The dangers of our new normal...

[Tiberius]

Ok, I read post 35 and you absolutely have a point. But again, I guess it comes down to numbers. How many people could they do this to before something was done about it? Really doesn't make sense for them to start going after political contributors or whatever on a small scale. What's the point? Now if they did wide spread abuses there would be an uproar. Hell, Christie couldn't close a bridge to screw someone over and get away with it. The Internet also gives us more freedom to do things like organize, expose corruption and stay informed. Even before the information, the government could go after people and did, we are more free now than ever, IMO

He doesn't even understand what HE'S written. He's a copy/paste nutsucking tool of the highest order. His next original thought will be his first.

 

If anything, at least he didn't try to insult you with his go-to "I'm rubber, you're glue..." rhetoric.

 

While you have crawled out of your hole for a moment, can you tell me what I copied and pasted here? You and several over trough feeders say that often and I just think you trash bags are projecting.

[IDBillzFan]

While you have crawled out of your hole for a moment, can you tell me what I copied and pasted here? You and several over trough feeders say that often and I just think you trash bags are projecting.

 

Crawl out of your hole. Trough feeders. Trash bags.

 

You can't even insult someone without using some old recycled comments.

[TakeYouToTasker]

I'm pretty sure the Bill of Rights were after that, Mr Constitution

 

The Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution, the purpose of which was to expand Federal authority from the levels it held under The Articles.

[Tiberius]

The Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution, the purpose of which was to expand Federal authority from the levels it held under The Articles.

Congress shall not...

 

They were amendments added to constitution to limit it's power. And the articles were crap, rope of sand, useless.

[TakeYouToTasker]

Congress shall not...

 

They were amendments added to constitution to limit it's power. And the articles were crap, rope of sand, useless.

It's part of the original document; a document which expands Federal power. This has nothing to do with your feelings about The Articles.

Edited March 16, 2015 by TakeYouToTasker

[....lybob]

Here's the thing GreggyT after the Snowden revelations there was a conversation about privacy, spying violations of 4th amendment rights, and while lefties like me and libertarians might have been up in arms the vast majority of America was "Meh" - and conversations are still going on and the anger and the hand ringing continue you're just not gonna find it on mainstream TV. I've been following this **** since the FBI Carnivore program and when they were putting splitters in all the fiber optics hubs but very few people care - I can tell people that the NSA is not building a 5 Yottabyte data center just to tell where your phone calls are going, I can tell them you don't need about 800 gigabytes of data storage for every human on earth to track some phone calls but most people just don't care.

[Tiberius]

It's part of the original document; a document which expands Federal power. This has nothing to do with your feelings about The Articles.

Constitution ratified: 1788

 

Bill of rights added: 1791

[TakeYouToTasker]

Constitution ratified: 1788

 

Bill of rights added: 1791

The Constitution was not unanimously ratified in 1788. Rhode Island and North Carolina did not ratify until after the Bill of Rights was added as part of the origional document. As such, the entire United States was not governed by the Constitution until 1791.

[FireChan]

Here's the thing GreggyT after the Snowden revelations there was a conversation about privacy, spying violations of 4th amendment rights, and while lefties like me and libertarians might have been up in arms the vast majority of America was "Meh" - and conversations are still going on and the anger and the hand ringing continue you're just not gonna find it on mainstream TV. I've been following this **** since the FBI Carnivore program and when they were putting splitters in all the fiber optics hubs but very few people care - I can tell people that the NSA is not building a 5 Yottabyte data center just to tell where your phone calls are going, I can tell them you don't need about 800 gigabytes of data storage for every human on earth to track some phone calls but most people just don't care.

Lefties like you?

 

Anyone surprised that a topic about the disappearance of privacy has devolved into a debate over the year the Bill of Rights and Constituion were ratified?

Edited March 16, 2015 by FireChan

[Azalin]

 

Let's walk this out a bit more. The bulk of your assets are in 1s and 0s on a computer, you access this through your debit cards and credit cards. All of that is logged and stored for analysis whenever it's deemed necessary. More and more of your bills are paid with automatic debits from your accounts, increasing your dependency upon being connected each passing day. So far you've never tripped any alarms or alerts at the state level because you live an otherwise normal life and abide by the laws of the land. You're not a killer, you're not a terrorist, you're not a kook plotting to blow someone up for whatever reason. You're Gatorman, US citizen, going about your day.

 

Cut to 2016. Unless something mildly historic happens, the GOP (whom you seemingly don't like very much, go along with it if that's not entirely accurate for the sake of this example) is going to win the presidency. Now, imagine that they ran your WORST nightmare, doesn't matter who -- it could be W again -- and he won. Now the GOP is in power, controlling the senate, house and executive. Now imagine that the new president is every bit the bastard you fear he would become, he's overturning gay marriages, he's repealing the ACA, he's about to start WW3 by bombing Iran because he had a bad BM to start his morning -- I'm talking your absolute worst nightmare of a president. Still with me?

 

Rightfully enraged by #45's new policies, you begin to exercise your right to free speech by donating money to the opposition party. The new president, as part of his scheme, wrote an executive order (classified top secret) that added "alerts" to all the watch lists of the surveillance apparatus. These alerts create a list of anyone who donates to the opposition party, or anyone who mentions going to a rally on the phone/email/text/social media. Even in jest. The moment you begin to move those 1s and 0s around in your bank account towards Elizabeth Warren's campaign, you're added to their watch list. Without needing a warrant, or without you having any knowledge they're doing so, the intelligence apparatus begins to go back through your entire history to see who you are. To look for ways to discredit you should they need to. Let's say this bastard of a president wants to take it one step further and freeze anyone's assets who pop up on the watch list (regardless of reason). So, your bank accounts are frozen (without warning), your mortgage payments, car payments, all your bills begin to mount up with no way to pay them. When you go to the bank to solve the problem, the bank tells you their hands are tied. The government doesn't have to tell them why they ordered your accounts frozen, that's classified. The bank has to comply and you're !@#$ed. No access to your money, no understanding of why this happened... all because you tried to voice an opposition opinion as is your right as a US citizen.

 

All of this, right now, today, is legal and possible without a warrant or need for judicial oversight. Think about that. Without due process, the US Government can declare you a threat to national security (without having to prove anything more than a suspicion) and completely remove your democratic means of expressing yourself. This has always been possible on some scale, history is full of tyrants imprisoning innocents. But no tyrant has ever had the amount of control today's US Government is capable of. I said it earlier and you scoffed, but if information is power then what the government has today is absolute power. And that always leads to absolute control.

 

While the idea of the above scenario seems unlikely to go that bad in a year's time, what happens 10 years from now? Twenty? Say it's 2035, it's been over two decades without a terrorist attack on US soil. ISIS / whoever is the boogeyman of the day has been defeated. But these policies are still on the books because the public has already considered them a fait accompli -- who's stopping the powers that be in 2035 from amending these laws and powers to suit their own political interests? Especially when they don't have to tell us (as the law is written today) that they've changed it at all?

 

You'll read this and think it's paranoia, but I urge you to inform yourself on the realities of the world you're living in first. If you do, you'll see that everything I walked out in this scenario is legal and possible today. The only thing that has prevented it from happening are the people currently in power. How much faith in those elected representatives keeping to the straight and narrow without abusing what essentially is unlimited power over the individual do you actually have? Hasn't there been enough political malfeasance over your lifetime to make you at least a little suspicious or hesitant to willingly surrender your individual right to privacy and due process to a faceless, nameless government entity with zero oversight?

 

You ask me for solutions and I have some. But not many. Why? Because this is an issue that isn't even being debated, it's difficult if not impossible to find a solution to something without understanding the full picture. Bits and pieces of that picture are now public but not the entire thing. We're not allowed to be fully aware of all the issues because our government doesn't think we're capable of making such choices for ourselves.

 

And attitudes like the one you're demonstrating in this thread are exactly why they may ultimately be right.

And once you absorb that... imagine what happens when it's not the US Government at the wheel of this kind of apparatus, but the Chinese/Russians/Iranians/Exxon/Apple/Google et al. If you don't think government is capable of overstepping their power and limits, how much faith do you have in corporations or criminal enterprises exerting the same type of restraint?

 

That's another reason why this is such an important issue. We might be the first perhaps only government to have this kind of capability presently, but we certainly won't be the last.

 

A very well worded, valiant effort on your part, but as you can see, you may as well be explaining particle physics to a mushroom. For what it's worth, I wish more people felt this way.

[Tiberius]

Here's the thing GreggyT after the Snowden revelations there was a conversation about privacy, spying violations of 4th amendment rights, and while lefties like me and libertarians might have been up in arms the vast majority of America was "Meh" - and conversations are still going on and the anger and the hand ringing continue you're just not gonna find it on mainstream TV. I've been following this **** since the FBI Carnivore program and when they were putting splitters in all the fiber optics hubs but very few people care - I can tell people that the NSA is not building a 5 Yottabyte data center just to tell where your phone calls are going, I can tell them you don't need about 800 gigabytes of data storage for every human on earth to track some phone calls but most people just don't care.

 

I am one of those people that just do not care. I admit it. What was the worst Snowden revolation that struck you?

[....lybob]

I am one of those people that just do not care. I admit it. What was the worst Snowden revelation that struck you?

I suppose the XKEYSCORE program - but that's not what you really want to know - what you really want to know is "if I'm not doing anything wrong why should I care if the government is spying on me ?" well I suppose it's how you think America is and which way America is going in the future. I'll give you my perception of where we are as a country.

 

1. America is a surveillance state that would have made the old Soviets green with envy

2. We live in a propaganda state that pales Orwell's imagination

3. Many of us live in a police state where the justice system has turned into system who's chief function is generating revenue which is made even more onerous when racial bias is also involved

4. Most of our politicians in both major parties are bribed and beholden to special interests

5. We have a two tier justice system where people of modest means are often crushed and the rich and powerful are to big to jail

6. Our government has implemented policies to blow up asset bubbles (Stocks, Bonds, Real estate, art ) while squeezing credit for infrastructure, Small business and job creation. expanding wealth inequality to historic levels.

 

You may think that government surveillance is there to protect you from foreign terrorist while I believe that government surveillance is there to blunt the inevitable backlash against a neoliberal economic system that always had a not for mass consumption goal of bringing first world wages and living standards into rough parity with third world wages and living standards.

[/dev/null]

I can tell people that the NSA is not building a 5 Yottabyte

[DC Tom]

Here's the thing GreggyT after the Snowden revelations there was a conversation about privacy, spying violations of 4th amendment rights, and while lefties like me and libertarians might have been up in arms the vast majority of America was "Meh" - and conversations are still going on and the anger and the hand ringing continue you're just not gonna find it on mainstream TV. I've been following this **** since the FBI Carnivore program and when they were putting splitters in all the fiber optics hubs but very few people care - I can tell people that the NSA is not building a 5 Yottabyte data center just to tell where your phone calls are going, I can tell them you don't need about 800 gigabytes of data storage for every human on earth to track some phone calls but most people just don't care.

 

The NSA is not building a 5 yottabyte data center. No one is. It would cost about $100 trillion to build, to hold the equivalent of 1000 years of internet traffic.

[Pine Barrens Mafia]

There's no doubt that the PATRIOT act is odious at best, and unamerican at worst.

[B-Man]

Doesn't quite fit with this thread....................I didn't want to start a new one.......I hope GreggyT will allow it.....Plus I second Azalin's praise for GreggyT's Post #35

 

 

White House office to delete its FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT regulations

 

From USA Today:

 

Th

e W

hite House is removing a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, making official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject all requests for records to that office.

 

The White House said the clean-up of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office — which handles office technology, human resources and other operational tasks for the White House — is not subject to the transparency law.

 

But the timing of the move raised eyebrows among transparency advocates, coming as it did on National Freedom of Information Day. It’s also Sunshine Week, an effort by news organizations and watchdog groups to highlight issues of government transparency.

 

 

No administration should be able to get away with this...........................in particular, one who boasts of its transparency

 

 

.

[IDBillzFan]

No administration should be able to get away with this...........................in particular, one who boasts of its transparency.

 

What you'll hear from this administration's supporters will start with something like "Well, the Bush administration did it," which is embarrassing by itself since Barry spent his entire campaign insisting he was not Bush.

 

But when the time comes that a Republican is president again, I have a feeling you'll hear people on the right frequently using the phrase, "Where was your anger when Barry did this?"

Edited March 16, 2015 by LABillzFan

[....lybob]

 

The NSA is not building a 5 yottabyte data center. No one is. It would cost about $100 trillion to build, to hold the equivalent of 1000 years of internet traffic.

1 to 2 trillion, they plan on each terrabyte costing around 20 cents - it will hold besides internet traffic years of video data searchable to time and place or facial recognition, or other unique identifiers.

Edited March 16, 2015 by ....lybob

[DC Tom]

1 to 2 trillion, they plan on each terrabyte costing around 20 cents - it will hold besides internet traffic years of video data searchable to time and place or facial recognition, or other unique identifiers.

 

It amazes me how completely gullible you people are.

 

That's twenty-five square miles of data storage capacity, using the best theoretical storage media postulated today. Using the best demonstrated storage media available (in a lab, not demonstrated in any quantity whatsoever), that's more than a thousand square miles of data storage capacity. Put another way: to store a yottabyte of data on anything that currently exists, you would be writing data to a storage device the size of Long Island (using a material that is only available in microscopic quantities right now).

 

Or, using standard technology available right now...you would several million years' of production of all forms of storage media currently manufactured.

 

 

Which is actually more ridiculous than the idea that the NSA can somehow spend two trillion dollars without gobsmacking the world economy.

[Deranged Rhino]

Doesn't quite fit with this thread....................I didn't want to start a new one.......I hope GreggyT will allow it.

.

 

It absolutely belongs here.