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> "If I told you right now to get a message to your cousin in Connecticut within an hour without using Skype/email/phone or anything of the other means listed,

> "If I told you right now to get a message to your cousin in Connecticut within an hour without using Skype/email/phone or anything of the other means listed, could you do it?" Where does this arbitrary 1 hour deadline come from? > "How are you going to communicate to your cousin where to look for the message and how to break it down?" In person, long before it's needed. Even better, if cousin A isn't reachable for some reason, cousins B, C, D, E and F are perfectly fine substitutes. > "is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms" No conspiracy needed, just everybody looking out for themselves within the framework of rationalizations they bought into. And when it comes to that, 4 million are nothing. Even 4 billion are nothing. "The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist." -- Erich Fromm Were tens of millions of Germans really involved in a conspiracy to industrially murder millions? Of course. They just weren't aware of it. All their individual little steps and reactions were somewhat rational, the bigger picture decidedly wasn't. Do you really honestly believe worse things than this haven't happened to more and better people than 4 million NSA peeps? Such hybris in itself is a ticking bomb. > "Having worked in every facet of the NSA as a linguist/intelligence analyst/programmer/many other things, and CIA contractor for a year, I tend to think the latter, and I'm very vocal about my thoughts on the intelligence community." How can working with people who aren't Snowden tell you that he wants to see the world burn? Or do you think that follows from your proposed dichotomy between "it's either all a deliberate conspiracy by everyone involved in it, even as janitor or secretary - or Snowden is a disgruntled worker"? > "Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community." I did, but I just saw you criticizing specific claims of Snowden, probably correctly so -- that doesn't mean "the media get it wrong" wholesale, it just refutes those claims. The only other thing that seemed relevant was this: Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. That can't be what you meant, so did I miss it, do I have to go further back, or was that bit about Snowden actually all?

PavlovsCat 13y ago
To whomever it concerns: Pressing a downward arrow is easy, if you can, also put your words where your clicky clicky is. Lest you want me to think you're pouting or something.
- jessedhillon 13y ago
  It's not much of a rebuttal -- the OP has facts and experience, you offer aphorisms and come close to invoking Godwin's Law.
  - bad_user 13y ago
    What happened during WWII is a blue-print for what society should not be (like an anti-pattern). Lets not restrain ourselves from talking about it based on some stupid Internet meme, especially when talking about relevant topics, such as identification, surveillance, discrimination, privacy and all kinds of human rights that should be fundamental for everybody, alien or domestic. Personally I think @PavlovsCat raised some interesting points. I also hate arguments by authority; if anything @bazillion's experience as an NSA employee and a CIA contractor raises red flags when thinking about his agenda or bias (although kudos for his transparency on the issue - isn't transparency great btw? ;)) What really bothers me about @bazillion's opinion is the logical fallacies he conjures: 1) establishing a protocol for communication is done by meeting with your peers well in advance, which does happen; trying to make this problem harder by restricting what you can do is setting up a straw-man 2) you can still use phone lines, you just need to buy a bunch of prepaid cards, tossing them away after usage, preferably with short messages without going into specifics, accompanied by small chat on weather and baseball games - you can make it so that conversations are indistinguishable from normal conversations or from noise, without using stenography and while still bearing important information. You can also receive incoming calls this way. You buy them in bulk, you communicate the numbers to your peers and you toss them away after each incoming call, with your peers being left to try out the next number in sequence. 3) on the Internet you can use strong encryption, in combination with whatever email accounts you want, including Gmail accounts, you just can't use the web interface. Route that access through easily changeable anonymous proxies placed in countries were the U.S. doesn't have much influence and voilà - you can be immune of NSA's spying and surveillance on the Internet, as they'll have nothing - no words, no name, no IP address. They can't even prevent the message going through, as you can ask for confirmation in your encrypted message and have that confirmation delivered encrypted as well. Surveillance on the Internet only affects the uneducated, which happen to be normal people living normal lives. 4) the world is not divided between evil men that conspire and maniacs that want to watch the world burn - Snowden's intentions and motives are actually irrelevant. And what NSA apologists don't seem to get is that NSA's intentions or motives are also irrelevant. What really matters is the final result ... people are not safer due to NSA's actions, while these actions are a disaster for privacy and for human rights in general. In fact terrorism prevention only fixes a symptom of the larger problem and one has to wonder why the threat of international terrorism is much smaller in Europe.

PavlovsCat 13y ago

To whomever it concerns: Pressing a downward arrow is easy, if you can, also put your words where your clicky clicky is. Lest you want me to think you're pouting or something.

jessedhillon 13y ago
It's not much of a rebuttal -- the OP has facts and experience, you offer aphorisms and come close to invoking Godwin's Law.
- bad_user 13y ago
  What happened during WWII is a blue-print for what society should not be (like an anti-pattern). Lets not restrain ourselves from talking about it based on some stupid Internet meme, especially when talking about relevant topics, such as identification, surveillance, discrimination, privacy and all kinds of human rights that should be fundamental for everybody, alien or domestic. Personally I think @PavlovsCat raised some interesting points. I also hate arguments by authority; if anything @bazillion's experience as an NSA employee and a CIA contractor raises red flags when thinking about his agenda or bias (although kudos for his transparency on the issue - isn't transparency great btw? ;)) What really bothers me about @bazillion's opinion is the logical fallacies he conjures: 1) establishing a protocol for communication is done by meeting with your peers well in advance, which does happen; trying to make this problem harder by restricting what you can do is setting up a straw-man 2) you can still use phone lines, you just need to buy a bunch of prepaid cards, tossing them away after usage, preferably with short messages without going into specifics, accompanied by small chat on weather and baseball games - you can make it so that conversations are indistinguishable from normal conversations or from noise, without using stenography and while still bearing important information. You can also receive incoming calls this way. You buy them in bulk, you communicate the numbers to your peers and you toss them away after each incoming call, with your peers being left to try out the next number in sequence. 3) on the Internet you can use strong encryption, in combination with whatever email accounts you want, including Gmail accounts, you just can't use the web interface. Route that access through easily changeable anonymous proxies placed in countries were the U.S. doesn't have much influence and voilà - you can be immune of NSA's spying and surveillance on the Internet, as they'll have nothing - no words, no name, no IP address. They can't even prevent the message going through, as you can ask for confirmation in your encrypted message and have that confirmation delivered encrypted as well. Surveillance on the Internet only affects the uneducated, which happen to be normal people living normal lives. 4) the world is not divided between evil men that conspire and maniacs that want to watch the world burn - Snowden's intentions and motives are actually irrelevant. And what NSA apologists don't seem to get is that NSA's intentions or motives are also irrelevant. What really matters is the final result ... people are not safer due to NSA's actions, while these actions are a disaster for privacy and for human rights in general. In fact terrorism prevention only fixes a symptom of the larger problem and one has to wonder why the threat of international terrorism is much smaller in Europe.