THE BORE
General => The Superdeep Borehole => Topic started by: radioheadrule83 on June 27, 2013, 09:28:21 AM
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Where do people here stand on this whole controversy?
I'm personally seeing quite a gulf between UK/EU and US reactions. As is usual. And I don't really understand that... are more people worried about it than it actually appears?
Because if not, how is it that some American's have come to think of their security services as infallible bastions of trust?
In September 1990 - did they not fabricate satellite photos showing Iraqi troops at the border of Saudi Arabia?
In September 2002 - did we not have the bullshit September Dossier, claiming Iraq not only had WMD, but that they were able to be deployed within 45 minutes?
In February 2003 - did we not have a Curveball-sourced global presentation of bullshit at the UN security council, that turned out to be total bollocks?
Have we not had countless inmates detained at Gitmo, with no thought to their rights, no due process and no apparent bevvy of evidence with which to prosecute them?
Every terror attack on US and UK soil, or on US/UK assets abroad - in the last 10-20 years, is an attack they have failed to stop. We only have their word on the amount of 'plots' that they have successfully foiled.
I read people defending the honour of these agencies with utter bemusement. What have they DONE to earn that high esteem? I don't know enough of what they do to trust them. Our politicians have simply empowered them to erode our privacy and our rights with the expectation that we will 'understand'.
Why are people so quick to swallow the idea that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about? Why are they so eager to believe that only superficial information will be collected?
Terrorism is not common enough to justify the mass data gathering programmes that countries like the US and UK are embarked upon. Just as people thought there was a commie on every corner, living in their street, eyeing everything and everone with suspicion - we now seem to believe that everyone is a potential terrorist and that all activity should be monitored in some way. Is that not bonkers?
Even if you buy the idea that they NEED all this information to perform 'needle in a haystack' searches upon their own their own intelligence data -- who is watching the watchmen? Our intelligence services and their hierarchies are not transparent. Given events in the last decade, we have very little reason to trust that what they publicly say is true. There is no assurance that this warrantless information gathering, that Snowdon has exposed, cannot be abused. It is not 'intelligence' to simply snoop on everybody; the NSA and other security agencies should be narrowing their focus, not broadening it. It seems to me they are using the continuing climate of fear to empower elite politicians with information. All the information they could ever need to line the pockets of militarist interests, to quell discussion and dissent, to prolong political corruption and to cement a corrosive hegemony through continued conflict and abuse of power: undemocratically and artificially.
At this rate, people harping on about the abuses of other state actors won't have to wait long before we find ourselves with something worse. Maybe its idealist to think we can have proper privacy and freedom, but I prefer the idea of being an idealist to just willingly allowing ourselves to live in some kind of quasi Gestapo or Stasi surveillance programme. Just as people on our side of the world see North Korean and Iranian leaders as evil caricatures, I can actually kind of understand why people elsewhere in the world see us as corrupt, imperialist and sinister. We are never going to change that with shit like this.
In my view -- if we accept these invasions into our lives, and jail Edward Snowdon for exposing them, the terrorists have already won. Bin Laden will have died victorious. Isn't it time to get SANE with domestic and foreign policy?
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I expect ms paint drawings when I click on a radiohead post. sorely disappointed.
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(http://i.imgur.com/PomfZ6j.jpg)
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:lol
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All the information they could ever need to line the pockets of militarist interests, to quell discussion and dissent, to prolong political corruption and to cement a corrosive hegemony through continued conflict and abuse of power: undemocratically and artificially.
If big stacks of metadata are what pave the road to a dystopian nightmare future, I'm pretty sure Amazon would be recommending me products to demonstrate my commitment to the glorious motherland.
A lack of transparency and accountability among the security bureaus is always troubling, but let's be honest. The most destructive US policies target foreigners, are largely tolerated/ignored/supported by a majority of the voting public, and aren't reliant on internal surveillance. What harm has PRISM done compared to even one typical drone strike on a wedding procession? Maybe a high pitch of outrage is necessary to break through the general apathy on this issue, but I'm not crazy about consumers of political news, generally safe and middle-class, trying to cast themselves as the central characters in an Orwell fanfic.
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Jesus Christ mandark, I have been trying to articulate how much I do not give a shit about the Prism shit and you did it in just one paragraph.
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All the information they could ever need to line the pockets of militarist interests, to quell discussion and dissent, to prolong political corruption and to cement a corrosive hegemony through continued conflict and abuse of power: undemocratically and artificially.
If big stacks of metadata are what pave the road to a dystopian nightmare future, I'm pretty sure Amazon would be recommending me products to demonstrate my commitment to the glorious motherland.
A lack of transparency and accountability among the security bureaus is always troubling, but let's be honest. The most destructive US policies target foreigners, are largely tolerated/ignored/supported by a majority of the voting public, and aren't reliant on internal surveillance. What harm has PRISM done compared to even one typical drone strike on a wedding procession? Maybe a high pitch of outrage is necessary to break through the general apathy on this issue, but I'm not crazy about consumers of political news, generally safe and middle-class, trying to cast themselves as the central characters in an Orwell fanfic.
I'd have a similarly laid back view if I were both a) American and b) believed that metadata was all they were collecting.
The metadata collection no doubt better informs further snooping, else why would they do it? And my main concern is the warrantless, opaque nature of what's going on. Spying on citizens and political offices in EU partner countries? To some extent we all know some degree of this happens in every intelligence service... but the scale of these programs is huge, and it seems unclear of what the consequences are, what may have already happened as a result, and who is accountable. What is in place to deter abuse etc? I think what shocks me most is that it poses such questions, yet there is a sheer antipathy over the revelations. There is a huge amount of trust that people seem to have in government run intelligence -- when in other circumstances -- citizens routinely display an almost insane level of distrust towards their local and central government. People think them untrustworthy, wasteful, inept... What makes intelligence services different?
I used to work in UK defence and our phys security briefings sometimes mentioned certain state actors like China, mostly being host to commercially-reasoned spying, that sought to steal IP and ideas, information about competitors etc. I wasn't really accustomed to the idea that the US was engaged in similar anti-competitive industrial espionage itself. Of course, when you think about a country serving its own economic interests in times like these, it makes some sense - but again, I'm still not comfortable with how accepting everybody is about it.
All hyperbole aside, we're obviously not in any kind of Orwellian nightmare -- but then, the amount of control and pliant obedience in 1984 is almost a caricature of evil. I hate references to Orwell in politics generally. We're more Brave New World - whereby, nobody gives a shit until they're physically touched by something. A situation in which authorities can spy on anyone, and act on that information to impose the kind of conditions they want - we've had that before. Consensus seemed to be, whenever it happened, that it was a bad thing.
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I enjoyed Dan Carlin's Common Sense on this. http://www.dancarlin.com//disp.php/csarchive/Show-255---The-Big-Long-Surveillance-Show/N.S.A.-security-spying
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I enjoyed Dan Carlin's Common Sense on this. http://www.dancarlin.com//disp.php/csarchive/Show-255---The-Big-Long-Surveillance-Show/N.S.A.-security-spying
Just listened to that. Dan Carlin has a good head on his shoulders.