caseymoz
caseymoz's JournalOh, Tony, I love it when you talk dirty!
"Homosexual sodomy" hehehe Now tell me about the flouradation of our drinking water!
I want to congratulate all LGBT people on this great victory today. I'll join you in celebrating June 26th every year as a great day in history.
I won't make any posts on more negative subjects today. Nothing to distract from your joy.
NSA spy program: a social/economic catastrophe
From Daily Kos: other countries are not going to stand for this surveillance and are going to divert their Internet resources away from the US.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218102/-US-NSA-Accused-of-Criminal-Privacy-Violations-in-Dozens-of-Nations-Snowden-Blowback
The United States can no longer be trusted, never, ever again.
This is a watershed moment that changes everything. You are witnessing an epic geopolitical shift that will profoundly effect the United States standing throughout the world. It will certainly affect your future.
Before this is over, the entire architecture of the Internet will be rebuilt. Here's why:
A huge proportion of all global Internet traffic flows through networks controlled by the United States. This is because eight of fifteen global tier 1 telecommunications companies are American owned -- companies like AT&T, CenturyLink, and Verizon. Furthermore, the social media services are also mostly provided by giants headquartered in the United States, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Twitter.
All of these companies are subject to U.S. law, including the provisions of the U.S. Patriot Act, no matter where their services are offered or their servers located.
Having the world's Internet traffic routed through the U.S. and having those telecommunications companies under its jurisdiction compromises the constitutionally guaranteed privacy rights of citizens of all other sovereign nations.
This will end.
The rest of the world will not stand for it.
It's a simple fact and an economic black swan for the US.
So far as I can tell, none of this is being reported in the press. It makes sense, however, that other countries would be extremely pissed about this. They seem to agree on two things: one is, they're not going to allow their Internet backbones to be controlled by the US. The second is, they're going to do their best to screw us.
And, no, the US can't stand alone if the whole world is against it. The loss of commerce in coming years is going to be incredibly damaging. This may truly be the end of our government system.
We should have never allowed agencies like the NSA to continue to exist after the Cold War. That was our first mistake. The second was ever allowing George W. Bush to become a candidate much less get into the White House.
And when the dust settles, history is going to be rough on President Obama.
NSA admits to listening without warrants.
Headline on Cnet:
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."
If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.
The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii "wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-listening-to-u.s-phone-calls-without-warrants/
Hmm. Warrantless surveillance. Any apologies to Greenwald or Snowden, yet?
BTW, the article did include this:
In case you forgot the surprise the day the Senate approved that law, then Senator Obama voted for it, leaving his supporters at the time stunned. I know I was. But we all forgave him. Most have probably even forgiven and forgotten. But I didn't forget.
I think that was his signal to the telecoms and the intel agencies that he was on their side. I can't think of anything else that could have been.
Disparities in wealth and self-worth are only part of it.
I've been under treatment for depression for years. What I tell my psychiatrist and counselor now is that prospects for the entire world depress me.
I grew up reading science fiction and had an optimism about the future. I had a negative self-worth, but I had optimism that the world itself would improve. I mean, we had put people on the moon, we had that energy crisis, but fusion energy would come along, the problems with nuclear energy had not become so explicit, at least not with me. When global warming was first hitting the news, it seemed that could be handled. Nationally. We had just had Vietnam, but seemed our nation had learned its lesson from that. There was the Cold War, but it seemed that would either be worked around or would destroy the world suddenly. Thinking about the future was a matter of the two systems learning to live harmoniously. Racial relations appeared to have nowhere to go but improve. There was certain anti-intellectualism and anti-science undercurrent in this country, but that didn't appear to have any legs. The gap between rich and poor wasn't a chasm. The military industrial complex was a problem, but it seemed to have a cause with national defense, and at least it employed a lot of people in technical positions, and it was a driver behind science.
I look at it today, and it's all worse. And I can trace back the point where it began to become worse to the day we elected Ronald Reagan. Before that, we had the canker of Richard Nixon, but all of the worst people in the Reagan administration had cut their teeth under Nixon.
The optimism, if not the actual prospects became better in the late '90s. Communism was over, and it seemed the world improve. Then the dot com and telecom crashes hit. And if that didn't disillusion my generation enough, George W. Bush was arbitrated President, consequently followed by 9/11, with all of the barbaric and oppressive measures to follow.
And wouldn't you know, they date the uptick in boomer suicides back to about the time of the dotcom crash. I bet it became much worse during Bush's first term.
Now, Global Warming is all but at hand. This culture is not going to move the population into space; in fact, physics has screwed us. Moreover, nothing has fixed the energy problem, and we have corporations running and ruining the planet. Bolshevistic communism has ended, but the military industrial complex has run amok and has turned against us. Moreover, the government spies on us wholesale, and has turned into a system that has to be called fascism in every way except subtlety. The only good thing I could name: the Internet. But that has consequences, because if the government doesn't show restraint (and ours doesn't), it becomes the best surveillance tool in history. Meanwhile, with overpopulation, depletion of resources, global warming, and general degradation of the environment, it's questionable to me that humankind will survive another millennium.
I could go on, but I'll sum up by saying when I graduated high school, this is not the world and the nation I thought I would see in my fifties. Part of it was just bad luck, but a lot of it is we just blew it. I think if I would have known when I was sixteen what I would see now, I probably would have committed suicide then.
It's depressing, even crippling. I keep going through antidepressants, escapism, focusing my attention on problems I can solve, and generally turning my attention away from the big picture when I have to.
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Member since: Fri Aug 1, 2008, 07:40 PMNumber of posts: 5,763
