Innocent Or Not, the NSA Is Watching You 410
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter.' It is, in some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' program created during the first term of the Bush administration — an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans' privacy."
End the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
It's time for the revolution. Kill the pigs in charge.
You are not innocent (Score:5, Insightful)
This 'outcry' you speak of... (Score:2, Insightful)
What became of it? I mean, did it have any effect? Where is it now? Did anybody lose their job over this? Any elected officials lose their seats? So far the only ones that did were voted out. Bunch of hogwash! Most of the voters want this, and more.
In Soviet Amerika the fascist is YOU!
Re:Innocent? (Score:5, Insightful)
At least a member of your family is probably guilty of:
- downloading something
- using prohibited agricultural products
- and if less than 21 and living in the US, using other also prohibited agricultural liquids.
And that's just for starters...
And the real "looser" in this equation, is that disconnect between law and ethics...
how can a parent educate their children when many laws prohibits actions that are hard to describe as unethical, and
many unethical actions are totally legal.
And if you have enough power, you can make illegal actions legal in your special case...
The right wing is pushing the morals out of the window... (and I'm not speaking of the operating system....)
Conflicted (Score:2, Insightful)
Many of the same people who are most angered and most vocally oppose such blatant 1984 style mass surveillance are the same ones that consistently vote and rally for more and bigger government, and support the politicians who favor a bigger/more-powerful government.
Yet, they don't see a conflict. They don't seem to understand that when you make a government large and powerful enough to provide all these social programs, entitlements, and levels of regulation, this is what happens. Politicians, being the type of people that politicians typically are, will use every opportunity of increased government scope & power to increase their control over the citizens and reduce/eliminate citizen rights and protections.
You can have a government that provides a social "safety net" and major social services/entitlements, and that regulates everything down to kid's lemonade stands and have things like this domestic surveillance-data facility.
Or, you can decide to risk people having the ability to make bad choices and possibly failing and have freedom.
You cannot have both.
Choose.
Strat
Re:Conflicted (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, because unchecked corporate rule would never oppress the citizenry. Stop conflating social programs with police states, it just shows your political naivete.
Re:Innocent? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something there to hang him."
The idea's not new. It's just that the period of social democracy in Europe and liberal democracy in America has come to an end, and the West is creeping back to an imperialist Britain of the nineteenth century with some more equal than others under the law. Once we've crept back another 200 years, of course, the very technology we created to liberate ourselves will be used to stop us before we think of setting a foot wrong.
And we'll applaud, just as we'll always applaud our destruction. Some of us will applaud it because we have stuck a "free market" label on it and have faith that it'll all work out; others will applaud it because we have stuck a "communist" label on it and feel assured that nothing can go wrong; so it is for "Jesus", "Mohammed" and every religion in between. Just occasionally, someone will stand up and ask what effect something has on the people living right now - but those people are dismissed by rulers who no longer have to live in the real world, cheerled by those useful idiots who aspire to leave it too.
Re:Not so deep in the desert (Score:4, Insightful)
you're not getting what I'm saying, are you?
there's no one here would could talk about it, with any direct knowledge AND be authorized to accurately tell what is going on and where.
what did you see? a building being made. and you jump to conclusions based on what? disinformation that comes from those that want to keep us all in the dark?
for all we know, this has been built and working and is in some other remote location and has been for 5 years now. for all we know!
why is this hard for you to understand?
you see some building built, the MEDIA report what they are told and you believe what they say? about such matters, especially?
today, I assume 100% of the info we get is 'managed'. I don't trust a thing that comes from 'established' sources. why should I?
Re:Conflicted (Score:4, Insightful)
binary-thinking, much?
you CAN have both, in the right ways and when designed not to walk all over our assumed basic human rights.
"its A or B. choose!"
idiots...
life is rarely so binary. life is FULL of grey levels.
Re:Conflicted (Score:5, Insightful)
From the summary:
Your "small-government" Republicans are just as much on board with this as the "big-government" Democrats.
Re:End the USA (Score:4, Insightful)
THOUGHTCRIME.
It's real.
Re:Innocent? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody's innocent anymore. There is too much information flowing about - we're all guilty of something. Even if you don't quite no what it is - it's not important. You're just guilty of something so it's important that somebody keep tags on you. Just in case.
That's more right than you think. One author claims that the average citizen commits three felonies a day without knowing it (due to the byzantine legal code which can be interpreted any number of ways): Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent [amazon.com]. It's an interesting read if you're into that sort of thing.
While it's probably true that the majority of such cases weren't intentional on the part of those who originally drafted the laws (maybe I'm being naive there), it's certainly true to say that as a rule it's more beneficial for those who value power *not* to have the average citizen be 100% perfect and law-abiding, as knowledge of lawbreaking gives them a legitimised form of pressure and control over them that they can exert if need be.
Clearly, they won't punish the majority of such infractions- and really don't care about them in themselves- but the potential to be able to do so is the main thing.
This alone is one (but not the only) reason that those who say that "those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear" (i.e. "law abiding citizens") as justification for government surveillance and intrusion are either exceptionally stupid or exceptionally disingenuous.
Life in any country where every transgression of the law was punished would be absolutely impossible and break down quickly. Of course, that would be assuming "good faith" use of the information that let us know this- as I said above, in practice, it would be more beneficial to those in power to simply accumulate knowledge of such offenses and use it against those it deemed most problematic.
Re:Not so deep in the desert (Score:5, Insightful)
Further the Wired account includes illustrations from the Army Corps of Engineers giving the layout (some buildings identified, others not) and it matches every other source of info.
You are taking your paranoia too far. Yes this is a massive NSA Data (and who knows what else) center. It will very likely infringe upon at least a few citizens civil liberties. But there is no question that it is what it is, and that is where it is being built. Something this scale couldn't be easily hidden anyway. It's power requirements are too big to hide in the desert. They had to build a power substation off the main high tension lines just for this facility.
On another note, why did it take this long to hit
Disturbing. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've come across a frighteningly high number of individuals who have a "nothing to hide nothing to fear" mindset. They support things like the Patriot Act without even thinking about.
Very, very disturbing. I really hope they're the minority.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:End the USA (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure you get on their list simply by posting in a subversive thread like this.
Yeah. I didn't bother posting anonymously, because I doubt it makes a difference at this point.
Re:You are not innocent (Score:5, Insightful)
Like the ancient Soviet Union (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Conflicted (Score:3, Insightful)
Small government republicans are a myth.
Re:End the USA (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. What the US government does have is lots of clever propagandists to tell you that voting will never change anything. And if a slight change happens, there'll be merry hell to play with your brain to explain to you why it must be reversed.
See minor party George Galloway's recent by-election win in England. Even though he's an angry white Scotsman who beat an Asian Muslim candidate, the press was at pains to claim that Galloway was only elected because the constituency was full of Muslims without a voice. Good start, then, but propagandists will try to turn this into some stupid race war. Trouble is, when you begin to realise that the propagandists are using you (among very many other groups) as a scapegoat - as Muslim groups with sufficient solidarity have begun to realise - then you begin to become immune to their propaganda. There was a point at which Jews stopped having an inkling of respect for the NSDAP, too.
What can be hoped is that various groups show enough solidarity to realise that the propagandists of all the major powers are working against them as well - from academics to small businessmen. Then, if everything's Cider with Rosie, they'll start to set aside their differences and realise that they all form part of one group: those who want to work a little, play a little, help each other, live free and - above all - not amass unlimited power at the expense of everyone in their way. It's not so much class war as ass war, and the asses are winning.
Re:You are not innocent (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:End the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You are not innocent (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Conflicted (Score:2, Insightful)
As for potential choices, you left out the entire quadrant of the graph where we have a social safety net but no nanny.
Because it doesn't exist anywhere but on a graph. As the government pays for your lifestyle, it becomes more and more controlling over what your lifestyle is. When it pays for health care, see how long it takes people to start complaining about how overweight people, smokers, or drinkers of alcohol taking "more than their share" - and how the government will reward "correct" lifestyle choices. When it pays for schooling, see how long kids at the extremes of the intelligence curve are supported due to having greater requirements than "normal" kids and the necessity for "equality".
When you ask a government to financially support your lifestyle, you give de facto control of your lifestyle over to your government,
Re:Has nothing to do with "hate" or "like" (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, you've got that soothing tone down! "Nothing Is Wrong Here, Move Along." Are you a cop? Did you learn it from your chosen news outlets (Newsweek, Forbes)?
Dispassionate mention of "Targeted Killing" check.
Specious distinction between "ordinary, everyday citizens" and people "linked to terror groups" check.
The "Intel Gap" (don't forget the Mineshaft Gap!)
And lastly: "America's Enemies".
I don't know where to even begin. CIA + War on Drugs + FBI maybe??
Organizations like the NSA (because it isn't unique, after all) amass information secretly, which gives them tremendous power. Power they *will* use, not just to inform on those dusky foreigners you're so worried about, but on "ordinary, everyday citizens", members of government, anybody they feel like. This notion of an innocent, transparent government ceaselessly working to guarantee it's citizens' safety doesn't exist in this world, in the US or anywhere else.
Re:Has nothing to do with "hate" or "like" (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow...thinly veiled ad hominem, attacking the messenger, fallacious descriptions — everything but addressing the actual content of my comments. Bravo!
Do you realize that foreign intelligence actually has a purpose, and that the US does have actual adversaries, not just of our own creation, and that there are governments which seek to project ideals and principles counter to ours?
Just because abuse exists — and history tells us it does — doesn't mean ALL activities are exclusively abuse. Indeed, our extremely free flow of information and lack of censorship reveals actual wrongdoing, or what people may perceive to be as "wrongdoing", far more easily than at any time in history. This creates an echo chamber where people believe things are worse than ever.
What's actually true is that we learn more, in more detail, and more quickly about the workings of our government than at any time in the history of our nation, or indeed, human history. Meanwhile, China is arresting people for "spreading rumors", locking down comments on state-controlled social media, forcing real-name registration on the internet, compelling lawyers to swear oath to the Communist Party, and similar.
Speaking of China...they're on pace to exceed US military spending in real dollars by 2025. I'm sure that is all for "peaceful regional defense".
You know, if the US didn't exist after, say, World War II, what do you think the world would look like? A happy, peaceful place? What about Western Europe? Would we even have the precious Internet that is part of the echo chamber where like-minded individuals convince themselves that the US is the source of everything wrong in the world, while in other places, people are, you know, actually oppressed?
Re:Has nothing to do with "hate" or "like" (Score:3, Insightful)
What concerns me is the slow decline of freedoms and people's acceptance of them if they happen slow enough.
"if that woeful day ever comes (and I will certainly not go down without a fight!)"
the aftermath of such a day, no matter the outcome, would mean a different country.
I like the country we have, the freedoms we have and i loathe the fact that an act of terror has had its desired effect in changing the policies and thoughts of its people to such a degree that the thought of losing our rights... is acceptable.