Source for the one percent had ties to terror stat?
Of course they did. I’m sure there’s a file on reasonable dissenters of this clusterfuck as well. And how does one disprove allegations when spying information is classified?
I wonder who from the NSA screwed David Petraeus? Someone that Petraeus stepped on during his rise, maeybe?
Give it time. I’m sure this type of thing will trickle down to local law enforcement, if it hasn’t already.
Cory’s summary got that part wrong, so I doubt he can find a source. Per the quote in the article, what the NSA document actually says is that of the six targets, three speak English. The NSA then examined the contacts of those three English speakers and found that 1% of their contacts were “affiliated with an extremist group or a Pakistani militant group." In other words, the English speaking targets correspond with extremists, in addition to looking at porn. The article goes on to say that the Arabic speaking targets have even more contacts with terrorists.
Also, to describe these people as being targeted for their “political beliefs” is a bit blase. I mean, I guess “genocide is a good thing and we should practice it against non-believers” is a form of “political belief,” but it’s hardly on the same level as “raise the minimum wage” or “lower the capital gains tax.”
I am amazed at how low the “contact with terrorists %” is. I’d have thought, through six degrees of separation, we could all be tied directly to Osama Bin Laden. I’d better clear out my internet history, after all MILF is also the acronym of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Well, actually these guys are at one degree of separation. The whole point of the “6 degree” meme is that everyone is allegedly connected indirectly, however in this case the targets are directly connected.
Depending on what they mean by contacts and extremist, sure. Anyone who comments on message boards regularly has probably talked to an extremist at some point. You could describe Boing Boing as a foreign-hosted website with known Marxist connections that advocates political action in the United States and its allies.
Yeah, that isn’t clear. I wasn’t sure if they meant someone in your address book is associated with extremists. That technically is a “contact”. So that could infer some degree of separation.
So, does everyone recall that weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who publicly and loudly insisted that there were no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, was targeted by fake underaged minor girls? Did they find his kink and go after him to discredit him?
If anyone asks, I don’t know you!
I don’t remember that.
So the targets are “affiliated with terror” in a Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon sort of way.
That would be everyone. Spooks don’t typically like army boys much, so it would have been pretty galling to have one assigned to rein them in.
So, once again, we see them behaving like the Stasi. And, over most of the net, there will be a chorus of Quislings saying this is all great, and Snowden is a traitor. They sometimes even show up here, though I’d be surprised if that happened for this particular revelation.
Yeah, right. Any excuse to watch porn on company time.
I assume contact means contact. As in, they have directly communicated with them. Either through a phone call, email, paper mail, or other.
I suppose you could interpret the word to mean something different than it usually does in these contexts, but if that’s the interpretive gauze that you chose to apply, then why trust anything the document says at all? Why assume that the document distorts a few select words rather than all of them? You’ve taken an aggressively cynical approach to the document and declared that certain words within the document have non-conventional meanings, but then somehow decided that overall the document is true and describes a real program. I don’t get that contradictory mix of cynicism and trust.
Why is your assumption any more valid than another assumption or interpretation? I don’t intend that as an insult, but the fact that you have to assume in the first place doesn’t make it so cut and dry. It’s not beyond spies to cast a wide net and then exert pressure from the outside in.
realistically, the NSA spied on everyone’s porn use. they’ve simply decided that for the time being they’re only going to use it against this particular group of people they call “radicalizers”. but who knows what the future holds, now that they’ve weaponized porn.
