Snowdon is a dummy

There are millions of people in the world including your truly that long before snowden knew how to remain hidden and how to communicate in a secure manner.

What snowden did was let us all know that our own damn government was using their technology against the american people.

Why then that before Snowden and before any limit on mass spying was in place was so many attacks with hundreds of people killed was able to be carry our worldwide?

So the american people knew that NSA was breaking their charter and the law before snowden?

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.

Over the past year, Belgian security forces tapped at least one bomber’s telephone and briefly detained and interviewed at least two other suspects — one for his travels to Syria and the other for his radical views, according to law enforcement officials here.

State prosecutors also had been pursuing Abdelhamid Abaaoud, an alleged ringleader of the plot, for dragging his 13-year-old brother with him to join Islamic State militants in Syria.

On Wednesday, police and soldiers raided an apartment in a Paris suburb in search of Abaaoud, and at least two of its occupants died. They included Abbaoud, French officials confirmed Thursday.

Although the attackers struck in Paris, several were living in or had traveled to a single neighborhood in Brussels.

The high level of awareness about the men — and the missed opportunities for police and intelligence agencies to stop them before the attacks in Paris — shows how difficult it is for hard-pressed security services to keep track of hundreds or thousands of people and pick out which ones might be organizing violent acts.

Not only were police suspicious of the men tied to the Paris attacks, but Belgian researchers and even journalists also were tracking their posts on social media.

Belgian officials said that three men linked to the Paris attacks appeared on a list of 800 Belgians with suspected ties to terrorist groups, a list maintained by the Belgian Coordination Unit for Threat Assessment, a government advisory group. France has a similar list, with 1,200 names.

Yet some experts point out that Belgian security services are handicapped by a shortage of people to follow suspected extremists, a dearth of Arabic speakers, a history of lax gun laws and layers of overlapping government authority.

Maintaining high security is never trivial as one moment of carelessness can undo years and reveal you to a high power enemy such as NSA but it is no more trivial now then before snowden.

All the techniques to have hidden and secure communications was in the public domain decades before snowden.

Let see I wish to tell Izzy when our next terrorist attacks will happen and some of the details.

I take the message and using any number of programs encrypted it beyond the known ability of anyone to break including the NSA and then turning to another program I hide the message in the lower bits of a jpg file.

The computer I used to do this is never connected to the internet.

After transfering the file to a netbook, I travel to a public hot spot and on top of that I boot the tor network and upload the picture to any picture sharing website using a one time throw away account.

Izzy take similar steps when downloading the picture and reading the message.e

It is surely a pain but doable and you are as safe from the NSA or anyone else as you can be.

Unlike others I don't think Snowden deserves a medal, he recklessly took classified information most of which had nothing to do with data spying and gave it to persons unauthorized. However, I do agree mass data spying has been largely ineffective in it's purpose of catching and terrorist before they strike. When you think about it, it makes sense. It is too much information to sort through and analyze in a timely manner for it to do much good.

I hope the day never comes when I have secrets so important that I have to do even half of that crap...or where I am so paranoid that I think I have secrets that important.

Quote:

I hope the day never comes when I have secrets so important that I have to do even half of that crap...or where I am so paranoid that I think I have secrets that important.

I was talking about how terrorists could communicate over the net and such would be at risk of getting a hell fired missile up their asses if they was careless so you could not said they would be paranoid!!!!!!!

For myself most of my communication are in the clear except those that contain finance info as those I do encrypted.

...I freely acknowledge I DO NOT KNOW HOW EFFICACIOUS IT HAS BEEN...and I suspect no one else here knows either.

Frank Apisa wrote:

...I freely acknowledge I DO NOT KNOW HOW EFFICACIOUS IT HAS BEEN...and I suspect no one else here knows either.

What we do know is that neither of our governments can give details of any successful conviction that came as a result of mass data trawl. They can give details of convictions brought about by targeted surveillance. And they were both very keen to carry on with mass data trawling just in case.

Logically it's fairly safe to assume that if they did have just one case they'd be singing from the rooftops about it. They're not.

I am not interested in prosecuting and convicting terrorists of terrorist activities, Izzy.

I am interested in STOPPING terrorists from committing terrorist activities.

Section 89a
Preparation of a serious violent offence endangering the state

(1) Whosoever prepares a serious offence endangering the state shall be liable to imprisonment from six months to ten years. ... ... ...

Frank Apisa wrote:

I am not interested in prosecuting and convicting terrorists of terrorist activities, Izzy.

I am interested in STOPPING terrorists from committing terrorist activities.

If someone wsants to commit a terroristic activity, is caught and thus stopped doing it - she/he/they get/s prosecuted and convicted here.

Quote:

Section 89a
Preparation of a serious violent offence endangering the state

(1) Whosoever prepares a serious offence endangering the state shall be liable to imprisonment from six months to ten years. ... ... ...

...I freely acknowledge I DO NOT KNOW HOW EFFICACIOUS IT HAS BEEN...and I suspect no one else here knows either.

Quote:

...I freely acknowledge I DO NOT KNOW HOW EFFICACIOUS IT HAS BEEN...and I suspect no one else here knows either.

We do know because there has been an investigation into and they reported the results of that investigation. Several in fact. If that information hasn't been out there for well over a year, I wouldn't have changed my mind about it.