BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

Yes, to the best of its ability. It's ability continues to improve.

Yes. It's why I wear a paper bag over my head and why I invest in Cheetos, which I keep under the mattress.

Do you have an opinion on what advantage NSA thinks accrues from this sort of obsessive peeping-tom behavior?

An opinion based on not much? I think they gain very little, other than possible job security. My gosh, we receive warnings from Russia on someone who ultimately sets off bombs in Boston, and what do we do? The answer seems to be "nothing in particular". I sure hope NSA is scratching its collective head over my last three phone calls.

Now, there is nothing there that should indicate I've got more faith in the government of Russia than my own.

That's rather sardonically amusing. Big Brother may be watching us, but he's clueless about what he's seeing.

convinving the victim that they will die without the assistance of the abuser is right out of the first month of classes of the Manipulation 101 course.

but as George Carlin kept on trying to tell us "Americans are ******* STUPID!"

Maundering, as usual . . . convinving?

In addressing this question I think we should differentiate between "Being Watched", and "Being Seen".

I don't believe any government (or organization) has the ability to actively Watch everyone. What they do have is the ability to watch large swaths of data and large parcels of property and to try to focus on things that appear unusual. And while that may not be much more comforting when it comes to worrying about Big Brother, I do think it's an important difference.

I would like to think (and to hope) that government is only spending its real (and limited) efforts on what it considers high value or high probability surveillance.

And at the moment, I'm not very worried about the large scale surveillance of public places and the collection of public data.

As I think I mentioned in the other thread, I'm far more concerned about the ability of the government to force private organizations to give up their own (privately collected) data merely to increase the volume of the data they are able to scan. It seems to me that data collected and owned by private firms (or individuals) is private property, and the government shouldn't have the right to acquire it without specific reasonable cause sufficient to require a specific warrant.

I agree with this to a degree, but to be fair, we don't know how many false positives their data analysis returns on a routine basis. So we don't know if they just missed this one due to ineptitude or if it was lost in the noise of false positives.

And in a larger sense with regard to the effectiveness of data collection and analysis of the type they are doing, we don't have (or at least, I don't have) any accurate idea of just how many terrorist plots they have legitimately stopped. If it turned out that they stopped hundreds and only missed the Boston bombers, then I would say they're doing ok. But if they stopped none and also missed the Boston bombers, then they are wasting our money, our time and our liberties for nothing.

In a way. I grew up in the last days of the Soviet Union and you literally couldn't breathe for the government. It is not so bad here...yet.

Right. They could have been very successful. Or not. This is what seems to be meant by that new phrase. Grading their own tests. I thinks that what's happening here is that a fair number of people are losing faith, and when that happens we start viewing everything the government does in a somewhat different light.

the Pollyanna's about government power impress me has having zero knowledge of the history of how government power has been used.

Let's say viewing their activities with a jaundiced eye.

It is, but insidiously so, through security mechanisms and secret programs that Adminsitration officials lie about to congress.

I don't believe there is any sinister design for establishing an Orwellian state, but slowly but surely the infrastructure is being laid, waiting for the time that a truly sinister administration will fully deploy it.

The worst thing we can do is complacently trust our government. It is far too large and complex to rationally warrant transference of any trust citizens have on any given leader, and the trust bestowed on our leaders is irrational, based on the reality of mendacity, incompetence and simple human nature.

Somewhere along the line we shifted our perpective from the government serving us to us serving the government. This is a bad place to be.

The internet companies involved in this surveillance want to save their reputations and reassure their customers that the information they've given to the government has affected only a small number of them, and Google has cited the First Amendment in its efforts to disclose information about the FISA orders.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-challenges-us-gag-order-citing-first-amendment/2013/06/18/96835c72-d832-11e2-a9f2-42ee3912ae0e_story.html

It's obviously a police state...

we dont yet have agreement that we live in a police state, but we do have wide agreement that we live in a surveillance state, with both the government and the capitalists watching us and recording. the capitalists collect information to sell to whom we dont know (our enemies?) and the government collects information they say for SAFETY! though this excuse is pretty far fetched which has to make you wonder if the real reason is to build a police state on the East German model.

this is where we are, when being too close to the government trashes your reputation. think about that for five seconds. resist screaming if you can.

Somewhere along the line we shifted our perpective from capitalism serving us to us serving capitalism.

everybody is out to enslave us, it is time to wake up!