Interesting development:
The Obama administration is preparing to unveil a legislative proposal for a far-reaching overhaul of the National Security Agency’s once-secret bulk phone records program in a way that — if approved by Congress — would end the aspect that has most alarmed privacy advocates since its existence was leaked last year, according to senior administration officials.
Under the proposal, they said, N.S.A. would end its systematic collection of data about Americans’ calling habits. The records would stay in the hands of phone companies, which would not be required to retain the data for any longer than they normally would. And the N.S.A. could obtain specific records only with permission from a judge, using a new kind of court order.
In a speech in January, President Obama said he wanted to get the N.S.A. out of the business of collecting call records in bulk while preserving the program’s capabilities. He acknowledged, however, that there was no easy way to do so, and had instructed Justice Department and intelligence officials to come up with a plan by March 28 — Friday — when the current court order authorizing the program expires.
As part of the proposal, the administration has decided to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to renew the program as it currently exists for at least one more 90-day cycle, senior administration officials said. But under the plan the administration has developed and now advocates, the officials said, it would later undergo major changes.
The new surveillance court orders envisioned by the administration would require phone companies to swiftly provide records in a technologically compatible data format, including making available, on a continuing basis, data about any new calls placed or received after the order is received, the officials said.
They would also allow the government to seek related records for callers up to two calls, or “hops,” removed from the number that has come under suspicion, even if those callers are customers of other companies.
This is a news write-up, so I will wait to see what people I trust say about the details, but let me be the first to say God Damn You Graeme Frost Scott Beauchamp Glenn Greenwald Bradley Manning Edward Snowden President Obama!
You’re just a totally clueless moron if you think this would have happened without Snowden, Greenwald, and all the other reporters who have brought this issue to the forefront. Hate all you want. I like this is happening, and you can keep all your “It would be better if they had done it this way” bullshit criticism and stick up up your nether regions. This never would have happened otherwise.
ranchandsyrup
The db response is that these changes will only expand the nsa’s reach. *shrugs*
Suzanne
Oh, Lord. Now we get to endlessly debate the term “dudebro” again, because that was so awesome on a thread about sexism: getting another chance to hear from men about how their feelings are hurt. So many men just deeply resent the fact that they, too, can be reduced to A Type.
SatanicPanic
“legislative proposal”= JUST WORDS!
AJS
@SatanicPanic: This
ulee
thanks for nothing Obama. What a tool. Nothing is ever going to change until we rise up and overpower the fuckers.
ulee
@Suzanne: Can you stop being such a moron about it, and just discuss it?
FlipYrWhig
Obama’s doing something only proves that he could have done something sooner, so fuck him, and his not doing something proves that he doesn’t care to try to do something, which if he did he’d already be too late anyway, so fuck him. Repeat as necessary.
Sly
Clearly we shouldn’t have voted for Barack Obama in 2012, and should have instead supported the third party candidacy of Barack Obama.
Could you imagine if Barack Obama was allowed in the same debate as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? The real issues of consequence would finally have a voice. Of course, the soulless Democratic Party would never allow a genuine progressive like Barack Obama to be on the same stage as corporate imperialist Barack Obama.
billB
Funny joke Barry O’Bama, you expect us to believe that our info is safer in the hands of NaZZi-Collaborators like Verission and Gooogle and Cooomcast. These are the frackers who secretly gave your thugs our info before. Putting duct tape on a 4 inch crack in Grand Coulee Dam ain’t gonna fix it.
Close NSA/FISA, man up Barry. FDR would do it. Lincoln would do it.
hildebrand
Two bits says the Congress kills any proposal from Obama, no matter what it does. I would put good money on Rand ‘Hero of the Dudebros’ Paul voting against it. No chance they will give any kind of legislative victory to Obama in a year ending in a whole number.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
But Barry lied about GITMO.
Ash Can
I agree. I just hope that, in the long run, the good outweighs the bad.
gratuitous
It’s definitely something rather than nothing, which is what was happening until Snowden absconded. How much something it is remains to be seen.
ulee
@Sly: I’ll take Obama over the alternative. I voted for him. But he is pretty much a company man. He can be right on the issues of our time, but he needs to be brought there under protest. This is getting old.
Hunter Gathers
Expect Congree to shit all over any proposal Obama puts forward. There’s going to be a million different excuses used by the conservative to vote against the thing, and Lord of the DoucheBros (you know, that fucker with the dead tribble on his head who likes to Whitesplain shit all the time) will vote against it because it voting for anything that The Near Sherriff supports is poisonous in GOP primaries. He’ll Whitesplain his way out of it, ruining the pants of the sexless freaks that support his neo-confederate ass.
MC Carpenter
I totally agree with the nod to Snowden!
Hill Dweller
@ulee: Obama is actually going to battle against the NSA knowing that Congress isn’t going to support his proposal. He runs a very real risk of making a very powerful enemy. Call him anything you want, but name another President that would stick his neck out like that.
Ian
Clearly let us criticize Obama for further reforming this program, and clearly anyone who has ever, in any way shape or form, dared to criticize the people you mentioned must now worship at the alter of this new ‘dudebrosim’.
Mnemosyne
And I wouldn’t be getting Amber Alerts on my phone if Amber Hagerman hadn’t been murdered. I guess we should be thanking the (still unknown) guy who abducted, raped, and murdered her since his actions ended up helping other people.
Sinnach
Dudebro today, iron-fisted tyrannical security state cheerleader tomorrow when his legislative proposal gets gutted/stonewalled/watered down in Congress.
Might as well start bitching that he didn’t go far enough now, he could solve it all with just one executive order now! or something. Might save some conspiracy theories later. Hah, who am I kidding?
? Martin
I like that it’s happening as well. I also like the Freedom of Information Act, though it doesn’t redeem Nixon.
Actually the worst thing about it is that it’ll just empower Greenwald to be even more of a dick.
Botsplainer
Another grand triumph for chickenshit candyassed gamers, porn collectors, old armed panty wetters, money launderers and white supremacist conspirators, the vast majority of whom make me embarrassed to be a white male.
Amazing how decades of real life police oppression of people of color gets yawns, but threaten to break up a cabal of crackers out to blow up Federal facilities and it becomes the worst tyranny ever.
ulee
It’s pretty disgusting when Obama and the Clintons need to be dragged into the obvious constitutional right of gay people to live their lives free of persecution. There is nowhere to turn, except, luckily, the people are way ahead of these grifters.
David Koch
? Martin
@Botsplainer:
This.
chopper
more for the ‘it’s not about snowden and greenwald’ file.
Darkrose
Can I like that it’s happening and still think that Greenwald is a jackass? Does it matter if my problems with Greenwald started in 2008 when he jumped all over anyone who dared to suggest that perhaps Ron Paul Might Be a Racist If…you accept campaign contributions from Stormfront and pose for pictures with them?
Hill Dweller
@ulee: Both Clinton and Obama supported civil unions because they thought leaving religion out of the equation was the quickest way to get gay and lesbian couples the same legal rights.
Moreover, Obama wasn’t dragged into ending DADT.
chopper
so, the inevitable question: what will FPers troll the blog with now?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
As is often the case in these discussions, I can’t’ tell the genuine “too little, too late” poutrage from the parodies
I actually do want more, and I’d love to see Obama call for more– the idea of a sort of “Devil’s advocate” in the FISA proceedings seems most important to me. But since I was a wee lad watching cartoons of a Saturday morning, I’ve understood how our government works
Belafon
Wanna bet they get this from the FISA court.
chopper
@? Martin:
but GG is gay, so let’s not listen to him.
David Koch
Snowden reveals NSA is spying on Huawei, a Chinese Army front.
Why would he reveal that? What does spying on the Chinese Army and Communist Party have to do with 4th Amendment rights?
As too Griftwald, why would you worship a BENGAAAAZHI Truther?
He adopted all the wingnut talking points about BENGHAZI. He repeatedly said the White House lied, that the WH had an obvious interest in spreading falsehoods (ie covering up), he even implicitly blamed Hillary Clinton over the security. He completely echoed Fox News.
Really, is there any difference btwn Birthers, 9/11 Truthers, and BENGHAZI Truthers?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
or opposing/ending the Iraq War, or proposing a stimulus, or saving the auto industry, or saving the alternative energy industry…
Belafon
@ulee: You mean the same Obama who has ordered the DOJ and other federal agencies to recognize the marriage of gays? Which could be potentially overturned by the next president? An decision that could potentially cost the next Democratic nominee?
kc
@Suzanne:
[sigh]
ulee
@Hill Dweller: I think Obama was dragged into ending dont ask, dont tell. And Clinton singed off on the Defense of Marriage Act. I am a democrat and I vote down the line, but it is the people who are guiding our forward motion. These politicians look at our good people and then agree with what they should have had the guts to agree with in the first place.
Botsplainer
@David Koch:
Glenn Greenwald is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
? Martin
@Botsplainer: Hey, the Chinese Army have 4th Amendment rights too!
Belafon
This will always be a fun topic. It will always be a challenge to figure out how to monitor a spy agency and yet allow it to do its job. Sounds an awful lot like companies that monitor their employee’s internet access.
And I still think Snowden and Greenwald are traitors.
different-church-lady
Well, thank god this hypothetical dire threat to my liberty is almost over.
David Koch
@ulee:
Please proceed, Emoprog
A Humble Lurker
@ulee:
Um what? What the hell are you talking about? While Obama was laying the groundwork to get rid of the thing permanently, every goddamn activist was saying he didn’t REALLY care about gay people unless he signed an executive order that could just get overturned by the next guy.
chopper
@David Koch:
the point of revealing the huawei thing is to get china pissed off in order to hurt the president.
Hill Dweller
@ulee: I was talking about Hillary Clinton and Obama campaigning on civil unions in ’08. Furthermore, Obama not defending DOMA in the courts went a long way to getting it found unconstitutional.
Obama was laying the groundwork to end DADT almost immediately after taking office. It took him almost 2 years to convince the Pentagon to go along.
Hell, Obama has done more for LGBT rights than all the other Presidents combined.
kc
@Botsplainer:
If NSA reform bugs you that much, you can always make a donation to John McCain’s re-election campaign. Dude.
different-church-lady
@A Humble Lurker:
For once, something that really did need FTFY.
Death Panel Truck
@? Martin: The FOIA was LBJ. He didn’t like it, but he signed the bill.
ulee
@David Koch: Now Obama will be dragged into legalizing medical marijuana. We all know we should just legalize the stuff outright. It sure would solve a lot of problems. Once again, the people will lead and if we’re lucky, the government will follow.
Botsplainer
@different-church-lady:
It should seal the vote of the zitty, fluorescent light tanned cosplay/DandD/gamer/coder white demographic, unless that demographic decides to go Rand Paul because drones and icky black people.
SatanicPanic
Uh, isn’t that how it should be?
? Martin
@Death Panel Truck: Oops. Privacy Act Amendments to FOIA, then.
ulee
@SatanicPanic: yes, that is how it should be.
A Humble Lurker
@ulee:
The federal government already decided not to do anything about Colorado and Washington. The people don’t need to do any convincing.
David Koch
It makes me laugh to no end how the pathetic, loser Dudebro-Emoprogs have formed a cult of personality around a Russian Spy
Please proceed, Comrades.
Botsplainer
@kc:
At least I’m not so wrapped up in white privilege and white supremacy apologia to pretend that collection of the data you hand out with every EULA you click is the greatest threat to freedoms ever. Tell me you’ve ever actually given a shit about the stuff perpetrated every day on people of color.
And no, joining a drum circle regarding white lefty cause du jour Mumia Abu Fucking Shithead doesn’t count.
askew
And you are a complete moron if you think for one second Greenwald, Rand Paul and the other white dudebros will give Obama one millisecond of credit for any of these changes. They have an axe to grind and do not like Obama presidenting while black. Lots of these people had zero problems with any of the NSAs functions prior to Obama taking office.
? Martin
@David Koch: Early Obama was a lot more effective. Remember when he signed that executive order on his first day to close Gitmo. Man, it’s so great that he didn’t wait for Congress and went ahead and took care of it himself. Having Gitmo closed is awesome.
ulee
@A Humble Lurker: the feds do not recognize these state referendums. They can bust people as they please. They shouldn’t, they often don’t, but sometimes they do.
Death Panel Truck
@? Martin: Actually, that was Ford, or rather, Congress. Ford wanted to sign the amendments into law, but was talked out of it by Rumsfeld and Cheney. Congress overrode his veto.
askew
@Hill Dweller:
And then GLAAD turned around and gave President Clinton an award for being a leader on LGBT issues, while ignoring everything Obama has done. They awarded the guy who signed DOMA and DADT and ignored the guy who signed the repeal of DADT and did not defend DOMA in the courts. Lots of white privileged and white hurt around Obama being a better president than Clinton.
? Martin
@David Koch: Fuck. Why do you keep wanting to deny Vladimir Putin and the Russian Army their 4th Amendment rights?
Another Holocene Human
@ulee: Yeah, that’s right: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, biggest enemies of the gays. However have we managed, I wonder? (And such dupes we were to vote for them.)
Chris
@askew:
At the moment, I don’t care too much about the credit. What seems more pertinent is this, from farther upthread;
I find this quite plausible.
Suzanne
@ulee: I can’t discuss this issue any more because I am bitter. I want all those right-wing motherfuckers who crapped their pants and got their war hard-ons on after 9/11 and pushed the PATRIOT Act through and greeted any objection or word of caution from liberals and libertarians with a giant chorus of WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA to have their rights eviscerated. I hope that each and every one of them have someone listening in on every single one of their phone calls and monitoring every website they look at.
I also just can’t muster up a whole lot of give-a-damn on this issue. I realize that this is my personal failing, that I am a bad liberal for running out of guilt. But I have more pressing matters at hand.
? Martin
@Death Panel Truck: Yes, but Congress passed the legislation to stop the abuses that occurred under Nixon.
ulee
@Another Holocene Human: Because, we the people, insisted. Not a hard concept to get.
David Koch
@ulee: Pot and telephone metadata, that’s your civil liberty issues. Not immigration, not the 800,000 blacks and latinos who were Stopped and Frisked last year in NYC, not the war on women? The selfish self focus – this is why you Dudebro-Emoprogs are so easy to mock.
Redshift
@Darkrose: Not sure who first said it, but:
Just because this is important doesn’t mean Greenwald isn’t an asshole.
Just because Greenwald is an asshole doesn’t mean this isn’t important.
Can’t we all get along?
(And if the FPers are pissed off about the trolling on this subject, perhaps addressing their posts primarily to the trolls isn’t the most effective way to have less of it.)
Mnemosyne
@David Koch:
But Snowden says he didn’t give any information to the Chinese or the Russians. And if you can’t trust a guy who illegally broke into computer systems using other people’s passwords because he was not authorized to access those systems, who can you trust?
Roger Moore
@Botsplainer:
This. Also, too, for people like Suzanne who don’t get the whole dudebro thing, this is the core of the argument. The criticism of Snowden and Greenwald is that they’ve ignored all kinds of government overreach and oppression because it doesn’t affect them in their life of white male privilege. It’s only when the government threatens to step on their toes that they freak out about civil liberties. It’s essentially the traditional criticism of conservatives who agree with one liberal priority that coincidentally affects them or someone they know.
kc
@Botsplainer:
You protest too much.
ulee
@Suzanne: You’re fine. You are working on it. Don’t give up. The southern bigots want you to give up. I’m just an internet nobody saying my piece. don’t give up.
ulee
@David Koch: Go ahead and mock me and call me a Dudebro. You are dutifully misinformed.
askew
@Chris:
I care about credit when the media and the liberal groups turn around and thank the nearest white person for Obama’s hard work. It’s been happening since 2009, this constant belittling of Obama and I am damn sick of it and the Dem establishment who stood by and watched it happen or in some cases helped belittle him.
different-church-lady
@Redshift:
No we can’t — not one of the all internet traditions.
David Koch
Why would Snowden reveal how the US is spying on Russian military, Chinese Army, Mexican drug cartels, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan?
Why would he want to help them out?
How does that affect US civil liberties?
Helping the very same Russian military that has sized Crimea – how is that “whistle blowing” and heroic?
Botsplainer
@askew:
Glibertarian gay white male money spreads around well, particularly if steered through the closeted brothers in wingnut congressional offices and conservative think tanks.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore: Um, I DO get the dudebro thing. I am fatigued of this topic because of the DougJ thread from last night in which he posted about sexism as a political force, and the discussion was derailed into 150 posts dissecting the term “dudebro”. Because some dudes found that term offensive. Because when discussing the power of sexism as a political force, the most salient issue was, YET AGAIN, the feelings and experiences of dudes.
John O
That’s about all that needs to be said on the matter.
Mnemosyne
@Redshift:
I think part of people’s exasperation with the topic is that some of us have been warning about these results ever since the PATRIOT Act passed and now you have all of these johnnie-come-latelies like Snowden who were A-OK with a Republican president having those powers and that access but freaked the fuck out over a Democrat having them. You know, just like we said would happen.
It’s tiring having to be Cassandra all the damn time, and it’s even more tiresome when you’re getting lectured about not having your hair on fire about it from the same idiots who not only thought it was hunky-dory back when Bush was doing it, but actually voted for that asshole. Twice. I’ve been upset about it since 2001. The fire has had some time to die down since then.
So, sorry, John, but you lose a few of your credibility points when you get upset at the people who were telling you for a dozen fucking years that this was going to be a problem and then a White Dudebro brought it to your attention and all of a sudden you were like, Holy shit, why didn’t anyone tell me this was going on? You know, other than the people who had been fucking telling you it was a problem for over a decade, because who listens to people who were right all along anyway?
Clear now?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@different-church-lady: I mock your value system and life choices. Your favorite movie is pedestrian and your taste in music is bourgeois and conventional. And your father smells of elderberries.
amk
@billB:
Remember cia ? #idjit
Higgs Boson's Mate
@David Koch:
It makes me laugh how you have to believe Greenwald in order to throw shit at Snowden. NSA seems to rely heavily on backdoors, voluntary handovers of records and brute-force breaking of encryption. Snowden fled to Russia nine months ago. Having worked with Russian software engineers here on H1-B visas I am pretty sure that if the Russians were provided with very specific blueprints of what NSA does and how it does it they wouldn’t need nearly a year to enact countermeasures.
mclaren
But…but…but…Snowden is a paid Chinese agent, according to Martin. And Greenwald is a grifter, according to Anti-Liberal Black Lady — one of your most prominent front-pagers.
You know, Cole, between having these people on your site and front-pagers like the accused rapist and a superwealthy health insurance company CEO who keeps telling lies about how wonderful the ACA while he stripmines privatized profits from the public Medicaid program, you need not have stopped being a hard-core Republican.
With “Democrats” like these infesting your website, you might as well be running Red State.
Kropadope
A little ad hominem to preclude anyone who would make that argument? Obama tried reforming these programs early in his presidency. He could get nowhere, even with Congress controlled by his own party. So he was never an obstacle.
This would never have happened if Republicans hadn’t suddenly rediscovered the concept of privacy as a result of a
blackDemocratic president.If anything, Greenwald was an impediment. He denigrates the reformers for insufficient loyalty to the complete destruction of the security state.
David Koch
piratedan
congrats JC, do a victory lap and feel free to ignore that the only guy that brought any additional oversight to the issue while no one was looking was the guy in charge. Feel free to feel secure that the government now doesn’t have access to this knowledge, but your telecommunications provider still does.. feel safer?
Granted the two aforementioned heroes of civil liberties are to be praised for their self serving and self aggrandizing efforts, player one wonked himself into a new gig while the other is apparently a tool of the new bastion of civil liberties that is Mother Russia…
here’s a golf clap…..
John O
No.
Just because a lot of us knew the Patriot Act was going to be a problem does NOT mean anything would’ve been done about it without the extent of the problem being made a bit clearer.
(And, for the record, I don’t think anything will be done about it now, because this President could drop a gold brick in the majority of Congress’ laps and they’d object on the grounds it is too heavy to get to the bank.)
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
Applause.
Don’t know if this charge applies to Snowden, but it certainly applies to all the VSPs who’ve had their hair on fire about the NSA since last year.
Kropadope
@Mnemosyne:
I also hate this denigration of people who refer to their peers as “dude” or “bro.” These are simple terms of endearment that do not, in and of themselves, tell you anything about their beliefs or attitudes, but merely about the general demeanor of the person and their associates. You’ll find that people of this persuasion can be perfectly respectful to the people around them.
different-church-lady
@mclaren: In other words, you haven’t read the front page in several months.
Lolis
@ulee:
So he is like every good president we have ever had then. Sorry if that actually involves you having to do work.
A Humble Lurker
@ulee:
But that’s besides the point. The Federal Government (scary capital letters included) could have interfered with it the way they did with the Papers Please law. They didn’t, so convincing doesn’t have much to do with it; they’re kind of already convinced, at least to a point.
@ulee:
Also, if you think Obama had to be dragged into helping gays when he started the process for dismantling DADT in his first year in office you were either not paying attention or are playing dumb. Very well.
Ian
@Botsplainer:
I think that we are both on agreement about these issues, but I have not ever once understood why being against a hyperactive security state instantly makes one a lily white overweight computer nerd. Interesting caricature tho.
danielx
William Binney
Thomas Drake
Either of these two gentlemen could and will tell you that what the NSA does daily is unconstitutional. Neither of them were contractors; both were long time NSA employees. Fact is, unfortunately, the G holds more information about us – all of us – than Stasi ever did about East Germans.
And they are going to go on doing it, and the government – in the form of a shit ton of agencies and organizations – gets to decide who is a bad guy, in many cases based on preposterous reasons.
Really hate to sound like mclaren, but he’s not wrong about everything – if you become enough of an annoyance or cause sufficient embarrassment to the government, they can and will find a reason to make you piss blood nightly and that’s before they get really unpleasant. Just ask Thomas Drake or Sibel Edmonds or Colleen Rowley or Barrett Brown or James Risen.
But hey! Look over there! Greenwald is a self promoter and bad person and Snowden should be shot!
ulee
@Lolis: I will criticize when it is due, especially when it comes to constitutional rights.
Mnemosyne
@John O:
The only way the problem was made “clearer” to the Village was by electing a black Democrat as president. Until that happened, they didn’t give a shit.
You didn’t find it awfully convenient that Snowden was all gung-ho about the security state right up until Obama’s election? Funny how a white dude suddenly discovered that spying on people was wrong as soon as a black president was in charge.
So, really, the only thing that’s been made clear is that there are a whole lot of people who only want Republicans to be allowed to spy on people. If you were anti-PATRIOT Act before 2008, that’s great, but keep in mind that people like Snowden and his libertarian buddies are not your friends, and they will fuck you over as soon as an administration that’s more to their liking is back in charge. Because they don’t have a problem with government spying, they have a problem with Democrats in government.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: Word. To all of your words.
ulee
@A Humble Lurker: He changed his position when it was politically expedient. Thats not a crime. I’m glad he did it. But lets not us lie to ourselves.
cokane
i dunno if greenwald was all that necessary. happy with what snowden did, sucks he ended up in russia
askew
@Mnemosyne:
Yep, Snowden wasn’t the only one who had a change of heart once a black man was president. The left doesn’t like to acknowledge the racism on our side but it is scarily apparent that it isn’t just Republicans who lost their shit when Obama got elected.
? Martin
@mclaren:
Really? I don’t recall saying that.
I think it’s suspicious that to flee US oppression of civil liberties, he ran to China and then Russia. Maybe he was just being hipster ironic, and I’m too old and uncool to get the joke. Maybe he’s just an idiot, which doesn’t bode well for trusting his judgement with our national secrets.
A Humble Lurker
@ulee:
On what? Also, you’re not disputing anything I said.
Ben
@amk:
Shh, no one tell him about Lincoln and Habeus Corpus, or FDR and Executive Order 9066…
John O
@Mnemosyne:
I’ve never cared about the actors all that much. Are they telling the truth? It appears so. I sure don’t hear much denial coming out of the NSA or anywhere else.
So the constant bickering about motive, personality, and personal politics among the players interests me not. To me, they did the country a favor regardless of motive.
The 4th Amendment has been completely eviscerated over the course of my lifetime, and anything that focuses more attention on it is OK by me. The other stuff is all speculation and an apparently infinite wanking loop of everyone’s own personal axes to grind.
ulee
@A Humble Lurker: I’m not necessarily disputing, I’m just talking.
amk
@Mnemosyne: Yup, all those pearls got crushed into diamonds somewhere around the end of 2009.
Ironic a bushbot twice(?) is lecturing about this. zealot converts are so boring,
cokane
ill just say though, im glad the info is out. but frankly im defeatist about the cyber-security state. looking into the future, more electronic devices, more time spent and capital in electronic form, more electronic media, it’s basically where we are heading. add to this companies and non profits collecting piles of data from it. eventually we’ll be insisting that our government not look at large piles of information that are available.
furthermore as more capital, business, and other information relevant to our economies, health, and society require cyber-security, the more the interest in the state managing that security grows. we should know what our govt is doing though.
? Martin
@danielx:
Corrected to point out how utterly unremarkable and useless that comparison is.
Or Barton Gellman.
NotMax
The entire ‘national security’ debate is lopsided, askew, the emphasis on the wrong term.
First must be determined the very nature of nation we want to live in, what levels and types of intrusiveness are acceptable within that nation, what boundaries of or intersecting public intercourse and private life are inviolate, and demand those be secured only as possible by means and methods which demonstrably, verifiably do not pollute, dilute or bypass those standards of freedom, with operational limits backed by swift and clear criminal penalty if exceeded, misused, misconducted or misapplied, plus an annual ‘state of security’ publicly released review and report by those charged with oversight.
And please, please, can we retire “dudebro?” It is as nebulous and meaningless as “terrorist” has become.
Mnemosyne
@John O:
And the still-anonymous person who raped and murdered Amber Hagerman did the country a favor, because we wouldn’t have the Amber Alert system for child abductions if he hadn’t done it.
You’re arguing that the ends justify the means. If this theory is right and the US is being hampered in gathering intelligence in Ukraine right now because of the information Snowden provided to Russia, would you be okay with that because having information about potential domestic surveillance in the US would be more important than the lives of people in Ukraine?
Chris
@NotMax:
Either you are with us, or you are with the dudebros.
ulee
@cokane: In Londen, it is all on camera. I guess it’s a protective measure but I sure wouln’t want to live like that.
ulee
@Chris: The word Dudebro is invented to hurt people. Let them at it. They’ll burn out of their own design.
Du
? Martin
@NotMax:
I think that’s a given as they’re synonyms.
Kropadope
@John O:
False, the strawmen they built have majorly hampered reform efforts, draining the political capital of reformers at all levels of the lawmaking process.
Kropadope
@? Martin:
No, I don’t think nebulous means meaningless, it’s more that meaning is elusive.
coin operated
@Mnemosyne: Spot Fucking On, Man!!!
And Mr Cole…you’re usually pretty reasonable, but your fawning admiration for Snowden makes me want to puke. Snowden’s one questionable contribution to the NSA debacle does not release him from all the fucking damage he continues to do to our national security. The conversation WAS trying to be had, but as Mnemosyne pointed out, it didn’t fucking matter until a Democrat took office.
Chris T.
It would have been better if the Easter Bunny and Santa Clause used the Tooth Fairy’s Magic Pliers to cause this to happen!
/silly (I think this is probably still needed, alas)
A Humble Lurker
@ulee:
So you think I’m right and you’re wrong then?
Mnemosyne
@Kropadope:
I don’t think the meaning is elusive at all — a “dudebro” is a libertarian who doesn’t care about things that don’t affect him directly. Abortion rights? Stop and frisk? Wevs. But the potential that someone could be collecting metadata from his cell phone and putting it into a database? OMGTHEWORSTCIVILRIGHTSVIOLATIONEVAH!
Don’t get me wrong, I like Cole and mistermix even when they get on my nerves, but one can’t help but notice they seem much more viscerally exercised about metadata collection than most of the other civil liberties issues they’ve covered. And they seem to be really, really upset that some of us think that the government mandating vaginal probes before an abortion is more of a civil liberties violation than cell phone metadata collection.
Of course, having said that, I now have to head off to bed, but I’m sure the
dudebrospeople who care deeply about civil liberties that just happen to only affect them will be along later to explain how totally wrong I am and how cell phone metadata collection is way more important than any other issue facing us today.John O
@Mnemosyne:
*sigh* I guess in your world I am. Can you show me some evidence we’d have the Amber Alert system without that tragedy? Shit happens, and then reactions happen, all the fucking time. We overreacted to 9-11. It’s time for a correction, and I don’t see how the reasons the correction comes about matter, because they’re not controllable. We had laws against rape and murder, and we had laws that once mattered, at least from time to time, related to the 4th.
I do not like it when people question or worse, presume to know MY motives, because they’re typically far too complex and infinite for anyone else to understand, at least about anything significant or important.
As for the Ukranians, I say let Putin and the Russian people stew in their own shit. See, “Iraq,” or “Afghanistan.” That peninsula has been disputed territory for 600 years, and insinuating that our modern intelligence capacity could control or alter events over there is a great example of imperial arrogance. IMHO.
NotMax
@? Martin
Were Potter Stewart still around, he’d most likely substitute “dudebro” for “hard-core pornography” in his famous “I know it when I see it” locution.
As well as be aghast at what the passing years have done to his opinions from the Supreme court bench on the fourth amendment.
danielx
@? Martin:
Martin – you don’t mind if I call you Martin? – if I’d ever been to Chik-Fil-A, you might have a point there somewhere, although my inferior understanding is preventing me from discerning it. But as to retailers in general, I don’t like personal data collection done by retailers any more than any other organization, but I can sorta understand it – they’re trying to sell me shit and figure out how to part me from my hard-earned dollars. But speaking of unremarkable and useless comparisons, I’m not aware that Chik-Fil-A or any other retailer monitors all of your, or my, or anybody else’s electronic communications as a matter of course. Unless, of course, you’re privy to information of which I am not aware, in which case please let us all know.
Kropadope
@Mnemosyne:
The term dudebro doesn’t tell us anything about a person’s politics or even their empathy level.
Mnemosyne
@John O:
Yep, Snowden limiting our ability to gather intelligence from Russia and China, among other places (like Mexican drug gangs) couldn’t possibly have bad results that boomerang back on us years later, so there’s no need to worry about losing our ability to spy on other countries.
Honestly, if Snowden had limited himself to revealing information about domestic spying on US citizens inside the US, he’d probably be a hero to most people here, including me. But that’s not what he did — he took information that exposed operations and personnel from the US, the UK, France, Germany, and other allies around the world. The information about US spying inside the US was just the bait he used to gain credibility so he could take a wrecking ball to overseas intelligence gathering.
Think I’m wrong? Take a look at the proportion of information about US domestic spying to information about overseas spying by the US and its allies. What has there been more of?
rda909
The last several decades we’ve been trying to stop a complete fascist takeover of the U.S. Constitution by people such as the Koch Brothers and other “trickle-downers” such as Ronald Reagan. Every single election cycle now is the frontline fight against these fascists/Republicans. The elections coming up later this year are the next battle in this long war, and President Barack Hussein Obama has done than any president to stop their oppressive march in many generations, which means anyone who is actually a liberal or progressive should be laying it all on the line starting now to make sure Democrats win this November.
Arguing over some unaccomplished Ron Paul-supporting chump who lied his way into a private-sector job specifically to steal classified information from America, then move to Russia via China while being enabled by his Brazilian BFF is exactly what the Koch Brothers want you to do, in order to “divide and conquer” liberally-inclinded voters since that helps Republicans/fascists win their elections. Why this is so difficult for so many privileged progressives to understand, who happen to be about 99% white people, is still mind-boggling. The choice is yours.
Mnemosyne
@danielx:
Your internet provider monitors every second that you’re online. Or do they not count as a “retailer”?
I’ll say again what I said from the beginning: as long as private companies are allowed to gather information about people, the government will try to access it. If there’s information you don’t want the government to be able to get a warrant and find out about you, you need to stop private companies from gathering it in the first place.
And this time, I really am logging off. Good night.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@danielx:
Re: Binney and Drake
I see a red flag when I read that they’re both tied to the Republican staffer Diane Roark- who was an expert on the NSA’s budget (and I stress- BUDGET). I see another when I read that Binney was an investor in ThinThread, TrailBlazer’s competitor. It’s the costs that seem to have been the complaint back in 2002 (when Binney and Roark took action concerning TrailBlazer), not civil liberties. Civil liberties seem to have been attached to their allegations after the 2005 public revelations concerning BushCo’s domestic spying.
In addition, it doesn’t seem to me that ThinThread guaranteed domestic privacy, seeing that Binney has said that NSA adopted ThinThread, but stripped it of its ability to anonymize targets.
gian
@Mnemosyne:
IIRC Snowden took the gig wit the intent of stealing the information he stole. He then fled to two countries, both of which would love the information and are not friendly to US interests.
praising this guy because now the NSA isn’t necessarily figuring out just how much John like midget porn from his internet searches is like thanking Soviet spies for stealing the plans for the hydrogen bomb because mutual assured destruction is bitchin’ cool and way better than what came before.
I’ve got tons more empathy for private manning than Snowden.
But then people who take jobs to get access to information to flee the country and give it to hostile governments have never been my heroes.
Snowden, and his apologists are full of shit. read MLK letters from Birmingham jail, or Thoreau on taking the motherfucking punishment for “civil disobedience”
Edward acts like a spy, and fled the country, like a fucking spy, and is cheering on the totalitarian regime in Moscow which is about as brutal to gays and dissidents as possible right now.
How free to speak out publically were the women in “pussy riot”
Snowden loves something, but “freedom!!!!!” isn’t it.
David Koch
@Mnemosyne: <—- This
AxelFoley
To quote Tommy from the TV show ‘Martin’: “Cole…you stupid.”
John O
@Mnemosyne:
LOL. I’ll bet dollars to donuts we’re still #1 in spying capabilities, foreign and domestic.
You’re coming across as someone who actually supported the Patriot Act, believe it or not. At least to me. You sure seem nervous enough about all those other scary countries, who combined don’t spend as much as we do on our precious national defense and represent barely >0 real threat to us, at least from the perspectives of military or intelligence capacity.
The world is unfolding as it will, and the best we can do sometimes is react. So it is, has always been, and will always be.
I’ll go to bed if you will. :-)
Kropadope
@David Koch: I will refer you here and here. You’re trying to attach a lot of meaning to a word that means nothing of the sort, to the degree that it’s even a word. You use dudebro like Republicans use socialist.
Pooh
@chopper: This topic is good for a few dozen more posts, I think.
Weak beer, Cole.
AxelFoley
@Botsplainer:
Ain’t it, though? Where the fuck were these priviledged chickenshit cowards when the NSA ran rampant during the 8 years of George W. Bush? Nary a peep from these fuckers.
President Obama has been trying to curb the NSA’s power before Snowden was a twinkle in these dudebros’ eyes, yet he gets villified.
Tell you fuckin bitches what–don’t think that minorities, especially black folks, haven’t been paying attention to how you asswipes have treated the first black President. How this man has got more liberal policies enacted than any Democrat since FDR, and still gets treated like shit by those that supposedly are on his side. Don’t think we won’t remember this shit. Try to win the White House without our support.
Hill Dweller
@Mnemosyne: There does seem to be some coordination on when to release what to the public. Every time a high profile person in the Obama admin visits a country and/or meets their leader, something gets leaked about us spying on them. This weekend’s story on NSA spying in China was obviously timed to coincide with the First Lady’s visit.
That type of shit seems to be more about vindictiveness and undermining the Democratic President than informing the public.
rda909
@Mnemosyne: “…people who care deeply about civil liberties that just happen to only affect them…”
That’s the thing…the stuff they’re incessantly whining about will never ever actually effect them either. There’s a .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 chance some intern at the NSA will accidentally read an email from Cole to his mother about when his laundry will be done for him to pick it up later, and even smaller chance anything will happen because of that unlikely event. Meanwhile, there are real problems that need solving right now, that effect the lives of millions of children and many probably just down the street from most of us, such a getting rid of pre-existing condition clause and lifetime caps on health insurance payments, which thankfully President Obama has already accomplished.
Winning the midterms in a few months is incredibly more important than any of these white privilege issues du jour, such as Ron Paul-loving traitor Eddie Snowjob’s charade. Again, everyone here has a choice on how to spend their time and energy today, and every day leading up the November’s midterms.
http://krebscycle.tumblr.com/post/51900396994/cynicism
Suzanne
@AxelFoley: Truth.
David Koch
@John O:
you wring your hands over telephone metadata, but blow off Putin seizing a territory with 2.6 million people. Their civil liberties don’t matter.
And then some still have the nerve to cry over the term Dudebro.
rda909
@AxelFoley: Preach!
Kropadope
@AxelFoley: My privileged white male self was all over the Bush administration and Congress when these and other civil rights abuses were being passed into law. I even wrote my Congressman and Senators on these subjects to get condescending, irrelevant form letters back.
I don’t see why you feel the need to tie me in with these others, based on the terms we use to refer to each other, and vilify us based on politics that we don’t share.
AxelFoley
@askew:
Ain’t that some shit? And some of these leftier-than-thous wonder why black folks give them the side eye.
As stated earlier, President Obama has done more for gay rights than ALL other presidents combined, yet organizations like GLAAD want to heap praise on the man who signed DADT and DOMA into law.
AxelFoley
@Kropadope:
I’m sorry, I don’t recall using your name in this. Glad to know that you’re one of those dudebros I’ve been hearing about, though.
rda909
@David Koch: Just guessing here, but these same douchebros claim that Dan Choi “made” President Obama become the most progressive president ever regarding LGBT rights, and Bill McKibben “made” President Obama spend beyond Manhattan Project-level funding for environmental advancements, and just as they are now claiming in this post that the Ron Paul supporter who chose to live under Vlad Putin is “making” President Obama curb NSA activities (of course ignoring how much President Obama did in this regard before they ever heard of Eddie Snowflake), and on and on….correct? Some “base” they are!
AxelFoley
@Mnemosyne:
This. So very much this.
Kropadope
@AxelFoley: You’re taking a group of people, assigning them out-group status and arbitrarily ascribing a whole bunch of values to them that they don’t necessarily share. Not cool, dude, and not a way to make or maintain allies.
? Martin
@danielx:
A friend of mine owns one of those companies that you buy mailing lists from. You’re in there, I guarantee it. It’s kind of cool/horrifying what’s in there. Your contact information isn’t the valuable bit. Instead, all of the associated metadata assigned to you is. They mine all of the public records – birth certificates and marriage licenses, driving and DMV records, voter registration, credit reports, etc. They buy customer lists from pretty much everybody. So they know what magazines you subscribe to, what kind of car you drive, whether you’re married or not, what credit cards you use and how much you spend monthly. Chick-fil-a is almost certainly buying those records along with everyone else and those records are almost certainly more comprehensive than what the Stasi knew about most East Germans. Databases are amazingly powerful things.
Sure they do. And it’s really no less complete than what the NSA has been collecting. (The coordinates on that page appear to be for the cable booster for my neighborhood, but Google can usually work it out within about 100 feet – and I don’t have GPS on this computer to offer up a location). But they can track what sites you go to, how you get there, etc.
Most people aren’t worried about this because it’s such a flood of information that extracting some meaningful bit about you is just not worth the effort. But the same is almost certainly true of the NSA as well, especially considering that the resources of Google and everyone else exceeds that of the NSA, plus they actually have a motivation to dig into your data (because they want to sell you shit), where the NSA really doesn’t, though they do have an intense interest in at least a few of us.
AxelFoley
@rda909:
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Krodapope
Like calling someone an O-Bot? Like accusing those who disagree of being Republicans and/or agents of the NSA? That sort of thing? Because that sort of thing is pretty fucking common around here, too.
AxelFoley
@Kropadope:
What makes you think I want these selfish assholes as allies?
rda909
Behold the genius of the Snowdenwald’s candidate of choice, Ron Paul:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glvkLEUC_6Q
And he’s considered the smart one compared to his spawn Randy! Not clear how “the government always destroys wealth” when in fact the government is what prints the money to begin with and business is simply a way to move it around, but maybe I need to watch more Glenn Beck or read more Glenn Greenwald in order to understand the logic?
Kropadope
@? Martin: Oh, come on, don’t you know that every person each has his/her own unique government shadow, watching every single detail of his/her life? /snark
Even when you describe the nature of the data collected and the fact that the government needs to pull a warrant to examine an individual’s metadata, some will just insist that the government collects every bit of content and can examine it at will. Pointing out the unfeasibility of this will lead to glib dismissals.
Kropadope
@AxelFoley: Don’t listen much? My entire argument is that the term “dudebro” does nothing to describe someone’s selfishness, empathy, political values, or anything of the nature of what you’re trying to assign to it.
dollared
@Mnemosyne: Totally.Inappropriate.Analogy. You are one bitter son of a bitch.
Kropadope
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Yeah, and I try to call people out on that, also, when used unfairly. But at least those terms describe what the user intends. The term “dudebro” is irrelevant to the topic. If we were discussing beer pong or blunt etiquette, the term may be applicable.
David Koch
TBogg criticizes the Dudebros:
Now TBogg didn’t mention or even allude to Griftwald once in his post, but that didn’t stop Griftwald from denouncing TBogg as “disgusting” and directing a rant at TBogg about…. wait for it… drooooonze.
I guess we’re gonna have to save a bunk for TBogg at the reeducation camp.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Kropadope:
Except that at the heart of it, the beer-pong-playing, blunt-smoking dudebro is a narcissist.
ruemara
Ball wash as much as you will, but he was talking about reforming the security state before Snowden.
Kropadope
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): You’re just tying a lot of negative assumptions to something that, at the heart of it, is a love of camaraderie.
Death Panel Truck
@? Martin: So first you say the FOIA was a good thing that nonetheless didn’t redeem Nixon, who didn’t sign the FOIA bill in the first place; then you say when pointed out to you that it was actually LBJ who signed FOIA into law that it was Nixon who signed the FOIA privacy amendments into law; then when told that it was Ford, and not Nixon who (didn’t) sign the privacy amendments to FOIA into law but that it became law because of a veto override, you say that “yes, but it was Congress that passed the legislation to stop the abuses that occurred under Nixon.”
Well, no fucking shit.
Kropadope
@Death Panel Truck: FISA?
Kropadope
@Kropadope: Never mind, my mistake.
Death Panel Truck
@Kropadope: That’s cool.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Kropadope:
A couple of serial killers can share a sense of camaraderie. Where’s the virtue in that?
Kropadope
@Death Panel Truck: Yeah, my bad, I tried to delete it almost right away, but that apparently requires moderation.
Kropadope
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Way to miss the point.
Socoolsofresh
@Mnemosyne: “It’s tiring having to be Cassandra all the damn time, and it’s even more tiresome when you’re getting lectured about not having your hair on fire about it from the same idiots who not only thought it was hunky-dory back when Bush was doing it, but actually voted for that asshole. Twice. I’ve been upset about it since 2001. The fire has had some time to die down since then.”
You are insane. The biggest apologist on this website for the NSA and the whole invasive spying apparatus, now that Obama is talking about changing it, oh ya of course now you have been against it since 2001! Just amazing. And now you are castigating John and others for not being on top of it as long as you have. Funny, every other thread until now you didn’t have a problem with NSA overreach, made all these excuses and explanations. Wow, just shows how you are the ultimate Obama tribalist, it is quite impressive, sadly not surprising.
Haha if only everyone had listened to you in 2001! I know you guys love saying you have been over it since 2006, nothing new, but Mnemosyne now claims she was against before anyone else! Haha you are such a Cassandra!
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Kropadope:
No, I didn’t. You missed mine: Narcissism. Self-centeredness. Blinkered self-regard.
Kropadope
@Socoolsofresh: I suppose that means she, too, was for reform without elimination during the George W. Bush administration. A position that will get you called a “traitor” by glib assholes for precisely opposite reasons no matter who is in charge. You are helping perpetuate the national security overreach by denigrating reform efforts. Good job, you’ve been quite successful so far.
Kropadope
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): No I caught it, I just think you’re very, very wrong.
Sure you’re not talkin about yourself there, buddy? Andy K, projecting an air of superiority over an out-group that his in-group gets the sole privilege of defining.
RandomMonster
This shit was well-known in the Bush days, for any who cared to listen. You didn’t care about it then, but you care about it now. And suddenly we’re the “totally clueless morons”?
Rich.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Kropadope:
And there you go, putting me in a group. And…The in-group? I sense that you disapprove of the in-group, whatever that may be. As if I’m from the rich-kids camp across the lake.
Oh, the irony.
Kropadope
@RandomMonster: I think his argument works a little better if adjusted.
There.
Kropadope
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): In-group by self-selection. One’s in-group may be another’s out-group. I’m not the one here trying to write a whole group of people off by their social habits or define that group in the most-negative-possible light.
I’m not sure if you noticed, but I don’t have much love for people who suddenly rediscovered privacy rights when Obama became president. However, you’re tying that to a completely separate, unrelated group of people.
I understand where you’re coming from, but this dudebro shit is just stupid. It does not adequately describe the phenomenon you are complaining about.
A person who doesn’t read here regularly would have no idea why you’re linking the term dudebro with that type of hypocrisy (that’s what defines this in-group you’re creating). Hypocrisy that can be found just as easily among old, stodgy Republicans, businesspeople, people with giant teddy bear collections, and any other demographic signifier you can think of.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Kropadope:
Outsider: “Hey, your buddy’s being a dick to the waitress.”
Dudebro: “Yeah, well, this one time my broseph totes kept me from getting my ass kicked.”
O: “Now he’s outside throwing a trash can through the window of that antique store.”
D: “Whatevs, he’s my bro.”
O: “And now he’s keying a car. I just saw a little old lady get out of that car.”
D: “What, are you a cop?”
O: “No…But that’s some awfully shitty behavior. If you’re his friend, or any kind of a good citizen, maybe you could stop him.”
D: “That’s my bro. Saved my ass. He’ll do it again in a heartbeat.”
O: “Now he’s beating the piss out of that apparently homeless guy.”
D: “That guy’s a dick! When we were seventeen, that asshole wouldn’t buy for us!”
Now apply that to, say, Cole.
Reader: “You aren’t worried that your buddy Greenwald pushes the Pauls?”
Cole: “Dude, Fourth Amendment!”
R: “You aren’t worried that the overwhelming majority of what’s been released from the Snowden stash details foreign intelligence gathering rather than domestic intelligence gathering?”
C: “He’s standing up for my Fourth Amendment rights!”
R: “You aren’t concerned that by putting this progressive President- I mean, the stuff he’s been able to push through is a few steps in the right direction, is it not?- in the figurative crosshairs might cause a backlash that causes all those gains to be lost?”
C: “Hey, you Nazi asshole, FOURTH AMENDMENT! Greenwald and Snowden are undoubtedly heroes!”
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Kropadope:
BTW: This conversation is the first time I’ve ever typed out “dudebro”, and I don’t use it in casual verbal conversation, either. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know from where it comes- and that just above is from where it comes.
taylormattd
@David Koch: Hahahaha.
taylormattd
@David Koch: Apparently Tbogg belongs in Cole’s “idiot” category
DK
@David Koch: Praise gawd. I am so sick of these neo-Paultards and their Insufferable Privileged White Kid Liberaltarian Syndrome 1) glorifying immature wolf-in-outsider-clothing conservanuts like Rand Paul; 2) telling me I should appreciate garden variety traitor-spy Ed Snowden as he undermines my safety and cozies up to homophobic, totalitarian regimes; and 3) trashing the most progressive President in a generation because the government found out that you they like watersports porn. Their imperviousness to facts — namely that without a valid reason as demonstrated by a warrant only the most harmless, superficial data is collected — is reaching Tea Party levels. The “Because Big Brother!” freaks are becoming as irritating as the “Because Jesus!” crowd. And yet every time they sign on to Reddit or turn on their iPhones to whine about Obama they are giving up more privacy and data than the NSA has. What this is really about besides bored guys with arrested development, I don’t know. But spare me Johnny-come-lately fake outrage because the Magic Negro you worshipeded six years ago turned out to be same as the Hillary b*#%h onto whom you heaped your dudebro misogyny, just like she said he was. Y’all wanted a Messiah — you got a President. He and his party are far better than the alternative and its not even close. Grow the eff up and deal.
TR
@David Koch:
Doug J is completely right.
Or did I miss the part where 300,000 people gathered on the Mall for a rally to end NSA wiretapping? The part where people marched from Selma to Montgomery to show their dedication to the cause? The part where lots of people protected, were jailed, often even killed to protest this?
None of that happened? Then Doug J is totally right.
jamick
@Botsplainer: u mad??
jamick
@David Koch: you seem really upset ;(
El Caganer
Why does it have to be one issue only? I don’t like government spying, but right off the top of my head I’d say that stop-and-frisk, stand your ground, sentencing disparities, abortion restrictions and voting restrictions all have a more immediate impact on individuals – up to and including life-ending – than NSA spying. Does that mean it’s a good thing? No.
Blowfly
I’m sure we’ll be hearing from the “IT’S NOT ENOUGH!!!!” shortly.
Keith G
@Mnemosyne:
Hmmm…..more breathless, hyperbolic, bullshit. Comparing Snowden’s crimes to the brutal murder of a nine year old girl.
Let me repeat that…the brutal murder of a nine year old girl.
I wonder how the victimized, and I imagine still grieving, family feel about the use of their tragedy for your light-weight fodder. Yeah, It’s the same fucking thing.
I was going to ask if you had no shame, but I know the answer.
I like President Obama. He has accomplished a lot. And he is imperfect, has made mistakes, but most likely he is as good as we can expect anyone who gets to be President to be.
What I don’t like are the flying monkeys of the ODF, the Obama Defence Force who take flight and get really strange when they intuit some criticism of the actions (or inactions) of the President. The above feces toss is just one example.
Yeah, there are many strange and extreme critics of the President, but his, and our, cause can’t be well served when his defenders resort to name calling and histrionics – when his defenders act more like Sean Hannity then they act like the President they purport to admire.
Cervantes
@El Caganer:
It does not, of course. That’s just a convenient straw construction.
Cervantes
@Keith G: I don’t think of it as the Obama Defense Force, and I rather doubt that Obama would, either. He’s shown himself to be somewhat more thoughtful, even about criticism directed at him. Maybe in honor of the underlying Stalinist tendency, we can call it the Holier-Than-The-Pope Division?
(“Stalinist” is overstated, obviously, but at least exaggeration is funnier than dragging the name of a brutally murdered child back and forth through the mud.)
(Incidentally, I left you a response in the other recent “dudebro” thread.)
DTOzone
I’m mostly joking, but what if this was his plan all along. It’s not like he, or any politician for that matter, has the courage to trend into unknown political territory, so what if he wanted to see the country’s response to the NSA and if it was negative, move forward with rolling back the program, rather that do the latter first and risk the country moving against you.
First outrage, then action. That is usually how it works in America.
Keith G
@Cervantes: True story regarding Holier-Than-The-Pope Division (or ODF) type behavior.
When I first started in public education it was 1982. If you wanted to start a ruckus in a classroom containing middle school girls all that was needed was a perceived insult to Duran Duran. It was understandable. Fragile ego structure at a socially perilous age can do that.
But what about now?
Carolinus
Good, this was the correct move, particularly since the third-party storage alternative was fraught with so many of its own issues.
Snowden, Greenwald and their fellow travelers constantly use the Section 215 collection program in rhetorical tricks to claim the NSA is spying on all Americans, or use recent panel reports, which were strictly about this program, to make misleading statements about all NSA collection being worthless.
Considering the program was largely ineffective due to the fact it wasn’t getting phone call records from cell phones or many smaller providers (less than 20% of americans’ call records were included) it just wasn’t worth the propaganda value it provided to the real “dudebros” (the lalaland libertarian anarchists).
Soonergrunt
Good.
Culture of Truth
It woudn’t have happened without Snowden, but it would have happened no matter who Snowden brought his information to. Greenwald may well have slowed it down. But yes, team Greenwald can hate all it wants.
El Caganer
@Cervantes: But it always seems to play out that way on these threads. It’s possible to be concerned about a number of problems at the same time – hell, it’s even possible to try to solve a number of problems at the same time.
rikyrah
Still don’t give two shyts about the NSA and the phone calls.
So fuck Greenwald and the traitor Snowden
Culture of Truth
But spare me Johnny-come-lately fake outrage because the Magic Negro you worshipeded six years ago turned out to be same as the Hillary b*#%h onto whom you heaped your dudebro misogyny, just like she said he was.
good points, but the Paulites never worshipped Obama, at best they were tepid supporters or outright hostile.
Cervantes
@Keith G:
Wasn’t there also a hip-hop (or some such) group called “Arrested Development”?
Carolinus
I actually don’t think this is quite as obvious as you make it out to be, Cole. Prior to Snowden’s defection, President Obama had already been responsive to Wyden’s lobbying to pare back the most intrusive aspects of Bush era Section 215 collection. Wyden convinced Obama to terminate the bulk e-mail metadata part of the program, and it was shut down by 2011. Ever since Wyden & Udall had been lobbying to remove what was left, which was the call record collection. Considering that part was largely ineffective because it was missing 80% of Americans’ call records, I don’t find it hard to believe Wyden & Udall would have ultimately been successful.
Cervantes
@El Caganer: I couldn’t agree more. Use of the tactic tells you something about the tactician and nothing about the topic at hand.
Culture of Truth
“You’re just a totally clueless moron”
“you can keep all your “It would be better if they had done it this way” bullshit criticism and stick up up your nether regions.”
“Hate all you want.”
Projection?
Keith G
@Cervantes: 10 years later. Their excellent album, “3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of…” came out in 1993.
Very good stuff. Give it a listen on Spotify.
Cervantes
@Carolinus:
Yes, giving credit to Wyden and Udall is something I can get behind. They have worked hard.
But let me ask a few questions about the conditions in which they have had to work. Prior to last summer, when Wyden and/or Udall tried to discuss the NSA’s call record collection in public, how openly could they speak about it? To the extent that they could not speak openly, why not? Has there been a change in how the relevant information is classified? What brought about this change? What difference, if any, did it make?
Cervantes
@Keith G: I will, thanks.
Rafer Janders
@Mnemosyne:
Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with you? What the fuck is wrong?? Besides not understanding how analogies work — “A commits a crime, B exposes crime, we owe B gratitude” is not the same as “A commits a crime against C, we develop method to stop future A’s from committing crime against C’s, we owe A gratitude” — you’ve once again proven yourself wiling to say anything, no matter how loathsome, to win a point in an argument. For once, have you no decency?
Go stand in a corner until you learn some shame.
Rafer Janders
@Mnemosyne:
No, they do not count. Your Internet provider is not a retailer. A retailer is someone who purchases products in large quantities from upstream manufacturers, either directly or through a wholesaler, and then sells smaller quantities of those same products downstream to the consumer for a profit.
DK
@Rafer Janders: Nah, he should stand in the middle of the room and continue waving the “U mad?” flag.
The real thing that Snowden’s personality cult finds loathsome is having a mirror held up to their unseriousness by an analogy that hit a little too close to home for them. Setting aside for a minute the semantical text-spinning attempt to make parallel analogies appear different, Ed Snowden didn’t “expose” anything necessary that was not already known to rollback these programs, something Senate Democrats were already working on for reasons that surely included accomplishing nothing except giving liberaltarian hacks like Greenwald something to whine about. What Eddy Boy did do was expose Americans to increased security risks by making public sensitive information unrelated to the relatively benign data collection programs in question — all the while colluding and cozying up to tyrants instead of manning up and facing heat at home like real dissidents (see Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail).
But at least the Cult of Ed can now move on from fake moralizing about their nonexistent privacy to taking to their fainting couches over Amber alert analogies — the horror! *rolls eyes* What indecency will have them prostrate in shock next week?
jamick
@Culture of Truth: shouldn’t you be furiously transcribing every word david gregory says??
DK
@Keith G: Heh. Is it breathless and hyperbolic to self-righteously nail oneself to an Internet cross on behalf of Amber Hagman’s family for a random online analogy they will never see? The Snowdenists have descended into parody when criticism evokes hot air like “have you no shame!!!” and “have you no decency!!!” It’s like they’ve all learned to faint on cue.
Obviously @Mnemosyne ‘s analogy was intended not to highlight similarities between Snowden’s selfish and thoughtless behavior and the murder of a child, but to make a rhetorical point using a provocative extreme that highlights the ridiculousness of “ends justify means” arguments. It’s so obvious that I’m guessing anyone who missed this is most likely being deliberately mendacious. That, or maybe the contributors here on all sides are not as smart as I think. In either case, they lose credibility. Especially since Snowden’s crimes can actually also result in despair, destruction, and loss of life — on an even larger scale long term.
The furious reaction indicates the Amber alert analogy struck a nerve amongst the Snowden cultists, and should be over and over again to mock their wrongheadedness. As a Hillary Dead-ender when it comes to idolizing flawed human beings, I have no dog in the fight between dudebros and Obamabots, except to say that the latter are exponentially more right than the former.
chopper
@rda909:
the ‘(insert name here) forced the president to act’ meme is the new ‘obama got lucky’.
either way it smacks of minimizing the black man’s work and intentions.
Keith G
@DK:
Interesting device.
In breaking the law as he did, I think Snowden has done more good than harm. I will be more than willing to revisit that notion as more data comes in, but I am pretty comfortable with it right now.
Does that make me part of the Cult of Ed?
You see, what harm that may have been caused is external – some bad actors and/or evil doers know more about certain of our intelligence MOs than they did before. None of which will lead to an existential, or even destabilizing, threat to the USA.
On the other hand, bucketloads of complacency and in some cases bad intent, has allowed for the growth of a wide range of governmental activities that have been unnecessarily shielded from the review of the citizens of the United States. That is a trend that is known to cause not only governmental instability, but also existential concerns about the role of Constitutional government.
Notice, I used “trend”. I am not saying that sans Snowden our republic might collapse by 2015, or ever. Nonetheless, historically it is clear that being free from the restraint of public accountability has not served certain groups within the US government very well.
Does this make me part of the Cult of Ed?
Cervantes
@Keith G:
Dull as dishwater.
Keith G
@DK: Really.
I hate to admit that I am old enough to not be one of the cool kids, so I might have to find out what dudebros means and figure out how it is a part of enlightened adult conversation….or maybe I won’t.
It’s probably some transient short cut used by folks who would rather draw lines, form teams, and feel good about their imagined correctness than deal with the complexities of the real world.
Elie
@Belafon:
I totally agree.Snowden and Griftwald are traitors. I acknowledge some good may have come from their activities. Earthquakes and tsunamis also remodel the earth’s landscape and force humans to adapt and improve our safety. They are still destructive forces…
And Griftwald can’t seem to bring himself to denounce Putin’s invasion of Crimea or anything else the “Soviets’ do… and all the libertarian com racist stuff he has advocated passively if not actively sited above by Dark Rose….awful — sad that some people hold that up as some sort of hero.
As for Snowden, I hope that he stays in Russia forever… till he is an old 80 something drinking his vodka and cursing the corrupt United States NSA. I hope that he never sets foot on US soil again and that he is buried there.
Rex Everything
Wow…it seems like such a short time ago that Cassidy was the only one dumb/clueless/uncreative enough to flog the White Male Suburban Dudebro line to death. Now they’re ALL doing it. Like it’s all they have left.
Truly, they’re circling the drain.
Rex Everything
@TR:
Yeah, like how I missed the part where you, David Koch, Botsplainer, Mnemosyne et al actually talked about stop-&-frisk, police brutality, the prison industry, and racial oppression FOR ANY OTHER REASON except as a prop for your stupid “why cure tetanus when cancer still exists?!” argument.
It’s not like any of you has ever written a book about it…
Rex Everything
But seriously, THIS line of reasoning has got to end: “Dudebros only care about what affects them personally. Bring up marriage equality & they reply ‘DRONES!'”
That is what’s known as a complete bullshit formulation. COMPLETE bullshit. Drones don’t affect any of us personally. That’s the whole point. That’s why they’re easy to ignore. Ignoring them is our particular first world privilege. Treating even the mere mention of them as an annoyance is not only appalling; it’s EXACTLY first world privilege, it’s the very definition of privilege.
You can imply what you want about dudebro homophobia, but most people who aren’t knuckledragging bigots are affected by marriage equality to some degree. It’s a matter of importance, if not to you, then to people you care about. Personal importance. It’s a part of your life.
Drones aren’t that. Not for Americans. To pretend they are is not even clever bullshit; it’s just complete stinking moronic bullshit.
Joe Buck
It’s a change in the right direction, but without an enforcement mechanism it’s of limited value. Otherwise we’d be asking the same people who lied to Congress about what they were doing to tell the truth to Congress about what they are doing now.
I don’t even think Obama knew everything that was going on: the NSA people see themselves as the permanent government and the current occupant of the White House is just one more target for manipulation.
LAC
@Belafon: amen.
LAC
@DK: I know ! Months later, with more hair loss and rice cake eating fun, Cole and co are still trying to get that ticker tape parade for the Putin whisperer Snowden. More ” He saved our hypothetically listened to non-interesting phone calls! He’s a hero!!!” Meanwhile he and chinless fuck got dick to say about Russian actions in Ukraine. But let’s play “name that country that spies on us that we are spying on” because that helps sooooo much. What can I say? The guy needs to have his likeness found on a piece of toast.
John Cole
@Elie:
I love it when you all throw up these ridiculous justifications for your blind hatred. “Ohh, if Only Greenwald would denounce the Russians and Putin, then I’d maybe take him seriously!”
Speaking of, would you provide me with a list of things I need to denounce in order to be considered in good standing? I will pass it on to Glenn, and then maybe you all will be satisfied.
LAC
@John Cole: ok, this hilarious. This motherfucker tweets about evvvvvverything under the sun that this administration as done wrong (THE DRONEZ AHHHHHHHH!!! Obama hates the gays! Etc, etc) and he has got finger cramps when it comes to this? The king of self righteous rage has nothing to say about anything that goes on in Russia?
I though that the fanboy “Tiger Best” assessment of greenwald was that he was principled. Yeah…..
Cervantes
@LAC:
No one cares what you or Glenn Greenwald think about the Russian government, least of all the Russian government itself. There is very little you can do to actually change its behavior.
Your highest civic responsibility is not to fulminate here about Russia. It is to monitor the actions of your own government — the one you fund, the one that acts in your name (or says it does) — and then to criticize and correct its actions where appropriate.
This is an elementary moral argument. You could stun me by finally grasping it.
LAC
@Cervantes: excuse me, doesn’t Greenwald live in Brazil? Does he have anything to say about the civil rights situation there? Or does he just save up all his viper tongued venom for a country he hasn’t lived in for years?
Carolinus
@John Cole:
He doesn’t need to denounce anything, it’s just worth noting that on the Russia / Ukraine topic, he actually has weighed many times, and it has always aligned with his pathological hostility to the West. He’s on multiple occasions written long editorials defending RT as less corrupt and less biased than its US news media counterparts, including in reaction to the Abby Martin outburst. He joined in the attack on Liz Wahl following her resignation. He’s tweeted out op-eds painting the Ukraine as a neo-fascist menace, nicely aligning with Russian talking points.
Let’s not pretend he’s taken some principled stand by completely avoiding weighing in on the crisis.
LAC
@Cervantes: and for the record, greenwald hasn’t done anything more than get more click bait for his writing and money for his “don’t tase me with facts, bro” media “empire”. He is not invested in solving any problems in this country and he could give a rats ass about any of us. A major city could get blown up tomorrow and that douchecanoe would would be tweeting about how the US had it coming because of whatnot. You stun me with how hard you have twist yourself in a knot about this grifter.
Cervantes
@LAC:
Hey, you’re catching on!
Yes, I agree with you that if someone (whoever it is) (1) pays taxes in, or (2) is anyway a citizen of, Brazil then he should, if possible, monitor and criticize that government. I have no idea whether any of these conditions is true in Greenwald’s case. Do you? I also have no idea if he has, in fact, criticized the record of the Brazilian government. Do you? And is there some specific criticism of Brazil you’re looking for?
On the other hand, if someone (whoever it is) has (1) renounced his US citizenship or (2) does not pay taxes to support the US government, then the civic responsibility is diminished (to say the least). Do you know if either of these conditions is true in Greenwald’s case? I haven’t the foggiest idea — but perhaps you do?
Cervantes
@LAC:
“For the record” does not mean what you think it does, unless it’s your opinion you want on the record — which is fine, but a little redundant at this point. In any event, I see no need to respond to your assertions.
LAC
@Cervantes: good. I see no need to respond to your obnoxious borderline hysterical reaction to my assertions either. But when you are through reading the 198,000,000 google results about Brazil’s atrocious human rights record, let us all know about all the things that ole civic minded greenwald has done for the US of A. I know that he has been in the forefront of fighting for gay rights and… Oh wait….
And since you are so brilliant I am sure that you can find out what ole civic minded Glenn’s view is about Brazil and it’s government is.
Rafer Janders
@LAC:
You’ve been complaining about GREEEEEENWALD!!!! and Snowden, OMG they’re going to kill us all! and yet you’ve said nothing, absolutely nothing, about the terrible situation in the labor camps in North Korea?!?! You have absolutely nothing to say about the recent massacres in the Central African Republic?
Yeah, don’t make me laugh that you’re actually a person of principle…..
Lynn Dee
I’m sure you’re right, John. But Greenwald is still smug, smarmy and insufferable. Now, maybe smug, smarmy and insufferable is what it takes to get this particular job done. But I still can’t stand the guy. Or Snowden either, for that matter.
LAC
@Rafer Janders: I wasn’t talking about me. But nice deflection. If snowald decides to run to North Korea and its famous embrace of progressive politics, I am sure you fanboys will be ignoring that too while Snowald gives his annual televised Christmas chat there.
I thought you greenwaldos argued better than that. But you’ve been on that self righteous train for so long, I understand how inconvenient Russia’s actions are ….choo choo.
Rafer Janders
@LAC:
I’m sorry, I won’t be able to hear anything you say until you denounce North Korea. Without that, your outrage seems…selective.
LAC
@Rafer Janders:you can’t hear and I don’t speak Stupid. Pity, we could have really had a meeting of the minds here. Good luck…
Cervantes
@LAC:
“Borderline hysterical reaction”? (Not interesting enough for me to ask what you’re talking about.)
You brought up Greenwald and Brazil. If you have a point to make, I’m sure you’ll make it (in the fullness of time).
Whereas here’s my perspective. You made comment #222 (directed at John Cole). It was entirely about Greenwald because, of course, that’s what you’re interested in. I responded to only one part of it, namely this part [A]:
In my response #223, I gave you an elementary moral argument as to why [A] is OK (even if true, which it is not). That moral argument applies not only to Greenwald but to anyone. I think (although one can’t be sure) that you understood it.
In #224 you tried to apply that moral argument to Greenwald, and in #226 you made a number of additional assertions about Greenwald (“for the record”).
In #227 (responding to your #224) I tried to help you apply the moral argument to Greenwald, making clear that if you need information about him, you’ll have to find it yourself because I don’t have it to give you.
In #228 (responding to your #226) I informed you that I saw no need to rebut your assertions about Greenwald.
You seem confused and disappointed that I’m interested here only in the general moral argument — and not in your deranged vendetta against Greenwald. Not to worry: I’m sure you’ll get over this disappointment, eventually.
Cervantes
@Lynn Dee:
That’s the part we care about.
And that’s the part we don’t care about.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Time to disentangle Mnemosyne’s lies and distortions once again. This is an ongoing job, like Hercules’ labor of cleaning out the Augean stables, so it will take a few word. Mnemosyne has a real skill at telling lies in 5 words that take 20 words to fully expose and debunk.
Oh?
Really?
You’ve been warning about the NSA collecting and keeping the voice calls of every person in America in a giant data center in Utah with the world’s largest collection of hard drives? You’ve been doing that since 2001?
No, I don’t think so, Mnemosyne, because (you see) hard drives weren’t big enough back in 2001 to hold all that data. Whoops! Your Big Lie has been revealed!
Back in 2001, a “big” hard drive was 20 gigabytes, not a couple of terabytes, as today. Drive capacity has increasing exponentially since 2001. Back in 2001 supercomputing power and the capacity of Beowulf clusters wasn’t large enough to deal in real time with the kind of searches the NSA does today. So once again, you’re just lying.
Nobody worried about the kind of insane Orwellian panopticon surveillance that’s going on today because back in 2001, the technology to store and search all that video and audio data in a reasonable amount of time didn’t even exist.
Yet you, Mnemosyne, seem to have no problem with president Obama ordering U.S. citizens murdered without a trial and without criminal charges. Does anyone else sense a contradiction here? Mnemosyne claims to be shocked, shocked that any president would dare to order nationwide surveillance of phone calls and emails…yet she swoons with delight at the news that Obama has ordered four American citizens murdered without trial or charges.
Do you really expect us to believe that horseshit, Mnemosyne?
You need to improve your lying skills.
Let’s unpack the distortions and lies Mnemosyne loads onto this paragraph. First, Snowden is 29 years old today. He would have been 15 years old back in 2001. So you’re complaining that…a 15-year-old Snweden didn’t go out and get a job at the NSA (which he was in junior high school) and then leak this information back then.
Are you drunk?
Are you on hard drugs, Mnemosyne?
Snowden is 29 fucking years old. He couldn’t possibly have gotten a job with the NSA much earlier than 2008 or 2009. And you’re whining that Snowden didn’t come forward earlier? How could he have, you halfwit? He was still in fucking high school!
Next, Mnemosyne claims without any proof at all that Snowden was “just fine” with Bush having all these powers but Snowden only came unglued when Obama exercised them. Snowden was in fucking high school when Bush did all this shit. I don’t know what you were like at age 17, but when I was in high school, my big concern was girls, not politics. I think that’s pretty standard any 17-year-old guy anywhere in America. So when you slam the high-school-age Ed Snowden because he was more interested in getting laid in high school that doing a bunch of stuff to Change the World, get a fucking clue. Junior high and high school kids are pumped up with hormones and worried about getting into the right goddamn college — their top priority is not writing their congressman about NSA surveillance.
And now Mnemosyne slams John Cole because, after 2005, Cole had a change of heart and turned from a hardcore fringe lunatic Republican into a reasonable person. Awww, c’mon! How many hardcore far-right Republicans ever see the light? And you’re bitching and whining? Holy crap, woman. Get a clue.
Beating up on John Cole because he saw the light and turned from a lunatic Republican into a progressive but did it just a little to late for your taste is about on the level of screaming at Obama because he initially sent a bill with too small a stimulus (which we know now) in 2009 to congress and then only later, circa 2012 or 2013, realized the economy needed more stimulus and now he’s pounding away at that theme in his stump speeches.
Hey!
Nobody’s perfect. Obama had no way of knowing the 800 billion stimulus was too small in 2009, and neither did anyone else. I sure didn’t. So you haven’t heard me criticize Obama on that score. We should be grateful that Obama did the right thing and sent a large stimulus package to congress in 2009, Which I give Obama credit for — and so should everyone else.
Likewise, we should all be grateful that John Cole saw the light in 2005. Maybe a little late, but sure as hell better than nothing. Yet instead ingrates like Mnemosyne persist in hammering on Cole because he wasn’t a progressive from the git-go, back in 2001.
And lastly, let’s bear in mind that all these depredations of panopticon surveillance didn’t mean that much back in 2001 because Bush’s violations of the constitutions aren’t nearly as extreme as Obama’s.
Let’s be clear here, Mnemosyne: George W. Bush never ordered any American citizens murdered without a trial. Obama did. The worst that would have happened from all this surveillance back during Bush’s presidency is that some foreign nationals overseas might have been killed with U.S. JSOC death squads. That’s unconstitutional, but it doesn’t threaten the very foundations of our democracy the way Obama’s order to murder American citizens does. Because Bush used this panopticon surveillence to target foreign nationals — but Obama is using this panopticon surveillance to target U.S. citizens, and not just for “terrorism,” but for revealing crimes committed by the U.S. government.
Barack Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous American presidents put together. That’s why this panopticon surveillence is so destructive to American Democracy. Obama is not just doing the same universal surveillance Bush did, Obama is using the results of this surveillance to send U.S. citizens to prison for revealing the crimes of the American government, to kidnap American citizens and hurl ’em into jail without charges for unlimited duration, and to murder U.S. citizens without even filing criminal charges.
No, not clear at all. In fact your arguments are incoherent, contradictory, bizarre, confused, inchoate, and dishonest.
mclaren
@Lynn Dee:
To each his (or her) own.
Personally, I find Greenwald principled and admirable, and Snowden clear-headed and sensible. But that’s just me. Your mileage may vary.
For the record, from the very first time I heard him speak politically, I found Ronald Reagan dishonest and halfwitted and infected with a fatal strain of cruelty and vengeful hate that I can only liken to inhaling the stench from a slaughterhouse.
The sheer viciousness of this kind of speech stunned me when I first heard, and staggers me today. My reaction to Ronald Reagan is apparently atypical — so who knows? Maybe my reaction to Greenwald and Snowden is also atypical.
DK
Snowden enlisted in 2004. By 2005 he was working for the US government as a security specialist. The soon-to-be traitor joined the CIA in 2006. He didn’t get a job with the NSA until after Obama became President, but the canard that he was too concerned about girls to register his complaints about Bush’s national security state until the black man got in office is total hogwash, like most dudebro complaints.
Before accusing others of being a halfwit, it helps to get facts so that you end up not looking like a complete fool. But loving the Cult of Ed getting their diapers in a tizzy over the crumbling image of their false idol.
But what do you expect from people who think a commander-in-chief killing terrorist traitors on the battlefied is a bigger threat to America than traitors and terrorists killing Americans and getting Americans killed. You know, because drones!
LAC
@Cervantes: I am not confused about you and you pathetic attempt to,pretend that blogging in Brazil is some high form of civics. Or a moral calling You got into an A and B posting conversation and now you are trying to project your silly defense of greenwald and Snowden on me. Your attempts to be a condescending smug asshole was duly noted throughout all this, so no need to over explain, m’kay? Read all your dumb posts. Thanks
Frankly I do not not know why you are bothering. I think Snowden is a traitor and I think greenwald is a thin-skinned hypocritical prick whose agenda is all about him. You tying some moral calling to what he is doing is what you fanboys do. As this thread shows, my opinion on these two is hardly an outlier. So aside from trying to take the most pretentious posting award from mcclaren, why you feel the need to bother does confuse me.
mclaren
@DK:
Since essentially everything you’ve posted is a lie, debunking your lies will be simple and quick. Afterwards, everyone will realize that you’re an ignorant incompetent liar, as well as pathologically dishonest.
Fact: “On May 7, 2004, Snowden enlisted in the United States Army Reserve as a Special Forces recruit but did not complete any training.”
So lie Number One from you is the claim that “Snowden enlisted.” No, he enlisted in the Army Reserve but completed no training. So he signed up for the reserves for never actually entered the program.
You need to do better than this with your lies. This one was so obvious it took 5 seconds googling the Wikipedia entry for Edward Snowden to reveal your lie.
And that’s lie Number Two.
FACT: His next employment was for less than a year in 2005 as a “security specialist” at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language, a partnership with the U.S. Government that is not a classified facility.
Edward Snowden was not working for the United States Government in 2005, he was working part-time at the University of Maryland — and despite his job title, the position was not classified and the facility was not classified.
Your lies are getting increasingly incompetent. People now realize you have no idea what you’re talking about. But wait: it gets worse.
FACT: ” In 2006 he joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a systems administrator and telecommunications systems officer.”
So instead of being a CIA agent, Snowden was employed by the CIA as a sysadmin. In other words, he was a glorified webmaster. Nice try with your
lie, but better luck next time.
And now for Lie Number Three, the claim that Snowden was “soon-to-be traitor.” Treason is defined specifically in the constitution of the united states. Let’s take a look at the definition of treason:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
How did Ed Snowden “levy war against” the United States?
He didn’t. You’re lying when you call Snowden a traitor.
How did revealing the U.S. government’s illegal spying on its own citizens in gross violation of the fourth and fourteenth amendments constitute “adhering to the enemies” of the united states?
Once again, it’s obvious to everyone that it doesn’t. So once again, you’re lying.
As always, everything you say is a lie. You lie and lie and lie, and expect no one to notice.
Fact: Ed Snowden did not start to go to his superiors with concerns about the illegal internet survellance until “after the black man got in office.”
See Snowden’s CIA career taught him that going through channels achieved nothing.
So a fourth lie for you, and you’re out.
You really need to improve your lying skills. Like Mnemosyne, you just can’t get your story to align with the facts.
Since you feel no compunctions about slinging around these baseless accusations that Snowden is a “traitor” and since you have no problem with telling lie after lie after lie, it’s only reasonable to return the favor.
Your efforts to undermine the United States’ fundamental governance by destroying the rule of law and making deliberately false accusations of treason shows that you’re an enemy combatant. You’re trying to destroy our democratic form of government by telling the flagrant lie that people who reveal government crimes are guilty of a felony. Off to the steel cages in Gitmo with you.
Cervantes
@LAC: OK, let’s leave it at that, thanks.
Lynn Dee
@Cervantes:
“We”? You’re the spokesperson for a group, I gather?
But more to the point, why should I care what you do and don’t care about?! I must admit, that tickled me.
Lynn Dee
@mclaren:
Absolutely. My mileage varies.
Cervantes
@Lynn Dee: Who said you have to care?
Anyway, what tickles me is that the people who criticize others for being obsessed with Greenwald et al. are, in fact, the ones with the obsession!
Lynn Dee
@Cervantes:
I don’t believe I’m obsessed. That of course would be your cue to come back with the clever riposte: Who said you’re obsessed?
Anyway, we seem to have reached the point of diminishing returns on this exchange. (And so soon! Right out of the gate, in fact!)
:)
Cervantes
@Lynn Dee: No, my apologies. I did not mean to imply you were obsessed. Was just countering your “tickled” with one of my own.
Your #231 was innocuous. It just reminded me of the pattern I described later in my #245.