Snowdon is a dummy

@Frank Apisa,

Quote:

Of course, someone like you wants to think you get to choose which are nonsense...and which are not.

I have never come across anybody who displays that fault more than Apisa does. I found it so habitual that I coined an acronym for it.

0 Replies

@BillRM,

Nice summary.

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

ehBeth wrote:

Nice summary.

Pathetic!

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

Right on cue!!

0 Replies

Diane Feinstein is finally angry about something -- spying on heads of state. Spying on the rest of us is just ducky -- trust her, she's in charge of oversight -- but spying on someone in the elite? Oh, now she's angry.

1 Reply

@JPB,

Quoting from her press release

Quote:

[...]Unlike NSA’s collection of phone records under a court order, it is clear to me that certain surveillance activities have been in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence Committee was not satisfactorily informed. Therefore our oversight needs to be strengthened and increased.

With respect to NSA collection of intelligence on leaders of U.S. allies—including France, Spain, Mexico and Germany—let me state unequivocally: I am totally opposed.
[...]

1 Reply

Let me do a “fair” sum up of my position (my opinions on the subject of the thread) here:

1) Snowden is not a dummy. He probably is naïve…and I suspect by this time he regrets he ever did what he did.

2) He is NOT a traitor. That charge is extreme and should be dropped.

3) He is NOT a hero in any sense of the word. He apparently is a thief…and he apparently violated several laws regarding classified documents.

4) I think he should be brought back to the US and subjected to a fair trial of his peers. My guess is that he will have a defense team second to no defense team ever before assembled.

5) My personal privacy is NOT an important thing to ME. I post under my own real name…and frequently share opinions under my real name in newspapers and magazines.

6) It is my guess that personal privacy is on its way out. Our technological evolution is such that expectations of personal privacy on a level we have previously enjoyed is little more than wishful thinking.

At no point have I ever said that anyone has no rights to keep secrets. That first paragraph of Bill’s “fair sum up” is an absurdity. I defy him or anyone else to come up with any post where I have suggested that “no one in the world” has a right to have secrets. At best, I have pointed out the difficulty in keeping secrets.

At no point have I ever said that only the US government or any of its allies are the only governments to be allowed to have secrets. That second paragraph of Bill’s “fair sum up” is abject nonsense…made up on the spot.

I do not remember at any point talking about the rights of Americans to know what their government is doing…although I will acknowledge that the nature of security requires some secrecy. I expect that appropriate congressional monitoring is reasonable. The third paragraph of Bill’s “fair sum up” is bizarre.

At no point have I ever suggested that we have to give up all our constitutional rights as a price for dealing with terrorists. That is hyperbole on a massive scale…and it makes Bill’s fourth paragraph ridiculous.

Bill’s “fair sum up” of my position was “fair” in the sense that FOX News is “fair and balanced”…which is to say…NOT fair at all.

2 Replies

@Frank Apisa,

Quote:

By the way, Nancy, I, and some friends visit Marie's Crisis...a bar in Greenwich Village built where Paine's house used to be. Legend has it that he wrote some of the "Crisis" here.

You however can not visit his grave as a crazy Englishman [is there any other type?] dug him up and took his bones back to England and then lost them.

0 Replies

@Frank Apisa,

Quote:

6) It is my guess that personal privacy is on its way out. Our technological evolution is such that expectations of personal privacy on a level we have previously enjoyed is little more than wishful thinking.

Nonsense it take the resources and the power of a major government to do the massive spying on the population that NSA is doing and there is no reason or need to allow the SOBs to used our own tax money to spy on us in such a manner.

Just because such spying using the power of government is possible is no reason to allow it and the world will not end and terrorists will not run wild if the email address books and buddy lists, or contact information of our cell phones of all of us are not available to the government in mass.

Sixty millions emails of the German people and such nations are also is not needed for us to be safer from terrorists.

Such data bases are tools of blackmail that undermine any free country and for example see how Hoover use far less information to blackmail presidents and congress for decades.

2 Replies

@BillRM,

Quote:

Just because such spying using the power of government is possible is no reason to allow it and the world will not end and terrorists will not run wild if the email address books and buddy lists, or contact information of our cell phones of all of us are not available to the government in mass.

Exactly. There is no such thing as fatality. The future is what we make of it.

And if cellular phones and emails are too easy to tap, let's go back to snail mail and couriers for the important stuff. In other words, we should take a page from Al Qaeda's SOPs.
Hear that, NSA? You're giving the world incentives to emulate Al Qaeda. Nice job!

0 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

Nice damage control work, but who would be foolish enough to believe that Obama was not informed? More likely, he was THE PRIME CLIENT for such spying on his counterparts. Who wants to listen to a president/chancellor/PM, more than another president/chancellor/PM?

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

Are you wondering, as I did, why this post sounded so different from his usual posts? Or did that not even cross your mind?

I put it down to broken clock syndrome.

0 Replies

@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

Oh Izzy, I just been hearing that you got a new "sheriff in town" in the form of the NCA that for the last year or so have been having fun going around heavily arm and raiding people homes in the early morning hours just like we do in the good old US of A.

None of this unarmed and polite law enforcement nonsense of the past.

It's not new at all, it's just a new name for SOCA. Our police aren't routinely armed, but there are specialists who are. As usual you've picked up the wrong end of the stick.

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

The NCA has been dubbed the "British FBI" by some ... as had the predecessor SOCA.

0 Replies

@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

Quote:
6) It is my guess that personal privacy is on its way out. Our technological evolution is such that expectations of personal privacy on a level we have previously enjoyed is little more than wishful thinking.

Nonsense it take the resources and the power of a major government to do the massive spying on the population that NSA is doing and there is no reason or need to allow the SOBs to used our own tax money to spy on us in such a manner.

Just because such spying using the power of government is possible is no reason to allow it and the world will not end and terrorists will not run wild if the email address books and buddy lists, or contact information of our cell phones of all of us are not available to the government in mass.

Sixty millions emails of the German people and such nations are also is not needed for us to be safer from terrorists.

Such data bases are tools of blackmail that undermine any free country and for example see how Hoover use far less information to blackmail presidents and congress for decades.

Thank you for your opinion, Bill. My opinion is that personal privacy is on its way out. Our technological evolution is such that expectations of personal privacy on a level we have previously enjoyed is little more than wishful thinking.

2 Replies

Meanwhile, Spain has opened an investigation into US eavesdropping on telephone calls.
Yesterday, Spain's El Mundo newspaper published a classified document showing that the US security services tracked 60.5 million Spanish telephone calls in a single month as part of their worldwide espionage program.

0 Replies

@Frank Apisa,

Quote:

My opinion is that personal privacy is on its way out.

Say bye bye to your democracy then. Once the NSA can blackmail any potential leader or politician into submission, why even bother voting?

3 Replies

@Frank Apisa,

Quote:

My opinion is that personal privacy is on its way out. Our technological evolution is such that expectations of personal privacy on a level we have previously enjoyed is little more than wishful thinking.

An you are an expert on the internet and computer/internet security I assume?

You are up on such subjects as perfect forward security or the encrypted standards being now build into IP6 or VPNs or pgp or.........?

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Quote:

Once the NSA can blackmail any potential leader or politician into submission, why even bother voting?

Not only that but such data bases are a treasure worth more then all the gold in the world that can distorted the whole world financial system.

Knowing what every major company/firm/government are planning on doing in the future and what every major banks/national banks officers and other major power center for that matter on the planet.

As had already been shown a number of times lately that we know of that the US government can not keep such data bases from being misused by those who run them.

How many hundreds of millions could you sell say Microsoft or Google plans to buy smaller firms over the next five years or what the Fed are going to set the banks discount rate at months before they announce the change.

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

5) My personal privacy is NOT an important thing to ME. I post under my own real name…and frequently share opinions under my real name in newspapers and magazines.

I post under my real name, I write letters and share opinions in newspapers as well.
But: I have decided to do so under my real name (and if I wouldn't, letters wouldn't be posted/printed).
However, I want to share the content of my emails, phone calls, letters etc only with those with I want them to share.

Personal privacy was one of the main factors, why people in the former GDR liked to get unified with "the other Germany". We still have an upper-level federal agency, where everyone can look at what the Stasi knew about her/him or wanted to know ... still 34,762 times in the first half of this year (6,837,620 times since 1991) Germans did so.

1 Reply

Snowdon is a dummy

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know