Snowdon is a dummy

Well...since I am saying "Let the government govern"...why are you suggesting they would be monitoring me.

Frank Apisa wrote:

Well...since I am saying "Let the government govern"...why are you suggesting they would be monitoring me.

You don't live here, so they wouldn't. And that's why I used the conjunctive.

The government wouldn't monitor you but the intelligence agency.
Certainly the government should govern - that's why we elected them (respectively the parties, they come from).
But they have to follow the constitution as well as I have my constitutional rights.

While the N.S.A. fixed problems with how it handled those purely domestic messages to the court’s satisfaction, the 2011 ruling revealed further issues.

Doesn't the congress' oversight committee supposed to make sure they operate legally?

[...]
Germany has some of the strongest laws in the world when it comes to surveillance and privacy. It is illegal for the foreign security service, the BND, to spy on its own citizens. But, the NSA has had bases in Germany since 1945 and there are no laws that govern its behaviour. A parliamentary inquiry is now under way, to try and establish what the BND knew – the only one of its kind in the world, post-Snowden – but when I visit Hans-Christian Ströbele, the veteran Green MP who is leading the inquiry, in his office in the Bundestag he tells me: “We think we will find good information about what the BND has been doing.” And the NSA? GCHQ? He shakes his head. “Isn’t that a bit depressing?” I say. “That we’re sitting here in the parliament of one of the greatest democracies on earth, with a constitution that had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and there is nothing, legislatively that you can do?”

“It is,” he says.
[... ... ...]
Poitras tells me how she has come to censor herself. “It’s not whether or not they’re watching, but the fact that you don’t know if they’re watching. You’ve internalised in some way this authority of the state.” At the end of the interview, I tell her how Snowden spoke at the Observer Festival of Ideas and how afterwards I and my colleague John Naughton asked him questions via Google Hangouts from my laptop. “Am I on the grid?” I ask her.

She guffaws. “You are so on the grid.” It’s only semi-serious but still. “As soon as you start to censor yourself,” Domscheit-Berg tells me, “then you leave the path of free speech. So many people now do this in Berlin. They avoid certain expressions. When we have meetings they leave their phones in different rooms. You have already lost your freedom.”

Have I already lost mine? Has it affected my online behaviour? Possibly. My thoughts have always flowed seamlessly from my brain to my fingers to Google’s all-knowing rectangular white box. And now? There’s the briefest pause. A hesitancy. It’s not exactly an iron curtain but it’s not nothing either. I’m being watched. But then, you are too. And, if you think it doesn’t matter, go to Berlin. Go to the Stasi museum. See how it all panned out last time around.

When the investigation is complete and they know what the BND knew, will they openly share it so the tech activist will know?

Sometimes it seems to me, Germany pats itself on it's back because they have laws, but it seems those in some places ignore those laws when they choose. Oh, well. (referring to "accidental" spying on Kerry and Clinton while they were spying on Turkey, you know, allies)

referring to "accidental" spying on Kerry and Clinton while they were spying on Turkey, you know, allies)

Sometimes it seems to me, Germany pats itself on it's back because they have laws, but it seems those in some places ignore those laws when they choose. Oh, well. (referring to "accidental" spying on Kerry and Clinton while they were spying on Turkey, you know, allies)

(If it's true what has been reported.)