"? How far do we let them erode our constitutional rights because you simply don't give a fuck?
From a bunch of goddamned freethinkers, I can't believe how many of you are okay with governmental abuse.
I'm actually not opposed to surveillance (though creepy) as long as there's a legal system protecting those being spied on from prosecution, oppression, witch hunts - not to forget blackmail - for things not breaching the law - hell, you can add for not breaching the specific law they are spying on you for. My main problem is that there is no law here. They are breaking the law, and nobody should be able to do that. If this is so important - pass a law - that specifies exactly what rights people have, and gives society 100% insight into what they are doing so that we can scrutinize it. The downside is that then terrorists could get insight into how to avoid it, and the Government would have a foot through the door, opening the possibility for them to pull even more oppressive shit on you guys (or me if this happened in Norway). So it really is a clusterfuck. But if this truly saves lives, which it most likely does, then I'm not quite sure how it can be a black and white issue.
Quote"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
? Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin
Pretty much self explanatory. Our government, for the last decade has been telling us "Be afraid, be very afraid" and the collective we have been shaking in our veritable boots. What scares me is how willing this country has been to let our liberty/freedoms erode all in the name of security.
What the individuals responsible for the bombings of 9/11 hoped to have accomplished has been accomplished.
Why are there terrorists? 8-[ Why is the United States hated by so many people? Could it be because we are immoral and invaded another country based on a lie, that our business practices in other countries are unethical, that we put people like Osama and other tyrants in power with millions of dollars, and then kill their children, while at the same time killing and maiming innocent civilians, even children with our military war machine. That we use barbaric torture
on prisoners that are quilty without going to trial.
What would we do if another country invaded us based on a lie? And now we have killer robotic drones that are killing innocent people. We brought this on ourselves with lies and violence while subjugating other people in other countries with extremely low paying jobs while destroying their environment. What have our business practices, and destroying the unions (the only voice of the working man) done to our own country besides destroying the environment? And we wonder why people here don't trust the government and big business and become terrorists. "We have met the enemy and it is us." :shock: :cry: :popcorn: Solitary
I agree with Solitary. I honestly don't blame the terrorists. I sympathize with them. The United States is by far one of the most evil countries in the entire world.
There were some unfortunate, knee jerk reactions to 9/11. Some of them are still being undone. I don't think this NSA "scandal" is one of those things. I agree that my country has done some bad stuff, even way before 9/11, but that event made some of us willing to sacrifice freedom for safety, which I find abhorrent. Gitmo, waterboarding, indefinite detention without council. Invading Iraq, (and Viet Nam, for that matter) on false pretense; Not good. Keeping phone records, just in case; I have no problem with that.
The ability to learn and or know about attacks existed prior to 9/11. Evidence has come out that has verified that. It has been suggested that had the administration acted on the information that was already available that they could have been prepared for or possibly thwarted the attacks of 9/11. So, the answer is not more surveillance but rather better response to the information that is being obtained. [-X
As a result of the incompetence that existed at that time what do our dufus idiots in office do? They create another gigantic (and expensive) Bureaucracy called Homeland Security (which is a joke and another topic all in itself) to replace those security agencies that were doing exactly the same job. This all under the guise of preventing duplication?
I don't doubt that they probably prevented attacks but who's to know (or verify) the exact number and exactly how the information was obtained to learn about them and block them. More than likely the procedures that were in place prior to the extensive phone spying would just as easily have prevented the same "attacks". That is if you really believe that there were in fact 50 attacks that were supposedly prevented. :roll:
Quote from: "FlatEarth1024"If the title of this thread is even remotely accurate, then tap away. The possibility of someone hearing me talking goofy with the woman down the block is a small price to pay for sleeping better at night and walking easier during the day.
"Goofy"? Do you mean "sexy" talk? If so please tell The Rick Copeland more. That might be really hot...
Quote from: "Farroc"I agree with Solitary. I honestly don't blame the terrorists. I sympathize with them. The United States is by far one of the most evil countries in the entire world.
Yeah, because citizen's of a country needs to be held responsible for everything their country ever did, regardless of wether they opposed it, didn't know about it, or weren't even alive. Great! One can't deny that the US has done a lot of sick and evil shit through it's time, but sympatizing with crazy, dogmatic nutjobs killing innocents is absurd - particularly when the one thing it accomplishes is more war, pain and hate. Of course, you can sympathize with whatever terrible events drove them to this, but not the acts themselves, just like we should in no way sympathize with the US supporting dictators and assassinating/removing eleceted officials.
Quote from: "Farroc"I agree with Solitary. I honestly don't blame the terrorists. I sympathize with them. The United States is by far one of the most evil countries in the entire world.
Thank you for attracting the NSA's full attention to this site and thread. I'll sleep better now. :roll:
Quote from: "AllPurposeAtheist"Quote from: "Farroc"I agree with Solitary. I honestly don't blame the terrorists. I sympathize with them. The United States is by far one of the most evil countries in the entire world.
Thank you for attracting the NSA's full attention to this site and thread. I'll sleep better now. :roll:
Enough of your constant scoffing APA. We get it. You don't give a shit about civil liberties.
Quote from: "Smartmarzipan"From a bunch of goddamned freethinkers, I can't believe how many of you are okay with governmental abuse.
I was going to say the same thing. Maybe I have too many preconceived ideas about how atheists actually think. It would seem to me that someone who valued independent thought and free speech would be saddened at how those things are becoming increasingly hollow at the hands of other people willing to let their government do things like this.
Quote from: "La Dolce Vita"Quote from: "Farroc"I agree with Solitary. I honestly don't blame the terrorists. I sympathize with them. The United States is by far one of the most evil countries in the entire world.
Yeah, because citizen's of a country needs to be held responsible for everything their country ever did, regardless of wether they opposed it, didn't know about it, or weren't even alive. Great! One can't deny that the US has done a lot of sick and evil shit through it's time, but sympatizing with crazy, dogmatic nutjobs killing innocents is absurd - particularly when the one thing it accomplishes is more war, pain and hate. Of course, you can sympathize with whatever terrible events drove them to this, but not the acts themselves, just like we should in no way sympathize with the US supporting dictators and assassinating/removing eleceted officials.
to a point, yes.
hope you didn't read the comments section of anything on the internet after the Boston bombings when it was thought the people that did it were middle eastern.
If there's anything I've learned from fiction and from history, it's that you tend to create your own enemies. But what some of you seem to be suggesting is that some events take place in a vacuum. You say that it's no wonder we've terrorists wanting to take us down given what we've done, but such could just as easily be pushed back by saying something like "It's no wonder the US did evil thing X given what country Y did to it."
Basically, I don't see how you could be consistent in this line of reasoning merely by placing an arbitrary stopping point to support one example, but not others.
Anyhow, I don't like really buy this claim of preventing 50 attacks, nor do I really like phone tapping or government access to email. However, despite being illegal for obvious reasons, I do have to wonder whether or not this is a true dichotomy: More (potential) security against terrorist attacks or being more likely to be caught off guard by them. Governments are pretty much guaranteed to have to do unscrupulous things for sometimes defensible reasons (espionage and torture during war, for example), so this may in fact be needed sometimes even if it doesn't sit well to say the least.
Surveilling an entire population based on the belief that what, anyone is capable of suddenly being a terrorist? Bullshit. All they are doing is trotting out justification for ignoring the first and fourth amendments. They may have prevented 50 attacks. but not by eavesdropping on some farmer in Iowa. The intent and reason for a warrant is that it singles out individuals for specific reasons and has to show cause, removal of which is unconstitutional.
The NSA is not just collecting metadata; phone numbers, closest cell tower, etc. You can build a PC with enough internal storage to hold a few lines of text per record for that.
They are collecting the contents of the phone calls, emails and their attachments, text messages. ALL OF IT.
The datacenter in Utah is not the only one, but even it it was it was built to hold more than metadata.
QuoteThe NSA's Utah Data Center will be able to handle and process five zettabytes of data, according to William Binney, a former NSA technical director . Binney's calculation is an estimate. An NSA spokeswoman says the actual data capacity of the center is classified.
"They would have plenty of space with five zettabytes to store at least something on the order of 100 years worth of the worldwide communications, phones and emails and stuff like that," Binney asserts, "and then have plenty of space left over to do any kind of parallel processing to try to break codes."
//http://www.npr.org/2013/06/10/190160772/amid-data-controversy-nsa-builds-its-biggest-data-farm
QuotePhone Spying Prevented '50 Attacks' Including NYC Plots
I don't care if it prevented 500 attacks. I really don't.
Freedom is worth dying for.
Interesting and relevant.
Using metadata to find Paul Revere (//http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/)
Quote"It's no wonder the US did evil thing X given what country Y did to it."
Do you know much about America's involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War? If not, I would look it up... the only country that "did anything to us" was Iran who nationalized their oil company because the British were doing some severe human rights violations against Iranians. Props to the Brits though; they were smart enough to ask the CIA to do their work for them so America takes the blame, not England. I respect them for that one.
The rest were countries were over-threw so we could have ways of combating the "evil" communists without being held responsible.
Quote from: "Shiranu"Quote"It's no wonder the US did evil thing X given what country Y did to it."
Do you know much about America's involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War? If not, I would look it up... the only country that "did anything to us" was Iran who nationalized their oil company because the British were doing some severe human rights violations against Iranians. Props to the Brits though; they were smart enough to ask the CIA to do their work for them so America takes the blame, not England. I respect them for that one.
I think you sort of missed my point. What I was getting at is that some of you are coming up with what seems an arbitrary termination point for blame, and then (at least tacitly) laying all the blame on the US for doing something horrible, as well as the blame for causing people in other countries to do horrible things. Again, I don't see how that's consistent. I'm certainly not defending the US' actions, it's just something that I think needs justifying.
Quote from: "Smartmarzipan"APA, do you condone the police illegally searching your car or home? Then in their warrantless, illegal search they find, let's say, some marijuana, and they lock you up for it? You're okay with that? Because what you're saying is that the 4th Amendment just doesn't fucking matter, anymore. "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide!" I'm sure there are a few people here who do some illegal things....why not just bust down everyone's door and clean house, eh? It's for safety, citizen!
So, where does it end? Do we stop at "terrorism"? How far do we let them erode our constitutional rights because you simply don't give a fuck?
From a bunch of goddamned freethinkers, I can't believe how many of you are okay with governmental abuse.
RAMEN.
And it wasn't too terribly long ago that most of us were railing against NSA spying during the Bush administration. #-o
Quote from: "La Dolce Vita"Quote from: "Farroc"I agree with Solitary. I honestly don't blame the terrorists. I sympathize with them. The United States is by far one of the most evil countries in the entire world.
Yeah, because citizen's of a country needs to be held responsible for everything their country ever did, regardless of wether they opposed it, didn't know about it, or weren't even alive. Great! One can't deny that the US has done a lot of sick and evil shit through it's time, but sympatizing with crazy, dogmatic nutjobs killing innocents is absurd - particularly when the one thing it accomplishes is more war, pain and hate. Of course, you can sympathize with whatever terrible events drove them to this, but not the acts themselves, just like we should in no way sympathize with the US supporting dictators and assassinating/removing eleceted officials.
You misunderstood my post. I wasn't saying what terrorists do is right. It's not. It's horrible. What I was saying was that I do not blame them, and I can understand what drives them to do the horrible things that they do. Put yourselves in their shoes. Imagine you're just sitting in your village one day when, because the US military suspects there may be a terrorist there, they bomb the entire village with a drone strike, but you survived. Nobody else did. Your mom and dad, children, siblings, friends and everyone else and everything else you've ever known for your entire life is gone, killed, slaughtered, in an instant. Can you honestly say that there's no chance at all you wouldn't be the least bit psychotic? That you're morality and reasoning would be at all skewed? Some of them really are just evil sadists. But most of them only know one thing. America killed their families and ruined their lives. I'm not saying what they do is right. But I'm sure as hell not judging them either.
Quote from: "Farroc"I agree with Solitary. I honestly don't blame the terrorists. I sympathize with them. The United States is by far one of the most evil countries in the entire world.
I don't agree with this sentiment. While the United States has done some seriously awful shit, I absolutely do not sympathize with other people who do seriously awful shit. I do think that Gitmo is only breeding more terrorists and the US government does things that make terrorism worse, but there is no way I'm going to sympathize with people who kill innocents because they're pissed off at something. They're
all bad and they all make this world a worse place to live in, and I give no shits about their "reasons".
Quote from: "Smartmarzipan"but there is no way I'm going to sympathize with people who kill innocents because they're pissed off at something. They're all bad and they all make this world a worse place to live in, and I give no shits about their "reasons".
this is how alot of the world views the US.