The Guardian releases part 2 of the Snowden interview:
The Guardian releases part 2 of the Snowden interview:
For every action, there is a corresponding over-reaction. -- Anonymous
Interesting article.Originally Posted by Fore
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/0...l#.UdzE1Mu9KSM
WASHINGTON — In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.
Dial 800 2RAT USNITCH
The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but
progress. -- Joseph Joubert
Attachment 1008
Those telco's, always playing the angle to make an extra buck$$ off the customer! Pretty handy, the laws passed to exempt them from prosecution for invasion of privacy. If you or I committed the same acts, we would be locked up. They not only escaped legal recourse (criminal & civil), they profit from exposing personal information.
What the government pays to snoop on you
Anne Flaherty
How much are your private conversations worth to the U.S. government? Turns out, it can be a lot, depending on the technology.
In the era of intense government surveillance and secret court orders, a murky multimillion-dollar market has emerged. Paid for by U.S. tax dollars, but with little public scrutiny, surveillance fees charged in secret by technology and phone companies can vary wildly.
AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 "activation fee" for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that, according to industry disclosures made last year to Congressman Edward Markey.
Meanwhile, email records like those amassed by the National Security Agency through a program revealed by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden probably were collected for free or very cheaply. Facebook says it doesn't charge the government for access. And while Microsoft, Yahoo and Google won't say how much they charge, the American Civil Liberties Union found that email records can be turned over for as little as $25.
Story Continues
The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but
progress. -- Joseph Joubert
Attachment 1008
Should have known big business was making a profit from it.
Good article here: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/...ainstream.html
This is the kind of issue that separates the patriots from the nationalists.Top Terrorism Experts Say that Mass Spying Doesn’t Work to Prevent Terrorism
The fact that mass spying on Americans isn’t necessary to keep us safe is finally going mainstream.
The top counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush – Richard Clarke – says:
The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.
***
If the government wanted a particular set of records, it could tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court why — and then be granted permission to access those records directly from specially maintained company servers. The telephone companies would not have to know what data were being accessed. There are no technical disadvantages to doing it that way, although it might be more expensive.
Would we, as a nation, be willing to pay a little more for a program designed this way, to avoid a situation in which the government keeps on its own computers a record of every time anyone picks up a telephone? That is a question that should have been openly asked and answered in Congress.
William Binney – the head of NSA’s digital communications program – says that he set up the NSA’s system so that all of the information would automatically be encrypted, so that the government had to obtain a search warrant based upon probably cause before a particular suspect’s communications could be decrypted. But the NSA now collects all data in an unencrypted form, so that no probable cause is needed to view any citizen’s information. He says that it is actually cheaper and easier to store the data in an encrypted format: so the government’s current system is being done for political – not practical – purposes. Binney’s statements have been confirmed by other high-level NSA whistleblowers.
Binney also says:
- Massive surveillance doesn’t work to make us safer
- The government is using information gained through mass surveillance in order to go after anyone they take a dislike to (a lieutenant colonel for the Stasi East German’s agrees)
From the horse's mouth:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/2...r-germans.html
Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs
Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.
“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.
In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.
“So much information, on so many people,” he said.
East Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.
Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.
“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”
Read more click here: NBCFrom NBC: Groups sue to halt NSA electronic surveillance
Rights activists, church leaders and drug and gun rights advocates found common ground and filed a lawsuit against the federal government to halt a vast National Security Agency electronic surveillance program.
In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing the unusually broad coalition of plaintiffs, is seeking an injunction against the NSA, Justice Department, FBI and directors of the agencies.
Read entire article click here: CNNFrom CNN: Do Not Track proposal is DOA
When two warring sides can't even agree on what "tracking" means, it's not surprising that little progress has been made toward launching a single browser button that prevents advertisers from tracking your online behavior.
The groundwork that the W3C chose was based on a draft that the organization's Tracking Protection Working Group cooked up in June. Both privacy advocates and digital advertisers raised objections to the draft, but it was considered the working agreement -- until the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), an industry trade group, proposed sweeping changes to the draft late last month.
In its ruling on Monday, the W3C said the advertisers' proposal muddied the already well-murked waters about what tracking would entail. Under the DAA proposal, advertisers would still be able to profile users and target advertisements to them -- even if those users had turned on Do Not Track in their browsers
For now, Do Not Track is practically dead in the water, and some browsers are coming out with their own solutions.
Mozilla, for example, said it will implement a feature in Firefox that blocks all third-party cookies. That would effectively block most tracking.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
