blankfist

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radx says...

Spiegel now reports of an NSA branch called "Follow The Money".

Guess what they do...

Yap, they collect information about international money flows and feed them into their aptly named database "TracFin". 84% is said to be credit card related data, though VISA again claims to know fuck all about it.

TracFin also includes everything they extract from SWIFT, which was something we predicted during our protests against the program in 2009. They publicly shamed our movement as being driving by paranoia, yet here we are. Again. Strictly enforced data privacy... my ass.

albrite30 says...

Thanks for your very educated response on the poll I created about Syria. Much appreciated.

blankfist said:

The right answer is noninterventionism, in my opinion. And sanctions aren't diplomatic solutions. They are acts of war on a sovereign country, which usually results in starving its people, which creates resentment.

Here's some reasons why noninterventionism is so important. First, bombing campaigns usually create collateral damage, and the funny thing about people, they tend to hate you when you kill their moms or sons or wives or friends. For reference, please refer to 9/11 in the U.S.

Secondly, Syria is having a civil war. How'd the U.S. like it if Britain supported the Confederacy during its civil war?

Thirdly, supporting the rebels is essentially being al-Qaeda's air force. Yeah, remember those guys? The guys who flew planes into our buildings? I don't think we should support them.

Fourth, our sudden pious indignation is misplaced, and worse, selective. I didn't hear one person in the U.S. calling to bomb Israel when they used white phosphorous on Palestinian women and children.

Fifth, you know exactly what is really fueling the march into Syria. It's not a humanitarian intervention, it's about oil. Syria doesn't want to trade their oil in U.S. dollars. Neither does Iran. If we allow the U.S. to bomb Syria, we will soon be marching into Tehran.

Sixth, who made us world police?

Lastly, it's not like we couldn't be spending that money at home fixing our infrastructure and taking care of our people. I think feeding the homeless here is way more important than making people homeless in other countries from bomb campaigns.

radx says...

The European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs had a hearing about NSA/PRISM/etc yesterday, with Jacob Applebaum and Alan Rusbridger amongst others. Greenwald was supposed to be videoconferenced in, but it didn't work for reasons unknown to me.

Two interesting bits of information:

1) Sweden is closely involved in the Fives Eyes program. They have an installation to monitor satellite communications and access to fibre optic cables that the members of Five Eyes don't have access to. No specifics were mentioned, but a quick glance at a map of long distance cables indicates to me that it's Russian communications they are interested in -- those run through Sweden.

2) Nations with access to PRISM/ECHELON besides the Five Eyes: France, Israel and Sweden. Likely to have access, though probably limited: Germany. Potential access, but unconfirmed: a total of thirty nations.

And, as a special bonus, the former chair of the special committee that authored the 2001 report on ECHELON said the following, paraphrased by me:

"If rentention of domestic communications meta data is deemed neccessary, the acquired data should not be stored outside of the respective nation. Normally, I'd say outside of the EU, but that just brings us back to the problem of GB and the GCHQ."

That's a high ranking EU official stating, on record, that GB cannot be trusted.

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