like it was done in the Guardian’s cellar? i would totally watch it!
My sentiments, exactly! Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of bastards.
(Download Flagger - it’ll add the terms of your choosing to the logs of whatever sites you visit, too.)
I’d be willing to bet a round of beers that No Such Agency has long since implemented context-sensitivity, to send all the “laundry list” blocks of words we used to send on Jam Echelon Day, to \dev\null. . .
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From what I understand, this happened with the Stasi, and it happens with most secret police agencies: they collected more data than they could analyze.
The question I think we should ask is what the real intent is: to gather data for analysis, or to intimidate people into silence because people are afraid of surveillance. If it’s the latter, then they don’t need to actually do anything with the data they collect, they just need to be known to be collecting it.
Either way, we should advocate that the NSA be shut down. But in that latter case, we could hope to call their bluff, through mass public dissent.
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If it was the latter, they would be telling us they were collecting it.
Unless you’re postulating that Snowden was a dupe or a false-flag operation. Which I suppose is possible.
Both.
Grab anything you can (preferably everything). Once it’s on file you can always go over it again.
At the same time it doesn’t hurt if people are intimidated and not quite clear about what you can do, what you can’t do, what you will do and what you won’t do.
I don’t think the NSA can be regarded as one monolithic block. (Is the ratio of the main building 1-2-3?)
Any organisation this huge is bound to have factions along various (front)lines.
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The Stasi weren’t nearly the first. The Spanish did it long before that, employing crowds of scribes to document everything that moved, and everything that didn’t. It has been said (I haven’t directly verified this) that the penchant for documenting and over-regulating helped sink their empire.
(Interesting to note that the Inquisition took place there, amid all that heavy documenting of people, though I’d imagine wholesale torture and murder are just a natural result of making decisions based on strong bias and metadata collections.)
I feel certain that is correct. Mentioned before, I think - I knew an NSA Cryptologist who was military, but left in disgust after spending all his time explaining his work to others who were getting paid several times as much for supposedly understanding and performing themselves the work that he performed.
Also see in other agencies - competition amongst middle management employees so severe that an opening in their bosses position had them tapping one another’s voice mail and hiding office keys so no one else could get the spot they wanted. People act like idiots everywhere, to a fair extent. Put them in a situation where it’s just about impossible to fire them, and you get Bureaucrats Gone Wild. NSA may do better than that sorry example - but I’m certain you’re right about competing groups.
Obligatory Link:
I really doubt it was a false-flag operation. Maybe there was something of a “plant a beacon on the Millennium Falcon” operation – that is, they’d assumed that sooner or later, someone would leak something, so they’d make some use out of it. I think that’s more likely than a false-flag operation, but still not very likely.
There already was some paranoia going around about the NSA in some circles. It’s a huge operation with an enormous budget, and it’s secretive, but we knew it’s official mission has to do with cryptography and monitoring international communications. That’s plenty of fodder for paranoia already, before we get to things like the leaks about the NSA planting equipment to monitor parts of the Internet backbone.
Snowden leaked much more detail, and it’s gotten much more public attention. I don’t think that the top bureaucrats at the NSA would have ever planned to leak this much detailed information. There’s been significant public backlash, politicians are starting to question the NSA, big tech companies are deliberately trying to distance themselves from the NSA, and the revelation of spying on foreign allies – particularly Merkel – has been a diplomatic problem for the US. So I have to conclude that Snowden is entirely genuine, and he’s down the world a significant service.
To be honest, I really wonder how intentional might be the sort of dynamic I talked about with the Stasi. I made a comment about the functioning of a system, and I’m not sure where the agency actually is. That is, I assume that the Stasi thought that mass surveillance was useful in a direct manner, for identifying dissidents and enemies of the state; but in practice, it was only rarely useful for that, and the real utility of it was intimidation. So the East German state overvalued the Stasi, and dissidents had an exaggerated fear of it and self-censored, and this dynamic persisted until the bluff was called.
I don’t know how conscious NSA bureaucrats may be of this; US journalism is notorious for its self-censorship – notorious at least with the sort of people who read Chomsky. And there’s a history of the US radical left going underground unnecessarily, to its own harm. The latter is the part I’m most concerned with at the moment, as over the last year or so, I’ve been following discussions about privacy and anonymity and cryptography among left activists, and it seems like an enormous amount of effort is going into efforts to avoid surveillance that will just isolate activists without really protecting them.
From what little I’ve heard from people who have some clue about the NSA, they’re technical geeks first and foremost. I wouldn’t put it past the CIA to use the NSA as part of their threat posture, internally or externally, but I really don’t think the NSA, even at a management level, would have much interest in anything outside the technical. That’s just not their game.
As the old New Yorker cartoon had it, MANY decades ago: “As a loyal American, I object to being spied upon by the CIA. It should be the FBI, or nobody!” I honestly don’t think the NSA thinks of themselves as being affiliated with either FBI or CIA – their job is to try to improve and automate signals intelligence; acting on it is someone else’s mission.
It would make no sense to suppose there is no liaison operation there. Sure, the NSA has its own specialty - but they aren’t just collecting that data so that it can sit around unused. The revelation of the FISA Court’s insane warrants and the NSA’s abuse and overextension of those warrants defies that idea, entirely. If this all operates at the general level of efficiency and usefulness as most other federal agencies, it’s a clown show. If it’s better than that, it’s an evil clown show.
I can’t see any reason other than personal sentiments to concentrate on what is happening with radical leftists. If John Doe stops emailing his mother on Yahoo due to fear of what this massive cluster threatens, that’s more than enough, right there. Otherwise, we risk allowing opposition to this thing to become fragmented by partisanship - and that won’t help us at all. This is one where we really do have to toss all of that and stay focused - because the harm done cannot be limited to any one group.
Example -Fox ran a headline that proclaimed (paraphrasing) “Congress Thinks NSA is not a Problem”. The story? An interview with a whole 2 extremely conservative congress members. Considering how many people actually watch that crud exclusively and believe it? We just got a large crowd of potential supporters for ending this thing axed. They may not have been the sharpest knives in the drawer, and I may not agree with their personal politics - but as usual, all Fox did was attempt to divide people some more, when we need to work together.
There have certainly been times when the federal government has threatened or outright abused and denied the civil rights of various groups of people, but this time, they’ve come after every single one of us - and that can’t be tolerated by any of us. It’s neither a Left-Wing nor Right-wing issue. The offense holds the potential to squelch any given pov or activity. Because, as much as I bitch about Obama, and as responsible for all of this as he is today (and he absolutely is), that organization and its activities were here before he was, and will be here after he’s gone unless we put a stop to it now. If we don’t step up together., it’ll simply fall into the hands of the Republican who is going to replace Obama due to the backlash he’s s busy creating. And either way, we still lose.
(You guys keep talking CIA and FBI - but don’t leave out DHS! They hold even more potential to do harm domestically because of the sheer breadth of their mission statement and mandates.)
OMG - your poor head!
And now, mine, lol. And we can’t un-see that, either.
Of course there’s a liaison. I’m just challenging the idea that the NSA is driving anything at the political level. That’s really not their thing. If you’re spinning conspiracy theories, they’re going to be the mad scientists providing death rays to the evil overlord, not the overlord himself.
“I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.”
– “Captain Future, Block That Kick!”, S. J. Perelman
Well, it’s not as if you weren’t expecting it. . .
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Oh, God no! No conspiracy theory here. Strong expectation of both actual conspiracies occurring at some points, as well as clown show-driven disparities and oversights, yes! Just Advanced Murphology at work.
Absolutely beautiful quote, btw! Love it.
OK - ya got me. Didn’t recognize the still shot for a sec, did the dumb thing and pushed play.
Nobody has ever topped MB. Ever.
Well, I’ve worked in several parts of DHS. I’d call them clowns, but that would insult artists who wear greasepaint and floppy shoes.
They’d be dangerous if they weren’t so mind-blisteringly STUPID. . .
Our tax dollars @ work. There’s something…incredibly perverse about working those kinds of gigs, then you get paid, and they deduct some of your pay so they can keep on doing what you just spent a couple of mind-blistering weeks trying to tell yourself you actually saw what you saw them doing with it.
(Pretend I inserted a link to a Twilight Zone psychedelic spiral there.)
Three reasons.
First, while there are competing and overlapping definitions for the left/right spectrum, the one I have most in mind is that the left favors redistributing power among the many and the right favors concentrating power among a few. Mass surveillance is, most obviously, a tool for control of the many by the few, so, by the definition I’m using, this is inherently a left issue, regardless of whether a particular person identifies with the left or is part of a consciously left political organization.
Second, there’s a long history of the US government (like most governments) attacking organizations and individuals of the radical left. The FBI’s origins lay in the Palmer Raids on socialists and anarchists following World War I, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO project to destroy the Civil Rights movement and the Black Panther Party are notorious.
Third, most of the people I hear discussing the threat of the NSA, and arguing that we should all learn how to encrypt all our communications, etc., identify themselves as left or radical left. And I am worried about a conflict between the need for mass popular organization (i.e., the most effective form for left political action) and an insistence on the use of technically difficult, narrowcast communication tools.
