Humanity seems to be all about fucking itself right into that Orwellian nightmare we're in today.

Less irony, more Orwellian...

"Make the United States safer". Oh, ffs. Anyone else immediately think of Ben Franklin when you hear this bullshit line? I'll trade a 9/11 and a Boston bombing every decade for the governement staying the hell out of my phone and my computer. (Omg, am I starting to sound like goptea'er?). This crap that Obama spewed the other night, roughly "you can't have both 100% security and 100% privacy", is the ol' statue-of-liberty play. He's implying that these programs provide 100% security. You can dismiss everything he says after that because his premise is FALSE. You can dismiss everything he said before that as well, but that's another rant.

And Mika, you can't demand a "yes or no" answer when you just don't want to hear the explanation. There is a very good reason why you weren't paid as much as Joe, and you should thank your lucky stars they still let you read the intros. And stop with the huffing and tsk'ing and eyerolls. You're starting to look and sound llike one of those shrill FOX "analysts".

Willie, what a dumb question. Of course there is a difference between state secrets that do not inpinge on our freedoms and rights of privacy and those that do, you knob. Some would even say the ultimate purpose of maintaining state secrets is to assist in protecting the very American freedoms and rights that are being grossly abused by these programs. The difference between Manning and Snowden is that Manning exposed warcrimes and other abuses being committed on brown people, and Snowden exposed an invasive, Orwellian-level spying and data-mining infrastructure being used on Americans by our own government. So yeah, a little different. So what? Both heroes. And it infuriates me when our government goes after them and tries to paint them as treasonists. They have committed no crimes against America because the government is not America. It's straight-up self-preservation, and has nothing to do with protecting the citizens of this country and the tenets on which this country was founded. What Manning and Snowden did, however, does.

There was once a time when democracies around the world, whether imminent, new, or struggling, could look to the US for inspiration. Now, we could learn much today from a country like Turkey. They get it. It took a few whacks with police batons, and lots and lots of tear-gas, but they get it now. They get beat down, and get smarter and angrier. We just get dumber and dumber no matter what this government says or does.

“The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.”
― George Carlin

“Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!”
― Bill Hicks

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.

I don't understand how you think that this is bogus at all. This is the latest abuse from the Patriot act which still exists. The president has reserved the right not only to spy on us but to prosecute those who give small windows in to the inner workings of what is supposed to be OUR government. Diane Feinstein basically threatens Greenwald, who will basically lose everything if he can't keep his sources. His sources will dry up as soon as he is targeted again illegally by the government. It's a serious threat, it's Orwellian as was already pointed out.

Furthermore watch a bit more of that episode and it goes on to talk about the Drone killings of two American citizens. One a radical cleric who was never accused of a crime, murdered by his country. The other his 16 year old son who wasn't even CLOSE to what they say he was. He was just a kid who wanted to go to college in the US after having been born here, and he was murdered.

So I don't see what you don't see about how the Obama administration is fucking awful, and is starting to look even worse than Bush.

"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!

Got to love the TSA, we spend millions every year to "protect us" haven't found one bomb. But a couple hundred dollars worth of drugs...that's something. I can hear the orwellian loudspeaker now. "Be safe Shitizen, don't help old people with there bags, it's for your own safety, they might be smuggling MARI-JUANA".

It's mostly a semantic quibble, I don't really disagree with you about this lady's credibility.

It just seems like American culture has been under a sustained attack by Orwellian wordsmiths who are trying to achieve through manipulations of language what they can't achieve by just making an open and straightforward case for their ideas.

We've seen a decades-long project to destroy the credibility of the press, which started with them claiming it's got a liberal bias (under the old meaning of the word, where this is assumed to be both unintentional and mild), while simultaneously saying all day on talk radio that "liberal bias" is a nefarious plot to brainwash people.

A decade or two down the road, you wind up with this whole counterculture of angry old white guys simply apoplectic about a series of supposed injustices committed against them (that never actually happened) by people who are prejudiced against them (who aren't actually prejudiced).

It is more than a little bit of a tangent, but I definitely get why calling her "biased" provoked this reaction from dft.

>> ^smooman:

injustice does not a police state make.


No, but having more of your citizens under police supervision than any other nation in the world damned well should. It's not even debatable, it's a matter of public record, our own and international as was sourced from both our own records and international above. How in the world do we figure that the nation with more of its citizens under police supervision than any other in the world isn't a police state?

The term Orwellian comes to mind. It's built slowly over the years so we didn't notice, it's us so we don't want to admit it about ourselves, but that doesn't change the fact that those are the facts.

The future won't be some Orwellian government appropriation of all our privacy. We will give it to them freely.

Nothing new here.

Complete Arizona press conference with their detailed "results":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w0SVOwWGjw

Snopes debunk of the whole thing (see lower section):
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/birthcertificate.asp

What's amazing to me is seeing a local news station so clearly co-opted by extremist views (and Arpaio's influence). I mean, I know it's a Fox affiliate, but the way this report is presented - complete with straight faced local anchors, an on-the-scene-reporter, and law enforcement collaboration - is positively Orwellian.

Many realize Fox (cable channel) has a political viewpoint (even those that agree with it). But not everyone who watches their local news broadcast realizes it can be this falsified.

Chilling.

This is terrifying—in the Orwellian sense.

The first video features a white woman in a crowd of white people. She singles out a lone black woman and then proceeds to bully and berate her. She makes it clear that these attacks are done in the name of her country and the white race, which is a cruel way to insinuate that she has the approval of the rest of her countrymen and fellow white people on that tram.

>>> That's a pretty bold assumption on your part. You believe she thought the orwellian serfs would back her up somehow? She is surrounded by Black people on that train--including one that could choke her or cut her throat from behind--and for good measure, there's a woman wearing a burqa in the background. It is more likely she had some mental disability, putting her kid in danger.

Thankfully someone stepped in and called this woman's bluff, which served to change the tenor of this exchange from a tense game of intimidation to a lone racist babbling nut.

The guy in the second video BEGINS his exchange as a lone racists babbling nut. He is a single black man in a crowd of white people.

He shouts out terrible things that he obviously has no intention or ability to carry out. No one takes him seriously. There is no bullying and no tension. People are laughing at him.

>>> Watch it again. There are other Black people on the train. And the nut's targets are not laughing. At all.

>>> Once again, you're making assumptions of questionable merit. First, you can't tell the level of someone's combat experience merely by sight, and if he's truly crazy he'll be immensely strong. Second, he's holding a glass bottle. He could've just as easily struck the woman to his left, with or without breaking the bottle first.

>>> Trying to summon up stormfront as a scary demon is laughable. Compare their ranks, which I assume aren't close to a few thousand, to the budgets and memberships of the NAACP, ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center.

You may believe you're "calling me out" and that's fine, you have every right to speak up. Individuals and group behaviors we can debate all day. However, the elephant in the room, with his buttocks spread across both videos, is the fact the French nutball was not condemned--by anyone--for his antics and there were no police looking for him after the fact.

You can be against intolerance or indifferent to it, but not selectively intolerant.












>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Let me break this down.
The first video features a white woman in a crowd of white people. She singles out a lone black woman and then proceeds to bully and berate her. She makes it clear that these attacks are done in the name of her country and the white race, which is a cruel way to insinuate that she has the approval of the rest of her countrymen and fellow white people on that tram. Thankfully someone stepped in and called this woman's bluff, which served to change the tenor of this exchange from a tense game of intimidation to a lone racist babbling nut.
The guy in the second video BEGINS his exchange as a lone racists babbling nut. He is a single black man in a crowd of white people. He shouts out terrible things that he obviously has no intention or ability to carry out. No one takes him seriously. There is no bullying and no tension. People are laughing at him.
Context matters. If I say 'I'm going to kill you' in a dark alley with a gun pointed to your head, it means something very different than if I say it after you accidentally spill coffee on my new shirt.
The above video has been bouncing around the hate cesspools of the internet - like Stormfront - in an attempt to show parity between these two very different events; parity between an empowered bully and a powerless fool.
Now you could have framed this as 'hey look at this crazy drunk racist guy, what an idiot' and you would have had no problems, but that's not how you chose to frame it, and as a result, this post didn't go that well for you. I'd rather not have to call you out like this. It's obviously upsetting to you. But when racial issues that resonate with the Stormfront crowd also resonate with you, you might have problems. Sort yourself out.

Why even I have well-wishers, cronies, and siftquaintances.

This is/was an ugly video about an ignorant fool spouting off, using language that, based on modern Orwellian British Law, would have him arrested. Since it's France, who knows?

Is he drunk? Bullshit, he's drinking Coke.

I wonder why society--the liberal half--thinks a free pass should be given to a minority who threatens violence? What does a White liberal do when an individual thug of color threatens his family? "Now kids, this man is an economically-disadvantaged oppressed person of color. Watch Daddy hand over his wallet to atone for the sins of of our evil exploiting race."

Unacceptable.






>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^Boise_Lib:
I was ready to argue with you--then I read the second paragraph--then I read the late addition. You are assuming the downvotes are automatic; using what? You don't know why anyone downvoted (except me--see comment above).
Your downvote is a blatant violation of Siftlaw. You ought to know better. Don't worry; nothing will be done because nobody likes QM. Siftlaws are only there to protect popular users.
I suspect the others are as well but we can only speculate since they haven't posted confessions.

Please do not confuse classical liberalism (now known as libertarianism) with the marxist and communist twaddle known as "modern liberalism", a preventable mental disorder that will be the ruin of Western Civ.

Political correctness is your training program to be a good slave.

YOUR training, not mine, Numbnuts.




>> ^Fade:

Liberalism is western democracy/civilization moron.
Liberalism (from the Latin liberalis)[1] is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights.[2] Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights, capitalism, and freedom of religion.[3][4][5][6][7] These ideas are widely accepted, even by political groups that do not openly profess a liberal ideological orientation. Liberalism encompasses several intellectual trends and traditions, but the dominant variants are classical liberalism, which became popular in the eighteenth century, and social liberalism, which became popular in the twentieth century.
Liberalism first became a powerful force in the Age of Enlightenment, rejecting several foundational assumptions that dominated most earlier theories of government, such as nobility, established religion, absolute monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings. The early liberal thinker John Locke, who is often credited for the creation of liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition, employed the concept of natural rights and the social contract to argue that the rule of law should replace absolutism in government, that rulers were subject to the consent of the governed, and that private individuals had a fundamental right to life, liberty, and property.
The revolutionaries in the American Revolution and the French Revolution used liberal philosophy to justify the armed overthrow of tyrannical rule. The nineteenth century saw liberal governments established in nations across Europe, Latin America, and North America. Liberal ideas spread even further in the twentieth century, when liberal democracies triumphed in two world wars and survived major ideological challenges from fascism and communism.
Today, liberalism in its many forms remains as a political force to varying degrees of power and influence on all major continents.>> ^quantumushroom:
The real illness in that Orwellian police state is found in the mental weaklings (proles) who called the cops over hateful, offensive speech. If the roles had been reversed and it was a Black person spouting racist rubbish, there would be no arrest or "bobbies" looking for her. It won't be much longer.

>> ^Skeeve:
While her tirade makes me sick, the fact that she was arrested for this makes me even more sick.
Freedom of speech means nothing if you don't have the freedom to offend people. The aim should be to draw the line where it causes harm - whether by inciting violence or by denying someone a job, etc.