(Jeff Danziger’s website)
Via Alec MacGillis at TNR (“Edward Snowden, Exemplar of the Beltway’s Economic Boom — Washington is full of high-earning contractors just like him”), the NYTimes follows the money:
WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden’s employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States…
The government has sharply increased spending on high-tech intelligence gathering since 2001, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have chosen to rely on private contractors like Booz Allen for much of the resulting work.
Thousands of people formerly employed by the government, and still approved to deal with classified information, now do essentially the same work for private companies. Mr. Snowden, who revealed on Sunday that he provided the recent leak of national security documents, is among them.
As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen…
Farhad Manjoo, at Slate:
If the NSA Trusted Edward Snowden With Our Data, Why Should We Trust the NSA?
Let’s note what Snowden is not: He isn’t a seasoned FBI or CIA investigator. He isn’t a State Department analyst. He’s not an attorney with a specialty in national security or privacy law.Instead, he’s the IT guy, and not a very accomplished, experienced one at that. If Snowden had sent his résumé to any of the tech companies that are providing data to the NSA’s PRISM program, I doubt he’d have even gotten an interview. Yes, he could be a computing savant anyway—many well-known techies dropped out of school. But he was given access way beyond what even a supergeek should have gotten…
The worst part about the NSA’s surveillance is not its massive reach. It’s that it operates entirely in secret, so that we have no way of assessing the sophistication of its operation. All we have is the word of our politicians, who tell us that they’ve vetted these systems and that we should blindly trust that the data are being competently safeguarded and aren’t vulnerable to abuse.
Snowden’s leak is thus doubly damaging. The scandal isn’t just that the government is spying on us. It’s also that it’s giving guys like Snowden keys to the spying program. It suggests the worst combination of overreach and amateurishness, of power leveraged by incompetence. The Keystone Cops are listening to us all.
James Fallows, at the Atlantic:
I’m glad we have this information; I am sorry we are getting it from Hong Kong….
I believe what I wrote two days ago: that the United States and the world have gained much more, in democratic accountability, than they have lost in any way with the revelation of these various NSA monitoring programs. That these programs are legal — unlike the Nixon “Plumbers” operation, unlike various CIA assassination programs, unlike other objects of whistle-blower revelations over the years — is the most important fact about them. They’re being carried out in “our” name, ours as Americans, even though most of us have had no idea of what they entailed. The debate on the limits of the security-state is long overdue, and Edward Snowden has played an important role in hastening its onset…
Timothy B. Lee, in the Washington Post:
Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?
… Americans are familiar with stories of dissidents fleeing repressive regimes such as those in China or Iran and seeking asylum in the United States. Snowden is in the opposite position. He’s an American leaving the land of his birth because he fears persecution.Four decades ago, Daniel Ellsberg surrendered to federal authorities to face charges of violating the Espionage Act. During his trial, he was allowed to go free on bail, giving him a chance to explain his actions to the media. His case was eventually thrown out after it was revealed that the government had wiretapped him illegally.
Bradley Manning, a soldier who released classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, has had a very different experience. Manning was held for three years without trial, including 11 months when he was held in de facto solitary confinement. During some of this period, he was forced to sleep naked at night, allegedly as a way to prevent him from committing suicide. The United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture has condemned this as “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of Article 16 of the convention against torture.”…
If Snowden had surrendered himself to U.S. authorities, he almost certainly would have faced charges that carry penalties of decades in prison. He might have rationally feared being subject to years of pretrial detention and the kind of degrading treatment Manning faced. And if he had chosen to fight the charges, he would have risked spending decades in prison if he lost.
There’s no question that the United States has stronger protections for free speech and the rule of law than repressive regimes like China or Iran. But it’s also clear that our courts defend constitutional rights less zealously today than they did in Ellsberg’s day. Snowden wasn’t crazy to question whether he’d be treated fairly by the American justice system.
Noam Scheiber, at TNR, “Why’d He Do It?“:
Since the 29-year-old intelligence contractor Edward Snowden outed himself as the source of the NSA leaks on Sunday, reporters and pundits—heck, even Snowden himself—have compared him with Bradley Manning, the Army private on trial for passing classified material about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks. There’s obviously something to the comparison—both men were apparently dedicated enough to the cause of transparency to risk their lives for it. But, after reading the early biographical reporting about Snowden, I can’t help recalling another transparency activist in the news recently: Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in January while awaiting trial for downloading millions of pages from JSTOR, the online database of academic articles.
… Over time, I think Swartz came to fear that the technology could be co-opted far more easily than he’d realized—that the wall protecting the good, noble uses of the Internet and from the greedy or nefarious uses was pretty fragile. If the small handful of people who had the power to police this wall—people like him, who were both extremely able technically but also politically aware enough to appreciate the stakes for society—didn’t take it upon themselves to do it, then the situation was pretty much hopeless. Instead of being a revolutionary tool for distributing knowledge, the Internet would become an exclusive club.
Snowden’s mindset seems similar to me. He told The Guardian that, as a teenager, he considered the Internet “the most important invention in all of human history” because it connected him to “people with all sorts of views that I would never have encountered on my own.” But, as an adult, he increasingly worried that surveillance was destroying the web. The same invention he believed could liberate mankind was becoming a tool of oppression.
Just Some Fuckhead
Nothing about what a douchebag Glenn Greenwald is? Stop mailing it in Anne Laurie!
srv
If you give your secrets to Google and Facebook, you should be willing to share them with Government.
Why won’t you friend Uncle Sam?
Because the legacy of Ronald Reagan is alive and well in America.
Omnes Omnibus
This won’t end well.
max
I agree with this post.
(The USPS is the way it is because we have laws governing its usage and protecting privacy. For some reason, probably involving the fact that Congress & the courts are run by old people, electronic communications are treated as somehow different from US Mail, for which there is absolutely no reason except ‘scary machines, eek!’.)
max
[‘As for Snowden, he won’t get ‘justice’, so there’s every reason for him to seek asylum. There are probably a million people in the US who could justifiably seek asylum. All that means is he has some damn sense.’]
BGinCHI
The eternal recurrence of the same.
See also Freud: we repeat instead of remembering.
piratedan
http://www.startribune.com/politics/blogs/210862561.html – Al Frankin’s take
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/06/edward-snowden-nsa-leaker-is-no-hero.html – The New Yorker….
Todd
Really? Shitstain Aaron Schwartz?
Said it before – if Spetznatz forces invade a boiler room of giggling Byelorussian hackers and machine gun them into something finer than hamburger as a lesson to hackers everywhere, I would be happy.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: The wheel, right?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@piratedan: Al Franken sold us out!
Just Some Fuckhead
Anne Laurie, is there any chance Brick Oven Bill has emailed you his thoughts on this matter? Can you share them?
Mino
New WaPo/Pew poll: Most Americans are perfectly happy to give away your privacy.
SatanicPanic
So we could engage in “activism” by liking things on facebook and “signing” petitions that no one reads. Let’s be honest, the internet is just a TV + Newspaper + Encyclopedia that you can interact with. It is not a tool that will fix everything wrong with the world.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Probably also some Steve Miller Band lyrics that cover it. Not to mention Classic Yes.
BGinCHI
@Mino: One glance at “reality TV” will be all you need to know about the level of knowledge associated with what’s at stake….
Great, now I sound like Tipper Gore.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Ellsberg got the benefit of being “first.” Had it happened again in the early 80s, that person would have been arrested. While 9-11 changed a lot of things, we weren’t that evolved to begin with.
BGinCHI
@SatanicPanic:
+ nudity + cats + Cole
El Cid
I wish I could create a realistic rumor that part of the NSA surveillance was creating a list of American gun owners, just to see the TeaBircher head-splodey reaction.
Just Some Fuckhead
@SatanicPanic:
The internet in its current form is not designed to fix the world. It is designed and optimized to allow us to look at funny cat pictures and argue with strangers.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
“Coyote (chaos) is always waiting, and He is always hungry.”
Baud
There was a wall?
FlipYrWhig
But isn’t that upper-left panel precisely what’s in dispute? There’s a huge difference between saying “the government knows it” and “if the FISA Court issues an order that names you or a friend or colleague of yours, the government knows it.” It’s the distinction between “everyone is always being watched” and “not everyone is being watched, but still too many people are, because FISA is too lax.”
But, in general, I like the notion that max brings up above–electronic communications ought to have some degree of privacy protection codified into law, the way snail-mail does.
Mustang Bobby
Five bucks says Hayden Christensen is already in talks to play Snowden in the movie version.
Kay
It’s true about the mail, it’s private.
But the Postal Service has a really powerful police function with a huge ” specialized” jurisdiction that includes anything that goes through the mail or anything that has to do with a post office bidness.
The Postal Inspection police arm work with law enforcement all the time. Fraud, drugs, child porn, and on and on. They have a very expansive jurisdiction and a lot of power.
Trollhattan
BAH ghost-reviewed for the government, CERCLA (Superfund) reports I’d worked on and would occasionally let slip the liklihood it was a boiler-room operation, such as the comment, “The report is poorly well written.”
Thanks guys, for your helpful guidance.
Keith G
AL….Why do you hate our President?
Don’t oppose narratives that this was not business as usual, but some sort of anti Obama 5th column run by
George Smileyerr, GG.I kid. NTL, It is clear that the surveillance is/ will be seen more and more as the answer to all manner of governmental issues. And we need to talk about it! I am glad that Obama’s reticence is being pushed.
Yes. We need fewer secrets and more conversation.
elisabeth
@Mino:
I’m surprised the number is only 56%.
Anne Laurie
@Todd: Yes, you’ve said many times that imagining any kind of violence makes you pleasure yourself. Do you have to keep sharing your fantasies, or is that part of the fetish?
Baud
@Kay:
I’m starting to think the USPS is responsible for all the leaks.
Soon enough, we’ll have a bunch of hipsters on here claiming they used the Postal Service before it was cool.
BGinCHI
@Mustang Bobby: Dead ringer for Sam Rockwell, though there’s nothing funny about that.
SatanicPanic
@BGinCHI: I knew I forgot something. Also, pr0n.
Corner Stone
@Anne Laurie: Until you said that I thought it was Cassidy posting the comment.
Todd
@Anne Laurie:
Darling, so long as I can drive the entire drum circle to so many tears that they wash away the scent of patchouli, I win…
Kay
@Baud:
Well, you’ve seen it. Look at how many prosecutions are “something or other through the mails”
They had a horrible reputation in the 1950’s, going after porn. They were incredibly aggressive. They’re a federal police force, quite simply. That’s what they do.
Baud
On the Manjoo article, other than Snowden’s claims, do we know that he had access to personal data, as opposed to just info about the system?
? Martin
@Kay:
No it’s not. They are legally permitted to capture anything on the outside of the envelope. Have been doing that since the 50s at least. That’s actually more invasive than the phone metadata, because unlike the phone metadata, they have both sender and receiver identity and address. They can capture the size and weight of the package, and where it was sent from. They can track how often you mail things, who you mail them to, and so on.
What they can’t do is open the package without a subpoena. That’s also true for phone calls, though.
Chyron HR
@Keith G:
So what happens if the consensus of the National Conversation on Privacy is, “Yeah, we’re cool with this”?
Violet
Has Ron Paul issued a statement on this yet? Snowdon seems to be a Ron Paul fan. Wonder what the man himself thinks of this.
different-church-lady
Jesus Fuck… Manning is in the U.S. FUCKING ARMY! He’s being court-martialed. It’s a completely different system.
So, information wants to be free… as long as the bad guys don’t read it. Fair paraphrase of that POV?
Cacti
If emo progs trusted John Edwards, why should we trust emo progs?
If voters trusted Richard Nixon/Ronald Reagan/George W. Bush, why should we trust the voters?
A fairly facile argument to make.
Baud
I think Mr. Lee misspelled “prosecution.”
Keith G
@Chyron HR:” Democracies” do dumb things all the time (see Jim Crow). There is always the hope that the courts can be helpful or, as in the Jim Crow days, inspired leadership taps into latent energies and grows a movement.
Or we can just imagine Bin Ladin smiling from the beyond as our republic transforms into something unrecognizable – a society of vast economic difference where the rich are free to enjoy their immoral gains because the surveillance state they built keeps the poor on a very short leash.
FlipYrWhig
@Keith G: By “surveillance state” are you intentionally grouping something like “stop and frisk” and this new set of NSA stuff? Safety from petty crime and safety from international terrorism?
Yatsuno
@Mustang Bobby: Have we not been punished enough?
Kay
@? Martin:
Yeah, I know the rules, Martin. I worked there.
It’s private as to content. They take it seriously, too. The “dead letter” office is really funny. They have to try to dicipher where it’s supposed to go without looking inside.
I had a boss who was really good. She had a gift for figuring out what street, city or state someone INTENDED to write :)
Some are easy, Alaska, Arkansas, but she’d come up with these dead-on guesses.
nanute
el cid @17
Try twitter. It might catch fire!
thalarctos
@? Martin: Not so much. You can put a false return address on, or none at all. You can drop it off at any random postbox. You are not required to provide ID when you send a letter. The PO only really knows where it was picked up and where it’s going.
different-church-lady
@Keith G:
Is there some kind of unified field theory of progressiveness you’re reaching for with that particular conflation?
Keith G
@Cacti: The man you make is straw.
Your two assertions are about a deliberate/social/public decision making process. In both cases there was access to open information and an exchange of ideas was possible.
Re:
The very point of the article is that there is no open decision making. The citizens are cut out of the process and told to “Trust us”. Now, once the public is rightfully engaged, they are free to make a hash of it as sometimes happens.
Rex Everything
@Todd: It just never gets old! What’s next, trash talk about Burning Man, you maverick you? Devastating allusions to patchouli? Let me guess — Che t-shirts: a fashion DON’T this season!
(Remember that Simpsons from like 20 years ago where Bart opens a Mad magazine: “The lighter side of HIPPIES?!? Ha! These guys don’t care WHOSE toes they step on!” Yeah. 20+ … years … ago …)
Keith G
@different-church-lady: Yes Mam, there is – and no reach is involved.
different-church-lady
@Keith G: Well, in that case I’d have to say that cold fusion isn’t your bag.
Berial
I know it’s not the point of this thread, but that first block quote points out something that always bothers me. Why is it that one of our political parties always assumes that a private contractor is ‘good’ when doing the EXACT same job as a government employee (who is ‘bad’)?
They always complain about the government employees being lazy and overpaid but the contractors usually cost MORE per hour. Is is JUST that a ‘capitalist’ gets to insert himself into the equation to take a slice?
karen
So the answer is, everything should be leaked? People shouldn’t be punished with leaking anything? What’s the difference between someone leaking government secrets to bring transparency to the office and someone selling government secrets? Just because money changes hands, that makes it less saintly or something?
Or is it only a heroic thing to do when there’s a President in office you’d love to see gone.
Where is the line between wanting transparency and wanting to shit stir? What happens if there is a terrorist action because of a leak? Should that person be held responsible?
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig: Sometimes it does appear that they are two sides of the same coin, in that those “other folks” can be targeted while the leading citizens and other “good guys” are free to follow their bliss unencumbered.
Kay
@? Martin:
They can’t do a reverse look-up either. Police can’t call with a name and get an address.
Obviously, they can send a letter and if it doesn’t come back they have a pretty good idea, though, although a lot of people just throw out mail that comes wrong name, right address.
The Postal Service, generally, don’t care about or use names. They use addresses. You probably have found this out if you’ve done an individual forward out of your address. Carriers are trained to drop their eyes to the 2nd line, the address. They have trouble with an individual forward because they don’t read the name(s).
Justin
I just want to note that the attached comic is nonsense, given that they were able to find the latest Ricin suspects by analysing the scans of every piece of mail sent. And you know what, I’m perfectly fine with that.
Keith G
@different-church-lady: Well, we will see, dear one.
I do not think that many in the middle class have noticed the all the extra barriers, and hoops and procedures that fall most heavily on those who have less.
karen
@Justin:
You see Justin, GG would not be OK with that, especially if it meant that it meant the Ricin wouldn’t reach Obama.
Keith G
@karen: Nixon also used national security as a fight against the flow of information that he did not want out.
Again, democracies are messy. Often too much info (in the eyes of the leader) gets out. Sometimes its a feature and not a bug. Imagine if a person in Cheney’s office had been brave enough to leak. Imagine if Colin Powell knew the true nature the the info provided by “Screwball” before his UN debacle. Yes would have been illegal. Might have saved some lives.
karen
Someone tell me where the line is between privacy and safety? How secure or open do you want things to be?
different-church-lady
@Keith G: I think they have. I also think they’d be mystified as to how government data mining was the thing keeping them on the treadmill while the 1% enjoy their vacation homes.
karen
@Keith G:
You’re right, democracies are messy. But that doesn’t mean that a simplistic solution like revealing everything is a good idea either.
FlipYrWhig
@Keith G: But there’s a thin line between saying that the government _could_ politicize the concepts of security and terrorism and use those powers to shut down dissent and harass the peons and saying that it currently does that. The latter is the root of conservative complaints about the IRS, and I’m not inclined to taking those as real complaints as opposed to paranoid fables.
Justin
Yeah, but it’s hard to present us as being on the edge of a Slippery Slope when we’ve been there for the past 5 years. So, you need a goat to be sacrificed in federal court in order to stoke the fires of OUTRAGE, at least the Snowden character seems to be up for the fun and games.
Keith G
@karen: Damn, I missed the memo where everything was revealed. Can you get me a copy?
Kay
I think the mail is an okay template, though.
They set up a system that protects content (privacy) yet they do PLENTY of crime fighting through the system.
It’s even been abused, I think the porn prosecutions were particularly abusive because they focused on gay porn, so ruined lives ( at the time, 1940’s and 1950’s). But the laws changed, so the postal service changed.
karen
@Keith G:
Everything hasn’t been revealed yet. But it seems like the opinion is, Assange, Manning and now Snowden did nothing wrong by leaking government secrets because we should have complete transparency in government. The opinion is also that Swartz’s hacking should not have been prosecuted because hacking isn’t a crime. My question to you is, what secrets should be leaked? Should all be leaked? Are you saying these people should have no responsibility for their actions? And what if someone had an agenda, does that make it more ok than if someone sells the information?
ruemara
@Keith G: You know, the President agreed with you about the need to have this discussion. Just wondering how he was reticent to have it.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig: I find the trend line worrisome. When I think of processes that would have been flat out objectionable a generation ago, but are rather standard now.
But to your point
Not directly, but …
Free Speech Zones? (wtf?)
Eco terrorists?
Terrorist threats?
The State Secrets Act?
Some of the nibbles are small, some are big, but nibbles they are none-the-less so by definition there is now less than there was before.
different-church-lady
@Keith G:
Nope. It’s classified.
FlipYrWhig
@ruemara: I think Keith was saying that Obama hasn’t been especially proactive about changing anything about the “surveillance state.” That’s probably true, although I do see that he’s been trying to set up legal frameworks and quasi-codified procedures, rather than simply saying that it’s his right to do whatever the hell he wants. But, again, it’s up to Congress to exert itself. If Congress wrote some sort of law setting forth privacy protections for Internet usage (perhaps along the lines of the USPS, as Kay has delineated above), and Obama refused to sign it, that would be a major problem. So… bring on the law! Smash the Surveillance State and pass the Wyden-Paul Bill!
Keith G
@ruemara: Been a long time coming. I know there were benefits for waiting til after 2012, and there were costs.
FlipYrWhig
@Keith G: I feel the opposite — I think that the late 1960s through the late 1970s were anomalous in terms of the relative elevation of privacy and dissent over law, order, and safety. We’ve regressed to the status quo ante.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
I really disagree that we are on a slow, inexorable slide from The Constitution.
Miranda was 1966, not 1866. The US has a long, bloody history of trampling over rights, coercing confessions, it was a fucking horror show.
The idea that people, or defendants, or prisoners have FEWER protections now than they had in those glory days when we respected the constitution is just horseshit.
Miranda was a RESPONSE to rampant abuses. They can go back to the 1950’s without me.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
And you got there before me, and we basically agree, although I think it still goes generally in the right direction, long arc.
We stopped executing juveniles in 2005.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig:
Not to be a nag (Oh god, no), but one can tell what a President has felt is important when he exerts his ideas into the public discourse and into the arena of legislation or administrate process.
To be clear, this does not make him a bad person (some like to play that game in his defense). His ideas about openness and ending the destructive habit of making so many actions secret was one of the things that made me bond with him six years ago. His slowness has been very frustrating and I think an unnecessary blemish.
Corner Stone
@karen:
Sure it does. That’s why every person on this blog is suggesting THAT VERY FUCKING THING.
ruemara
@Keith G: Slowness. Have you ever dealt with legislative bodies? I’m serious in asking this question.
? Martin
@thalarctos: And the same is true for burn phones. If you’re intent on evading the system, it’s not hard to do. My point is that if people think metadata collection for phones is an invasion, well, they better not see the postal system as any more secure.
Jeremy
I agree with Kay. When has America ever been a beacon for Civil liberties. The damn country was founded on slavery, exploitation, and murder.
And I don’t see much of a difference between the freedoms we enjoyed pre 9/11 and post 9/11. Yes there should be limits but like I said before the idea of privacy in a more technological era is out the window, and the idea that we always had it is ridiculous.
Kay
@ruemara:
It’s also THIS Congress.
There is absolute despair in voting rights circles because they think Roberts is going to throw protections back to Congress.
That means “no protections”
No one is even pretending THIS Congress will redraft the VRA.
Kay
@Jeremy:
I make a real distinction on state action, though.
I don’t think clicking through on contract
terms means I agree to state sharing.
I like a clear line on commercial versus state, mostly because I think conflating those two will.lead to more privatization of “public” and that REALLY worries me.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig:
Well it certainly is a mystery to me where the roulette wheel of justice will stop on this issue – and for how long.
That is why for years as a HS govt teach, I emphasized the hell out of civil liberties and as a transplant to Texas made sure that the history of speech, seizure, and trial rights were well considered. That is also why I feel compelled to poke at complacency and conventional wisdom.
And I do note that a rather substantial infrastructure for security and surveillance is being constructed. It will beg to be used and if there is profit in its used (and lobbying money available) it will be a hammer in search of as many nails as it can find.
Prisons for profit…Anyone?
Keith G
@Keith G: Kay I am in moderation Help
Kay
@Keith G:
I can’t! I can’t get to the editor on this phone :)
Sorry.
Mnemosyne
@thalarctos:
And that’s different from them knowing the number that placed the call, the number that received the call, and the duration of the call … how, again?
The Post Office has much more information even if you don’t include a return address because they know both where the letter was dropped off and the exact location where it was delivered. If both people on the call are using cell phones, there’s no way to know their location just from the phone number.
ETA: One example, my cell phone number is in Los Angeles. My mom’s cell phone number is in Phoenix … but she’s living in Illinois right now. If the government has my number, her number, and the length of the call, how do they know either of our locations? What if I’m visiting her in Illinois, so both of us are outside of our area code?
Keith G
@ruemara: Come on. Not slowness in getting it done. Slowness in staging the discussion. I have only typed in terms of getting the ball rolling, not winning the game
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: There is a cohort here who seem to believe that, once sufficient commercial players have one’s info, privacy is essentially dead and the state may as well have what it wants.*
*I am not of them and may have allowed some sarcasm to creep into my description of the position.
AA+ Bonds
wrong thread
Keith G
I see what I did wrong…as corrected:
@FlipYrWhig:
Well it certainly is a mystery to me where the “spinning” wheel of justice will stop on this issue – and for how long.
That is why for years as a HS govt teach, I emphasized the hell out of civil liberties and as a transplant to Texas made sure that the history of speech, seizure, and trial rights were well considered. That is also why I feel compelled to poke at complacency and conventional wisdom.
And I do note that a rather substantial infrastructure for security and surveillance is being constructed. It will beg to be used and if there is profit in its use (and lobbying money available) it will be a hammer in search of as many nails as it can find.
Prisons for profit…Anyone?
Ruckus
@thalarctos:
Fingerprints? They would be on the outside.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: Not if the calls were coming from inside the house….
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s just a terrible idea, on so many levels. Bright line! Draw it!
Part of this IS about privatization, too.
As they use more and more contractors ( and I know defense is the biggy) they will have less and less control, I would think.
Keith G
@Mnemosyne:
What tower it used to transit the call. Your GPS, Your credit card usage. Does your Mom get bennies.
Now all that is only if they break their word and actually do associate names and numbers…… and our government never would break its word…..so, no worries.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
The question was about the USPS inspecting the outside of mail. Considering how disgusting the outside of my phone get sometimes I’m not sure fingerprints could be lifted. DNA sure. Hell there might be enough gunk on there to clone me. Why in the hell anyone would want to do that though is beyond me.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: Sorry, I have reached a point with this story and its ubiquity here on B-J that I am occasionally tossing in random silliness.
Corner Stone
@Mnemosyne:
So you have absolutely zero idea what it is that’s being discussed here?
There’s a small thing called “location”.
Thanks
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone:
Where’s that?
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
I like random silliness. Or non-random silliness. Life is too short to be serious every minute. And mine is arcing towards the end with no silliness whatsoever so any moments of silliness surly must be enjoyed.
Keith G
@karen: I believe in civil disobedience, and it has a good deal of moral heft because of a price to be paid. MLK broke laws. MLK spent time in jail. And there is that whole wooden cross thingy.
So such an either/or gambit does not move me. Leakers can be brave, misguided, committed, daft, narcissistic, noble, sincere, and opportunistic. –
Until someone shows me the digits, I will assume that the as luck would have it, Manning did more good than harm in that it gave us info that our government was was sure we should not see. But that is not to say no harm was done – harm was done.
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
None of that is part of metadata. If you want to make the argument that the government is gathering more information, then make that case, because it’s not part of the case that Greenwald is claiming he has.
Yes, a cell phone call can be traced and triangulated if you have enough data. Your task is to show that the necessary data is being collected, which, again, is more than Greenwald is currently claiming.
Keith G
@Mnemosyne: Yes I know,. Everything relevant to your notation was conveyed at the end of my comment when I typed,
JustRuss
@Just Some Fuckhead:
No it isn’t!
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
Uh-huh. Again, I ask: if we can’t trust private companies to protect our data and assume they will always break the law, and we can’t trust the government to protect our data and assume they will always break the law, what third party do you see stepping in to take on that responsibility?
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Actually, that is a pretty good reason to prevent anyone from keeping it.
Bob In Portland
@max: HTLINGUAL.
karen
Isn’t metadata used by law enforcement as evidence to prove or disprove a suspect’s whereabouts or who they did or did not communicate with?
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, but there’s still time left in the day.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’ve got no problem with that — again, as I understand it, that would put us more in law with the privacy laws they have in Europe. But as long as that information exists, the government will want to access it to help them investigate crimes. If people are screeching like this because the government used the currently legal FISA process to access the records, then we should prohibit any entity, public or private, from collecting that information.
I’m kind of hoping this will turn into a Jungle situation where people freak out about the amount of data that private companies have about them and demand that Google et al stop collecting it, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon, either. Give me convenience or give me death.
JR in WV
@Todd:
You reveal your total lack of worth as a human being in one or two sentences. Schwartz was a better human than you in his fingernail. Still is, really.
I would tell you to use your brain, but I suspect your best effort is in the post, knowing how to spell spetznatz or whatever.
Trolls are more fun than you.