those evil commie chinese have been killing beautiful american babies with the sole purpose of creating these thumbdrives

all that much. What we already have is damning. No doubt more will come.

Last edited Sat Jun 15, 2013, 06:38 PM - Edit history (1)

We know nothing new that we already didn't know. That's more like a towel toss, where you toss in the towel and are satisfied with what we have already uncovered years ago.

Snowden and Greenwald Beginning to Self-Destruct; ‘The Nation’ and ‘Mother Jones’ Raise Questions

http://thedailybanter.com/2013/06/snowden-and-greenwald-beginning-to-self-destruct-the-nation-and-mother-jones-raise-questions/

:EGREGIOUS*

Copyright!

And he sniffed Elmer's Glue when he was in kindergarten!

"Methinks they WANT us to defend Snowden from over-the-top attacks and not focus on the NSA."

So it only LOOKS like the majority of DU hates Snowden.

I don't really know what to think about Snowden. What I find shocking is the misplaced anger of so many DUers. It's like they'd rather not know what the government is doing.

and this site is fucking infested.

If only 10% of the members support the NSA, but they post 10 times as frequently as the 90%, it looks "evenly split" but it's not. The 10% have made an art form of distorting the impression one gets of DU public opinion.

you are in along with a lot of others.

Sticking to facts isn't supporting the NRA.

NO OTHER SITE DOES THIS.

There's a very, very good reason for that.

It appears that it's essential for us to punish leakers very severely these days. Here's the problem. Our spook corps has grown tremendously since the advent of the internet. We now have well over 100,000 spooks working in the FBI, CIA, NSA and various other spook agencies. These days, most of these spooks are engaged in cyber-warfare operations. There are simply too many of them to control. Any one of them could betray us, and a single betrayal could cost us billions of dollars and years of effort. Furthermore, in this environment, just one leak could seriously strengthen our enemies. Here's how:

We have developed what our spooks call zero-day exploits. We worked hard on these and spent a lot of time and money developing them.

We have spent billions finding weakness in all kinds of computer programs that can be exploited. Because we have not exploited these weaknesses yet, the developers who produced the software have not yet patched the programs. They remain vulnerable, and the NSA is just waiting (keeping that software vulnerable) so that we can attack our enemies when (and if) we need to. Snowden (or another leaker) might be able to sell or give away all the holes we spent years discovering. That would severely curtail our cyberwarfare capabilities and would represent a waste of billions upon billions of dollars.

This, I assume, is why we punish whistleblowers and leakers so severely these days. It's to deter all these spooks, whom we could never completely control. We have to remind them that the price for disloyalty is severe. Or, so the thinking goes.



-Laelth

that the concept of compartmentalization is reinforced to those in charge after this Snowden affair. I am all for our government preparing for cyber attacks and cyber warfare and I hope this Snowden affair leads to a rethinking of many issues related to securing these contingencies and strategies.

What I fear is the use of these technologies by private companies and foreign governments that have nothing to do with our national security. I also care about the 4th Amendment and do not wish at this time to surrender it.

Cheers!

I am also worried about nefarious corporate exploitation of all the data our spooks have collected, though I note that the 4th Amendment does not apply to said corps. It seems clear that we have an agreement to share data with certain foreign governments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

Our government can get around the 4th Amendment by having foreign spooks (from another Five Eyes nations) spy on Americans and then "give" the data to the U.S. government. So far, there has been no Constitutional challenge to this practice, afaik.

We simply lack the jurisprudence to handle these matters. The last test case on a remotely-related subject dates to 1979. Our technology has advanced so tremendously since that time that we really have no idea what's Constitutional and what is not. We need guidance from the SCOTUS on this. I can not imagine, were I sitting on the SCOTUS, how I would rule on a case that balances the 4th Amendment with national security interests of this magnitude. It would be a difficult call. This may explain why the SCOTUS has not heard a case on point. They may not want to deal with it.

Regards,

-Laelth

I also think Snowden needs to be held accountable for his actions.

your fucking government too. What's with you calling the government names based on a 29 year old who stole data off the fucking government computers and fled with it to Hong Kong where he turned it over to the Chinese. And you have no proof or reason to believe that Hong Kong Eddie didn't take your personal data and give it to an unelected authoritarian fucking Chinese government.