NSA Collects 200 Million Text Messages Per Day 287
ilikenwf writes "A new release from the files obtained by Edward Snowden have revealed that the NSA collects millions of text messages per day. These are used to gain travel plans, financial data, and social network data. The majority of these texts and data belong to people who are not being investigated for any crime or association. Supposedly, "non-US" data is removed, but we all know that means it is sent to a partner country for analysis, which is then sent back to the NSA."
Pitchforks (Score:2, Interesting)
Torches, hangmans nooses....these are a few of my favorite things.
Releases (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pitchforks (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. Time to insist on our Constitutional Rights.
And some guillotines.
Re:What is the signal/noise ratio? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why they need to hire some Biostatisticians and Statisticians with PhDs.
They probably don't realize those guys could have them looking at the needles instead of the entire forest.
Re:Any evidence? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And (Score:3, Interesting)
Young people overwhelmingly voted for bush?
Many documents of Snowden's date from the reign of King George II.
Re:There's nothing we can do !! (Score:5, Interesting)
[I've taken the liberty of reflowing your text and eliminating your extraneous spaces preceding terminal punctuation, in order to improve both cohesion and my ability to reply.]
Whether we vote Republicans or for Democrats, we vote for the same fucking system. "Vote for somebody else then," you say. Who? Third party? Libertarians?
Yes — absolutely I say vote "vote for third parties" (especially to voters in "safe" states (i.e., non-swing states)). I also say "vote your conscience," "voting for 'lesser' evil is still voting for evil," "third parties need your vote — some D/R candidates don't even want you to vote," and "voting for a third party isn't 'wasting your vote; voting D/R (especially in a "safe" state) is wasting your vote."
The third parties are one of our best shots for restoring liberty, and they deserve the support of everyone who values the liberties that the authoritarian D/R Corporate Party has sacrificed on the altars of control, security theater, and corruption. (I usually recommend that people on the left vote Green, and people on the right vote Libertarian — both parties' anti-authoritarian platforms emphasize the restoration of civil liberties. It's a recommendation I encourage others to espouse if they like, as it conceals no left/right agenda.)
I *AM* a libertarian, but even me know that the "Libertarian party" is worse than a fucking joke.
I'm a left/socialist-libertarian, and I disagree. The Libertarian Party's last presidential candidate — Gary Johnson [wikipedia.org] — was an excellent choice for them; a completely sane, former two-term governor of New Mexico. As a left-libertarian, I was in agreement with nearly all of his social and foreign policy positions.
Every single day the system fill us with nonsensical topics such as "abortion", "welfare abuses", "prayer in the school" and so on, so to occupy our attention. So we have the line drawn in between the people along the line of "Pro Life" vs "Pro Choice", and people having protests over "Gay Parade" (on both sides), and so what? I mean, those are the devices that the fucking system used to divert attention AWAY from the hundreds of millions of morons living in America anyway.
I congratulate you for your unusual recognition of this for what it is (a distraction) — but it also illustrate the vast majority of issues on which the D/R factions of The Corporate Party are in agreement, as well as serving as divisive mechanism of control of the populace, via "divide & conquer" and by dissuading us from uniting against the government or their draconian policies. This strategy failed recently, in a wonderful coming-together between left and right for the "Restore the Fourth" rally in DC to oppose mass-surveillance. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a trend that will continue all the way to the voting booths in 2016.
Re:There's nothing we can do !! (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the days of totalitarianism our history teacher told us once "It does not matter which party wins in the US, their imperialist politics does not change. It is the illusion of choice" . After the class we all said to each other "Ah, that was a nice piece of communist propaganda".
And then the system collapsed, we went abroad and saw for ourselves. The teacher, at least in this respect, was right! How depressing...