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Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

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Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#251
post #234

I hate to use this tone but, so be it. Maybe now you morons who continue to vote in the pieces of shit into our government who are bent on taking more and more power for themselves will wake up and figure it out? How much more proof do you need? Does this make you angry yet or is Obama still your diety? Oh, and Republicans don't get a pass either. The point is that all of you morons voting like robots along party lin…

Vote Republican: Patriot act created Vote Democratic: Patriot act abused I'm not sure where this leaves us, which is worse?

Patriot act was overwhelming supported by Republicans AND Democrats when passed. Let's not rewrite history here.

The more we learn about the Obama admin, the worse it gets. This isn't a R vs D thing.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#252
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A socially regressive policy is something like making abortions illegal. Libertarians aren't socially regressive, it's the conservative part that is

I do find it funny how abortion even rises to the level of audibleness in the conversation. We have a government that is consuming massively more of the GDP than ever, is grabbing more and more power at every turn, is subsidizing every kind of bad behavior from international banks to a horribly corrupt food stamp program of epic proportions. Even if you hate the idea of illegal abortions, aligning yourself with "big…

> do find it funny how abortion even rises to the level of audibleness in the conversation.

Legalized abortion, allowing half the species agency over a basic biological function central to their ability to equally participate in society, is the single most important human rights issue since the outlawing of slavery. Of course it rises to the level of "audibleness." It should be deafening!

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#253
post #105

Dutch person here with a little insight what's to come for you guys. Some information about our tiny little country (in Wester Europe, very pro-US) with just 17 million people. Our government listens in on more calls every year than in the whole of the US combined. All our telecommunications providers are forced to have the capability to intercept all traffic (phone and internet). Encrypted data must be stored for an…

> You can purchase one without your name and address but you can only add money to it using your bank-account. The system tracks all travelers' movements (departure and end points for each leg of every journey), in most cases combined with the traveler's identity. It retains the data for seven years Not to discredit your whole post but is this really the case. You can buy those 1 hour/24 hour/48 hour passes for cash.…

Funny that this thread has become about the Netherlands.

I moved to Amsterdam from Seattle last November, and have to say that I feel far less vulnerable here, information-wise. Perhaps if I compared the policies and behaviors of only the national governments, I would remember the US as the land of the free, but I prefer to take all levels of government and corporate power into account.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, you can buy the one-time cards and they won't be able to track you. But for regular travellers like myself those one-time cards are much more expensive than the ones linked to your bank account. Not to mention the hassle of having to buy a new card every day...

That hassle can in principle be totally mitigated. When you buy an OV-Chipkaart from a service desk (like an NS desk at a train station), they will not only charge you the 15€ (or whatever) fee, but they will also ask you how much you want to use to load the card. You can pay cash at such a desk. You could probably also use those desks to reload the OV-Chipkaart with cash, but I've never tried that.

> You could probably also use those desks to reload the OV-Chipkaart with cash, but I've never tried that.

You should be able to, especially the older generation has trouble with modern payment systems and (perhaps rightfully so) mistrust paying stuff by card.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#255
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird thing is, nobody seems to care. I care, it's one of the reasons I will keep voting for the pirate party.

I think people did care but we see these stories so regularly now, even though I know it's a bad thing, I find it hard to care.

Second, they get in the news once, minor uproar (particularly on the internet), then... nothing. Maybe in cases like the The Pirate Bay blockade, which gets through to certain news sites from time to time whenever they get a new domain name or host, where they remind the audience that for that single web page, ISP's have been made to censor it by court order (and need to update their blocked domain names / IP addresses)

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#256
post #87

I hate to use this tone but, so be it. Maybe now you morons who continue to vote in the pieces of shit into our government who are bent on taking more and more power for themselves will wake up and figure it out? How much more proof do you need? Does this make you angry yet or is Obama still your diety? Oh, and Republicans don't get a pass either. The point is that all of you morons voting like robots along party lin…

I am not American, so I am not an as immersed in your politics as many of you so take it with a grain of salt but this is my opinion. Obama is about the most dangerous thing that could have happened to your government. Why? In most of the world outside from the US, after Bush's second term, you simply couldn't defend him. My family tends to be very pro USA (blindly), but with Bush, it got to the point that it was not…

The problem isn't really with Obama, it's that the American people haven't done much against the government's attempts at power grabs. There are a variety of reasons for why not, ignorance being high on the list, but perhaps the most prominent reason is that we expect our government to keep us safe, for better or worse.

If Americans are just now getting upset about this, it's ultimately our own fault, as this was the fairly logically expected result of the Patriot Act, and we haven't really done enough to get rid of it. The 'right' response would have been to vote out every single Senator and House Representative that voted for such an egregious overstep on our liberties, but in reality, that ignores a whole slew of other interests those politicians may have supported.

If, for example, I am gun-toting civil rights advocate, a Senator that votes against an assault weapons ban comes out slightly ahead, even if that same Senator also voted for the Patriot Act.

If I'm a gay man, looking for federal recognition of marriage, I'm in the same boat. Someone who votes for gay marriage, but also against privacy, comes out ahead.

The net, basically, is that privacy is nobody's 'hot-button' issue because even while somebody can espouse the inherent ignorance of the "If you have nothing to hide..." argument, we, for the most part, don't have anything to hide. So while we don't acquiesce to these intrusions of privacy, we let them fall by the wayside in the wake of more important issues.

The real bitch of the matter, of course, is that Republicans are almost certainly going to scream 'outrage' to this new knowledge, even though it was Bush's policies that implemented their capability. Meanwhile, democrats will likely 'defend Obama' because it would otherwise reflect negatively on the party to not do so. In sort, it's political ammunition. The outrage we see won't even be universal. You'll probably see exceptions on either side (Lindsay Graham, Republican from South Carolina has already said this information "doesn't bother" him), and ultimately, if the 'blame' can be assigned in such a way that it advances someone's political agenda, that's what'll happen.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate to use this tone but, so be it. Maybe now you morons who continue to vote in the pieces of shit into our government who are bent on taking more and more power for themselves will wake up and figure it out? How much more proof do you need? Does this make you angry yet or is Obama still your diety? Oh, and Republicans don't get a pass either. > The point is that all of you morons voting like robots along party…

> This is not true. Although some policies and attitudes have changed since 9/11, US society has not fundamentally changed and the major problems pre-9/11 are the same post-9/11. We have way more problems after 9-11. We've invented more problems, starting with the TSA that nudiescans and molests people -- the Patriot act, spying on Americans, other fear mongering.

The US gov't has always engaged in the practices you mention against the people, although this has expanded since 9/11. The point is that this behavior isn't fundamentally different from past policies and doesn't represent a major change in the how the US operates (obviously this is a problem).

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#258
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do find it funny how abortion even rises to the level of audibleness in the conversation. We have a government that is consuming massively more of the GDP than ever, is grabbing more and more power at every turn, is subsidizing every kind of bad behavior from international banks to a horribly corrupt food stamp program of epic proportions. Even if you hate the idea of illegal abortions, aligning yourself with "big…

> do find it funny how abortion even rises to the level of audibleness in the conversation. Legalized abortion, allowing half the species agency over a basic biological function central to their ability to equally participate in society, is the single most important human rights issue since the outlawing of slavery. Of course it rises to the level of "audibleness." It should be deafening!

You completely missed the point.

When you give so much power to the government, it doesn't matter what your individual opinion is on abortion or any other noise issue.

You have given your opponent a checkmate because you allowed that opponent to take your queen earlier thinking that he was somehow your friend.

Re: Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

#259
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice printing all but eliminates the idea of anonymity for tracfones. All they'd need is one conversation, and they can look for you from there on using your voice. They can back trace who you are by who you talk to and so on; relatively trivial to figure out who you are from there, particularly assuming you make a few calls and or reveal any details.

I'm skeptical how accurate voiceprinting can be after all the distortion/compression of a cell signal. If you have a device you use to have contacts you want to keep secret from the NSA, you probably shouldn't call your friends on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Death_and_lega...
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