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Author Topic: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?  (Read 193279 times)

Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #100 on: July 08, 2013, 05:10:55 pm »

That's right, it's great Conservative policy to slay golden geese, close places making money...

Rob, I understand your sarcasm, but it is not always that simple. Sometimes business owners close one place not because they are losing money, but because they can make more money somewhere else (e.g., third world). That's the "secret" behind the latest "rich getting richer" wave going on right now, while the majorities of Western populations are experiencing the worst decline since the Great Depression. I do not know enough about the Thatcher England to discern which was which, it is quite possible that it was simply an inevitable obsolescence of old industries. But I do know that in the past your boys used to burn crops (to preserve higher market prices), while millions were dying of hunger nearby.

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Wake up, stamp, your dream has never worked. Anywhere. Ever. Folks died, shot by guards as they leaped barriers to get away from it.

Maybe because they were lured by another dream, the American dream, that turned out to be a mirage even for the majority of Americans these days? There's been a lot of disappointment among former East Germans, once the initial enthusiasm waned and the harsh reality started to sink in.

Far be it from me to defend the plausibility of Stamper's dream, but the opposite ain't that simple as you portray it to be either.

Vladimirovich

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #101 on: July 08, 2013, 05:16:52 pm »

Okay gang, time to fish or cut bait. How about all of you who're convinced we've imported either the methods of Hitler or Stalin

Hitler or Stalin ? those methods were invented way before 'em... they were just grateful pupils of the greatest "democracies"  ;D ... from concentration camps to you name it.

www.nytimes.com/2013/07/06/opinion/lincolns-surveillance-state.html

“The Secretary of War has my authority to exercise his discretion in the matter within mentioned.”

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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #102 on: July 08, 2013, 05:41:55 pm »

...If you're not awake enough to realize we're at war, please say so...

Well, I need a coffee, so...

But seriously, Russ, isn't the reliance on endless, perpetual war the gist of Orwell's 1984?

RSL

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #103 on: July 08, 2013, 06:11:17 pm »

Golly, nobody seems to have a plan. Everybody seems to want to sidestep the issue. The point is that when you're actually faced with having to deal with something like this, things get a lot more complicated than when you haven't any responsibility. Then you can bash what the people with the responsibility are doing without any consequences.

Come on, tell me your plan.
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nemo295

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #104 on: July 08, 2013, 06:24:23 pm »

I do not dispute that certain form of intelligence gathering can be useful and necessary. The trouble is, it could be misused too, if not now, then in the future. One example I already posted (FBI database), and the other would be IRS cherry-picking its audit targets based on political affiliation.

It isn't just some forms--any form of intelligence gathering can be abused.

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I personally object to Google-style metadata collecting as well, but the worst that can happen is being bombarded by their ads. Or another example how much metadata can reveal: how Target knew a teenager is pregnant before her dad did. But the worst that can happen if the government starts abusing it is frightening.

This is a public policy discussion that needs to happen. There are many countries that are a lot more strict than the U.S. is about the kinds of user data a company like Google can collect. I personally don't have a problem with Google collecting metadata on me, because I accept the tradeoff between Google being able to provide services for me that depend on them collecting metadata and their need to sell the data to advertisers. No company can run on good intentions alone.

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I agree that he gist of this debate is a balance between what the government does and the oversight of it. And sometimes such an oversight can not be trusted solely to a shadowy committee. Sometimes the public indeed has the right to know. And sometimes it might require someone to break the law for a public debate to happen, just like Rosa Parks did. She went from a common criminal to a civil rights hero, but only after a shift in public opinion, spurred by her breaking the law and the ensuing public debate. So, no doubt that Snowden broke the law. Whether the end result will be a shift in public opinion and a change in practice, remains to be seen, of course.

I don't think we're far apart on that issue. I would argue that in Snowden's case, in particular, he was wrong to disclose Prism's existence and methodology. Prism helps us to weed out terrorists and he did my country a disservice by compromising it. The real issue, as I see it, is not programs like Prism, but rather how we handle the results that those programs provide us with. I personally don't have a problem with the NSA gathering what amounts to the same information that appears on my phone bill. That's no more egregious than Google knowing what websites I've visited. How that data is used, however, is very important and I agree that in this era of digital eavesdropping oversight becomes even more important. I also agree that such oversight is currently far too weak, amounting to little more than a rubber stamp on what the NSA and CIA ask for.

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What makes me personally uneasy about Prism is the underlying logic: it is not just like looking for a needle in a haystack, it is more like burning millions of haystacks to make it easier to spot a few needles.

I don't agree with that analogy. I think it overstates the issue. Prism isn't destroying what it searches through. A better analogy would be the SETI project, which uses supercomputers to sift through vast quantities of intergalactic noise looking for recognizable patterns.
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nemo295

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #105 on: July 08, 2013, 06:35:30 pm »

Tell you what. Since you're so ok with drag-net style collection gathering, why don't you volunteer to send the police the GPS coordinates of where you start and end every car journey you make?

That's just metadata that shouldn't be seen as spying, right?

No, wrong. That's an order of magnitude beyond what Prism does. Prism isn't following you. It's looking at lists of international phone calls made to and from the U.S. It gives the government far less information about you than, say, your credit and debit card records do. Or your medical records. Or your ISP traffic records. Or your email. The NSA has neither the means nor the interest to follow everyone. That would be a massive waste of resources. They want to be able to detect the few who should be followed. That's what Prism was designed to help with.
« Last Edit: July 08, 2013, 06:40:17 pm by Doug Frost »
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #106 on: July 08, 2013, 06:44:08 pm »

No, wrong. That's an order of magnitude beyond what Prism does. Prism isn't following you. It's looking at lists of international phone calls made to and from the U.S. It gives the government far less information about you than, say, your credit and debit card records do. Or your medical records. Or your ISP traffic records. Or your email. All they need to do to get those is make a phone call to a judge and get a warrant. It only takes a few minutes.

But, but, Doug, how do you know what Prism does or doesn't!? Google, Microsoft, etc., servers are not used for phone calls, yet the government gained access to them. There is a lot of info on them, including your email, ISP records, passwords (which then lead to your medical and financial records), and much, much more.

Rocco Penny

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #107 on: July 08, 2013, 07:04:44 pm »

truth?
Why in the world,
would any of you, much less the ones that have long intimate knowledge of American politics,
keep letting the same bunch of liars conspire to build a world fraught with danger beyond compare?
You all already almost annihilated the human race with nuclear weapons,
lied about Iraq and Saddam,
lied about Bin Laden and his real power base,
lied about almost everything,
and now we're supposed to trust you to know what's best?
Forget it.
I for one ain't biting.
Dismantling the bad set up one piece at a time.
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nemo295

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #108 on: July 08, 2013, 07:26:28 pm »

But, but, Doug, how do you know what Prism does or doesn't!? Google, Microsoft, etc., servers are not used for phone calls, yet the government gained access to them. There is a lot of info on them, including your email, ISP records, passwords (which then lead to your medical and financial records), and much, much more.

Yes, those servers do contain more than just metadata about communications. I'm just going on what Snowden told us about Prism. I have no idea if Prism is really limited to what Snowden said it does. Maybe yes, maybe no. I doubt that Snowden was privy to everything. Or it could be that those servers were accessed because they contained accounts of people identified by Prism rather than being scanned by Prism itself. In any case we know that the NSA has tools in addition to Prism that allow them to spy on whoever they would target with Prism, so the distinction is a little academic. I have no doubt that they can get whatever they want on anyone they want whenever they want it. The NSA is a spy agency, after all. So to get back to your point, we either need better oversight for the NSA and CIA so we can be reasonably assured that they're only going after bad guys, or we need to take away their ability to spy on people altogether. I vote for the former.
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dreed

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #109 on: July 08, 2013, 09:04:39 pm »

No, wrong. That's an order of magnitude beyond what Prism does. Prism isn't following you. It's looking at lists of international phone calls made to and from the U.S. It gives the government far less information about you than, say, your credit and debit card records do. Or your medical records. Or your ISP traffic records. Or your email. The NSA has neither the means nor the interest to follow everyone. That would be a massive waste of resources. They want to be able to detect the few who should be followed. That's what Prism was designed to help with.

No, it is exactly what PRISM does when put in the context of cars. Arguing that it is less information about a person than something else is beside the point. The point is that it is the collection of information through the use of drag-net policing of the entire populace.

As for the NSA's capability:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- and that's just one facility.

If it is indeed only a "few" that they need to track then they're spending an awful lot of money building very large data centres to put IT equipment in.

If you want to bury your head in the sand and deny what's going on, feel free...
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nemo295

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #110 on: July 08, 2013, 10:25:12 pm »

No, it is exactly what PRISM does when put in the context of cars. Arguing that it is less information about a person than something else is beside the point. The point is that it is the collection of information through the use of drag-net policing of the entire populace.

As for the NSA's capability:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- and that's just one facility.

If it is indeed only a "few" that they need to track then they're spending an awful lot of money building very large data centres to put IT equipment in.

If you want to bury your head in the sand and deny what's going on, feel free...

Please enlighten us as to how a list of international phone calls amounts to "drag-net policing of the entire populace".
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dreed

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #111 on: July 09, 2013, 02:25:53 am »

Please enlighten us as to how a list of international phone calls amounts to "drag-net policing of the entire populace".

Because none of the information is gained with a specific reason or target in mind and nor is the a specific target as there would be with a wiretap request.
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Rob C

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #112 on: July 09, 2013, 04:59:43 am »

Rob, I understand your sarcasm, but it is not always that simple. Sometimes business owners close one place not because they are losing money, but because they can make more money somewhere else (e.g., third world). That's the "secret" behind the latest "rich getting richer" wave going on right now, while the majorities of Western populations are experiencing the worst decline since the Great Depression. I do not know enough about the Thatcher England to discern which was which, it is quite possible that it was simply an inevitable obsolescence of old industries. But I do know that in the past your boys used to burn crops (to preserve higher market prices), while millions were dying of hunger nearby.

Far be it from me to defend the plausibility of Stamper's dream, but the opposite ain't that simple as you portray it to be either.

Fair enough, Slobodan, location moves do happen because of economically driven factors too.

In the case of stamper’s bête noire, Maggie T, most of Scotland’s shipyards were closed because they had simply become redundant. They were already dead on their feet, and only the ‘workers’ didn’t seem to realise that. Private ownership and its investment potential was ever hindered by union militancy (I ran the gauntlet of that militancy, as an affected apprentice, during the infamous apprentices’ strike of 1959 - or was it early 1960?) and huge amounts of basic ignorance and impoverished education provided fertile and unquestioning ground for the development of communist ideology. And I use the term intentionally. Not socialist, communist. In today’s papers, Miliband, the union-sponsored leader of the UK’s Labour opposition party of the day, has been publicly embarrassed by union manipulation of local political candidate selections up in Scotland. So much so that he has announced that the party is reconsidering its position vis-à-vis its union association, the very association that provides most of its war chest, and ruins its possible appeal to non-union people and potential voters.

But anyway, back to the yards. Shipbuilding peaked as costs in Britain rose and yards in France, Germany and then the Far East could manage to build bigger cheaper. Good, more reasoned labour relations in some of those lands meant that deliveries could be maintained without financially ruinous penalty clauses being implemented. That, coupled with the huge rise in the change from boat to air travel, meant that the day of the boat in Britain was up.

(Regarding the coal mines: same story there. It was dirty, labour intensive, relatively expensive and logistically a friggin’ nightmare, as anyone who remembers buying a ton of coal and storing it somewhere, setting and cleaning fireplaces every day will know. Oil, electricity and gas were the modern answers to the heating and energy problems. The country took a shower and cleaned up.)

So, when the yards could no longer be kept open with private money, the ones that didn’t vanish found themselves effectively nationalised, the huge political fake being that the industry no longer remained a private money sink but a public one. So that was okay, then. The fake jobs continued apace. Until the money ran out.

Unfortunately, just as with film and digital, with my own business in bespoke calendar production, times change and the reasons why some businesses are able to thrive simply evaporate.  Sure I don’t like it either, but reality forces me to accept reality. Blaming other people or politics (other than PC!) for my problems serves no purpose and, ultimately, just gets in the way of seeing new paths forward, for which I can personally vouch too.  

The indigenous car industry in Britain is so well documented, both its rise and its fall, that it serves no purpose re-reporting it here! All you need do for a start is check out Red Robbo!

But hell, what’s the point? The blind will never see and the wilfully so observe even less than the naturally afflicted.

Rob C
« Last Edit: July 09, 2013, 05:07:55 am by Rob C »
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Rob C

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #113 on: July 09, 2013, 05:56:58 am »

Well, I need a coffee, so...

But seriously, Russ, isn't the reliance on endless, perpetual war the gist of Orwell's 1984?


Is it no less the reality?

War doesn't have to draw blood to be war. And as someone once said: countries don't have friends, they have interests.

;-)

Rob C

Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #114 on: July 09, 2013, 08:33:17 am »

War doesn't have to draw blood to be war.

Are you sure?

"War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities"

the Definition of Aggression
Quote
Invasion of a State by the armed forces of another State, with or without occupation of the territory, heads the list of aggressive acts set out in article 3.
[...]
nothing in the Definition prejudiced the authority of a State to exercise its rights, compatibly with the Charter, within its national jurisdiction (A/9890, para. 10). Paragraph (g), relating to irregular bands or mercenaries going from one State into another, constituted one of the major difficulties in reaching consensus on the Definition. Agreement was finally reached by narrowing earlier proposals to limit the text to “sending” organized groups, rather than organising and supporting them.

Without some commonly accepted definitions someone might just as well unilaterally declare 'war' on people with red hair, or those not wearing Hawaiian print shirts, or other terrorists.

Cheers,
Bart
« Last Edit: July 09, 2013, 08:57:49 am by BartvanderWolf »
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Robert Roaldi

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #115 on: July 09, 2013, 11:35:34 am »


Without some commonly accepted definitions someone might just as well unilaterally declare 'war' on people with red hair, or those not wearing Hawaiian print shirts, or other terrorists.


Or declare "war" on drugs or poverty!  :)
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nemo295

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #116 on: July 09, 2013, 11:52:46 am »

Because none of the information is gained with a specific reason or target in mind and nor is the a specific target as there would be with a wiretap request.

Well, that's because it's looking for possible targets by searching through international phone call records.

So let me ask you a question. What would you propose as an alternative to Prism for ferreting out terrorist communications?
« Last Edit: July 09, 2013, 11:54:57 am by Doug Frost »
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #117 on: July 09, 2013, 12:00:15 pm »

... What would you propose as an alternative to Prism for ferreting out terrorist communications?

I know what. But can't tell you... the terrorists would find out ;D

Isaac

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #118 on: July 09, 2013, 12:10:30 pm »

Oil, electricity and gas were the modern answers to the heating and energy problems.

"Coal produced 42.8 per cent of the UK's electricity in 2012..."
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Vladimirovich

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Re: Is Richard Snowden a heroe or a criminal?
« Reply #119 on: July 09, 2013, 01:00:38 pm »

Google, Microsoft, etc., servers are not used for phone calls, yet the government gained access to them.
M$ owns Skype, Skype is used for "phone" calls, so logically M$ servers are worth attention... and Google Voice (about Google)
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