PRISM

[xoxoxoBruce]

Now, now, don't you know Berrigan... uh, I mean Snowdon is a hero? He should be rewarded for telling us what anyone who was paying attention knew in 2007.

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by sexobon

Hanging, firing squad; or, drone?

Venezuela may be punishment enough...

[Griff]

or Russia. As long as the rest of the planet is populated with these petty dictatorships it doesn't put much pressure on our homegrown fascism to ease up. I liked it better when Snowden was hanging with free folks in Hong Kong, but we're determined to drag the free world down.

[ZenGum]

Petty dictatorships? Aint nuttin petty about Putin's dictation!


FTR, I disagree with the recent posts disapproving of Snowden, but that's becoming a matter of opinion, not information, and I'm not in the mood for that kind of argument. But I think it's time to stop claiming to be the "Free world".

Mind you, US hegemony is still less fucked up than that of China or Russia.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I'm tired of every cocksucker that betrays this country automatically being made a folk hero.

Hegemony? We're just carrying on the family tradition.

[sexobon]

Why not let bygones be bygones so Snowden can come back. He can settle down in a nice protected neighborhood somewhere in Florida. To show there's no hard feelings, we'll even buy him a brand new hoodie and have George Zimmerman keep an eye on him.

[ZenGum]

Not a holiday camp in Cuba?

This article in Der Spiegel http://www.spiegel.de/politik/auslan...-a-911589.html quotes Jimmy Carter as supporting Snowden and even saying "Amerika hat derzeit keine funktionierende Demokratie", i.e. America does not have a functioning democracy.

Has this made it to the US media yet?

[Griff]

Oh no, that would be an inconvenient narrative.

[glatt]

It's showing up on a few second rate "news" sites, but no major news source besides Der Spiegel is reporting it.

[Lamplighter]

The cost of digital data storage has gone down so much, nothing is not feasible !

ACLU
Catherine Crump,
July 17, 2013

You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans' Movements

Automatic license plate readers are the most widespread
location tracking technology you’ve probably never heard of.
Mounted on patrol cars or stationary objects like bridges,
they snap photos of every passing car, recording their plate numbers, times, and locations.

At first the captured plate data was used just to check against lists of cars
law enforcement hoped to locate for various reasons (to act on arrest warrants, find stolen cars, etc.).
But increasingly, all of this data is being fed into massive databases that
contain the location information of many millions of innocent
Americans stretching back for months or even years.
<snip>
Because of the way the technology works – these devices snap photos
of every passing car, not just those registered to people suspected of crimes
– virtually all of the data license plate readers gather is about people who are completely innocent.
Data that we obtained through our records requests illustrates this point vividly:



Law enforcement data-retention policies today are all over the map.
While some police departments store data briefly, others keep it for a long time, or indefinitely.

The entire report is down-loadable as a PDF file.
(See, everyone can store data cheaply, even you )

[xoxoxoBruce]

I bitched about the plate readers monitoring Interstate 80, years ago, but I was called paranoid, and told not to worry.

Everything you need to know about PRISM.

[Undertoad]

[Lamplighter]

You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans' Movements

The headline here is pretty misleading.
There's a real issue about "You" when the data is being stored for years.

At least the "red-light cameras" that give you a $300 "ticket-by-mail" have a photo of the offending driver.
How many car owners can say who was driving their car on a particular highway
on any particular date at any particular time...4 or 14 or 44 years ago.

This amassing of enormous amounts of "data" is a waste of resources,
because the digital age has created one truism: garbage in - garbage out.

[ZenGum]

And yet, they are incapable of spying on even themselves, apparently.

http://www.propublica.org/article/ns...rch-own-emails

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency's public-relations efforts.

A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person," rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.

[editing by ZG]

"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic," she added.

[Lamplighter]

Ron Wyden is still at it... hinting, but not disclosing.
This weekend new issues may be becoming public.

Washington Post
David A. Fahrenthold
July 28, 2013

With NSA revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s vague warnings about privacy finally become clear

It was one of the strangest personal crusades on Capitol Hill:
For years, Sen. Ron Wyden said he was worried that intelligence agencies were violating Americans’ privacy.
But he couldn’t say how. That was a secret.

Wyden’s outrage, he said, stemmed from top-secret information he had learned as a member
of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But Wyden (D-Ore.) was bound by secrecy rules, unable to reveal what he knew. <snip>

Two years later, they found out.

The revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden
— detailing vast domestic surveillance programs that vacuumed up data on phone calls,
e-mails and other electronic communications —
have filled in the details of Wyden’s concerns.
<snip>
Now, in the aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures, Wyden is pressing his case on two fronts.<snip>

On Friday, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. responded to a letter co-authored by Wyden with new details.


Washington Post
Peter Wallsten
July 26, 2013