Snowdon is a dummy

Quote:

The chief congressional critics of the US National Security Agency said Thursday that a White House review panel report gave them momentum to end bulk domestic surveillance, but expressed reservations about one of the panel’s central proposals.

In an indication of the changing political landscape for the NSA, Representative James Sensenbrenner, the chief House sponsor of a bill preventing the agency from collecting US domestic phone data, said Thursday that “President Obama’s hand-picked panel” highlighted “the need to enact the USA Freedom Act.

But Sensenbrenner, in an interview with the Guardian, was wary of its recommendation that phone companies or other private parties should store communications data for the NSA to search.

"The administration has not yet made the case that increased data retention is necessary, but I welcome any proposals that serve our national security interests without undermining constitutional rights” Sensenbrenner said.

And, of course the taxpayers would be paying the telecoms for the expense of this extra storage - just as we're now paying for the cost of providing the data to the NSA. This is a cash cow for the phone companies. One of the reasons, imo, that they've been so slow in coming out against the program.

I expect that if we did adopt this foolish idea of having private companies store data for our spy agencies, it would only take a few seconds for the people who presently complain about how horrible the NSA is, to switch gears and start complaining about how horrible those private companies are.

If third-world states wish to cut themselves off from the internet, I doubt the civilized world will even notice.

Members of al-Qa'ida?

If the UN ever passes that absurdity, they will find that the civilized world will ignore them and the internet will continue as before.

If anti-American bigots use the fact that we spy on terrorists and disreputable governments to justify not doing business with American companies, that is not the fault of American spy agencies.

The point being that the holder of the information could not legally hand it to NSA without a warrant from the Federal courts

and better yet not the secret FIC court that should be done away with.

But we would notice if the EU and China and Japan and so on would cut us off.

The civilized world more and more are viewing the US and the UK as not being part of that world due to our government own actions.

No my friend people that the US government can not act openly against due to them breaking no known laws.

But wait until the complainers decide that "having it held by a private corporation" is much worse than "having it held by the government".

If you do away with court oversight of the government, the government will then be free to operate without any court oversight.

The problem is that NSA ia spying on everyone and unless you would wish to just turn over all your trade secrets and such over to a branch of the US government you need to shut down the access to your information from NSA and not trusting that US hardware and software does not have back doors in them enough to buy them is part of shutting that access off.

Which people, who are not members of al-Qa'ida, are having their porn browsing habits exposed by the government

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html

-- The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority.

None of the six individuals targeted by the NSA is accused in the document of being involved in terror plots. The agency believes they all currently reside outside the United States. It identifies one of them, however, as a "U.S. person," which means he is either a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. A U.S. person is entitled to greater legal protections against NSA surveillance than foreigners are.

radicalizing others through incendiary speeches

None of the six individuals targeted by the NSA is accused in the document of being involved in terror plots.

You are confusing the NSA with China and France. The NSA doesn't spy on corporate secrets.

If you are not a terrorist or the government of a disreputable nation, you don't need to worry much about the NSA.

http://www.cajuntechie.org/2013/06/an-interesting-article-on-nsa-domestic.html

BY KRIS KOTARSKI, CALGARY HERALD

In October 2008, a 39-year-old former U.S. navy linguist who worked at
a National Security Agency (NSA) centre in Georgia went on ABC News
and blew the whistle on himself and his fellow NSA operators for
listening in on the private conversations of hundreds of American aid
workers and soldiers calling home to the United States from Iraq.

“Hey, check this out,” David Murfee Faulk says he would be told.
“There’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this
call, it’s really funny, go check it out.”

Another linguist, 31-year-old Adrienne Kinne, told ABC that the NSA
would listen to calls made by military officers, journalists and aid
workers from organizations such as the International Red Cross and
Doctors Without Borders, listening to “personal, private things with
Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with
anything to do with terrorism.”

“We knew they were working for these aid organizations. They were
identified in our systems as ‘belongs to the International Red Cross’
and all these other organizations,” Kinne told ABC News. “And yet,
instead of blocking these phone numbers, we continued to collect on
them.”

You are confusing the NSA with China and France. The NSA doesn't spy on corporate secrets.

The civilized world does not object to the fact that the US government has spy agencies.

If China and the less worthwhile parts of the EU choose to cut us off, I for one wouldn't notice a bit.