Snowden and the Pulitzer

H'ethetheth said:
The option that seems to be left out here is to not give the terrorists quite so much reason to hate your guts.
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So how exactly were we supposed to give Theodore Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, Eric Rudolph, Wade Michael Page, James Kopp or Glenn Miller less reason to hate our guts?

People are going to hate us no matter what we do. In a perfect world we would have effective ways to prevent disaffection before it starts, but until that utopia comes we need effective ways to detect the haters, track their activities and hopefully stop them from causing harm.

provided the government does not make mistakes.
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Everybody makes mistakes. It has been estimated that in the US about 200,000 patients die per year as a result of medical errors. Does this mean we should disband the NIH, shut down all the hospitals and make it illegal to practice medicine? Of course not.

"Say, why do you keep snapping your fingers?"
"It's to keep the tigers away."
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Before 9/11 that argument might have flown. Now, not so much. The truth is that what we don't know can hurt us. And the harm caused by that one terrorist operation which was not stopped in time? Apart from the immediate death and destruction, it gave the Bush administration an excuse to invade Iraq - at a cost of 25,000 Americans killed or wounded and 3 Trillion dollars down the drain.

Snapping your fingers won't keep tigers away, but that is exactly what opponents of the NSA's data collection and analysis are proposing. If the NSA is ineffective it's not because they have too much data, but that they can't get enough. They want a dart gun with a high power scope, but we are telling them to just snap their fingers and hope.

and people who happen to regularly frequent the same places, the neighbours, the terrorists' colleagues, the friends they make as cover for their operation,
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Surveillance doesn't hurt them, and if they are connected to the perps in any way then it's no different from a bank robbery or murder plot.

people who happen to be near them when the hellfire missile explodes...
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This is a completely separate issue, and has nothing to do with data collection techniques. But if anything, having better intel should reduce collateral damage.

Hahaha! This has to be one of the most ironic things I've read in a while.
"Don't listen to those fear mongers, listen to me! They're coming to kiilllll you!!!"
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I would rather that the threats be taken care of quietly. But people hate to think that the government might be keeping anything from them, and they love death and destruction! "If it Bleeds it Leads" has always been a successful news strategy...
 
Monketey Ghost said:
Yah.
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I'm not saying they hate my guts much less, mind you, being a western European and everything. But honestly, if you think there are no good reasons for people in several countries around the world to dislike America, I'm not sure what to say.
Again, not that there aren't such reasons to dislike many other countries, such as my home country the Netherlands, or my country of residence, Germany (I can think of a few).
 
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Roger Ramjets said:
So how exactly were we supposed to give Theodore Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, Eric Rudolph, Wade Michael Page, James Kopp or Glenn Miller less reason to hate our guts?
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I don't know. Depends on why they were so angry. I'm not familiar with the specifics on these domestic nutcases.
I assume there is a reason you left out Al Qaida, or Iranians from these examples. I hope it's because you see they would have reasons to dislike America.

People are going to hate us no matter what we do. In a perfect world we would have effective ways to prevent disaffection before it starts, but until that utopia comes we need effective ways to detect the haters, track their activities and hopefully stop them from causing harm.
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At the cost of how many lives?

Before 9/11 that argument might have flown. Now, not so much. The truth is that what we don't know can hurt us. And the harm caused by that one terrorist operation which was not stopped in time? Apart from the immediate death and destruction, it gave the Bush administration an excuse to invade Iraq - at a cost of 25,000 Americans killed or wounded and 3 Trillion dollars down the drain.
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Yes, and the whole NSA debacle is a direct consequence of Bush declaring "war on terror". That's basically what I'm saying. The war on terror, as it is waged now, is a ridiculous travesty that very likely* causes much more harm than the thing it purports to prevent. And that's excluding the hypocrisy of Guantanamo etc.

Surveillance doesn't hurt them, and if they are connected to the perps in any way then it's no different from a bank robbery or murder plot.
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Again, this is provided the government doesn't make mistakes. And we're talking about a government that thinks it's okay to do anything up to and including calling an airstrike on you if you are suspected to be part of a terrorist organization. More data is more false positives.


*The only reason I don't say "demonstrably", is because it's impossible to say how many lives are saved by the prevented attacks.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
Skeptic Ginger said:
Any reason you left out Daniel Ellsberg?
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For the same reason I left out Jane Fonda - because they aren't officially traitors, so if I included them then I would also have to include all the 'traitors' who supported the Vietnam war.

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Do you remember why Ellsberg isn't "officially" a traitor.

It wasn't through lack of effort by the government.

He was charged under the Espionage Act, among other things, almost identical to the charges the government is making against Snowden, and he went to trial. Probably the only thing that kept him from being convicted was the exposure of all shenanigans and the laws the Nixon administration broke trying to get a conviction, and prosecutorial misconduct so over-the-top egregious and outrageous that the judge ultimately threw the case out of court.

Otherwise he'd probably be sitting in jail right now instead of sticking up for people like Snowden and Manning and doing lectures and appearances, talking about how important transparency is to a truly free country.
 
H'ethetheth said:
That seems like a fair and level headed assessment. Wow, yes, I'd never even heard of James Clapper, but it must be the reason for my opinion on Snowden, because that is apparently my "entire moral case."
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I said "tends to be", I have discussed this with a wide variety of people and it's usually the sole argument, and no one is willing to accept another version of his testimony. It's kind of like the conspiracy theory that Bush lied us into Iraq. Bush lied, people died. Remember? According to Snowden, it was the reason for his decision, he couldn't emotionally handle knowing that the people were being lied to! Man!

When Edward Snowden was asked during his January 26, 2014 TV interview in Moscow what the decisive moment was or why he blew the whistle, he replied:

“I would say sort of the breaking point was seeing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back.”

Now, looking at what Clapper's defenders and what he himself said in the letter to Feinstein, how does Snowden look to you now? Feels much better believing that Clapper lied doesn't it ;)
Apparently this has nothing to do with why I find Snowdon's actions justified. Or the thousands of innocent poor sods in Iraq, Afghanistan and God knows where who died for the "war on terror"; the conflict started to prevent attacks like at the World Trade Center, which has now cost twice as many additional American lives as the WTC attack and in total has cost a multiple of the lives lost during all terror attacks in the last 40 years combined.
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So you think it would have been better not to try and kill the terrorists and wage a war against the people pledging to continue to launch attacks against us? I really don't follow you.

And you really think we went into Iraq in order to prevent more 911s? :boggled:
It has brought us blessings such as Guantanamo Bay, execution by Drone without trial and "enhanced interrogation".
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Hey you know one consequence of Obama being against Guantanamo? More drone strikes! Drone strikes are legal we're at war, didn't you know?
All that for the small small price of our privacy and our moral high ground.
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No one invaded your privacy. Do you have evidence of this? We still have the moral high ground, although I understand some people have no guts and think hugs are the only answer.
I guess Americans can rest easy knowing that the NSA is only interested in where they are at any time, who they know and talk to, who they meet and where, not in what they say.
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Do you have evidence of this? They had extreme checks and balances and restrictions on how the data could be used. Only for terrorists, and if anyone tried to abuse it, they were caught and it was reported. They had good reason to collect the data as opposed to letting the companies collect it and then querying them. Now they are forcing the companies to adopt all of these new rules so they can acheive the same goals while letting them keep it. Only because a bunch of people are now paranoid, not because they had no legal authority to do it in the first place.
I'm vewwy sowwy this Snowden guy happened to you.
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You should be disappointed that he caused damage to military intelligence that was legal and democratic and respected your rights and privacy, and embarrassed that you accept conspiracy theories about what the NSA is doing.
 
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H'ethetheth said:
The option that seems to be left out here is to not give the terrorists quite so much reason to hate your guts.
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So you take a look at the reasons that bin Laden gave for waging war and go "Yeah! that makes sense!"?
The war on terror, as it is waged now, is a ridiculous travesty that very likely* causes much more harm than the thing it purports to prevent.
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Interesting opinion! :rolleyes:
 
Monketey Ghost said:
The Blame America crowd FTW
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They are quite the bunch right? Imagine you could get them all on a panel together at an event. Chomsky, Greenwald, Assange, Snowden and Ron Paul! It would be *********** brilliant! They should all work together on a book or something.
 
You do know Joey, that Bush did lie us into a war. I suggest you reassess your past conclusions about that.

But back to the thread. I notice the classic ad hominem attack, H'ethetheth posts a couple paragraphs of points and mentions there is some blowback involved, and the response:

"You blame America therefore we need not look at anything else posted."

For the record, I don't "blame America", but we don't have perfectly clean hands either.

I also never heard of Clapper until this thread. In addition, I've been following the NSA spying since they built that room in the AT&T building in SF and then started building the Utah facility. I've been aware of data mining long before 911 and Bush's use of it without FISA warrants.

Snowden exposed the extent of the data mining and the lie it is only being used on foreign sources. Which, BTW, never was exactly true since all the NSA needed was one side of the exchange to be outside the country.

The biggest abuse of this spying has been spying on reporters' phone and email contacts trying to stop whistleblowers. Governments don't want citizens to know they faked things like Jessica Lynch's rescue, hid Pat Tillman's death from friendly fire, and drone attacks gone awry. They don't want the citizens to know not only did they kidnap and torture Khalid El-Masri by mistake, after they found out it was a mistake, they left him rotting in prison a couple extra months in a feeble attempt to avoid embarrassment about it.

But back to the spying. Besides using the tactics to suppress freedom of the press by intimidating reporters and whistle blowers, this country has a not too distant history of spying on political dissidents. That is one risk denied by both Bush and Obama, but then why were uniformed police sans any identification standing along side the police in Seattle at war protest marches a few years ago? I asked one of them what organization he was with, it was during the Blackwater heyday. He refused to say. I don't know if he was NSA or Blackwater, but these security whatevers were also snapping pictures of marchers.

It's a slippery slope to claim you need all this spying to keep terrorists and bay but then it turns out you are also using it to stop whistleblowers who are exposing the cover up government wrongdoing. And gee, of course it's only watch political dissidents who might commit terrorist acts. Well that's not what history reveals actually happened with all the spying on civil rights workers and Vietnam war protestors.

Finally, back to the claim, they aren't listening to anyone's actual calls, obviously they have the ability to do so. Why do you take their word for it they aren't?

NSA: Some used spying power to snoop on lovers
 
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Skeptic Ginger said:
You do know Joey, that Bush did lie us into a war. I suggest you reassess your past conclusions about that.
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I suggest you look up the word "lie" in the dictionary.
But back to the thread. I notice the classic ad hominem attack, H'ethetheth posts a couple paragraphs of points and mentions there is some blowback involved, and the response:

"You blame America therefore we need not look at anything else posted."
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:rolleyes: I look at what else was posted and found it stupid.
I also never heard of Clapper until this thread.
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Then why did you claim that congress was lied to?
Snowden exposed the extent of the data mining and the lie it is only being used on foreign sources.
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What lie? When? How?
The biggest abuse of this spying has been spying on reporters' phone and email contacts trying to stop whistleblowers. Governments don't want citizens to know they faked things like Jessica Lynch's rescue, hid Pat Tillman's death from friendly fire, and drone attacks gone awry. They don't want the citizens to know not only did they kidnap and torture Khalid El-Masri by mistake, after they found out it was a mistake, they left him rotting in prison a couple extra months in a feeble attempt to avoid embarrassment about it.
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Snowden exposed something regarding this? The government has been illegally spying on people and intimidating journalists?
But back to the spying.
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So no then...
Besides using the tactics to suppress freedom of the press by intimidating reporters and whistle blowers, this country has a not too distant history of spying on political dissidents. That is one risk denied by both Bush and Obama, but then why were uniformed police sans any identification standing along side the police in Seattle at war protest marches a few years ago? I asked one of them what organization he was with, it was during the Blackwater heyday. He refused to say. I don't know if he was NSA or Blackwater, but these security whatevers were also snapping pictures of marchers.
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Oh so absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about, belief-based and basically a long-shot at justification for supporting Snowden without any real direct vindication. Not surprised.
It's a slippery slope to claim you need all this spying to keep terrorists and bay but then it turns out you are also using it to stop whistleblowers who are exposing the cover up government wrongdoing. And gee, of course it's only watch political dissidents who might commit terrorist acts. Well that's not what history reveals actually happened with all the spying on civil rights workers and Vietnam war protestors.
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This happened and Snowden exposed it? You have evidence this is a threat? Or you're going along with the Alex Jones crowd on this one?
Finally, back to the claim, they aren't listening to anyone's actual calls, obviously they have the ability to do so. Why do you take their word for it they aren't?

NSA: Some used spying power to snoop on lovers
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LOL
 
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The Don said:
This presupposes that the wheat can be reliably sorted from the chaff and the huge volumes of data can be turned into effective anti-terrorism intelligence. The current facts don't seem to bear this out.

  • There seems to be a trend to collect and hoard data "just in case" rather than be selective about the data that is captured and retained
  • There are enough "false positives" where innocent people are hassled because of the oversensitive nature of some of the algorithms involved [*]Then again, there are also cases of terrorists slipping though the net so the algorithms are not that sensitive

The security services need to demonstrate that they are using the information effectively in the way you describe
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The highlighted bit is the same argument that is used to decide whether medical screening is a good idea on a particular population.

Imagine there is an algorithm that can detect terrorists with 99.9% accuracy (positive and negative) by looking at some type of data. Imagine there are 30,000 terrorists in the US who are scanned and that there are 300-million Americans who have been scanned.

Of the 30,000 terrorists, 99.9% are detected, leaving only 30 to go free.

Of the 300-million Americans, you have a 0.1% false-positive rate, so 300,000 innocent people are caught in the sweep.

There is a 90% chance that any one person caught by the algorithm is innocent.
 
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jimbob said:
The highlighted bit is the same argument that is used to decide whether medical screening is a good idea on a particular population.

Imagine there is an algorithm that can detect terrorists with 99.9% accuracy (positive and negative) by looking at some type of data. Imagine there are 30,000 terrorists in the US who are scanned and that there are 300-million Americans who have been scanned.

Of the 30,000 terrorists, 99.9% are detected, leaving only 30 to go free.

Of the 300-million Americans, you have a 0.1% false-positive rate, so 300,000 innocent people are caught in the sweep.

There is a 90% chance that any one person caught by the algorithm is innocent.
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Which tells us that widespread, blanket spying on everybody's phone and internet communications is probably a huge waste of resources.
 
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