And another one. So now that we have it in print, can we drop the pretence and call it what it is: the world's most sophisticated system of industrial espionage.

I'd complain about being spied upon by supposed friends and allies, but as recently declassified documents showed, the Allied Control Council reserved the right to spy on any and all communications in Germany, even beyond the reunification in 1990. So it's not like we had any privacy to begin with, only the illusion of privacy, lasting a whopping 61 years. And it's all legal. Unconstitutional, but legal.

Snowden's material included surveillance statistics, showing that the NSA is intercepting, on average, 20 million phone calls a day in this beautiful country of mine. Most of it will be plain old industrial espionage, just like the bugs they planted at the EU offices.
So I'm rather surprised at the lack of outrage coming from my government. I know they don't give a rat's ass about the privacy of us plebs, but industrial espionage on a massive scale? I'd assumed they wouldn't like that one bit. Not a peep though, only silent obedience.

Anyway, everything's presented as shocking news in the media, so I thought I'd just link a certain document, aptly named AN APPRAISAL OF THE TECHNOLOGIES OF POLITICAL CONTROL. As you can see, it is a report that was presented to the European Parliament in 1998.

Skip to 7.4.1:

The Interim report said that within Europe, all email, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London then by Satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York Moors of the UK.

I'd say anyone who doesn't see the harm in PRISM should have all his communication monitored by the FBI for a year. Let's see if they find any harm in that.

Terror attacks that get prevented tend not to get quite the same news coverage. We'll likely never know how effective it was, but is the efficacy of the program at all relevant?

I don't think the motives behind this whole prism thing were some machiavellian aspiration to become Big Brother. They have blown the terror threat out of proportion and have allowed the ends to justfy their means. Nobody wants another Boston or 9/11, but the idea of a future where such terror attacks are impossible by way of mass survelliance is far more frighteningly dystopian. Buuuuuut I am in danger of making a slippery slope argument and creating a false dichotomy. Needless to say society is about the sacrifice of freedoms for some degree of security. I hope the debate as to where that trade might become unfavorable continues, and I certainly hope those that provided the seed for it dont end up swinging from a rope for treason.

I'm heading over to their site for the rest.

To say the least
You guys are fucked
And we're going to be fucked as well within a matter of time.

These system, all the info, PRISM etc etc. When it falls into the wrong hands... well you're going to be in 1984 before you can say nineteeneigh

(continued conversation from http://videosift.com/video/Democracy-Now-A-Massive-Surveillance-State-Exposed. Feel free to join in.)

@enoch - Specifically, what new power has the government gained here? (this is not a rhetorical question)

I'm with you on torture, warrantless wiretaps, illegal wars, assassinations (in general, thought I think Al Alakwi was justified considering the body count he had racked up), persecution of whistleblowers, persecution of journalists

The current NSA scandal encompasses none of these things. If they want to record your phone calls, they need a warrant. They didn't under Bush - but they do now - and PRISM can't go after your internet data at all.

Even if they did want to grab everyones' information, can you see how difficult it would be to pull off? How many phone calls are made in a day? (millions?) How many warrants would it take to get access to all those calls? How many man hours would it take to record and listen to all those calls? Even if the NSA were full of villainous mustache twirlers, doesn't that seem like a futile task? 99.9999% of the information would be useless.

I believe that the NSA genuinely works to stop terror attacks. I know there has been much bullshit done in the name of the "war on terror", but I believe there is a genuine need for an Agency that deals with National Security. I would imagine most countries have some kind of similar body.

I don't have a problem with information gained through search warrants. My major complaint is that this stuff is not better explained to the public. I know that there is plenty of specific information that needs to be kept secret in order to not blow the cover of agents who are wiretapping suspects, but I think the broad strokes should be put out there. Here's what we are doing. Here's why. Here are the problems we've had. Here are the successes we've had. How are we doing? How can we improve this?

I also think there would be far less need to monitor if drugs were legalized and the war on terror ended.

Anyway, I think this kind of surveillance is going to become status quo, will not be overly problematic and will be completely uncontroversial in a few decades. As far as abuse goes, you don't need any of these high tech contraptions to listen to people's phone calls and track internet usage. These things can be done fairly easily with comparatively primitive tech that can be bought legally at spy stores.

http://www.spy.th.com/audiocat.html

@criticalthud I don't disagree with what you say. My point is that judge approved wiretaps and internet surveillance should be a legal part of the law enforcement/National Security arsenal. How to do it best is beyond me. I think warrants and constitutional protections are decent checks and balances, but I know they are not infallible. As I mentioned to enoch, if someone wants to listen to your calls, be that person a high ranking government agent or your grumpy neighbor, it can be done easily with low tech. Killing these guidelines would do nothing to protect you from a rogue agent or personal vendetta.

If all this leads to a real discussion on the war on terror or the war on drugs, I'd be thrilled. My prediction is that it will just be used as a politicians electoral bludgeoning device until everyone gets sick of hearing about it and it slides off the radar screen.

@enoch - Specifically, what new power has the government gained here?

I'm with you on torture, warrantless wiretaps, illegal wars, assassinations (in general, thought I think Al Alakwi was justified considering the body count he had racked up), persecution of whistleblowers, persecution of journalists

The current NSA scandal encompasses none of these things. If they want to record your phone calls, they need a warrant. They didn't under Bush - but they do now - and PRISM can't go after your internet data at all.

Even if they did want to grab everyones' information, can you see how difficult it would be to pull off? How many phone calls are made in a day? (millions?) How many warrants would it take to get access to all those calls? How many man hours would it take to record and listen to all those calls? Even if the NSA were full of villainous mustache twirlers, doesn't that seem like a futile task? 99.9999% of the information would be useless.

I believe that the NSA genuinely works to stop terror attacks. I know there has been much bullshit done in the name of the "war on terror", but I believe there is a genuine need for an Agency that deals with National Security. I would imagine most countries have some kind of similar body.

I don't have a problem with information gained with search warrants. My major complaint is that this stuff is not better explained to the public. I know that there is plenty of specific information that needs to be kept secret in order to not blow the cover of agents who are wiretapping suspects, but I think the broad strokes should be put out there. Here's what we are doing. Here's why. Here are the problems we've had. Here are the successes we've had. How are we doing? How can we improve this?

I also think there would be far less need to monitor if drugs were legalized and the war on terror ended.

Anyway, I think this kind of surveillance is going to become status quo and will be completely uncontroversial in a few decades. As far as abuse goes, you don't need any of these high tech contraptions to listen to peoples phone calls and track internet usage. These things can be done fairly easily with comparatively primitive tech that can be bought legally at spy stores.

@criticalthud I don't disagree with what you say. My point is that judge approved wiretaps and internet surveillance should be a legal part of law enforcement/National Security arsenal. How to do it best is beyond me. I think warrants and constitutional protections are decent checks and balances, but I know they are not infallible. As I mentioned to enoch, if someone wants to listen to your calls, be that person a high ranking government agent or your grumpy neighbor, it can be done easily with low tech. Killing these guidelines would do nothing to protect you from a rogue agent or personal vendetta.

If all this leads to a real discussion on the war on terror or on the war on drugs, I'd be thrilled. My prediction is that it will just be used as a politicians electoral weapon until everyone gets sick of hearing about it and it slides off the radar screen.

Going public with his face is the only thing that keeps him alive. In time, we forget him and then he is suddenly found in a mangled wreck that is quickly decided it was an accident. USA does not forget.

What we should do is to make those keywords appear on every email we send, you know yellowcake what i PRISM mean POTUStotal bomb nonsense. You can stick it up to them, provide enough nonsensical data that triggers enough boxes and they get stuck. No matter how much fine computing they have, the final decisions are always done by a human. spamspamspamspam....

In a nutshell, my main gripe with this is the large disconnect between the media hysteria and the actual specifics of the case.

OMG, PRISM IS LOOKING AT MY WEB INFO!

Nope, PRISM was designed to collect foreign data. It legally can't be used on Americans. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/304349-administration-declassifies-prism-information

OMG, THEY ARE RECORDING ALL MY PHONE CALLS!

No they aren't, the only data they can collect is phone number, call time and length.. If they want to record you, they'll need a warrant. http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-collection-verizon-call-records-draws-instant-backlash-135550018.html

(I picked the first sources I could find. If they aren't sufficient, let me know and I'll find better, though I've not heard anyone say that either of these points are untrue.)

Another thing that makes me suspicious is that this leak seems to have been coordinated with the republican scandal offensive of a couple weeks back. This feels like a campaign strategy.

I'm not hearing any specific arguments about NSA protocol from either of you in this discussion. I'm getting the impression that you see the NSA as a group of assholes, unconcerned with National Security that instead focusses on harassing citizens. - which means we are having two different arguments "what are reasonable measures to be used to investigate attacks on American soil?" vs. "The NSA is evil".

These arguments exist in different universes. Can you think of a way to reconcile them?

@enoch - Specifically, what new power has the government gained here?

http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2013/06/what.html

"Dear Google users—

You may be aware of press reports alleging that Internet companies have joined a secret U.S. government program called PRISM to give the National Security Agency direct access to our servers. As Google’s CEO and Chief Legal Officer, we wanted you to have the facts.

First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

Finally, this episode confirms what we have long believed—there needs to be a more transparent approach. Google has worked hard, within the confines of the current laws, to be open about the data requests we receive. We post this information on our Transparency Report whenever possible. We were the first company to do this. And, of course, we understand that the U.S. and other governments need to take action to protect their citizens’ safety—including sometimes by using surveillance. But the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.

Posted by Larry Page, CEO and David Drummond, Chief Legal Officer"

NSA PRISM program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others
www.democracynow.org/2013/6/7/a_massive_surveillance_state_glenn_greenwald

"Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin with news that the National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top secret program on Thursday, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs that allow them to track a person or trace their connections to others. One slide lists the companies by name and the date when each provider began participating over the past six years. But an Apple spokesperson said it had "never heard" of PRISM and added, quote, "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," they said. Other companies had similar responses.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, columnist, attorney, and blogger for The Guardian, where he broke his story in—that was headlined "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal." This comes after he revealed Wednesday in another exclusive story that the "NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers." According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, the scope of the NSA phone monitoring includes customers of all three major phone networks—Verizon, AT&T and Sprint—as well as records from Internet service providers and purchase information from credit card providers. Glenn Greenwald is also author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. He’s joining us now via Democracy—video stream.

Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Lay out this latest exclusive that you have just reported in The Guardian.

GLENN GREENWALD: There are top-secret NSA documents that very excitingly describe—excitedly describe, boast about even, how they have created this new program called the PRISM program that actually has been in existence since 2007, that enables them direct access into the servers of all of the major Internet companies which people around the world, hundreds of millions, use to communicate with one another. You mentioned all of those—all those names. And what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want. And at the time, when those of us who said that the NSA would be able to obtain whatever they want and abuse that power, the argument was made, "Oh, no, don’t worry. There’s a great check on this. They have to go to the phone companies and go to the Internet companies and ask for whatever it is they want. And that will be a check." And what this program allows is for them, either because the companies have given over access to their servers, as the NSA claims, or apparently the NSA has simply seized it, as the companies now claim—the NSA is able to go in—anyone at a monitor in an NSA facility can go in at any time and either read messages that are stored in Facebook or in real time surveil conversations and chats that take place on Skype and Gmail and all other forms of communication. It’s an incredibly invasive system of surveillance worldwide that has zero checks of any kind.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, there is a chart prepared by the NSA in the top-secret document you obtained that shows the breadth of the data it’s able to obtain—email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, Skype chats, file transfers, social networking details. Talk about what this chart reveals.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the crucial thing to realize is that hundreds of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions—in fact, billions of people around the world essentially rely on the Internet exclusively to communicate with one another. Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chats and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication. And what the objective of the National Security Agency is, as the stories that we’ve revealed thus far demonstrate and as the stories we’re about to reveal into the future will continue to demonstrate—the objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. And that’s what this program is about. And they’re very explicit about the fact that since most communications are now coming through these Internet companies, it is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, as you reported, the PRISM program—not to be confused with prison, the PRISM program—is run with the assistance of the companies that participate, including Facebook and Apple, but all of those who responded to a Guardian request for comment denied knowledge of any of the program. This is what Google said, quote: "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege [that] we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, first of all, after our story was published, and The Washington Post published more or less simultaneously a similar story, several news outlets, including NBC News, confirmed with government officials that they in fact have exactly the access to the data that we describe. The director of national intelligence confirmed to The New York Times, by name, that the program we identify and the capabilities that we described actually exist. So, you have a situation where somebody seems to be lying. The NSA claims that these companies voluntarily allow them the access; the companies say that they never did.

This is exactly the kind of debate that we ought to have out in the open. What exactly is the government doing in how it spies on us and how it reads our emails and how it intercepts our chats? Let’s have that discussion out in the open. To the extent that these companies and the NSA have a conflict and can’t get their story straight, let them have that conflict resolved in front of us. And then we, as citizens, instead of having this massive surveillance apparatus built completely secretly and in the dark without us knowing anything that’s going on, we can then be informed about what kinds of surveillance the government is engaged in and have a reasoned debate about whether that’s the kind of world in which we want to live.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the FISA court under the business record section of the PATRIOT Act, therefore it is lawful.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Dianne Feinstein. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.

But I would just defer to two senators who are her colleagues, who are named Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. They have—are good Democrats. They have spent two years now running around trying to get people to listen to them as they’ve been saying, "Look, what the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so radical and so distorted and warped that Americans will be stunned to learn" — that’s their words — "what is being done in the name of these legal theories, these secret legal theories, in terms of the powers the Obama administration has claimed for itself in how it can spy on Americans."

When the PATRIOT Act was enacted—and you can go back and look at the debates, as I’ve done this week—nobody thought, even opponents of the PATRIOT Act, that it would ever be used to enable the government to gather up everybody’s telephone records and communication records without regard to whether they’ve done anything wrong. The idea of the PATRIOT Act was that when the government suspects somebody of being involved in terrorism or serious crimes, the standard of proof is lowered for them to be able to get these documents. But the idea that the PATRIOT Act enables bulk collection, mass collection of the records of hundreds of millions of Americans, so that the government can store that and know what it is that we’re doing at all times, even when there’s no reason to believe that we’ve done anything wrong, that is ludicrous, and Democratic senators are the ones saying that it has nothing to do with that law.

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange.

SEN. RON WYDEN: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

JAMES CLAPPER: No, sir.

SEN. RON WYDEN: It does not?

JAMES CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the questioning of the head of the national intelligence, James Clapper, by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways.

We are going to do a story, coming up very shortly, about the scope of the NSA’s spying activities domestically, and I think it’s going to shock a lot of people, because the NSA likes to portray itself as interested only in foreign intelligence gathering and only in targeting people who they believe are guilty of terrorism, and yet the opposite is true. It is a massive surveillance state of exactly the kind that the Church Committee warned was being constructed 35 years ago. And we intend to make all those facts available so people can see just how vast it is and how false those kind of statements are.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein. Speaking on MSNBC, she said the leak should be investigated and that the U.S. has a, quote, "culture of leaks."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is that this was a routine three-month approval, under seal, that was leaked.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Should it be—should the leak be investigated?

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I think so. I mean, I think we have become a culture of leaks now.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, being questioned by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Glenn Greenwald, your final response to this? And sum up your findings. They’re talking about you, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington. It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

But look, what she’s doing is simply channeling the way that Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power, which is, if you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have been about. It’s what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It’s to create a climate of fear so that nobody will bring accountability to them.

It’s not going to work. I think it’s starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can’t be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we’re certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they’ve been doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we want to thank you for being with us. Is this threat of you being investigated going to deter you in any way, as you continue to do these exclusives, these exposés?

GLENN GREENWALD: No, it’s actually going to embolden me to pursue these stories even more aggressively.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I want to thank you for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper. We’ll link to your exposés on our website, "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal", as well as "NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily"." - Democracy Now!

Degassed water helps, too.

We did this as an experiment in undergrad. Degassed water, a container with a simple shape (we just had a rectangular prism), a thing to vibrate it, and a thing to control the amplitude/frequency of vibrations. We usually got three or four nodes, depending on how good we were doing.

It was quite a while ago, but I think we had a piece of equipment we used to tell whether we were getting close to a resonance, and then it was just by feel to actually get sonoluminescence to happen. Cuts down on the amount of patience required, but still takes a bit.

>> ^Truckchase:

@ 9:06:
<NitPick>People thing Federal Reserve Issued currency is real money too. It's not any more real than bitcoin; it's just the belief that makes it real. </NitPick>
Other than that, great vid. I'm still working up the guts to ditch FB. It makes me miserable seeing all the surface level BS people's lives are becoming, yet I have a hard time deleting my acct. .... neeeed ... more .... willpower.
Edit: I'm a bit surprised at the reaction here. I guess I'm in the minority (of the vocal) on VS. It would be interesting to see people's reaction to this based on age. I'm old enough to not be "old" (I'd like to think) but to have seen a substantial part of my adult life with and without facebook, and on the whole I think real friendships sustain more harm from these tools than good. The base notion of FB creates an incentive for people to view their own life the the prism of mass consumption which I think really does change behavior in a generally bad way.
That said, I'm not blaming it for the downfall of modern society or anything, just asserting it's a net-negative. If more people deleted their accounts I'm confident we'd be better off overall, and I'm trying to work up the courage to take the lead on that.


The reaction is more to his self righteous, overly inflated, far reaching, conspiratorial nature more so than the 'core' message. If it'd been a video which had a light hearted feel, and pointed out the reams of posts from friends that are just entries into competitions or playing the apps or that sort of crap (of which I've ended up completely blocking people because about 90% of some people's post are just that crap), and that maybe not posting what your dreams were about each night... or you know, just common etiquette, it may have done really well, and probably been posted by people on facebook as a non direct way of telling others 'um, you're being sort of dicks on this thing'.

But no, he tried to insinuate he knows all, and that anyone using facebook is a mindless sheep, and that there is no good to come from it.

Well he can go back to his conspiracy bullshit on his websites and youtube videos and continue to think he knows better than everyone.

And die unhappy having changed nothing.

@ 9:06:

<NitPick>People thing Federal Reserve Issued currency is real money too. It's not any more real than bitcoin; it's just the belief that makes it real. </NitPick>

Other than that, great vid. I'm still working up the guts to ditch FB. It makes me miserable seeing all the surface level BS people's lives are becoming, yet I have a hard time deleting my acct. .... neeeed ... more .... willpower.

Edit: I'm a bit surprised at the reaction here. I guess I'm in the minority (of the vocal) on VS. It would be interesting to see people's reaction to this based on age. I'm old enough to not be "old" (I'd like to think) but to have seen a substantial part of my adult life with and without facebook, and on the whole I think real friendships sustain more harm from these tools than good. The base notion of FB creates an incentive for people to view their own life the the prism of mass consumption which I think really does change behavior in a generally bad way.

That said, I'm not blaming it for the downfall of modern society or anything, just asserting it's a net-negative. If more people deleted their accounts I'm confident we'd be better off overall, and I'm trying to work up the courage to take the lead on that.

Haven't had a chance to watch the clip yet, but I just had to add my 2¢ on this. I wouldn't describe Moyers as liberal or fair. He's progressive and his shows are definitely agenda-driven. And that's a good thing, because he's really good at what he does. The difference between Moyers and someone like Limbaugh or Olbermann is this: Moyers has thoughtful discussions on important political and cultural topics with scholars and experts on the topic at hand, with rational, fact-based arguments (which are neither infallible nor unassailable) presented with great articulation; Limbaugh and his ilk instead offer screeching opinions based largely on emotion (usually fear and/or anger) with just enough facts laced in to make any outright lies or other deceptions believable. They're all just as motivated by an agenda as any other broadcaster. The difference is the usefulness of the content and the style with which it's presented.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Bill Moyers is about as fair as you get when it comes to media. He definitely sees the world through a prism of liberal empathy, so I can see where you might find him unbalanced. Every newsperson and newswriter is biased towards what they believe to be true, and it's not really a problem so long as you are fair about it. The problem with FOX is not that it presents a far right perspective on the news, it's that they do it in such a dishonest way, and then call it 'fair and balanced.' Do you ever think how ridiculous it is that the phrase you choose to use so often 'fair and balanced' comes from the largest and sleaziest propoganda outfit in the history of the planet? >> ^quantumushroom:
For all of you that chide Fox, Moyers's trumpeting shows are nothing close to being fair or balanced, he's a mirror for liberal vanity. At least Rush does his schtick on how own dime and creates wealth, which the Moyers's of the world then siphon away for who-knows-what.>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
Probably not, but do you notice how calm, reasoned and intelligent his show is? Why is it, do you think, that publicly funded media is so vastly superior to privately funded media? >> ^quantumushroom:
Has Moyers ever had a show that taxpayers didn't have to pay for?