Snowdon is a dummy

That's because they have the "freedom of choice." It's not about your isolated ideas. That's why it's called a "democracy."

Why would anyone consider moving to another country because they are dissatisfied with their government in any democracy?

If that's so, why did you even suggest I join Snowden in Russia? [/quoe]

Because you seem so unhappy here in the US. I thought I answered that three times already. You having trouble following?

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You're an idiot besides not making much sense on most things.

Yes, ci...I understand that you have to think of others as uninformed, ignorant or as idiots who make no sense.

That probably makes you feel better about yourself.

I can understand why you would want to do that.

I can decide on my very own whether I'm happy in my country or not; none of your business.

Making idiotic suggestions is in your stupid guessings.

... ... ... Intercepting the telephone calls of Angela Merkel would have been "politically unwise" and "certainly illegal under German law", according to a former senior British secret intelligence officer.

However, he says that under international law, tapping into the German chancellor's telephone conversations "would appear to be fair game".
[...]
Inkster says that while NSA surveillance programmes violated the domestic laws of countries subjected to espionage, it was less obvious that they violated international law.

"International lawyers hold a wide spectrum of opinions on the legality of espionage, and there was nothing in existing international law that expressly proscribed espionage," he writes.

He says it is clear that the NSA's own protective security was "not fit for purpose" in dealing with what he calls an "insider threat" – a reference to Snowden, a former NSA contractor. That has long been recognised.

But Inkster claims there was an implicit argument by newspapers publishing the Snowden revelations that the data was "so promiscuously distributed" that the NSA deserved to have its secrets exposed. That argument is self-serving and does not stand up to close analysis, says Inkster.

In his article, titled The Snowden Revelations: Myths and Misapprehensions, he says the NSA had no interest in the "private communications of ordinary citizens" in the US or elsewhere, and lacked the motivation and resources to monitor them "on a systematic or intensive basis". The term "mass surveillance" is a misnomer, says Inkster.

He says Snowden's revelations will undoubtedly act as a catalyst for some states to speed up their efforts to diversify their communications networks "to minimise dependence on US systems".

This is an issue that Merkel said she would raise with Hollande in Paris. But the process of avoiding having to rely on US networks "began some time ago", writes Inkster.
[...]

Same thing could be said about freedom of speech, but I still defend freedom of speech.

And if the term "mass surveillance" is a misnomer, where does it start? 90%? 100%?

The NSA and its allies have been conducting mass surveillance on their own populations

The term ‘mass surveillance’ is a misnomer. Mass surveillance would imply that the states in question had been systematically monitoring the communications of their citizens and taking actions against them on the basis of the information gleaned from this process. In fact, what has happened is that the NSA and its partner agencies have been running huge quantities of communications metadata through computer programmes designed to identify extremely small target sets on the basis of very strict criteria; as Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Iain Lobban put it in his public testimony to the UK Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC): searching the haystack for fragments of needles. Some errors have been registered – a judgment by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court made public by the US government revealed that, since 2011, some 56,000 emails of US citizens and residents had been improperly read. As a proportion of the total email traffic fed through NSA computers, this number is vanishingly small. The NSA had logged and reported these errors – and the very fact of the FISA court judgment identified the errors suggests that the checks and balances built into the US oversight system are working correctly. Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest anyone in the US has suffered any injustice or discrimination as a result of their emails having been read.


The NSA and its allies have been violating the data-privacy rights of foreign nationals not protected by US law

There is a growing international consensus towards the proposition that, as was affirmed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2012, the rights to privacy enshrined in the 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights apply in cyberspace. But there is no global consensus on what constitutes personal data in cyberspace. EU data-privacy legislation, for instance, treats IP addresses as part of personal data, whereas the US Supreme Court has ruled that they are not. The US is operating on its own interpretation of the law, as it is entitled to do, citing the imperative of national security. From a more practical perspective, the NSA has no interest in the private communications of ordinary citizens and lacks both the motivation and the resources to monitor them on a systematic or intensive basis. There comes a stage in any monitoring process where machines can no longer do the job and humans have to take over. The staffs of both the NSA and GCHQ would have to be many times larger than they in fact are in order to monitor such large volumes of traffic, much less take follow-up action. Moreover, it is now clear that much of the non-US data searched by the NSA was in fact provided by the intelligence services of the countries concerned, with the authorisation of their governments, as part of a programme of collaboration on counter-terrorism.

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Same thing could be said about freedom of speech, but I still defend freedom of speech.

Do you defend and trust the intelligence community to have at if finger tips the means to blackmail our leaders?

Do you defend citizens even citizens that have service this nation military with honor and who have no criminal charges against them being block from returning home due to some unknown bureaucrats placing them on a no fly list for unknown reasons????

All that is just fine with you as we can and should trust all government bureaucrats without question????

Do you think for a second that the kind of people who would used the power of government to cause pain to hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens by blocking lanes on a bridge would if given the access would not then misused intelligence information to punish their enemies.

At least the government of NJ does not have secret stamps to cover up their misdeeds.

Sorry massive spying is a **** poor way of finding enemies as have been shown by the fact that all that information on phone calls have not found one terrorist plot to date.

Those data bases by existing however are a danger to all of us and given human nature and our history they will sooner or later be used by people who have access to them to attack political enemies.

You do not know that to be the case.

You are way too paranoid, Bill.

BillRM wrote:

Sorry massive spying is a **** poor way of finding enemies as have been shown by the fact that all that information on phone calls have not found one terrorist plot to date.


Frank,

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You do not know that to be the case

.

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You do not know that to be the case.

Sorry Frank but that bit of information came from the President own panel so we do in fact know that as a fact.

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You are way too paranoid, Bill.

Was the people who Kennedy and other president send the IRS after for political reasons also paranoid?

Was the Rev King paranoid when he received a blackmail letter from Hoover suggesting that he killed himself?

Was Presidents beginning with Truman paranoid concerning Hoover?

Was the people of NJ sitting for hours in traffic jams cause for political reasons paranoid for that matter.

How about the citizens who find themselves on no fly lists for no known reason with some of them not being able to return home as a result paranoid?

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BillRM wrote:

Sorry massive spying is a **** poor way of finding enemies as have been shown by the fact that all that information on phone calls have not found one terrorist plot to date.


Frank,

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You do not know that to be the case

.

You don't either...

...but NSA hasn't shown otherwise, and most reports show they did not prevent any terrorist activity by their mass data collection.

We do know that IT'S AGAINST THE LAW~!

Constitutional rights
The right to privacy often means the right to personal autonomy, or the right to choose whether or not to engage in certain acts or have certain experiences. Several amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been used in varying degrees of success in determining a right to personal autonomy:

The First Amendment protects the privacy of beliefs
The Third Amendment protects the privacy of the home against the use of it for housing soldiers
The Fourth Amendment protects privacy against unreasonable searches
The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, which in turn protects the privacy of personal information
The Ninth Amendment says that the "enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." This has been interpreted as justification for broadly reading the Bill of Rights to protect privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.
The right to privacy is most often cited in the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, which states:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

No, Frank, you continue to ignore the primary issue; IT'S AGAINST THE LAW!

The Ninth Amendment says that the "enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." This has been interpreted as justification for broadly reading the Bill of Rights to protect privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.