NSA web/phone records collection

MadYaker

Id admire your faith in peoples willingness to protest. While I don't disagree that it is whats needed I doubt it will actually happen. This is a start though. At least the NSA are being brought to light and have been forced to answer some questions. The whole "nothing to hide = nothing to fear" argument won't do imo. If these systems or the data they collect were to get into the wrong hands (some would argue the NSA are the wrong hands but that's for another thread) the potential for abuse is frightening.

Between this and Google/Facebook etc collecting huge stores of data on everyone I think in about 20 - 30 years time we'll look back on these revelations and we'll wish we'd done more about it and not have been so blasé.

You T.I.A point is interesting. I don't remember hearing him say anything about that on the campaign trail when everyone was cheering on Obama! Although I suppose it was a strategy originally implemented by his predecessors. You'd wonder do the US government actually believe that this is the best way to protect their country? Is that what they are really interested in or is all this for something else?

Whenever I'm thinking about this kind of stuff I always try to look at the big picture to try and understand it, but I always get the feeling that the US government are looking at a far bigger picture than anyone else.

Be like Nutella

basically no matter what we say now most people here will think we've gone into the CT side of things so there's no point in trying to have any sort of rational debate however I will say that the NSA was never set up to fight terrorism nor is anti-Terrorism it's central mandate even now. The NSA that we see today is simply a product of the cold war. Well it's slightly more complicated than that but basically you have to imagine a big scary enemy... which the USSR genuinely was for a long time.... and then it died and withered and imploded and disappeared almost overnight leaving an awful a lot of people 50-100 thousand people across all the agencies without a scary enemy. Lots of different things happened in the world since then including the rise of all sorts of crime and Islamic terrorism and all sorts of strange groups who hate this and that but nothing ever replaced the big bad USSR as an enemy to focus on in a world where the US was an untouchable HyperPower. In the last 15 years however that has changed and although the US is still totally untouchable militarily speaking it does have to contend with genuine rising power in China. At the end of the day the NSA people still wanted their jobs and their power and ultimately their funding and the thing with Intel spending is that it's like a ratchet - it rarely goes backwards in real terms... in fact it never does because all they have to do to lobby for no cuts in the sequester is shout '9/11' or talk about 'well we can't discuss the raw intel but if you could see what we see every day you'd be scared sh1tless and give us so much more money to protect you' etc etc... they can't lose. Until now - Until Edward Snowden took actual 'paper' evidence with him - not like the other whistle blowers of the last 10 years who's word of mouth can be discredited in any number of ways... easiest of all by saying they're crazy. Snowden is a smart fella... and he knows how the media game plays out so he's got a massive quantity of really juicy sh1t on the NSA and they can't touch him or it'll all hit the fan so he's playing the long game of attrition from the safety of Russia which is obviously so ironic seeing as Russia is one big police state run by a KGB thug as we all know, as does Snowden. So he's releasing document by document waiting for the protest to swell up and the articles to be written by the biggest papers and the interviews on the biggest shows and for the groundswell to reach a point where people are actually protesting on the streets which is what we're seeing begin recently hence the timing of this most recent 'NSA Tracks every mobile on earth' story.... it's a clever game he's playing and he's right to do it this way. To let it all sink in to people and to let people have a chance to understand the breadth of what is going on and to articulate their positions as pundits, writers, interest groups, ACLU and of course politicians. The NSA are sh1tting themselves because they will know what kind of things he could release but not necessarily know exactly what he got out of there with? which I'm sure we'll hear about at just the right time. That journalist Greenwald has left the Guardian to join the most single minded pitbull truth telling MOFO journalist to ever walk this earth - Jeremy Scahill and you can be damn sure that their new journalism project will center around the remaining juicy Snowden NSA Leaks.