Snowdon is a dummy

“I think in some cases the partnerships are more important," he told an audience in Washington.

Frank should be happy that the NSA was spying on the Popes and the church as after all it is well known that the Popes are in lead with international terrorists.

Need to stop those terrorist threats after all..........

But for the record, I am not happy that the NSA is doing any spying or monitoring. I would be very happy if none of it were necessary.

I have no way of knowing whether it is necessary or not...so I am going to assume there was some reason for it being done.

Frank Apisa wrote:

But for the record, I am not happy that the NSA is doing any spying or monitoring. I would be very happy if none of it were necessary.

I have no way of knowing whether it is necessary or not...so I am going to assume there was some reason for it being done.

Indeed. There must have some reason:
- the NSA is not allowed to conduct queries or examine content unless it or a court determines that "national security" is at stake,

...- national security is and was apparently at stake millions of time.

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Frank Apisa wrote:

But for the record, I am not happy that the NSA is doing any spying or monitoring. I would be very happy if none of it were necessary.

I have no way of knowing whether it is necessary or not...so I am going to assume there was some reason for it being done.

Indeed. There must have some reason:
- the NSA is not allowed to conduct queries or examine content unless it or a court determines that "national security" is at stake,

Well...that certainly is what we laypeople think anyway.

Frank Apisa wrote:

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Frank Apisa wrote:

But for the record, I am not happy that the NSA is doing any spying or monitoring. I would be very happy if none of it were necessary.

I have no way of knowing whether it is necessary or not...so I am going to assume there was some reason for it being done.

Indeed. There must have some reason:
- the NSA is not allowed to conduct queries or examine content unless it or a court determines that "national security" is at stake,

Well...that certainly is what we laypeople think anyway.

Actually, I copied that from an opinion by Christopher Slobogin, who holds Vanderbilt Law School's Milton R. Underwood Chair in Law, is the author of "Privacy at Risk: The New Government Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment". Not really a layperson.

But...as Dan Deirdorf shows almost every weekend...decided whether a play was the right play or the wrong play is much, much easier after a play has been run and been a success or a failure.

One might have thought that an average intelligence would have thought of that before mounting the operations.

Frank Apisa wrote:

But...as Dan Deirdorf shows almost every weekend...decided whether a play was the right play or the wrong play is much, much easier after a play has been run and been a success or a failure.

I only can underline what spendi wrote above:

spendi wrote:

One might have thought that an average intelligence would have thought of that before mounting the operations.

But for the record, I am not happy that the NSA is doing any spying or monitoring. I would be very happy if none of it were necessary.

All in all...I regret that some of the action taken has been taken...but I am not as certain as some of you folk that too much was taken and not enough benefit obtained...or as some would have it: Too much was taken no matter how much benefit was derived.

Jury is still out for me. Interesting that so many people feel they can come to a reasonable decision on something like this...with all the "cannot be disclosed" features.

Frank Apisa wrote:

All in all...I regret that some of the action taken has been taken...but I am not as certain as some of you folk that too much was taken and not enough benefit obtained...or as some would have it: Too much was taken no matter how much benefit was derived.

181,280,466 records a month were being sent back by GCHQ to NSA headquarters - including who sent and received emails - in a process carried out overseas that would be illegal in the US - perhaps that really wasn't too much.

Obviously, Walter...this is another issue on which you have no doubts.

It's not about whether I have doubts or not.

I don't like what seems to be in those documents. And if someone presents papers of our secret services, or the French, or ... - I wouldn't like that, too.

Here, I'm just copying/pasting what I read in various media.

The mind, not the hand, holds it together. But, for that very reason, to pre-
serve the ever endangered structure, one figure is even more important than all
the energy of enterprising master-men that make cities to grow out of the ground
and alter the picture of the landscape; it is a figure that is apt to be forgotten
in this conflict of politics — the engineer, the priest of the machine, the man
who knows it. Not merely the importance, but the very existence of the
industry depends upon the existence of the hundred thousand talented, rigor-
ously schooled brains that command the technique and develop it onward
and onward. The quiet engineer it is who is the machine's master and destiny.
His thought is as possibility what the machine is as actuality. There have been
fears, thoroughly materialistic fears, of the exhaustion of the coal-fields. But
so long as there are worthy technical path-finders, dangers of this sort have no
existence. When, and only when, the crop of recruits for this army fails —
this army whose thought-work forms one inward unit with the work of the
machine — the industry must flicker out in spite of all that managerial energy
and the workers can do. Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted
minds were to find their soul's health more important than all the powers of
this world; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism
that is taking the place of rationalism to-day, the very elite of intellect that is
now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense
of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux) —
then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of
intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.