There’s no Daddy like a Tory Daddy:
Only terrorists, criminals and spies should fear secret activities of the British and US intelligence agencies, the Foreign Secretary has insisted. […] He added that law abiding citizens had “nothing to fear” from intelligence agencies’ activities.
That’s the fundamental proposition that’s been on sale from both the US and British government for the last dozen or so years, in two simple sentences.
PaulW
Honest citizens should fear when their personal information is not secure, and ripe for abuse. Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
4tehlulz
Dozen?
Bill E Pilgrim
@PaulW:
That’s a keeper.
c u n d gulag
The government is interested in good hygiene, so, to make sure everyone’s underwear is clean, they must wear it on the outside, so the government can check!
Anyone wearing underwear, UNDER what they wear, will be assumed to lack proper hygiene, and be picked up, hosed-off, and then beaten with a hose!!!
If you wear your underwear on the outside, you have nothing to fear.
OY!
FridayNext
@4tehlulz:
Exactly. I have been hearing some form of this my whole life. It’s the number one go-to bullshit when a cop wants you to surrender your 4th Amendment rights. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”
Funny how people in authority never think this philosophy applies to THEM.
Todd
@PaulW:
You can’t claim privacy while making agreements that you grocer can send your discount card data to valued partners. Or when your credit card purchases have to clear through your vendor, it’s merchant processor and your bank, all before being reported in aggregate statement totals to Transunion, Experian and Equifax.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Speaking of insecurity…
That’s what I thought listening to him this morning. Since the Guardian found that 90% of the material given/stolen was too sensitive to publish, it’s odd to see a news organization with a better sense of what is safe to publish than the person who provided it to them.
Hopefully GG goes rogue. C’mon Glenn, you KNOW you want to do it! Think of the fame, think of the accolades! You’ll be famous!!
srv
@c u n d gulag: I wonder if I could market RFID-proof underwear to the teahadis.
cleek
it’s kindof the fundamental proposition of government, period: we trust them to behave, given the powers we allow them to accrue.
Paul in KY
This is the culmination of Andy Warhol’s observation that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 seconds.
He just didn’t know that the entity to which you would be famous was the government.
Keith
He forgot to include wankers.
jayackroyd
And vice versa. If they’re investigating you you can be sure you fall into one of those three categories..
Whether you know it or not.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Josh Marshall talks to someone overseas who thinks that China wouldn’t have a problem with shipping Snowden back home if the US wants it.
Really, HK/China is seen by him as a sanctuary? This guy seems to make some really flaky decisions, that’s for sure. Being a regular reader of GG should have been a hint. I could see the government now asking people undergoing security checks to list the reporters/bloggers that they regularly read and follow.
“Oh, I see you wrote Glenn Greenwald down. Thanks for coming in for the interview. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
That’s an easy sell: It’s how most people who don’t live politics at least 2 hours a day think. And I think most of history is documenting the screwups of the few people who do spend at least 2 hours a day following politics.
Soonergrunt
What he said.
Lolis
On twitter, GG said he had been communicating with Snowden since February, but Snowden worked for that agency for three months or less. Very odd. GG should pony up and reveal all the info so we can see if he has proof of any illegal spying. It’s pretty clear that he has no journalism background from all his interviews. Defensiveness and hysterics do not give him credibility.
Cacti
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
I am not a psychiatrist (IANAP), but some of Mr. Snowden’s behavior seems suggestive of Histrionic Personality Disorder.
the Conster
The NSA doesn’t even have to be competent – the kerfuffle is like putting an ADT home security sign in front of your house without buying the service, or the national security version of “go ahead punk, make my day”. Do they or don’t they know what I’m doing? How much DO I want to get involved in a terrorist plot?
David in NY
Martin Luther King, Jr., would probably disagree with Mr. Hague. At least he had grounds to, when he was alive.
raven
@Soonergrunt:
When you walk through the garden
you gotta watch your back
well I beg your pardon
walk the straight and narrow track
if you walk with Jesus
he’s gonna save your soul
you gotta keep the devil way down in the hole
Higgs Boson's Mate
It isn’t the size of your data. It’s how you use it.
Cacti
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
That’s what everybody with small data says.
piratedan
well it appears that GG is in a “Take that Penbroke scholars!” frame of mind. i.e. I’m going to hurt this administration even if I get someone else killed, because sacrifices have to be made….. and so goes Glennathor, son of Denathor, son of Xthelion.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Cacti:
No wonder Glenn likes him, it meshes with his NPD. :)
Seriously, there is something not right about this guy, that’s for damned sure. A bunch of IT people I hang with are questioning his $200K salary too. They first thought there was something to his story (undying libertarian nerds) but now that they have read more about it/him, they think he’s full of shit.
@piratedan:
Yup. His saying that he would turn the focus back on the US government is coming across as more of a threat than him having more ‘news’. If Snowden gave him some really sensitive stuff that is irrelevant to the case but would hurt the US, I have no doubt that Glenn would put it out there just to do it.
One thing is for sure, Ron Paul supporters are really fucking nuts.
Punchy
@Odie Hugh Manatee: TPM says he’s a Rand Paul supporter. So yes, he’s a friggin dumbass liberterian. Go figs that he thinks the Kongers will offer this guy a great job and a place to live.
Related….anyone know what kind of scratch this guy just jettisoned by opening his pie hole to G-squared? Wouldn’t a contractor working with top secret clearance bring down at least $100K?
Edit: Looks like OHM just answered my query
belieber
It’s boring around here. Why don’t you people get all “Obama is Hitler” like Dkos. Now that is fun…and embarassing to all liberals…but I digress.
We need a wr0ng way Cole post blowing wet kisses at Greenwald. Nothing like a dose of ignorance to liven things up.
Gin & Tonic
Nearing 20 years since those words were published.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Punchy: According to something I saw yesterday, it was $200K.
Cassidy
If he was a contractor, the salary is believeable. I was offerred 190K to be the team Medic for a PSS contract with the State Dept. through one of the PMC’s. I have a hard time believing the level of access he claimed ot have or the credentials necessary to have gotten that salary/ access level.
Amir Khalid
If this surveillance policy began in Britain “a dozen or so” years ago, then it began under a Labour government.
Paul in KY
@piratedan: Way to work in a Gandalf quote from LOTR. Major nerd points there!
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Punchy:
He claims he was paid $200K a year but since he only worked there for three months he sure didn’t make a whole lot of that salary. His requesting the Post publish the story with a cryptographic key in three days so he could prove to a foreign government that he was the leaker is really ‘interesting’.
Soonergrunt
@Punchy: Not necessarily. I was an IT contractor with a TS:SCI clearance for several years and I never made more than $57K doing that, and that’s when I worked for a Field Operating Agency of HQ USAF.
It’s going to depend entirely on where he was doing that, and for whom, and while I suppose it’s possible (I’m not familiar with that particular TS IT community) but the only places I’ve ever personally heard of IT people making $100K+ on contract to USG was in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Cacti
@Gin & Tonic:
Many people already do as a condition of employment. That battle is long since lost.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Glad that’s settled, what’s on TV tonight?
Higgs Boson's Mate
Maybe the whole thing is a plot by the spooks to get the Chinese to pay a lot of money to the flakiest guy in the organization.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@belieber: I normally read through a lot of the comments at DK, it’s just who I am, but it’s gone over the deep end today. One of the diary is about how the Washington Post changed it’s original story from “the government is directly connected to the databases of every phone company getting all the data it wants” to “the government gets warrants to get the phone information on foreign nationals” without posting that it had, with the diary warning people to get their facts straight. Comments started claiming that well, the government must have forced the Washington Post to change its story.
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: Contract make that kind of money when hired through a PMC. This is where I get skeptical. If he was hired through a PMC, who almost exclusively hires prior service, we’d be hearing “former Special Forces/ Navy Seal/ AF SSG with Cyber Command”, etc.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Punchy: I spent several years doing business with the Chinese. This delusional idiot is going to get wrung dry and then extradited. Possibly in a box if he plays his cards poorly.
Seanly
How does the NSA gathering not violate the 4th Amendment?
And what is a good non-violent response “If you have nothing to hide bla bla bla”?
Emma
I don’t care if they collect metadata until the cows come home. I want steel hawsers controlling how they use it. Currently,as I understand some of the legal explanations, the law says that if they identify a phone number as suspicious they have to get a warrant to actually look at the contents of the call. I want the rules for that tightened. And I want an “expiration date” on that data. After a certain number of years it gets deleted and wiped.
piratedan
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): LGF had Charles going on about that on Saturday where the Post changed the story from it’s original SHOUTING AT ALL THE THINGSs perspective to taking the hysteria out and then linking to that version without posting that the story had been edited or revised or updated or that the Post was even following their own published correction guidelines. So it had the appearance that the Post was backing down from their original version. I guess you could question whether the government was the reason or the fact that the vast majority of the Technical houses that they cited as being forced to channel their data into a Federal repository categorically denied that was the case and were pushing back on GG’s original claim.
Todd
@Lolis:
Hey, here’s a fun thought – does Brazil have an extradition treaty with the US? Did GG (or should I call him Gigli) cross a line from news aggregator to co-conspirator?
Here’s hoping that with his vaunted legal skills, he represents himself.
Lavocat
Um, no.
Rather, citizens have nothing to fear from LAW-ABIDING intelligent agencies’ activities.
Transparency builds trust; secrecy builds distrust. And for damned good reason.
pamelabrown53
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I was reading through those same comments at DKOS and to me more than a few sounded like Glen Beck sockpuppets…and I support the repeal of the AUMF and either repeal or serious restrictions on the Patriot Act.
Todd
@Seanly:
The legal standard is set at a reasonable expectation of privacy. All of your electronic transactions with corporate America nowadays include data sharing with undisclosed third parties, and you usually do it by contract, hence destroying any notion of privacy.
Also, in 1979, SCOTUS specifically confirmed that the warrantless collection of pen register data on local calls is appropriate – pen register data including numbers called, calls in, and presumably duration. Basically, the past version of your cellphone bill.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Todd: Since 1964. But I don’t think that’s GG’s biggest concern.
If I were living in a country like Brazil, one with such a long and cherished tradition of death squads, I would probably spend more time with my mouth shut than he does.
cleek
@Seanly:
the NSA isn’t gathering the data; they are legally obtaining the “business records” of telcos with whom we do business. they aren’t gathering our information, they’re gathering Verizon’s information. SCOTUS has repeatedly said that this is OK.
Gopher2b
Ah, but everyone breaks laws with no expectation they’ll get caught (e.g. weed, obscenity, extramarital affairs, piracy, speeding, ripping the tag off your mattress). It’s part of the grand bargain. I think the point is that this changes that calculus.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Seanly: Because in almost all cases it’s voluntary. Go back and read your cell phone contract, or your TOS for your online provider, which all state explicitly in 6-point font on page 38 that they have the right to share information about the account holder or use of the account with third parties.
cleek’s explanation is better than mine.
El Cid
On the other hand, when it comes to health insurance or food aid or welfare, the gubmit can’t be trusted to do nuthin’ right!
lamh35
Oh and now some are comparing Snowden to Rosa Parks…really…really.
Lord I just cannot even be bothered with some people.
Snowden ain’t nobody’s Rosa Parks people.
El Cid
@lamh35: Who forced upon us the responsibility of coming up with a moral characterization of Snowden one way or the other? Why do I have to come up with some morality tale analogy of who he is or isn’t like? When did that become my responsibility?
Mandalay
It’s ironic that a couple of media lapdog stooges, Charlie Rose and Norah O’Donnell, skewered Eric Cantor this morning, to expose the real issue: the lack of government accountability…
Sweet.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Seanly: Question back, how does Congress passed a law, the president filed a warrant under the law, and a judge approved the warrant, violate the 4th amendment? The best answer to that is “the Supreme Court” hasn’t ruled that it does or doesn’t. All three branches of government approved the data access.
Plus what everyone else said.
Corner Stone
@lamh35:
“Some” what? Some of the voices in your head? Some random jerks on twitter?
Who is making this analogy or comparison, and in what forum?
Corner Stone
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
It’s hard for the SCOTUS to rule on something that’s never allowed into courts for litigation.
Mandalay
@cleek:
That is right. Now if it is proven that unreasonable seizures resulted then that is another matter, but I don’t think anyone is making that claim.
Roy G.
Indeed, the shadow govt. on either side would never, ever use this information to, say, track and disrupt the next wave of #Occupy or austerity protests.
Shalimar
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I could see the government now asking people undergoing security checks to list the reporters/bloggers that they regularly read and follow.
Why would they have to ask? Can’t they just check their massive internet database and see for themselves?
soonergrunt (mobile)
@Cassidy: that was my response. “$200K/year? Wait, what?”
Gin & Tonic
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Which is why we have to intelligently make the tradeoffs. If it’s more important to me to save 50 cents on a box of Cheerios than it is for Stop & Shop to track my ceral-buying habits and share them with General Mills, I’ll do that. And if I’m interested in the privacy of my e-mail, I will choose a provider that does not expres the right to share my data with the NSA (and, in fact, under EU guidelines, cannot.)
Hawes
This debate is healthy and long overdue. We should have had it a decade ago. But I’ve never gotten the sense that those suffering from Libertarian Narcissistic Disorder were ever interested in nuanced debate about the balances between liberty and safety. They are liberty absolutists and I’m fine with that. But they aren’t necessarily interested in nuanced debate.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Roy G.: Why would they need phone data for that, when I could sit down on facebook and twitter and read what they are doing? Get a warrant for after the fact call times, or facebook for up-to-date planning?
El Cid
@soonergrunt (mobile): I think the situation is a bit analogous to the free handing out of money by contractors of money like the early occupation of Iraq. They’re getting so much money they don’t give a shit. $200K / year is a lot for an employee like Snowden, but likely not much at all for his employer. Ain’t nobody looking over their budget closely anyway.
Mandalay
@lamh35:
“some”? Do you have any links for that?
I see people refuting the idea that Snowden should be compared to Rosa Parks, but I don’t see anyone actually making the comparison in the first place.
the Conster
@Mandalay:
This is where it gets interesting now. The idiots in Congress are going to have to pick a path to go down, with both paths laden with booby traps for them.
Cassidy
@Roy G.: A) what Belafon said and B) I don’t think they’re really interested in that.
Procedurally, Occupy has only been a nuisance and only became local/ slightly regional problems. Sure, the Feds kept tabs, but FLEO involvement was largely uninvolved. Secondly, FLEO and the IC still don’t hold hands and skip together. Sure, they finally lay in the same sandbox, but it’s not a lovey dovey relationship.
The G* protesters warrant attention, but those poeple have been tracked for years anyway.
I think the big thing that still doesn’t get talked about is why are we upset about this? We signed away our privacy long before now. I get why it concerns people, but what have we done to personally avoid this? Nothing.
Cassidy
@El Cid: That kind of money gets handed out, but it gets handed out to very specific types of people who have a very selective resume. It’s the kind of resume that gets mentioned every time people like that end up in the news. Without that kind of thing preceeding any discussion of his name in the media, I have to question it’s truthiness.
Mandalay
@El Cid:
I don’t think anyone has likened Snowden to Rosa Parks. Even if some random wacko poster actually did, it is hardly worth raising it as an issue. It’s a strawman.
But may I be the first to say that Snowden really reminds me of JFK, Gandhi and Mandela? There’s definitely something about them in his smile.
AxelFoley
@PaulW:
Hey, Veni, Vidi, Vici to you, too, pal!
EconWatcher
As we’ve discussed on previous threads, we aren’t going to stop the government from doing a lot of electronic monitoring and snooping. It’s not going to happen. But maybe we could achieve would be the appointment of some kind of citizen’s inspector general or civil liberties czar (whatever you want to call it), with the highest security clearance and a specific mandate to root out any individual abuses in use of information. There may be other ways to go at this, but some kind of permanent internal check is needed.
Narcissus
According to TPM Snowden checked out of this hotel sometime today.
LanceThruster
I often felt that since elected officials are doing the people’s business, they should be wired up to a full time CCTV to record their every transaction. Afterall, if they’ve nothing to hide, they’ve nothing to worry about.
lamh35
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/edward-snowden-army-discharge-92486.html#ixzz2VoqcUXb8
belieber
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Sometimes both sides really do do it. I always thought Liberals were better than that. Dkos is working hard each and every day to prove that wrong!
Jockey Full of Malbec
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
A full-fledged engineer with post-grad degrees would be lucky to make $135K at a place like Booz-Allen. Most would make less.
Your IT friends have an excellent sense of smell.
Corner Stone
@EconWatcher:
Now I think we’re getting to the meat of this.
Corner Stone
@LanceThruster:
Can you imagine the sheer inanity involved in trying to listen to what a Congressperson might mumble out loud all day long?
That’s the kind of job they’d have to pay someone $200K a year to do.
? Martin
Dozen? Try hundreds. I fail to understand how digital communication somehow created all new ways to fear the government. The government has been able to collect metadata and eavesdrop on phone calls for a century. They eavesdropped on telegraph communications during the Civil War. The government has run the postal service for two centuries and not only has had the ability to keep track of who you write to and when, but has had formal mechanisms for doing that for two centuries, plus the ability to open, read, and reseal your mail. They’ve been able to collect information about you from your tax records, your census records, and a host of other government interactions.
Either we trust the government to follow the law or we don’t. It makes no sense to trust them with spying via the IRS but distrust them with spying via Verizon. And if you distrust them everywhere, then the only recourse is to go full tea party and demand to privatize everything and abolish the census and IRS.
I don’t know, maybe people watch too many spy movies or something, but the very people that dismiss the IRS ‘scandal’ seem to be hip deep in believing the government is actively breaking the law by spying on the public. That’s utterly inconsistent. Either the hundreds of thousands of people across agencies that handle our personal information are completely unreliable about following US law, or they are as a group good public servants that reliably follow the law with the occasional outlier. Evidence seems to suggest its the latter, and while we get some rogue groups assembled like the guys that ran Iran/Contra, and the guys that pushed the limits on warrantless wiretapping, those wind up being short-lived outliers. The media eventually catches up with these things, or Congress, or the courts. Our checks and balances may not be immediately effective, and they can be individually infuriating, but they do work over the long arc.
soonergrunt (mobile)
@Cassidy:
@lamh35:
So we have here a guy who enlisted in a reserve SF unit (yes, you can do that) and never completed IET/AIT.
some point he got a secret/top secret clearance.
None of this precludes the truth that the surveillance state could be a real problem, but it does tend to cast some doubt an other claims of his such as “I had the authority to view the personal information of whoever I wanted to, even the President…”
Cassidy
@soonergrunt (mobile): Just a nitpick….the reporting is off. There is no reserve SF unit; 19th and 20th Group are National Guard.
Ted & Hellen
No, no, no, silly…everything changed in November 2008 remember?
Everything hoped and changed, actually. And here we are.
Harry Buttle
I used to think I had nothing to fear either.
David in NY
@soonergrunt (mobile): The one problem here that is indisputable, I think, is that whether or not he is correct about what he says is not provable one way or the other given the current lack of transparency in the system. The government’s sole answer to him is “trust us” and the fundamental basis of our Constitution is not just to “trust them” about this kind of thing. Checks and balances (Obama’s argument that since all three branches have a role in this, it must be OK) are hardly infallible, especially in the face of a threat from the “other” (see Korematsu, Hiryabashi). And if, as is likely (source, EFF), the judicial standard for review of a warrant application based on this stuff is merely “reasonable suspicion” the Bill of Rights isn’t doing us much good either.
But until we know more about how this actually works, which the government will do its damnedest to keep us from knowing, we are in no position as citizens to do our duty to decide reasonably whether trusting them is something we want to do.
? Martin
@EconWatcher:
All of these agencies have that. They all have Internal Auditors with top clearances that can internally blow the whistle on anything they see. They have a huge General Council that advises leadership on everything that they do letting them know where everything stands in relation to the law. These agencies are all required to regularly brief Congress on their activities.
Either these systems work or they don’t and adding new layers isn’t going to change that.
Cassidy
@David in NY: You just have to keep in mind that in our community there is always the “former Navy Seal/ Green Beret/ CIA Operative” who did secret black ops no one can talk about in Cambodia/ Laos/ Middle east and, coincidentally, there are always 3-4 of them in every VFW hall. So for us, when a guy like this starts saying things that raise certain red flags, it immediately makes everything else suspect.
That being said, it’s not really all that pertinent to the information that has been leaked. But, it does make you question his agenda and what the real story is.
? Martin
@Seanly:
Courts have ruled repeatedly that collecting metadata does not violate the 4th amendment. The threshold seems to be that so long as they stop short of reading the content, they’re good. That goes back at least half a century. The standard appears to have been set through the Postal Service – they can collect whatever they want from the outside of your mail, but they can’t open it. They’ve extended that logically to phone and online information.
raven
@Cassidy: Ever swingin dick that ever put on a uniform was a fucking “point man”. No slack. no drag, everyone just walked in one big line.
LanceThruster
@Corner Stone:
Look at what they blather when they know they’re in front of a camera as when
at the end of a heated exchange with Eric Holder, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) accused the AG of attempting to “cast aspersions on my asparagus.”
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: I was never on combat.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: I was never a point man. Maybe on some training exercises, but that’s it. We all rotated through it, though. It was good trianing.
Mandalay
@Cassidy:
That is factually correct, but the way the media portrays the character of the leaker may frame the way it presents the entire issue.
Snowden said “I don’t want public attention because I don’t want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing.” but that will probably not be how coverage progresses. I’ve already read that a neighbor in Hawaii claimed that Snowden wore a baseball hat to hide his face.
I fully expect our MSM to write mountains of drivel on Snowden, and treat the information he revealed as a side dish.
Cassidy
@Mandalay: Again, it’s navel gazing on the part of veterans, TBH, but it really does block out anything he says. It’s hard to take him seriously even if his motivation(s) are pure.
Cassidy
@Mandalay: …and hit enter before I was done…
It’s kind of his fault. You can’t say shit like that, where the pieces don’t add up, just to make yourself seem more important without having everything questioned. FWIW, everything he said may be the truth. Personally, I find it suspect, but that means nothing. But if it turns out to not be completely true or som4ething he can’t verify, then what? He should know beter.
Soonergrunt
@Cassidy: True. But the difference between Army Reserves and Army National Guard is lost on most people who don’t have experience with those organizations. For everybody else, here’s some background info on this from an officer of the Utah NG with whom I served in Afghanistan:
Since they are National Guard units, people do enlist directly into them. And while most of the SF-qualified Soldiers in those units had prior Active Duty experience, there are some people who enlisted directly and went to the SF school and got the qualifications. There are also supporting staff that are not SF qualified, like 25B IT techs, 92G Food Service Specialists, etc. who wear maroon berets because they are jump qualified in an Airborne unit.
There are also a large number of non-hackers who enlisted in those units and will NEVER wear a green beret or even the maroon beret of the supporting staff because they are non-hackers, but National Guard regulations do not allow forced transfers to units more than 50 miles away, and they still get to wear the SF Arrowhead with Airborne tab because that is the unit patch. They are forever assigned to the Readiness Enhancement Company and they never go to (or they fail) SF school and either do not attend another MOS producing school needed by 19th SF or whatever the issue is, but eventually after a year or so they get dropped from the rolls if they do not transfer voluntarily.
Ruckus
@Cassidy:
He sounds much more like a keyboard commando than the real thing.
Knew someone once who published a first person story about being a medic in Vietnam. The story sounded OK on first read but those who had been there were suspicious. They checked it out and it turned out it was all fabricated. All of it. He lost his job over it. Of course he was so bad at his job and so full of shit he may have lost it anyway.
Maude
Late to the thread.
What made me uneasy was Snowden’s claim that he knew where the CIA stations were on foreign soil. Was he implying that he is going to out them?
That stuck out to me like a neon sign.
Roy G.
@Cassidy: I wish I could be so sanguine, however, it came out after the fact that FLEO and DHS were involved in the Occupy Oakland protests. Sure, they may not be interested now, but who is to say about the future? Obviously, the potential for abuse here is tremendous, yet the few safeguards in place are being dismantled posthaste. Does the name COINTELPRO mean anything to you?
Also, too, Clapper lied to Congress about this program, which is technically a crime, so who’s to say that we’re still not being lied to?
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: I’ve got a buddy in 20th Group who was trying to get me to come over and be in the support company. Damn that Airborne run requirement!
But, anyway, it’s a nitpick on my part, not aimed at you.
Paul in KY
@raven: I know in my USAF Comm unit, I flew the M-27 ‘Paper Burner’ combat desk. Oh, the stories I could tell, if only it wasn’t all highly classified…
Mandalay
@Cassidy:
That’s true. With hindsight he should have revealed his identity and then said nothing more.
That wouldn’t have stopped the media trying to find out his shoe size and his favorite cereal, but it would prevent the dumb (or at least implausible) comments he made diverting attention from the information he released, which was the very thing he claimed he wanted to avoid.
Cassidy
@Roy G.: The potential for abuse is in everything and existed long before any of these recent discoveries. Not to be all Infowars, but if anyone belives that our IC hasn’t been domestically spying in some capacity for a long time is delusional or naive. Maybe they didn’t have the capability a few decades ago that they do now, but it’s been happenning, I guarantee. Remember, the Pariot Act made stuff legal that was already happenning.
But, that’s kind of the NSA and, by extension, the IC’s job. I would genuinely be surprised to find out these activities are recent. I’ve said in other threads that we gave up privacy the moment that we fired up a 1200 or 2400 modem and accessed AOL or Prodigy or some BBS. it was all over after that and someone, somewhere was storing the data and our gov’t has had many ways to get access to it. others have said and I agree, I trust our gov’t more with that data than I do corporations.
No doubt that FLEO did some investigating into Occupy; I expect no less and, objectively, they should. We’ve seen across the world how simple protests become armed conflicts. Again, though, the impact of Occupy was more local and regional and beyond some simple intel gathering, they really weren’t looked at all that much. tehre was nothing to see, no threat. I’d bet money that you’ll find far more intel assets at a Klan or Teatard gathering than Occupy. The first are significantly more dangerous.
So yeah, anything can be abused, but I think you’d be surprised at how mundane a lot of it is.
Corner Stone
@Roy G.: Law&Order taught me the NYPD had a Red Squad infiltrating protest groups in the ’60s.
Corner Stone
@Roy G.:
Clapper has about as much credibility as those doctors that stood before Congress and swore that smoking tobacco was not harmful to your health.
Soonergrunt
@Cassidy:
@raven: Back when I still went to the VFW regularly (they had cheap beer,) there was this one guy who told me that he was a Clerk/Typist in Viet Nam. I offered to buy him a beer. When he asked me why, I told him that he was the only guy I ever met who was a Clerk/Typist in Viet Nam, most of the guys I met being SEALS and SF and so on, and with all the Silver Stars, DSCs, Medals of Honor and so on and so forth, he had to be the hardest working troop in country typing up all those awards that they all had.
He looks at me for a moment and says, dead serious, “you know, some of those guys were probably lying to you.”
I laughed so hard my face hurt.
Corner Stone
@Mandalay: I’m really not getting a good feeling off Snowden.
And I think GG’s sense of the grandiose failed this occasion pretty badly. He’s not stupid and should have known every person and their dog was going to start slagging this story the second they saw his byline. That video should have been tight and clean.
Now the data is one small aspect and we’re going to get the full bonanza on personality.
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: You want a beer?
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: My Mom knows two guys who were super secret CIA black ops ninjas at her VFW. One of them even told her he owuld be putting her in danger if he told her what he’d done. I don’t have the heart to tell her they’re full of shit becuase hse’s so enthralled with the stories. I just refuse to go to the VFW with her.
Mnemosyne
@Mandalay:
If it turns out that there’s even one part of what he released that’s fabricated or even just incorrect, he’s completely hosed as far as his credibility goes because so many other parts of his story aren’t adding up.
Soonergrunt
@Corner Stone: Which is a shame, because this is a discussion that we the people should be having.
Soonergrunt
@Mnemosyne: And of course something in there won’t add up. Not just because somebody who’d lie or dissemble about the things that he already has done will lie or dissemble about other things because that’s what they do, but because even if he wasn’t lying or dissembling, it’s the very nature of intelligence to be indirect and imprecise. Intelligence people (at least the ones I’ve known) always talk about capabilities and tendencies and trends, and they never make blanket statements because you can’t know everything (even about your own organization.)
Ben Cisco
@Paul in KY: BWAHAAHAA! Good one.
Mandalay
@Corner Stone:
Nor me. Although what he has said should not detract from his actions it surely will.
El Cid
@Cassidy: I’ve known people who for years at a time pull in $200K plus and though successful at what they did (for a time) they weren’t amazing or selectively chosen, they just happened to be at a company which was raking it in and wasn’t bashful about sharing it — for a while. Then the companies went under (often partly because of that) or whatever vein that they had tapped ran dry. $200K / yr would truly be remarkable to me for me to receive, but it’s not that huge for some employees when it comes to companies I’ve known raking in the dough. It’s not necessarily all formalized, GS, or university hiring out there. Salespeople make that much.
Cassidy
@El Cid: I don’t disagree with you at all. In the IC and national Security world, though. the people who make the 200K mark usually have backgrounds that say former Special Forces/ Navy SEAL/ Air Force Computer warfare, etc. Again, to gauge it, I was offered 190K just to be a team medic for a PSS team running mobile/ personal security for State Dept personnel and I’m only a leg, grunt Combat Medic.
RT
Labour are as authoritarian as the Tories. Just read or listen to what its senior MPs say.