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In reply to the discussion: "Edward Snowden ONLINE NOW" Transcript/Raw data of what he really said & how he said it [View all]Catherina
(35,568 posts)Because this has destroyed years worth of decryption and trust.
If it was just to fix constitutional abuses, there wouldn't be any files with international repercussions revealing how we (the US & the UK, the two closest partners in crime) recently lured foreign diplomats to our little diplomatic internet cafes to get a hold of their signals. And that, for example, we had decrypted the Russia President's encryption code. That right there is extremely sensitive information that just dried up all our surveillance of the Russian President's voice communications. Years of work just went down the drain and all they're getting now are signals they haven't decrypted yet. Everyone, internationally, just changed their encryption codes because of this.
There are too many unknowns going forward, of what this will do to the MIC. I don't see the President taking such a risky leap to handle US constitutional abuses. Snowden just dealt a real blow to the war machine. Theoretically, the Russians and the Chinese could be discussing an attack on the US right now and we wouldn't know it. We can still intercept it but not decrypt it to process and analyze it.
Years of work for international surveillance just went down the drain. Not to mention our *honor* after assuring our allies, over and over again, that we weren't spying on them, weren't performing industrial espionage and that things like all those Boeing contracts just fell in our lap. This has huge international ramifications. Everyone will deal with it politely, like diplomats do, but the trust level just went from 0 to -250. I don't see any US official risking that fallout just for our privacy.
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