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> a whistleblower have disclosed it Like how the NSA shenanigans got the whistle blown on them before they got very far?

by pyre 12y ago

Someone1234 12y ago
Yeah. People love to ignore even recent history. We had evidence that the NSA program was going on since 2003 and in 2005 anyone who was paying attention knew that they had hooks into major telephone hubs and under-sea cables with most of the major carriers (and there were already several whistleblowers). We also knew they were building huge data centres. But many people ignored it because "the US Government would never do such a thing!" It literally took Edward Snowdon to spell it out to these people before they would believe, but if your head wasn't buried in the sand nothing in the Snowden leaks should have been a shock or surprise (except maybe the fiber intercepts between private company's data centres, that wasn't known). I think people will naively pretend that the US Government has no influence over popular media OR social media until it is spelt out to them in plain English from internal memos. However we've already seen enough leaks to know SOMETHING is going on, we just don't know the scale (kind of like the 2003 version of the NSA scandal, we aren't at the 2005 level of knowledge yet).
- rhino369 12y ago
  We didn't just had evidence. There was a huge political debate about warrent-less wiretapping during the Bush administration. Public debate, laws were passed, the whole 9 yards. In fact the big snowden shocker turned out to be bullshit. The report that the NSA had direct access to facebook and gmail. Turns out that was just a misinterpretation of a powerpoint slide. The only new and important info Snowden leaked was the metadata from phone companies that included everyone.
  - throwaway2048 12y ago
    people are still repeating the "its only metadata" line?
  - pyre 12y ago
    How about how we give a direct, unfiltered feed to Israel with a "promise" to discard things like emails between US government officials that accidentally make it in there? Seems like a sound practice to me! The Israelis would never break the terms of such a contract!

> a whistleblower have disclosed it Like how the NSA shenanigans got the whistle blown on them before they got very far?

by pyre 12y ago

> a whistleblower have disclosed it Like how the NSA shenanigans got the whistle blown on them before they got very far?

Someone1234 12y ago

Yeah. People love to ignore even recent history. We had evidence that the NSA program was going on since 2003 and in 2005 anyone who was paying attention knew that they had hooks into major telephone hubs and under-sea cables with most of the major carriers (and there were already several whistleblowers). We also knew they were building huge data centres. But many people ignored it because "the US Government would never do such a thing!" It literally took Edward Snowdon to spell it out to these people before they would believe, but if your head wasn't buried in the sand nothing in the Snowden leaks should have been a shock or surprise (except maybe the fiber intercepts between private company's data centres, that wasn't known). I think people will naively pretend that the US Government has no influence over popular media OR social media until it is spelt out to them in plain English from internal memos. However we've already seen enough leaks to know SOMETHING is going on, we just don't know the scale (kind of like the 2003 version of the NSA scandal, we aren't at the 2005 level of knowledge yet).

rhino369 12y ago
We didn't just had evidence. There was a huge political debate about warrent-less wiretapping during the Bush administration. Public debate, laws were passed, the whole 9 yards. In fact the big snowden shocker turned out to be bullshit. The report that the NSA had direct access to facebook and gmail. Turns out that was just a misinterpretation of a powerpoint slide. The only new and important info Snowden leaked was the metadata from phone companies that included everyone.
- throwaway2048 12y ago
  people are still repeating the "its only metadata" line?
- pyre 12y ago
  How about how we give a direct, unfiltered feed to Israel with a "promise" to discard things like emails between US government officials that accidentally make it in there? Seems like a sound practice to me! The Israelis would never break the terms of such a contract!