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Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

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Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#51

Post by jacobolus »

bcit-cst wrote: post #35
jacobolus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charlie Rose gets lots of inside access and high-powered guests because his MO is to kiss up to powerful people, ask softball questions, and follow whatever plan he made for the interview, regardless of the answers he gets. He almost never asks useful follow-up questions, often doesn’t seem to pay any attention to what his guests have to say, and asks lots of moronic paragraphs-long yes-or-no questions (my favorite a…

I cant disagree with you more . I am long time hn lurker and this is my first post. I have been religiously watching Charlie Rose for the last decade . He is one of the best interviewers in the game . I learned more about the NSA surveillance program from this one hour interview than every other newsgroup ( tv , reddit , hn etc ) combined over the last week. He really is a genius . He gets more out of the guest than…

I’ve been watching Charlie’s interviews since I was in middle school in the late 90s, and his interview style can be roughly broken into two categories as follows:

1. (If the guest someone powerful and mainstream of high status and inside access, someone like a business tycoon or politician or beltway pundit.) Ask inane softball questions, talk the guest up, agree with everything said, and generally make himself seem like an enormous ass-kisser. Praise the guest’s wisdom and insight. (For the most obnoxious examples of this, see his numerous interviews with the invariably clueless Thomas Friedman.)

2. (If the guest is a more marginal figure, e.g. an academic or an activist, or really anyone with an opinion that Charlie hadn’t considered before or doesn’t want to hear.) Interrupt the guest, ask inane questions, when they answer in a way he doesn’t want ask the same question over and over again until they’re thoroughly fed up. Condescend as much as possible. Intentionally chop off their interesting sentences halfway through and redirect the conversation back to whatever “setup” thing Charlie is thinking about.

The occasional sports star, movie director, etc. ends up with a somewhat better interview, because in those cases he’s not spending all his effort trying to push his own point-of-view and sometimes he even listens to the guest.

Find any week when the same guest was on both Charlie’s show and Fresh Air. Listen to Terry Gross’s masterful interviewing in delight. Listen to Charlie’s awful awful interview and bash your head into the wall until all that remains is a dent and some bloody pulp.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#52

Post by brown9-2 »

weland wrote: post #18

Dear God, it's like I'm a kid again. I didn't grow up in the US; when I was a kid, we didn't have this kind of interviews on TV. For one thing, most of the TV shows they aired was propaganda, and it was so utterly boring most of us didn't bother. The newspapers, on the other hand, carried propaganda along with the news, so you kindda had to read it, too, if you were to know what's happening. The smarter folks could e…

FISA has provisions for surveilling "facilities", buildings, and locations, and is not limited to orders to surveil just an individual.

A more generous reading would suggest that is what "foreign entity" is referring to - cases where the NSA is surveilling a safehouse or a military base and not necessarily a human being.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#53

Post by brown9-2 »

malandrew wrote: post #9

The question I want to see asked is: "Obama, in the course of your day, you and your staff probably interact with many foreign diplomats and other persons which this system is likely to classify as 51% likely to be foreign. On top of that, the content of those conversation, depending on the topic at hand, is likely to include words that would trigger an alert. With this in mind, do you think it is acceptable that tho…

Do you really think that the NSA isn't sensitive to not being seen as spying on Congress or the President? That would be an obvious scandal that any moron would be smart to avoid.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#54

Post by brown9-2 »

yaakov wrote: post #5

Obama: > You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names. There is no content in that database...At no point is any content revealed because there’s no content that...the FBI — if, in fact, it now wants to get content; if, in fact, it wants to start tapping that phone Snowden ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n... ): > If I target for example an email…

The quotes you have highlighted are discussing two different things.

Obama is referring to the phone metadata database.

Snowden is referring to what an analyst sees after an email address is targeted, meaning that an active surveillance process has been started for that specific email address and that the email provider has begun to provide access.

So of course these two statements are different, because they are talking about different things. The operative phrase in Snowden's statement is "If I target", which should be read as "after I start data collection for an email address...".

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#55

Post by aetimmes »

malandrew wrote: post #9

The question I want to see asked is: "Obama, in the course of your day, you and your staff probably interact with many foreign diplomats and other persons which this system is likely to classify as 51% likely to be foreign. On top of that, the content of those conversation, depending on the topic at hand, is likely to include words that would trigger an alert. With this in mind, do you think it is acceptable that tho…

I believe Snowden has gone on record saying that members of Congress are exempt from NSA spying.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#56

Post by TheCondor »

hooande wrote: post #21

The reason that FISA warrant requests have such a high acceptance rate is because a federal prosecutor wouldn't ask for one unless they were certain it would be approved. They don't have to file a request every time a federal agent wants a warrant. They have the option to say "You need to gather more evidence". They say a good trial lawyer won't ask a witness a question without knowing what the answer will be. FBI la…

That's the opium....

We don't know if the requests are good or bad. We have no way of reasoning about the approval rate other than looking to other courts, which suggest that it's impossibly high. We simply don't know but we wish.

Alternatively, if you were the judge and presented with something, perhaps something you might think about rejecting and they say there is a pending threat and they think this guy might blow something up what would you do then? Knowing your decision likely would never be made public...

At the very least they could make these decisions all go public after five years or something. The other counter argument here is that if everybody involved really takes it seriously, they are really looking out for our safety and really trying hard, shouldn't somewhat zealous agents try to overreach? Never a single case simply based upon religion or someone's nation of origin? Unless they just listen in anyways... In which case FISA is even more of a sham.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#57

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

brown9-2 wrote: post #52
weland wrote: post #18

Dear God, it's like I'm a kid again. I didn't grow up in the US; when I was a kid, we didn't have this kind of interviews on TV. For one thing, most of the TV shows they aired was propaganda, and it was so utterly boring most of us didn't bother. The newspapers, on the other hand, carried propaganda along with the news, so you kindda had to read it, too, if you were to know what's happening. The smarter folks could e…

FISA has provisions for surveilling "facilities", buildings, and locations, and is not limited to orders to surveil just an individual. A more generous reading would suggest that is what "foreign entity" is referring to - cases where the NSA is surveilling a safehouse or a military base and not necessarily a human being.

A foreign company might also qualify as an entity. Even a company that merely has offices abroad might qualify. US Citizens who work for foreign entities might very well be included.

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#58

Post by JonnieCache »

angersock wrote: post #42
weland wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, yes, we had those, too. In the beginning, they were fierce opposites of progress, prisoners of the old mentality. It then became rather uncomfortable to label them as such, when a twenty-year old mentality was about as old as the regime itself, so we ended up with similar derogatory terms: fiercely anarchist, adversaries of order, hippies, and as the reality got more and more dire, mentally-troubled and drug use…

These "dedicated malcontents", I presume?

In the UK we're called "domestic extremists."

Re: Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests

#60

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

mtgx wrote: post #49
Spearchucker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And what that does is that does not apply to any U.S. person. Has to be a foreign entity. Referring to a living, breathing human being with feelings, emotions, needs and wants (just like any American) as an "entity" is what Rory Miller calls "othering" [1]. The point of othering is to remove the humanity from someone or from a group of people. It makes it easier for someone to monitor, torture and... kill someone e…

The media could help here, by instead of using the administration words in their articles, they'd be using their words - the normal words. Also, at every press conference where they say "entities", they could ask, do you mean "people"? Or something along those lines. The people in the media are American citizens, too. It would help if they'd try to defend their own rights, too, instead of being nice to the government…

If "the media" were going to help, they could have done that at any time since 9/12/2001.
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