the idiotic attacks on Snowden show exactly how petty and pathetic those folks are

[truedelphi]

109. Maybe those who have their heads up where the sun don't shine

Haven't had their rights violated. (Or at least, they don't think they have.)

But it is a serious matter.

If you don't think that there could be a coordinated effort to relieve business people of insider information, if you don't think that should the halls of Congress and the Occupant in the Oval Office become even more stridently Corporatistic, then I guess it may well be pointless to have the discussion with you.

But here is what Snowden said today at SXSW:

Ben: (The moderater: So Ed, if the NSA is willing to take these steps that actually weaken security, that spread vulnerabilities that make it in some sense easier not just for us to do surveillance but for others to attack they must think there is an awfully good reason for doing that. That there are bolt collection programs that these activities facilitate the collected ____ _mentality that it really works. This is a very, very effective surveillance method that is keeping us safe. You sat on the inside of the surveillance systems for longer than people realize. Do these mass surveillance programs do what our intelligence officials promise to Congress that they do? Are they effective?

Ed: “They are not. That is actually something I’m a little bit sympathetic to and we got to turn back the block a little bit and remember that they thought ___ was a great idea but no one had done it before, at least publicly. So they went “hey! we can spy on the world all at once. It will be great, we’ll know everything.” But the reality is, when they did it, they found out that it didn’t work. But it was a ___ so successful in collecting data. So great at the contract that no one wanted to say no.

But the reality is now, we have reached point where a majority of people’s telephone communication are being recorded - we got all these metadata that are being stored - years and years. But two independent White House investigations found that it is has not helped us at all, have not helped us.
Beyond that, we got to think about what are we doing with those resources, what are we getting out of that? As I said in our European Parliament testimony, we’ve actually have tremendous intelligence failures because we’re monitoring the internet; we’re monitoring, you know, everybody’s communications instead of suspects’ communications. That lack of focus have caused us to miss news we should have had. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Bombers. the Russians have warned us about it. But we didn’t a very poor job investigating, we didn't have the resources, and we had people working on other things. If we followed the traditional model, we might have caught that. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the underwear bomber, same thing. His father walked into a US Embassy, he went to CIA officer and said my son is dangerous. Don’t let him go to your country. Get him help. We didn’t follow up, we didn’t actually investigate this guy. We didn’t get a dedicated team to figure what was going on because we spent all of this money, we spent all of this time hacking into Google and Facebook to look at their data center. What did we get out of that? We got nothing. And there are two White House investigations that confirm that.

#### Material that appears redacted is a result of the fact that several proxies were used to have the Snowden SXSW connection.