Here's the article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance

"Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process – they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general."

Gestapo-mentality at work -- it's sickening.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by radx.

Double-Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Sunday, June 9th, 2013 12:44pm PDT - doublepromote requested by radx.

Thanks for the link to the article,and thanks for the ups!

How long before Obama sends a drone to Hong Kong?

*controversy *waronterror *politics

Adding video to channels (Controversy, Politics, Waronterror) - requested by MrFisk.

*news

Adding video to channels (News) - requested by MrFisk.

Civil disobedience to combat the shit: Everyone should start now speaking freely of everything from bringing down office buildings with exploding pig's bladders to disrupting nationwide power grids with the power of Pokemon attached to Charizard provided Fire Energy...

Write unintelligible and nonsensical letters to congressmen and senators with return addresses from any and all intelligence apparatus

Wear (at least once a week) a crisp, company-man suit with that little white coiled communications wire dangling out of an ear and walk around in federal buildings and court houses....(Make sure the slacks are ass-less)

Subvert, misdirect, confuse, stifle and incinerate the insects that hold the reigns of this shitstorm factory of servers-

Attend open sessions of congress and laugh manically whenever anyone starts speaking. ABOUT ANYTHING-Bring a hundred people with you...

There's all sorts of effectual mayhem to take part in, your "vote" at this particular stage in the game, means FUCK-ALL

And they said journalism was dead.

beat me by an hour eric.
*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, June 9th, 2013 6:50pm PDT - promote requested by enoch.

It's such a frustrating mess. Despite most of these elements manifesting in the government almost a century ago, it's like we went full-1984 overnight.

What the shit makes governments so god damn evil at their core? Always! Why?

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

The people at the NSA are not evil - I'm sure they feel righteously justified working to keep Americans safe. But - what they are - is wrong. Overstepping and taking power, usurping the constitution in their work. I agree with Edward that this kind of power eventually corrupts and leads to a totalitarian state - even with the best of intentions

This guy, Edward Snowden is another smart guy, and another patriot - just like Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. They're out there and they're sacrificing for all of us. I'm thankful that they are.

This guy is definitely smarter than Manning, because he took extraordinary steps to get away. Even if he's on the run he's in better shape than Manning who suffers greatly. We should make it a requirement that the next president who wants our vote must pardon Manning.

I don't like Assange, he's such a cunt and you can see that with his personal relationships. He has of course done something important and he shouldn't be put in jail for what he did, but I feel that some of the people from Wikileaks should get more credit than they did. What might be happening though is that Assange has decided to play the martyr, and keep everyone off his former colleagues. Whether that was done selfishly or selflessly I think it was a good thing. And certainly what he did was very important, this is just my personal opinion of him.

I worry about this Edward guy though but I think it was very smart of him to go public with his identity. Now everyone can put a face to the man who the NSA and the CIA will be either hunting or trying to discredit. It severely ties their hands in the PR department.

Change we can believe in.

Assange changed over the years. I met him at the 25C3 in late 2008 and he was a cool cat. Maybe you're right and he just took one for the team, and maybe years of shit got to him, no idea. But he seemed a decent bloke in the days...

@dag
i love you man.




no homo

Some people say I'm a cunt, it's just how I look to them. His stupid hair and smug ass look, and the fact that Manning was in solitary for 9 months while Assange has been happy with clean sheets. Kinda ticks me off.

@dag, I see what you're saying, and I erred in using the term "evil", since it's a subjective and meaningless word.

However I don't believe the NSA really, really think they're protecting Americans. I think government always wants more control, sees a way or a moment to grab more, and does. If there's any concept of "protecting" any one citizen, I can't believe it's anything other than some perverted form of the concept (reverse stockholm syndrome?)
As for specific motivations for a government to seek more control over the people within it's borders, I believe objectives such as "stop all file-sharing", "verify census data more accurately", "find out who's not paying taxes", "discover what 'X' does on his day off, and persecute if we don't like it", and so on.

But yeah, not evil, but not working for the citizens either. It boggles my mind that military walking around on foreign soil, and violating personal rights and freedoms just like this NSA crap doesn't strike someone in office as the very reason people fly planes into buildings to begin with. If they really wanted to protect citizens of the country, they could stop pissing off the rest of the world. But that's my idealistic view of reality.

This is true in every organization, and apparently in the most secret one in the world, that you have to have someone who runs the infrastructure, and it's probably going to be 29 year old unix geeks like this guy. The administrators of these secret networks will have unmitigated access to everything, which means they will see everything, and no one will be able to monitor them because no one understands what they do. The fact that this guy had that kind of access level is pretty mindblowing in itself. Seems like system admins in intelligence agencies are able to see more about what is really going on behind the scenes than almost anyone else. My guess is that they will more heavily compartmentalize the access of their IT departments in the future and be a little more selective about whom they are contracting these things out to.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

I think it's a mistake to think of "the government" as a single entity and capable of doing good or bad - it leads to all kinds of problems.

There are bad policies, bad laws, misguided individuals within government, people driven by self-interest, fear and prejudice, internal cultures that lead to incompetence and bad actions - all of those things - but no Emperor Palaptine in the woodworks - covertly angling for more power for its own sake.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant and that's what's needed in the US government. I like the French idea that a government should fear its people (as it does in France) and not the other way around.

Just the fact that Obama and his intelligence chief try to justify the program by saying that it only targets foreign individuals blows my mind - I mean WTF?? Don't we deserve privacy here in Australia? It's like a giant fuck you to the near 7 billion people who don't happen to live within the US borders.

It makes me so angry - especially that all of these American tech companies were in cahoots with the NSA - yes even Apple.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Good points Shiny - I also think we might be looking at the first signs of the nation state crumbling as the primary organiser of people in civilisation. Anyone remember how the US government was treated in SnowCrash? They were just another corporation jockeying for influence among many.

Likely that America will breathe out a collective "meh" in a few weeks as their attentions become, once again, waylaid by Twitter, Facebook, XBox, cell phones, Minecraft, Duck Dynasty, VideoSift... It's as if the ability of a society to resist the oppression of its government is inversely proportional to it's advancements in distraction and entertaining itself.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of citizens of Turkey are risking, and ocassionally paying with, life and limb over a few trees.

Clearly the reasoned debate plan failed to stop the patriot act so lets go with some flair this time and kick start a giant ass monument for this man's heroics.

Crap.. This guy looks just like me...

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....

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, or one of the less-grounded members of this community (you all know who you are!), and I'm not trying to make this out to be the good/bad/evil scenario, i.e. Emperor Palpatine et al. I use "government" as a collective, general term, however I felt it was apt in this context given that people strictly within the government, and maybe lobbyists to an extent, are responsible for these various decisions that have led us to this point.
No, they don't seek power for it's own sake, but the handful of objectives I listed in my last post are a sampling of what might drive an organization to pursue power fervently.

There does seem to exist a greater, definitively single-minded pursuit of lessening the civil rights of US citizens since the turn of the millennium, in an attempt to have more power over them, and while "government" at large generally fumbles over itself when it attempts to get all the parts moving together as one, I believe you can see the broader cooperation happening here. From inclusion of said US Tech companies roles, the nation-wide abuse by the police force, aggression of US border patrol agents, random TSA checkpoints on some state highways, and the statements made by the president and his staff, which only seem to serve to blow off civil concerns with one breath while granting increased power to these same entities with the next.

At this point in a country's history, it seems to me that the only thing that can change the course of an entire nation is decisive action by it's citizens on a scale that would simultaneously qualify as an act that justifies all their overreaches of power. And I don't mean in any way acts of violence, but if there were a 5-million-man-march on the capitol tomorrow to show a mass appeal for reason and demand accountability, I believe it would be used as an example of why the government is pursuing such surveillance to begin with.

Sorry this is long winded, but lastly, I wouldn't feel too bad about Obama's allegedly targeting only foreign individuals. To me that felt like damage control to appease the US populace rather than an affront to foreign nationals. They said the Exact. Same. Thing. about the Patriot Act, and that was being used to arrest US citizens for minor infractions by local law enforcement not 6-months after it was passed. Disgusting.

Does anyone else feel this isn't anything new? There have been confirmations of similar programs for decades now. If I remember correctly subsequent conversations boil down to a mix of "who cares?" and "what are you gonna do about it?"

Yes, this is just the continuation of Bush era programs and even programs from the 90's, nothing new, but it is exactly the kind of thing Obama claimed he would stop as soon as he was elected, instead he doubled down and now wants to prosecute people who remind others it's happening. YOINKS!
I've been sending encrypted emails headed 'infected monkeys ready for release' and the like for decades now. If they're going to investigate me, I'm not going to make it easy for them, and I'll use enough resources that they must ignore 10 others in order to read my pie recipe. If enough people did that with me, the program might end.

Reports that he's gone missing in Hong Kong now: http://www.theage.com.au/world/excia-leaker-goes-missing-in-hong-kong-20130611-2o0ni.html

He's probably relocating to a place that's owned by someone sympathetic to his cause. It's not immediately distressing news. I really doubt the US would be stupid enough to try and nab him right when this shit hits the fan. Trying to bring him back to the US might kick off serious protests that they can't handle.

(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.

I think that cat is already out of the bag.

Would you be surprised to learn that Australia is monitoring internet activity in other countries? I bet you $10 they do.

It would piss me off to learn that the NSA was reading our hot daily sexts, but does that potential for abuse mean they shouldn't be able to check out what Kim Jong Un is doing in NK, or check up on unstable regions with nuclear capabilities?

What do you think?

When the US first follows up on Treaties that it makes with North Korea than maybe I'll give them credit enough that they can use to spy on me and others. The facts of the disputes between North Korea and the US are when the US gets more conciliatory they get more conciliatory, when we get more aggressive, they get more aggressive.

You can read it everywhere they'll write something about how North Korea is breaking it's treaties and defying the world, read down the page a bit and it'll tell you how the US first broke said treaty and allows countries to defy the world on Nuclear weapons constantly.

They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt when they work so hard to destroy the world daily!

@dystopianfuturetoday

The idea that the government needs to get warrants in order to do what it wants is naive at best. Even if they did adhere to that there is no public oversight of the court you're speaking of, so they will do what they do, and serve their masters.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

But the big difference is that *everyone* here in Australia relies on things like Gmail, Microsoft cloud tech, Amazon etc. It's not like we have our own local systems to fall back on.

We didn't see Google and Apple and Amazon as arms of the US government - and I guess that's naive - but now we will.

Expect to see more pushes for decentralising the Internet. Look for Australia, the EU and Asian countries to take control of their own Internet infrastructure.

Microsoft is going to have a tougher time selling things like Office 365 to overseas governments and multi-national groups. Likewise for Google Docs, Dropbox, Apple iCloud etc.

This whole thing is very, very bad for American IT companies.

Pfft. All these damn whistleblowers. You know I hear this latest one was even an American! Imagine that, homegrown whistleblowers in the US of A, You ask me what you need is more surveillance so you can catch these buggers before they even get to inhale the breath to blow them blasted whistles.

You can say that, but there is a reason we all use those services. They do the best job. If anyone came forward as a legitimate contender, they would also be approached, or a backdoor would be found. Resistance is futile.

Do you think that the required warrant necessary for the US to look at your info is not a good enough safeguard?

Do you think the NSA should track people that pose a threat to the US or it's citizens?

Do you think Australia should track people that pose a threat to the country or its citizens?

Do you think the NSA should monitor North Korean internet activity?

Is your argument that no information should be gathered on people that pose legitimate harm US citizens?

Reading the comments, my fear is that the outrage people are feeling is being framed in the wrong context. If we don't get the proper handle on this, all that outrage is going to fall on deaf ears. The people who are at the root of this are going to sense that we don't understand what's going on and dismiss all protests as irrelevant.

This is certainly not an issue of "evil government" or "power hungry institutions". This is an issue that involves people. People that are just like you and me. In fact, the ones who are responsible for the monster that's been created ARE people with the same motivations and rational capacity as you and I.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us." - Pogo

We are almost all guilty of making personal, selfish, idealistic and altruistic choices with blinders on to the larger impact of our choices. We all have a frustrating capacity for focusing on small picture goals and ignoring the big picture results. How many of us work for industries that have horrible environmental and social impact? Do you ever take into account the contribution you make to those disasters? Or are you comfortable in the belief that one person, "you", making fried chicken isn't responsible for the agregious level of child obesity in your country? Or you satisfied that building servers for BP doesn't in any way make you culpable for the massive negative impact of the industry as a whole?

We want to frame the ills of our societies in terms of villains which we can name...and even put a face on. But in the large chain of decisions that must be made and actions that must be taken, there is almost never one individual with the power to change the course of events. If one is ever identified, that person is almost certainly a scape goat, selected by popular consent for the very purpose of putting a face to the atrocities.

Governments and corporations are collections of individuals with the same strengths, weaknesses and short sightedness that we all posses.

So this problem arises from a troubling mentality that's very common in all orginzations. The tendency to view our individual actions and contributions as discrete from the larger result of the group. A small minded focus on results over impact.

This issue needs to be addressed in those terms, the troubling realization that good people with good intentions lost sight of the bigger picture. Only then will our protests ring true to the people involved.

And understand what's being discussed here also. This is not about personal invasion of privacy. That's certainly not how the architects of this see it. This is not the local police wire tapping "you". This is about a massive collection of data that could never be utilized effectively in those terms. It's complete historical data that exists for the purpose of analyzing as a whole, to learn the patterns that signify the actions of people who would do you harm. It is at the point such patterns are identified that investigation at an individual level, within that data, would begin. Perhaps that's why the people who created and manage this system don't feel it's a threat to you. Because they have no interest in you and didn't design the system for you...assuming you're not a terrorist.

But the danger that WE know is real, that they've lost sight of, is a matter of degrees. What happens when the definition of "enemy" begins to slip? What happens when, over time, all dissent is viewed as disruptive to the security of the country?

That's the big picture and that's the danger. Make sure you're protesting the right thing, if you want to be heard.

I think William Binney would completely disagree with you, as he talks about in this video, and I think if anyone knows he does.

Fair enough. I probably hastily overstated that part.

Yo, play Ingress with me. It's an augmented reality game with two factions fighting over actual points of interest in reality: Post offices, fire departments, police stations, parks, college campuses, jamba fuckin juices.

Each location is a portal that you fight over and DESTROY for your factions. I am in the Orange County Resistance. If they want to stop us from playing, then they're going to have to stamp out all of our freedoms.

Fight the power peacefully and practice war in augmented reality!

@poolcleaner me: Garden Grove, Stanton, Westminster, Fountain Valley, Irvine, Costa Mesa. Civil Disobedience in the form of gaming.

That is why it is important to recognize your faults as just another human being, and then to align your entertainment consumption with entertainment that provokes and builds physical strength.

Be an early adopter, but not for the OCD obsession over the adoption, rather for what that new technology or entertainment means for for our freedom and the continuation of the species in civil society!

Be healthy and live in a healthy society. I know I have been out there and fuckin gung ho anti-police, but for good reason -- they drove me to a breaking point; a breaking point that I can finally see past. I don't fault institutions but the individuals that allow bad things to happen to good people and to society at large.

Be better, live better -- align your time with your positive agendas. It's not all a vicious cycle.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

It's not really a warrant though is it? This is a good take on it:
http://wp.me/p1RmvN-tO

I think the US should track and investigate people to the extent that it doesn't violate the constitution. I think they are violating the constitution. So does the ACLU and the EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/86-civil-liberties-groups-and-internet-companies-demand-end-nsa-spying

I think American companies that are working in collusion with the NSA should be forced to disclose any information that is being harvested from domestic or overseas customers.

I don't want to hear the phrase "keeping Americans safe" anymore as an excuse for this Orwellian bullshit.

@dag - What I like best about your comment is that you present constructive criticism, while the rest of the media, government and public are preparing the tar and feathers.

I'm frustrated by the way we focus on personality and ignore the systemic nature of these kinds of issues. Once we tar and feather Obama, the next president will find herself/himself in need of effective national security measures and will likely go along with whatever the NSA thinks is best. Hillary is Stalin! Rand Paul is Hitler! Rinse and repeat. This is part of the reason why nothing ever seems to get done.

As an aside, I've certainly been on the offensive side of these crusades with Bush, McCain, Hillary and Romney, so this newish perspective is something of an epiphany. Not to say I didn't voice legitimate gripes, but I took cheap shots aplenty.

In short, I'm probably feeling what the rest of the world has long known, that Americans are immature, aggressive and completely unproductive in the way we manage their civic affairs, and it's not going to stop till we wise up.

(So just give up)


Anyway.....

@dystopianfuturetoday

i think i got my argument down to one word.
took some time because you know me..
i comment like i think:rambling and incoherent.

the word is transparency.

if this dragnet is SO needed and SO vital to national security and catching brown people.
then lets allow this giant pig into the courts and lets discuss the value of this particular intelligence gathering.
lets shine a bit of light in those dark corners yea?

a healthy democracy needs sunlight and fresh air the breathe.

holy shit, just saw a pic of the girlfriend he left behind.

The boy isn't a traitor or a hero, he's a FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!

Statist gonna state.

*quality

This video has already declared quality - ignoring quality request by MrFisk.