But we have to spy because of Terrorism or something right?
Many have claimed, even here, that we must spy on civilians and monitor the internet to make sure that the Terrorists are unable to gather and plot attacks against us.
I was wondering then, how exactly did we miss this?
Washington (CNN) -- A new video shows what looks like the largest and most dangerous gathering of al Qaeda in years. And the CIA and the Pentagon either didn't know about it or couldn't get a drone there in time to strike.
U.S. officials won't comment on that, but every frame of the video is now being analyzed by the United States.
Now, before the Authoritarian set and the defenders of the empire get started. I'm going to include this bit from the story.
That bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, is believed to be responsible for several attack attempts against the United States, including the failed 2009 Christmas Day underwear bomber attack in Detroit.
Al-Asiri doesn't appear in the video. He remains in hiding, and intelligence experts say he and other AQAP leaders have gone back to using couriers to communicate to avoid detection. That makes it even harder to figure out what al-Wuhayshi may order next.
Can you hear the battle cry yet? Because of Snowden and Greenwald, we have lost the ability to track the Terrorists. We missed a chance to kill the Al Qaeda leadership because of Snowden. My question in response to this predictable whine from the usual suspects, how many times have we killed the leadership of Al Qaeda?
If anything, this proves the assertions of the privacy minded even more. You see, you can't intercept a phone call that isn't made. You can't use the computers to sort the thoughts in a persons head. Long before Snowden had released the information to the world, the targets we were bombing the crap out of had really dropped down to Taliban leaders heading to peace negotiations in Pakistan, and wedding parties where someone had something that sort of looked like a gun. Every time the "terrorists" made a phone call or sent an email we sent a bomb flying through their window. Don't tell me you expected them to remain dumb forever. Eventually they were going to wise up.
So this big meeting of Terrorists somewhere in Yemen with no Drones in sight, nor any advanced warning, kind of makes you wonder what those billions of dollars we spend on intelligence gathering are going for.
I remember that the Oil well Inspectors who were supposed to be doing checks on among other things Deepwater Horizon were busy watching porn on their office computers. Imagine if they had the right security clearances, they could have been activating webcams of teen-aged girls all over the world and watching them live in their bedrooms.
I still suspect that many of these "intelligence workers" are doing little more than that, just sitting and watching little girls in their bedrooms.
