111–120 of 131 posts
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“Congress shall make no law” seems pretty comprehensive.
The problem is usually with the definition of 'people'. Slaves, for example, did not qualify for a long time. 'People' living outside the country are not generally considered to be covered (see the routine open assassination of people accused of 'terrorism').
Edward Snowden is an American patriot. He followed his conscience and acted in good faith to defend the constitutional rights of the American people.
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I feel like people forget that leading up to the Iraq war, France and Germany were aligned with Russia and very much against US interests. They were a frenemy at best. I'm not saying it's right - we were in the wrong on Iraq and that was obvious before it started. But just like the US has had a HARD turn towards fascism, there's nothing stopping that from occurring to our allies as well. I'd argue it's dereliction of…
I'm curious about what interpretation of events leads you to the conclusion that, say, France was aligned against US interests? What about Canada? Edit: And it's one thing (not necessarily a great thing) if you and your allies are knowingly and willingly exchanging intelligence about suspicious activities you pick up in each other's countries to tip off law enforcement. Exfiltrating corporate industrial and technolog…
(This is kind of expected, since EU members were/are too cowardly to even engage in Bosnia, a country of 4 million people, so cannot conceive of the military will of the US.)
What's less well-known is that a single US "envoy" flew to Iraq to broker/demand a last-minute surrender deal, but the Iraqis wouldn't accept a thuggish level of statesmanship (protocol), so declined to talk to him.
There were also attempts by Iraq, the Arab community and the UN at various times to broker a peace, but none of those parties had the authority and decisiveness to speak on behalf of Hussein essentially. (ie. talk is cheap.)
If you remember Baghdad Bob, then you know that developing countries are very prideful:
You would need to convict him first.
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It took 7 years for the courts to finally figure that out even though it seemed like ridiculous overreach to everyone. Off the top of my head I recollect they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it, inserting spying equipment in Google data centers forceing them to now to end to end encryption and many other shady things. Not to mention the collection of zero days that almost certainly will get…
You make it seem like they’re just hitting Googles hardware randomly. It’s been postulated publicly that spies have been found at Google that facilitate information to the CCP. If I were a defense organization this would concern me and I believe they have legal clout to act. Liberal does not mean lawless. You expect USA to do nothing but sit back and accept it’s just a part of doing business to get spied on and IP th…
On the other hand, there were multiple stories about the guy from Saudi Arabia who was at twitter and I think he got away back to S.A.
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You make it seem like they’re just hitting Googles hardware randomly. It’s been postulated publicly that spies have been found at Google that facilitate information to the CCP. If I were a defense organization this would concern me and I believe they have legal clout to act. Liberal does not mean lawless. You expect USA to do nothing but sit back and accept it’s just a part of doing business to get spied on and IP th…
I was on mobile so difficult to give adequate sources at the moment. My point was they were essentially MITM'ing all traffic in google data centers. I fail to see how that "makes the US more secure". "The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden…
Aside from phone metadata collection, they weren't spying on Americans. They could tap communications of non-Americans outside the US, and they could find those communications in Google WAN traffic crossing the US border. It's Google's fault for not encrypting it because any number of other countries with fewer laws against spying on their citizens could have done the same thing. It is good that Google and other Internet companies now use https everywhere and encrypt their WAN traffic, but the threat vector should have been well known at that point given what China had already been doing publicly for years.
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He leaked a lot more US government programs than that one, and all of those were legal. Had he only leaked phone metadata collection, he would have a case.
It took 7 years for the courts to finally figure that out even though it seemed like ridiculous overreach to everyone. Off the top of my head I recollect they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it, inserting spying equipment in Google data centers forceing them to now to end to end encryption and many other shady things. Not to mention the collection of zero days that almost certainly will get…
It was ruled illegal in 2015 by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
> inserting spying equipment in Google data centers
There is no evidence of this in the Snowden leaks or anywhere. Google would know if it had unaccounted for hardware in its datacenters. They put network analyzers on international links that carried Google traffic.
> they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it
For hardware shipped to targeted foreigners. We should expect our spy agencies to do this if they are even moderately competent.
> They used parallel construction with other law enforcement orgs as they leaked run of the mill criminal behavior (not national security related) so as to not disclose the real way they got the info.
Where is the evidence for this claim?
> The core concern I have is all this apparatus are tools of fascism and control of any dissenting voices including the opposing political party.
That would be a valid concern for unchecked domestic surveillance but not for what Snowden leaked.
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He simply tarnished certain federal bureaucracies, not America at large.
I live in Germany and When I moved here I sensed animosity for America. When I asked my local friends they said It was made a lot worse after what he leaked.
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It took 7 years for the courts to finally figure that out even though it seemed like ridiculous overreach to everyone. Off the top of my head I recollect they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it, inserting spying equipment in Google data centers forceing them to now to end to end encryption and many other shady things. Not to mention the collection of zero days that almost certainly will get…
> It took 7 years for the courts to finally figure that out It was ruled illegal in 2015 by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. > inserting spying equipment in Google data centers There is no evidence of this in the Snowden leaks or anywhere. Google would know if it had unaccounted for hardware in its datacenters. They put network analyzers on international links that carried Google traffic. > they were intercepti…
I may very well have some details wrong.
Re: parallel construction reference here though clearly this is more recent: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/28/hemisphere-phone-records/
At the bottom of this article it references the NSA and Snowden but says no explicit links was proven. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction