NSA Spying: Now It’s Personal

[marmar]

By Eva Galperin and Nadia Kayyali via EFF


Imagine that you watched a police officer in your neighborhood stop ten completely ordinary people every day just to take a look inside their vehicle or backpack. Now imagine that nine of those people are never even accused of a crime. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even the most law-abiding person would eventually protest this treatment. In fact—they have.

Now replace police officers with the NSA. The scenario above is what the NSA is doing with our communications, under cover of its twisted interpretation of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The Washington Post has revealed that “Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets.” Additionally, “nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents.”

The thousands of pages of documents that provide that basis for the article are not raw content. Rather, as Barton Gellman, one of the authors of the article states in a follow up published several days later states: “Everything in the sample we analyzed had been evaluated by NSA analysts in Hawaii, pulled from the agency’s central repositories and minimized by hand after automated efforts to screen out U.S. identities.”

What that means is that if you’re on the Internet, you’re in the NSA’s neighborhood—whether you are in the U.S. or not. And like those who protest unjust policies like stop and frisk in their cities, you should be protesting this treatment. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.juancole.com/2014/07/spying-its-personal.html

[Mnemosyne]

1. K&R for more visibility. nt

[Tuesday Afternoon]

11. I hope you are never at the wrong place at the wrong time.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

16. Welcome aboard

Thanks for letting us know about your self-perceived personal courage. I'm not sure what that has to do with the Constitution or the principles on which this nation was built, but welcome to DU anyway.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

26. I don't see any courage in people willing to give up

their privacy to 'keep us safe'.

I just see cowards who are so afraid of 'terrarists' who are less likely to kill them than lightning strikes.

And now he's NameRemoved, heh.

[riderinthestorm]

3. K and R and off to the greatest page...

[Octafish]

4. What Hannah Arendt said.

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

via Chris Hedges

[DirkGently]

8. Good description of the problem.

Why people suddenly think police power is now magically self-limiting, when we set up our entire country founded on the premise that it is not, is a great mystery.

[Enthusiast]

21. Excellent point.

Not a happy thought.

[grasswire]

5. I wonder if the defenders of the surveillance state...

....get some sort of shield or exemption from the programs. That could explain why some on the Internet work with such zeal to disrupt and deny, 24/7.

[TheKentuckian]

6. I doubt it other than the "it doesn't apply to me" sort

I don't believe they think their support creates an exemption, no.

I don't honestly understand what the real motivation even could be.

Sure, in anger and frustration I speculate what in a given moment seems to be the underlying mechanism but personally I can't imagine what would be worth it or how it would seem right at all.
I just can't get to the place where I can see even from afar that allows me to know where the Hell they are even coming from and it makes it very difficult to avoid visceral, automatically furious reactions in these matter when from my point of view they are talking really, really wicked, stupid, and crazy.

I do sense a nebulous but reactionary response to "government is the problem"/"small government" nonsense in the mix though, that I can begin to grasp but pull away from because it drives to dangerous distortions like "government is always good"/"more government is always the solution"/"unlimited government".
Instead opting for government is the necessary tool that allows us to work together with a force multiplier that allows us to do what we could not do on our own but a tool the requires constant vigilance and an active hand on the reins which dictates participation, transparency, a respect for the will of the people, and an acceptance of the constraints of rule of law.

[LondonReign2]

20. The real motivation seems quite apparent to me

Without exception, every single person working to minimize the NSA spying on these boards is also an ardent supporter of President Obama. They are quite terrified of anything that could possibly reflect badly on him. Policy matters are no considered in terms of being good or bad, but rather do they make Obama look good or bad.

Some of them were stridently against the spying was being conducted under Bush. Undoubtedly they'll be concerned again when a Republican is next in the White House.

[TheKentuckian]

23. That is certainly one of the stronger impressions I get

I still stand by not getting how the trade off can be processed, such a consideration makes no sense. Obama comes and goes, the power sticks.

What you say may be true but such people are completely delusional, none to bright but ever seeking to be shrewd, and amoral, at best.

[elias49]

25. I wonder...are they so vehement as to get into ugly slurs

and childish name=calling? Good Lord, can people be so DEVOTED? I certainly support the President but not to the exclusion of common sense. In my opinion, the intelligence bureaucracy is just too large and entrenched to be easily handled or changed by the man in the White House for 4 years or 8...the man in the White House is no magician. I don't blame Obama for the NSA

[xchrom]

7. du rec.

[Uncle Joe]

9. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[hughee99]

10. If you live in NYC, you don't have to imagine it. Police have been doing it for years.

[klook]

12. "Unbridled, unconstitutional collection of the contents of communications needs to end."

That's the bottom line.

https://www.standagainstspying.org/
- see where your elected representatives stand on this question.

[randome]

13. Yeah, that Bush administration sure was a bad one.

Good thing the FISA Amendments of 2008 put a stop to this kind of thing.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

[TheKentuckian]

24. If "put a stop to" is now defined as cynical codification and instutionalizing then sure!

[Armstead]

14. But,but,but I don't like Snowden's hair

[woo me with science]

15. K&R

[Electric Monk]

17. k&r

[WillyT]

18. K & R !!! - Thank You For That !!!

[Autumn]

19. Recommended!

Nothing to see here, move along.

[Enthusiast]

22. Yup

[woo me with science]

27. kick