Snowdon is a dummy

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

oralloy wrote:

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

Bullshit they even spy on trade negotiators.

Other then the four other nations that is in bed with us in spying on the world all nations seem fair game.

So I and others here who hate what NSA is doing and dare to speak out are members of al-Qa'ida?

If anyone say anything against the US government they are al-Qa'ida members?

oralloy wrote:

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

You need to read some non-U.S. news sources - from various political perspectives.

Pretty much the entire world believes the NSA has been allowed to do things that are not acceptable.

The U.S. is losing status and face with many of its allies/former allies.

China has control of a lot of U.S. debt. The U.S. needs to stay on China's good side or there will be nothing left of the U.S. economy.

oralloy wrote:

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

That's whistling in the dark oralloy

and if true makes the NSA's activities pointless.

But we don't use our spy agencies to steal corporate secrets.

https://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/991101-echelon-mj.htm

Trade Secrets : Is the U.S.'s most advanced surveillance system feeding economic intelligence to American businesses?

Kurt Kleiner
Mother Jones November 1, 1999
No one is surprised that the United States uses sophisticated electronic spying techniques against its enemies. But Europeans are increasingly worried about allegations that the U.S. uses those same techniques to gather economic intelligence about its allies.
The most extensive claims yet came this spring in a report written for the European Parliament. The report says that the U.S.

National Security Agency, through an electronic surveillance system called Echelon, routinely tracks telephone, fax, and e-mail transmissions from around the world and passes on useful corporate intelligence to American companies.

Among the allegations: that the NSA fed information to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas enabling the companies to beat out European Airbus Industrie for a $ 6 billion contract; and that Raytheon received information that helped it win a $ 1.3 billion contract to provide radar to Brazil, edging out the French company Thomson-CSF. These claims follow previous allegations that the NSA supplied U.S. automakers with information that helped improve their competitiveness with the Japanese (see "Company Spies," May/June 1994).

Is there truth to these allegations? The NSA is among the most secretive of U.S. intelligence agencies and won't say much beyond the fact that its mission is "foreign signals intelligence." The companies involved all refused to comment.

"Since the NSA's collection capabilities are so grotesquely powerful, it's difficult to know what's going on over there," says John Pike, an analyst at the watchdog group Federation of American Scientists, who has tracked the NSA for years.

This much is known: The NSA owns one of the largest collections of supercomputers in the world, and it's an open secret--as documented in the European Parliament report--that Echelon vacuums up massive amounts of data from communications satellites and the Internet and then uses its computers to winnow it down. The system scans communications for keywords--"bomb," for instance--that might tip off analysts to an interesting topic.

Fueling allegations of corporate espionage is the fact that defense contractors and U.S. intelligence agencies are linked extensively through business relationships. Raytheon, for instance, has large contracts to service NSA equipment, according to the European report.

Englishman Glyn Ford, the European Parliament member who initiated the study, wants the NSA to come clean about its activities in Europe. And the Europeans have some leverage on this issue, if they decide to use it. In a drive to improve surveillance, the United States is pressuring European governments to make telephone companies build eavesdropping capabilities into their new systems. But if that's what the U.S. wants, says Ford, it's going to have to be open about what information it's collecting: "If we are going to leave the keys under the doormat for the United States, we want a guarantee that they're not going to steal the family silver," he says.

In the meantime, congressional critics have started to wonder if all that high-powered eavesdropping is limited to overseas snooping. In April, Bob Barr (R-Ga.), a member of the House Government Reform Committee, said he was worried by reports that the NSA was engaged in illicit domestic spying.

"We don't have any direct evidence from the NSA, since they've refused to provide any reports, even when asked by the House Intelligence Committee," Barr says. "But if in fact the NSA is pulling two million transmissions an hour off of these satellites, I don't think there's any way they have of limiting them to non-U.S. citizens."

Last May, after the NSA stonewalled requests to discuss the issue, Congress amended the intelligence appropriations bill to require the agency to submit a report to Congress. (The bill is still in a conference committee.) And the NSA will face more questions when the Government Reform Committee holds hearings on Echelon and other surveillance programs.

"We ought to prevent any agency from the dragnet approach--where they throw out a net and drag anything in," Barr says.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-brazil-oil-petrobras

Petrobras is the largest company in Brazil – majority owned by the state – and one of the 30 biggest businesses in the world. Photograph: Bloomberg/ Getty
The US National Security Agency has been accused of spying on Brazil's biggest oil company, Petrobras, following the release of more files from US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The latest disclosures, which aired on Brazil's Fantástico news program, have led to accusations that the NSA is conducting intelligence-gathering operations that go beyond its core mission of national security – often cited as the key distinction between the agency and its counterparts in China and Russia.

The revelations are likely to further strain ties between the US and Brazil ahead of a planned state dinner for president Dilma Rousseff at the White House in October. Bileteral relations have already been muddled by the earlier release of NSA files showing the US agency intercepted Brazilian communications and spied on Rousseff and her aides.

Petrobras is the largest company in Brazil and one of the 30 biggest businesses in the world. Majority owned by the state, it is a major source of revenue for the government and is developing the biggest oil discoveries of this century, which are in a pre-salt region deep under the Atlantic.

Fantástico revealed a top secret NSA file – giv

And as you are not an al-Qa'ida propagandist, the NSA is not going to root out any porn browsing habits that you may or may not engage in

BillRM wrote:
Other then the four other nations that is in bed with us in spying on the world all nations seem fair game.

They are fair game.

That is incorrect. The civilized world does not object to the fact that the US government has spy agencies. You are referring to third-world riffraff.

You really are unaware of much of what is going on in the U.S. and the world.
Fascinating to see the absolute isolation you appear to be living in.

oralloy wrote:

But we don't use our spy agencies to steal corporate secrets.

Bullshit......

Trade Secrets : Is the U.S.'s most advanced surveillance system feeding economic intelligence to American businesses?
Mother Jones November 1, 1999

The US National Security Agency has been accused of spying on Brazil's biggest oil company, Petrobras, following the release of more files from US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

oralloy wrote:

And as you are not an al-Qa'ida propagandist, the NSA is not going to root out any porn browsing habits that you may or may not engage in.

An those people are not charge with being members of .al-Qa'ida either.

oralloy wrote:

BillRM wrote:

Other then the four other nations that is in bed with us in spying on the world all nations seem fair game.

They are fair game.

So almost every nation on earth is fair game even allies????

oralloy wrote:

That is incorrect. The civilized world does not object to the fact that the US government has spy agencies. You are referring to third-world riffraff.

Oh you have not been reading about the reactions of the bulk spying being done against the citizens of friendly nations?

Leftist propaganda.

Come on the one charge was from the information that Snowdon had released an none of his released information had been challenge by the government as not being truthful.

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/20/21975158-nsa-program-stopped-no-terror-attacks-says-white-house-panel-member

A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.


“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”
While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.”
“We found none,” said Stone.
Under the NSA program, first revealed by ex-contractor Edward Snowden, the agency collects in bulk the records of the time and duration of phone calls made by persons inside the United States.
Stone was one of five members of the White House review panel – and the only one without any intelligence community experience – that this week produced a sweeping report recommending that the NSA’s collection of phone call records be terminated to protect Americans’ privacy rights.
The panel made that recommendation after concluding that the program was “not essential in preventing attacks.”
“That was stunning. That was the ballgame,” said one congressional intelligence official, who asked not to be publicly identified. “It flies in the face of everything that they have tossed at us.”