President Obama announced on Friday that he will place new limits on intelligence agencies’ bulk collection of phone call records. But he rejected some other recommendations to rein in surveillance made by a panel of outside advisers.
The NYT lists the changes. It’s insubstantial.
I love your commentary, but I knew it before reading a single word. LOL The emperor is DEFINITELY wearing no clothes at this point.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/17/us/nsa-changes-graphi…
Meet the new NSA, just like the old NSA.
Does anyone else see this as an exercise in appeasing the public rather than correcting the abuse? The panel seems to have taken this seriously, but everyone else involved from government just seems to be annoyed that their surveillance activities were leaked.
I’m really not comfortable that the NSA will continue the policy of indiscriminate data collection, regardless of the rules in place. It just feels wrong for governments to entitle themselves to store details of our private lives without a warrant.
Edited 2014-01-18 03:48 UTC
Well, yeah, of course. It’s business as usual in the halls of power.
Of course, this won’t in any way improve the U.S standing globally but you, or at least your government and big corporations, seems to be happy isolating yourselves and hampering actual innovation.
Yes, Alfman is clearly happy with that situation. It’s good to see that you weren’t fooled merely by the fact that he expressed the exact opposite sentiment; obviously the statement “I’m really not comfortable that the NSA will continue the policy of indiscriminate data collection” was just meant ironically…
Edited 2014-01-19 14:53 UTC
BallmerKnowsBest,
“It’s good to see that you weren’t fooled merely by the fact that he expressed the exact opposite sentiment”
Haha! This really gave me a good laugh. Ironically he was right, that was just a parody, not what I actually thought. I love the NSA.
<!– hide from NSA spiders
What worries me is that merely expressing opinions openly might come back to haunt us if the government is building a database of “dissidents” by data mining through all our online activities.
In china, some of our dissenting posts might get us in trouble with the government. I’m thankful to have more basic freedoms in the US, yet I still don’t trust the NSA to restrain from deploying the full arsenal of data mining capabilities at it’s disposal without regards to the ethics or constitutionality behind them. We are moving unnervingly closer to the legal and technical framework for the “thought crimes” from the novel 1984. We are just not there yet, but we are inching in that direction all the time.
The profiles compiled by the NSA today may be permanent even if we could trust the NSA to delete the raw data every 5 years. There’s no saying what future governments/administrations/agencies are going to do with that regardless of the “rules” in place today. So, I strongly feel we are perfectly justified in demanding the government not keep the data at all without a warrant establishing a reasonable need to have it. The mere fact that we’re discussing this shows how far the US has regressed at civil liberties.
–>
Edited 2014-01-19 22:54 UTC
The best sentence in his speech was something like: “They have families and children and they use facebook too just as we do. They are our friends”.
Yeah, except these friends can turn on your camera and record you at any time, and also know every website you go to, everyone you talk to, and what is said. Oh also your location. But other than that, just like your other friends on FaceBook. NSA: FUCK YOU.
If they have families and children and use Facebook and whatnot have zero relevance to if what they’re doing is right or wrong or even whether they’re good people.
Kim Jong-un has a family too.
But hey, family, children and emotions is always a good card to play.
Edited 2014-01-18 11:31 UTC
I didn’t closely followed the commision thing, but from the NYT report it seems that the commisions’ recommendations barely fit into acceptable maximum extent of government power. The fact that they’ve got rejected even after the whole internet surveillance thing blew up out in public seems to me yet more alarming than NSA’s operations themselves.
What I want to see, “No data collected without a warrant, signed by a real-live judge.”
President Obama and the NSA are protecting us all!
No he’s not and no they’re not.
Edited 2014-01-18 11:36 UTC
Poe’s law applies there, because what it was said was probably a sarcasm, but it’s impossible to know it just by reading it.
Edited 2014-01-19 02:50 UTC
Well, I thought so too but then the title kinda contradicts the post being sarcastic.
The title says “More racist attacks on Obama?” like the people who think that “Obama and the NSA are protecting us all, it’s racists who are attacking Obama”, hence the probable sarcasm.
Edited 2014-01-19 16:04 UTC
So to summarize, everybody can go fuck themselves and the government is going to continue to do whatever it wants regardless of what anyone thinks or has to say about it. Business as usual.
I think this summarizes it very well:
http://www2.justiceonline.org/site/MessageViewer?dlv_id=10382&em_id…
This forum is buggy. After logging in, my previously written post went to a wrong topic. And I even cannot delete it.
Edited 2014-01-18 13:00 UTC
The United States in its arrogance as a world superpower is not only spying on everyone else, but its own people and for no other reason that it simply can. Incredibly, most people who are poled simply shrug this off and go back to their idiot television programming thinking “who cares because I have nothing to hide.” I have to wonder what it will take to get the public outraged enough to do something drastic. Maybe if the police start showing up at peoples’ homes and search without warrants (or with a sealed warrant signed in secret by an unnamed judge) that will do the trick.
Yeah, it really is sad. I’ve spoken to at least one person who said that, and yet again he also didn’t like 2112 by Rush, and is a ‘Linux Administrator’ who doesn’t think Linux is ready for the desktop, and wanted to use Windows 7 to do his administrating. He also doesn’t think a chipset on a motherboard does anything for performance or stability…
There are a lot of couch critics here in America. People who are very opinionated as long as they don’t have to get off the couch. We’ve been conditioned to be like this. We’ve been conditioned to be submissive.
We’re also a very divided country with our politicians seemingly trying to deepen that divide as much as possible. Maybe it’s to prevent us from becoming united? If we’re too consumed with hating each other, we’re no threat to those in power and those engaged in the raping of the middle & lower class.
Our election system is rigged in that it allows for fraud, and citizens votes do not decide who wins elections. Our leaders have manipulated the rules making it near impossible to remove people we don’t like AKA gerrymandering. “The will of the people” is allowed only when in alignment with what those in power want.
Lastly, I don’t believe my government is spying on everyone, including our own citizens, to protect. Those who seek to destroy the US have already won because they have made a once great nation into a fearful & paranoid, that is going to self-destruct.
There mere fact that I’m hesitant to submit posts like this speaks volumes. Who is the biggest threat — the people on the other side of the Earth wishing you to fail, or those who are looking over your shoulder 24/7 recording every aspect of your life?
I really really thought OSNews would be the one website in the world to avoid mentioning O’drama-bama.