Snowdon is a dummy

I can say that although I feel a loyalty to my country (just as I feel a loyalty to humanity in general)...I am certainly not so infatuated that I will not speak out when I see it doing wrong.

oralloy wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

oralloy wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

After having implemented this surveillance program in complete secrecy

The program was authorized by public legislation.

Not explicitly. The regime justifies its surveillance program, PRISM, by way of its 2008 amendment to the, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, but it isn't in that amendment.

That may be the case with PRISM, but the program that was just eviscerated was explicitly authorized by the PATRIOT Act.

Which program is that?

oralloy wrote:

And given the fact that the program that was explicitly authorized by law has just been eviscerated for no good reason, there seems to be a good argument for going the route of just implementing these programs without any legal authorization.

What argumen would that be?

oralloy wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

oralloy wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

and circle-jerk collusion throughout all of the branches of government

Was it bad that they got warrants from judges before they accessed the data???

It's bad that the judiciary won't even consider this program's legality on the basis that no one has demonstrated that they've been directly harmed by this program. They're issuing warrants through a program of dubious, to say the least, legality.

Are we talking about PRISM or the phone metadata?

The phone metadata collection is what PRISM authorized.

oralloy wrote:

The phone metadata program was legal as far as I can see.

Yeah, that's the regime's argument as well.

oralloy wrote:

It is noteworthy that the explicitly legal program was just destroyed, while the not-so-legal program continues unabated.

What programs are you talking about?

The mass data program (whatever it is officially called) was discontinued probably because (would have to look it up to know for sure) there was/is too much evidence which suggested it was too vast to do much good in tracking down terrorist. Why continue a program if it does no good, just for ideological reasons?

My guess...

...AND THIS IS PURE GUESSWORK...

...is that it is not as ineffective as some of its detractors want to paint it...

...and it is almost certainly not stopped.

I suspect it has gone further underground.

Essentially, I think the only thing we have lost...is the intensity of the over-sight.

InfraBlue wrote:

oralloy wrote:

. . . the program that was just eviscerated was explicitly authorized by the PATRIOT Act.

Which program is that?

The phone metadata program.

Since the programs that have no judicial or Congressional oversight are the ones that survive, we should free the NSA of all such oversight.

I thought PRISM was something about recording everything on the internet.

InfraBlue wrote:

oralloy wrote:

The phone metadata program was legal as far as I can see.

Yeah, that's the regime's argument as well.

Well, it had been authorized by law, and the data was only accessed with the permission of judicial warrants. The claim that it was legal was on pretty solid ground.

The lesson is clear. It is a mistake to subject our intelligence operations to Congressional or judicial oversight.

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab in Russia have discovered yet another new nation-state attack attributed to members of the infamous Stuxnet and Duqu gang. But this time the perpetrators were hiding in plain sight—inside the security firm’s own networks.

...

The attackers appear to be the same group that created Duqu, spyware discovered in 2011 that was used to hack a certificate authority in Hungary, as well as targets in Iran and Sudan, and that shared a number of similarities with Stuxnet, the famed digital weapon that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear program. The team’s handiwork popped up again in 2012 in two sophisticated spy tools Kaspersky helped expose—the massive Flame surveillance platform that infected thousands of victims over a period of five years and the mysterious Gauss attack, which contained a payload so securely locked that it’s yet to be deciphered.

...

Kaspersky wasn’t the only victim of Duqu 2.0. Based on data the company collected from its customers, the attackers also struck a series of hotels and conference venues, each of them a location where members of the UN Security Council met in the past year to negotiate Iran’s nuclear program. That program is a recurring interest for the attackers behind the Duqu code, which shouldn’t come as a big surprise. The US and Israel reportedly were behind Stuxnet, but various researchers have long suspected that Israel alone was behind the Duqu code. The focused spying on the nuclear negotiations, from which Israel was excluded, would seem to support this theory.

Additionally, the security firm Symantec, which obtained samples of Duqu 2.0 provided by Kaspersky, uncovered more victims of the targeted attack code among its own customers, and found that some of these victims were in the US—a fact that would be cause for even more concern if the attack were perpetrated by the US government.

oralloy wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

oralloy wrote:

. . . the program that was just eviscerated was explicitly authorized by the PATRIOT Act.

Which program is that?

The phone metadata program.

The PATRIOT Act allows for wiretaps of telephones without court order.

It doesn't authorize phone metadata collection.

oralloy wrote:

Since the programs that have no judicial or Congressional oversight are the ones that survive, we should free the NSA of all such oversight.

Which programs are those?

oralloy wrote:

I thought PRISM was something about recording everything on the internet.

PRISM is the phone metadata collection program.

oralloy wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

oralloy wrote:

The phone metadata program was legal as far as I can see.

Yeah, that's the regime's argument as well.

Well, it had been authorized by law, and the data was only accessed with the permission of judicial warrants. The claim that it was legal was on pretty solid ground.

The fact that the regime granted itself authorization through the secret implementation of this program to surveil the citizens of the US throught their cellular phones is on pretty shaky legal ground vis-à-vis the 4th Amendment.

oralloy wrote:

The lesson is clear. It is a mistake to subject our intelligence operations to Congressional or judicial oversight.

You've pointed out what's being done with some of these programs. You haven't explained why it's a mistake.

The threat of abuse by the government of this enormous power that it granted to itself is too great to be accepted.

He could have bypassed all that by returning to the U S,