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Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

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201–210 of 228 posts

Re: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

#201
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think here you're assuming wealth was the limited resource referred to, were it might be other things.

I can't think of something they can justifiably compete over, except security, in which case it's only jusitifable when the other party is initiating threats.

How about global clout?

Re: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

#202
post #110
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why you think international spying is unnecessary. Until countries cease to compete for limited resources, it seems to me like an inevitability.

Why should it be considered morally acceptable by those who vote? When have we had the opportunity to vote on it?

de·moc·ra·cy /diˈmäkrəsē/ Noun:

1. A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.

2. A state governed in such a way.

3. The cake is a lie.

Re: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

#203
post #80
post #27

If this is true doesn't it mean that Bin Laden won the war on terror? Every time I go to the airport I think this. Those full body scanners? Thanks to Bin Laden, now you practically get strip searched for every flight. You have to take off your shoes. You cannot take drinks on a plane. You then have everyone on edge no matter where you go. You and a friend play CounterStrike. You get on the bus and start talking abou…

Muslim here. I never understood both sides and their actions. I mean I find both Islamic fundamentalism and American actions all round globe both equally dumb. I don't think OBL ever had it as an explicit aim to pull down US militarily or culturally transform US into a Islamic state. That is impossible, and I assume somebody like him already understood that. I guess his aim was to drag US into a war and then reduce t…

"I was expecting more of a Intelligence based response where the CIA would hunt him down and kill him, instead of wasting trillions dollars."

You have to realize, while the money is wasted from the perspective of tax payers, it's a profit from the perspective of, say, weapons manufacturers (just taking those as an example).

Sure, they "wasted" money, that wasn't theirs, on things that enhanced their control. The time and resources of common people actually do get wasted, but other than that, the whole thing was and continues to be a success. Just don't lump a whole nation, the citizens and the policy makers, together. That can only lead to confusion. War is a racket, so is the war on terror - and if these fundamentalists didn't conveniently exist, others would have to be created.

Re: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its actually surprising that US fell for it. Yep. Bush would have been a hero if he hadn't fallen for it. Compassionate conservatism, expressed in Medicare Part C. Tax cuts combined with modest military expansion would have held the deficit in check. But remember the pundits saying, "this one calles for boots on the ground"? Even Jon Stewart showed a clip of Bush or someone making a compassionate statement, and comme…

Really? Are you talking about the Clinton whose sanctions killed half million Iraqi infants from 1991 to 1996 alone and his the secretary of state though the cost of sanctions was worth it? The Clinton who in 1998 knowingly bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan that supplied cheap medicines to millions of Africans? http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084/ Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a…

Nobody thinks of Clinton as committing us to the kind of war which drains our resources. Everyone thinks of Bush that way. Remember Bosnia? That was Clinton style.

Re: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

#205
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a list of all of Architects/Engineers. They each include credentials, license numbers, etc. The list if overwhelming. Graduates (and professors) from top schools in the country are included. http://www2.ae911truth.org/signpetition.php I am not an expert and I have no idea what actually happened on 9/11. It is up to each of us to form an opinion using the evidence that we have available.

"It is up to each of us to form an opinion using the evidence that we have available." This sounds noble, but in fact it is the way of madness. Information does not stand on its own. Without the right background knowledge and experience you cannot assign any level of certainty to a deduction you make from a piece of information. Just because you are capable of interpreting some of the information and forming reasonab…

Ceding your opinions to those who "know" requires first identifying them as such. So yeah, it may sound smart to the layman, but that was just a bunch of pointless sophistry and FUD. Moving on...

Re: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the invasion of Afghanistan was inevitable, but not Iraq. Afghanistan was a big mistake (even Rthe USSR, with a land border, couldnt handle it) but Iraq was worse and bizarre.

>I think the invasion of Afghanistan was inevitable Inevitable as in "in response to 9/11"? I don't think so, it was planned months, if not years before September 2001. [edit, corrected typo to 2001] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/afgh-n20.shtml US planned war in Afghanistan long before September 11 By Patrick Martin 20 November 2001 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1550366.stm Tuesday, 18 September,…

I'm not arguing justice or decency. Simply that in response to the 9/11 attack the US was going to do something, and Afghanistan was that something. I think in pure pragmatic terms it was a stupid something.

From his own point of view. Osama had declared war on the US and picked what he considered to be strategic targets. In purely military terms I think he picked his targets very well.

Re: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

#207
post #201
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of something they can justifiably compete over, except security, in which case it's only jusitifable when the other party is initiating threats.

How about global clout?

That does not seem like a justifiable thing to compete over, to me.

Re: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

#208
post #136

Might I suggest having some fun with one's dossier? Like randomly doing the exact opposite of what you would ordinarily do on a daily basis. Here are some ideas... 1. Take the bus instead of driving your car. 2. Buy a pack of cigarettes if you're not a smoker. 3. Buy magazines you would never normally buy. 4. Attend a political meeting of the party you typically oppose. 5. Buy vegetarian food for a week if you're a m…

Apple has a patent on this.[1] [1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

I wonder if the wiping techniques used to securely erase data from government HDDs would count as prior art here.

Re: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's largely a case of selective memory. People often have a rosy memory of what they believed. Bush said he had clear evidence of WMD's in Iraq, that he showed this to Blair and Blair confirmed. I think it would be fair to say that most people would agree that Hussein wanted WMD's. So I think it's fair to think that most Americans and most in the international community believed that Iraq had WMD's. The ar…

Um... I was on anti Iraq war demos when I was 18, because it was obvious to me Saddam Hussein had no WMDs. And I was _not_ alone in this assumption: "In London, at least 750,000 people demonstrated in what police called the city's largest demonstration ever." Source: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Protest-Iraq-War16feb03...

But I bet that most of those 750,000 believed that Iraq had WMD's of some sort, perhaps very limited in capability.

But they also believed that a war was an inappropriate response to the existence of those WMD's.

Re: Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

#210
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This and the other comments refer to "battles" in the war on terror, if you will. I'm not sure it's how OBL planned but it does kind of look like he might have been happy with our trajectory.

Only if you buy into "because they hate our freedom". In reality OBL couldn't care less about US domestic civil rights and liberties. He cared about US presence in the middle east and support for Israel. The "the terrorists have won"-notion is based on the viewpoint that terrorists are just evil and want "bad things" to happen to their enemies. So whatever unpleasant consequence for you means that the terrorists have…

I read most "the terrorists have won" arguments as in-kind rebuttals of the silly "because they hate our freedom" rhetoric used to defend the War on Terror. In other words, I see those arguments like this: if terrorists really are exactly as we're told, and they just hate us and want to hurt us, then they've accomplished that goal.
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