Yet another article from a guy who thinks this is "new" and something Obama did... do these people even do research anymore? These programs and programs like this all date back to before the cold war. There's ones that get shutdown, new ones that pop up, and others that get renamed, but they are always there. And it's not just the NSA. It's the FBI, the CIA, the DHS, and every branch of the military. But reading that article was painful because he kept mentioning how it "just happened", and "now that Obama has done this" type statements. Ugh. Do some more research Mr. author, this is nothing new, and nothing Obama "created", it's just one of the man iterations of the same intelligence gathering policies that have been going on since we were trying to find Ruskie spies hiding amongst us decades ago. This author is dense at best, and honestly seems like he wrote his article based off of Reddit comments or some other equally shitty source. I feel like a broken record replying to all these NSA articles.
Candidate Obama used it as a differentiator of himself. Here is a video of him in 2007 talking about how the tapping of US Citizens is bad and about the preservation of constitutional rights to privacy.
The impresion I have is that Obama "was convinced" to go along with these programs after elected. He might have truly believed the system was not abusive, or if he didn't he would be risking creating enemies inside his government, or both. The problem is, no matter how much non-abusive such a system might be today/yesterday, it will/would derail into abuse in the future (1 year, 5 years, 10 years time, who knows). There's no way people with this kind of power would always "be responsible".
Yeah, I'm with you on this phree. Obama actively campaigned to protect our civil liberties and once in office completely ignored them. He's a liar. Wolf in sheep's clothing.
He also promised to stop these "Wars of agression", and apparently that meant just being more quiet it about it and attacking Pakistan with drones. I do get what you are saying. But no offense, surprise surprise a candidate from one of the two major parties said something on the campaign trail that he didn't follow through with once in office. Color me surprised. :) My only point was he didn't start these programs, and even if he did want to stop them good luck putting the kaibosh on numerous programs numbering in the billions of dollars. Pulling the plug would be tough, and be met with lots of push back.
They do. And the Clinton cruise missile strikes. People hailed Clintor for not going to war, but he launched hundreds of cruise missiles into Iraq during his presidency.Do the Pakistan drone strikes remind you at all of the Cambodia bombings?
You should check out mk's post. It seems to me that the "boiling frog" anecdote is perfect for where we find ourselves. The water is getting pretty damn warm.
Maybe I am reading this wrong, but my impression is that you are saying that people should not feel indignant now because the US has a history of similar overreaches. If that’s the case, I don’t agree with that stance. We did know that The Bush administration was copying all AT&T internet traffic for a time, but we did not have clear evidence that it continued. We also did not have evidence, particularly evidence confirmed by the government, of massive coordination by the plurality of major internet companies that provide email, search and other messaging and storage technologies. Before this week, I did believe that the NSA probably needed a court order to get my emails from Google. I did not know that Google was providing them to the NSA a priori. Nevertheless, even if there were smoke that people should have picked up on earlier, before last week, alleging that the US was doing just this would have been met with disbelief in the wider media. It would have been labeled as unfounded paranoia. The PRISM revelations, and the government confirmation, has provided us proof of a very large scope program, and signals not only the direction that the US is taking, but that while Obama once felt he had to campaign on a different position, from here on out, total information awareness is to be a non-issue. With this story and the Obama administration’s response, the US surveillance narrative is moving from scattered evidence of abuse to the normalization of a police state.
No, sorry if it came off that way. I'm just miffed about how all of a sudden every journalist/blogger and internet commenter is an expert on NSA and PRISM, and many of the articles I've read over the last few days act like this is something new that just happened. I'm more frustrated that people aren't doing their research, and haven't cared for the last 6 decades about this stuff, and even after this NSA/PRISM thing none of them still did any research. That program started in 97 under Clinton, it was exposed in 2006 under Bush. A lot of these programs really took off under Clinton, because let's not forget, he was a two term President that was in office during the internet boom and massive growth. A new technology that needed to be monitored (for them). A lot of new programs and a ton of funding got funneled into programs like this during that time, because they saw so many communications moving to this new medium. Every President since the cold war has been involved in these programs, be it democrat or republican. Exactly. I hang around some conspiracy communities, though I think most of those people are nuts and think most of their "theories" are complete bullshit (I don't even like mentioning that I read conspiracy sites or like associating myself with them), but I've always been interested in the capabilities of the US government. I remember reading about ECHELON when I was in middle school, and back then, even mentioning something like that to people was met with people saying I "shouldn't be so paranoid", and "why would the government want to listen to my phone calls?" type responses. So no, my previous comment you replied to wasn't telling people "it's okay because it's always been around", it was more ripping on that writer for not being a good writer, reporter, or doing any research whatsoever. Now that the stories out about NSA/PRISM, I want to remind and educate people when I have the chance to inform them that there are hundreds of programs, and that they date back decades. The outrage needs to be focused on the spying on American citizens in general, not the NSA and PRISM specifically. I just wish more reporters and journalists were talking about the history of these programs, and how bad it really is, and how massive these programs really are. I just fear that like every other "internet outrage" that this will be forgotten in a week or two, and everyone will go back to talking about how much the Xbox One sucks or something.you are saying that people should not feel indignant now because the US has a history of similar overreaches.
We did know that The Bush administration was copying all AT&T internet traffic for a time, but we did not have clear evidence that it continued.
It would have been labeled as unfounded paranoia.