And shutter the programs in a transparent, verifiable way (if that’s even possible at this point).
Sure it can be verified. Picture an OPEW - Organisation for the Prohibition of Electronic Weapons - staffed by techies with degaussers and thermite destroying all those fancy hard drives and SSDs in the NSA datacenters.
I’m sure just like the Syrians they’ll be able to squirrel some data away at various other locations, but you just can’t fit all the data they’ve collected on a bunch of thumb drives in a shoebox (or they wouldn’t need that shiny and enormous Utah facility).
No way. Electromagnet! A big ol’ truckload of gaussilicious destruction primed to shred every HD in the joint.
Tell that to Valerie Plame.
It is a sign of a crumbling regime, a fact which has been obvious to anyone outside the US exceptionalism belief bubble for at least 10 years.
1 Like
Oh for Christ’s sake people, grow the f— up!
Countries spy on each other constantly. It barely counts unless there’s double agents and cash for secrets. And someone on Merkels staff needs to slap that cell phone out of her hand.
3 Likes
Almost. Go onto sites like Talking Points Memo and read the comments. There are plenty in the “Snowden is a narcissist and Obama is doing nothing wrong!” bubble. You speak the truth in my opinion though…
2 Likes
Right. You use a ricin-tipped needle secreted in an umbrella.
1 Like
The whole thing about the NSA spying on a world leader like Merkel is extremely disturbing, wether Obama was informed about it or not. If Obama knew it’s disturbing to know that the US executive branch spies so directly on allied leaders, and you can only imagine how that information was abused in say, treaty negotiations for the free trade zone. But if Obama didn’t know the whole situation is possibly even more disturbing, because then it has become clear that a very powerful executive agency is no longer under the control of (the elected portion of) the executive branch.
Well thank God this Administration has tightened up their ability to ferret out and prosecute whistleblowers and leakers. Now they can concentrate on killing off the messenger instead of altering the repellent/unconstitutional practices.
It turns out that he already reversed course on managing the debt, drug policy, drones, security, rights, free speech, telling the truth, etc. etc. Hoping for him to see the light and come back to sanity is unlikely. We’ve come a long way from “The Buck Stops Here”.
Not trying to derail here, honestly I’m not, but for future reference “spook” is also a racist slur for people of African descent–which, as far as I know, would describe Obama.
SOURCE: I grew up in a reeeealy racist area.
Fine, then let him know this banana agrees with rocketpj’s sentiments.
Just look at them.
Wow, it’s almost as though people in the career of spying can’t be trusted to keep secrets.
I agree, I don’t really give a damn if the US is spying on German leaders, or German leaders are spying on the US president. It might be bad taste, and sometimes as a merely practical matter I might be pissed about it happening by our enemies against our allies (and then, I’m more pissed at the incompetence of those who let it slip under their radar)… but you get involved in the upper echelons, you’re in the game, and the game will be played, and you know it will.
It’s when the spying includes monitoring the activity of the average person (of their own country or another) with no evidence of wrongdoing, that I get outraged, that is an abomination against human dignity.
1 Like
Because, all men may be created equal, but dagnabbit, bidness is bidness!
I can’t disagree with that. But see Congressional oversight of the NSA is a joke. I should know, I’m in Congress Consider that the spooks live in deceit like fish live in water, and they have special advantages in law that enable them to cover up in ways that politicos can only dream of.
Oversight can be stymied by declaring any given piece of info as secret even beyond Oversight’s clearance. When the spooks are allowed to gather any information and declare it secret, and they are allowed, even expected, to lie to Oversight, then Oversight has no standing whatsoever, except to the spooks as another layer of deception.
From a realpolitic point of view, the problem is the scale of the spying. In the old days of humint, you had to train a suitable agent and insert them into the appropriate organization, then set up more agents to pick up their intelligence and pass it back up the chain to the analysts. The scale was restrained by the difficulty and expense of training agents and analysts, and countries had rough parity with each other. The USA, forex, is a big influential country, which meant that it spied on a lot of countries — yes, even its allies — but a lot of countries spied on it, using precisely the same methods.
Up until a decade or so ago, even sigint required human management at a fairly low level. With the increased capabilities afforded by both Moore’s Law continuing unabated and the inflated budgets conned out of Congress for the War on Terr, there’s now little restraint on the ability of the NSA to automatically gather data and mine it for correlations, which gives the USA enormous advantage over the rest of us. It’s no longer about a low-level bureaucrat or two passing on memos and gossip back to Washington or Berlin; it’s now a few bureaucrats passing a few files to Berlin and the NSA recording seven million phone calls a month for Washington. And ditto for every other so-called ally of the USA.
Look, no offence, America, we’re friends and all, but that doesn’t mean I want you privy to nearly everything significant that goes on in my government, or between my government and Merkal’s.
1 Like
So, it’s Europe’s fault for being vulnerable? Victim-blaming much?
2 Likes
I think the amount of industrial espionage performed by US intelligence agencies for US companies may also factor in to these blank checks being written.
It’s not just for protection from terrorists. You can use it for sabotaging foreign interests economically, or stealing industrial secrets, or destroying political enemies, or cyber stalking general’s and their mistresses.
Honestly… it kind of sucks at preventing terrorism. But its great for all those other things!
Axel Springer Verlag (Bild) is what kept Rupert Murdoch out of Germany.
His market is saturated.
This articles veracity should be judged as if it had come from The Sun. Or Fox.
