Snowdon is a dummy

Not sure it is positive...but if I had to bet, I'd bet that the world would have had a better chance of preventing that attack if Edward Snowden had not done what he did.

Thinking in terms of France and terroists I am not so sure this is a good thing. If it will save a couple of hundred to thousands of lives I could endure them pikeing on my phone conversations.

Name me one time that massive spying on US citizens had stop one terrorist attack.....just one damn example would do.

So the NSA had stopped spying on Belgian and French citizens due to a "Snowden effect"?

Not sure it is positive...but if I had to bet, I'd bet that the world would have had a better chance of preventing that attack if Edward Snowden had not done what he did.

Or break the constitution by issuing what amount to a general warrant for the bulk of all american citizens communications.

Quote:

Not sure it is positive...but if I had to bet, I'd bet that the world would have had a better chance of preventing that attack if Edward Snowden had not done what he did.

Once more name me one attack that did not happen due to the massive and non-target spying.

BillRM wrote:

Name me one time that massive spying on US citizens had stop one terrorist attack.....just one damn example would do.

It is hardly reasonable to ask a question that can only be answered by possessing and exposing classified information.

ill...only someone insane would suppose that our clandestine services are going to name the kinds of things they stop and the methods they use to stop them.

Funny how when the same question about targeted surveillance is asked they're only too happy to give chapter and verse. Possessing and exposing classified information isn't much of a problem then.

In any case, if you were running an intelligence agency...and you were successful in stopping attacks...would you brag about it or talk about it in generalities and not say anything that the terrorists might use to avoid detection in the future.

Are you privy to information that the FBI and the CIA have in referance to secret stuff? I think you are as full of it as Baldy and some of the other genuises on this site.

It dosent bother me especially if it helps to stop a lot of killing of innocents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(science_fiction_story)

"Deadline" is a 1944 science fiction short story by Cleve Cartmill which was published in Astounding Science Fiction. The story described the then-secret atomic bomb in some detail. At that time the bomb was still under development and top secret, which prompted a visit by the FBI.[1]
In 1943, Cartmill suggested to John W. Campbell, the then-editor of Astounding, that he could write a story about a futuristic super-bomb.[2] Campbell liked the idea and supplied Cartmill with considerable background information gleaned from unclassified scientific journals, on the use of Uranium-235 to make a nuclear fission device. The resulting story appeared in the issue of Astounding dated March 1944, which actually appeared early in February of that year.
By March 8 it had come to the attention of the Counterintelligence Corps, who saw many similarities between the technical details in the story and the research currently being undertaken in great secrecy at Los Alamos. Gregory Benford describes the incident as told him by Edward Teller in his autobiographical essay "Old Legends":
Coming three years later in the same magazine, Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline” provoked astonishment in the lunch table discussions at Los Alamos. It really did describe isotope separation and the bomb itself in detail, and raised as its principal plot pivot the issue the physicists were then debating among themselves: should the Allies use it? To the physicists from many countries clustered in the high mountain strangeness of New Mexico, cut off from their familiar sources of humanist learning, it must have seemed particularly striking that Cartmill described an allied effort, a joint responsibility laid upon many nations.
Discussion of Cartmill’s “Deadline” was significant. The story’s detail was remarkable, its sentiments even more so. Did this rather obscure story hint at what the American public really thought about such a superweapon, or would think if they only knew?
Talk attracts attention, Teller recalled a security officer who took a decided interest, making notes, saying little. In retrospect, it was easy to see what a wartime intelligence monitor would make of the physicists’ conversations. Who was this guy Cartmill, anyway? Where did he get these details? Who tipped him to the isotope separation problem? “and that is why Mr. Campbell received his visitors.”
Fearing a security breach, the FBI began an investigation into Cartmill, Campbell, and some of their acquaintances (including Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein).[3] It appears that the authorities eventually accepted the explanation that the story's material had been gleaned from unclassified sources, but as a precautionary measure they requested that Campbell should not publish any further stories about nuclear technology for the remainder of the war.
Campbell, in the meantime, had guessed from the number of Astounding subscribers who had suddenly moved to the Los Alamos area, that the US government probably had some sort of technical or scientific project ongoing there. He declined to volunteer this information to the FBI.