What evidence is that? Do you have any information on what China or Iran or Russia or the UK or anyone else does? Besides, that gets to my other question: is it only bad if you're really good at espionage? If the US was worse at espionage, you'd be OK with it? What is the proper measure of how good a country is allowed to be at this?
Why doesn't everyone just assume every piece of electronic evidence they create is being tracked and act accordingly. If everything is 100% transparent we can make value judgements on what is really bad and what is just average human behavior.
Significantly the worst based on what full and subjective analysis of each countries espionage program? Where are the Chinese, the Russian, and the Iranian Snowdens bringing transparency and balance to their own spy programs?
Well, bad news (or good news depending on one's take on this - probably the more US intelligence he spilt, the more heroic he will be?) he's not yet done. “If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published.” http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/...ht-booz-allen-job-gather-evidence-nsa?login=1
This sort of ties into a discussion we are having in another thread but as Mathloom always reminds us since we have the vote we basically are the same as the state. You might not agree with the sentiment but we do have government of the people, by the people and for the people. If we don't like it we can wholesale vote them out of office. (yeah I know there are a lot of practical hurdles to it but that maligned document some white guys came up with in 1789 makes it possible.) Also playing, quoting or linking to Nickelback should be a bannable (if not capital) offense.
Nobody knows. All we know is what whistle-blowers have told the American people. My suspicion is, somewhere out there, there are a cache of American secrets that would disgust the American people. Wikileaks just touched the boundaries. people disappear into black sites, and some are murdered there. Surveillance casts a wide net across the nation. "Meta-data" is used to find Spitzer and cause his downfall---an example of a politicized use of executive powers. We're all stuck debating the tip of an iceberg, I think. The American government, and especially the Obama Administration, has demonstrated clearly enough that it cannot be trusted on these matters whatsoever. The prerogative is to hide embarrassments into classified documents.
No one cares if you're good at it. I guess that's an issue of urgency, rather than importance. How would anyone have evidence of this other than the alleged perpetrators whose ability to withhold evidence you are supporting here? We can only base such assessments on indicators. - The US is fond of militarily occupying, invading and surrounding other sovereign nations. - US military spending dwarves the next 20 countries combined, most of whom are allies and would cooperate with such a program. - A whistleblower has come out and said that the NSA is going far beyond its mandate, and has evidenced it with the slice of information he could demonstrate without endangering anyone. You think these countries are going to come out and announce their numbers? It's good that you're better than China, Iran and Russia, the shining light of civilization. That's the America we're supposed to hug and roll out the red carpet for when the troops arrive, huh? If you think that the absence of evidence means we should withhold judgment, then: lol.
This is a huge deal in Europe. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights The Europeans have spent forever tailoring precise privacy laws, and now they know that the NSA willy-nilly does not give a s**t about them.
"espionage" on millions of foreign citizens, universities, banks and companies? That's like using nukes on unarmed Iraqis. It is terrorism.
Not to rely too much on just one dude, but if we may once again turn to Spooner... Spoiler Someday you will know all this to be true. Now, having these positions won't make you very popular - you won't be confused for a Rockstar, but they are the right positions. I am kind of grateful this came up, because this is How You Remind Me of Spooner, of whom I'm a big fan. Later, I'll share a Photograph of me wearing a shirt with a quote of his on it (which I had to stop wearing because everyone thought it was Marx).
You and WNBA said your concern with the US was that we do it more/bigger/better than everyone else. So my question is if we didn't do it as well, would it be a problem? So in other words, you actually have no idea and just made up the idea that hte US is the worst. That's your evidence? The first is true of a number of countries. The 2nd seems irrelevant unless level-of-ability is again your measure here (you say it's not). The 3rd gives us one data point that is useless in a comparative analysis. Of course not - you're the one making the claim that we are worse than everyone else. Either you have the information to compare, or you're simply making stuff up.
wow... wtf are you are smoking? but then i guess you do like the WNBA so you clearly have some issues.
I had a certain amount of sympathy for the dude, or if not sympathy, at least a bit of understanding of what he was allegedly trying to accomplish. That is, until he ran off to State Control of Media, Including Internet, And Every Other Damn Thing there is that has to do with Information. In other words, China, which controls Hong Kong, and then to a country coming in second place, the Sovi... uh, Putin's Russia. You can bet that China got every scrap of everything the guy had on his laptops before they sent him off to Moscow. I could care less about him now. I hope he enjoys his vacation while it lasts. And my feelings about the guy have nothing to do with Obama continuing to do what was started under George Bush. I've been against this crap for years. I was against Bush doing it, with avid support from the GOP, and I've been against the Administration doing it. Honestly, people are surprised??
There are rules on whistleblowing. You don't just leak out whatever you want and then run off to Hong Kong.
Let's go over what we know. Snowden, according to the Guardian, brought 4 laptops with him to Hong Kong, an area which is under the jurisdiction of the Chinese. He possesses data which the Chinese would almost love to obtain, and is in a country which has had incredibly icy relations with the United States in the field of cybersecurity. He then travelled to Russia, which had perfectly legitimate reasons to bar Snowden from entering due to the fact that his passport was revoked, but they did not do so. Russia also doesn't have good relations with the United States either and would also like said data. So, what conclusion are we supposed to draw here? Either Snowden is a spy, Snowden is so blisteringly incompetent that he couldn't think of 50 other better ways to release his data than to go to the Glenn Beck of the left and then flee to countries which are rivals of the United States, or some combination of the two.
