The vast majority of DU supports Snowden's and Greenwald's actions

[truedelphi]

241. You state:

If it came out that this was the case then we would be thanking Snowden for alerting us and giving us a voice in the debate.

That is exactly Snowden's point. The NSA has the ability to untangle their meta data and re-assemble the phone conversation you or I had last week with with the Anti_Monsanto protesters. This can be done at any point in time.

So today, while talking to the protesters is legal, if in five years that is not the case, that evidence could blacklist you or me or do harm that is much much worse that a mere blacklisting.

I am old enough to remember how many lives were ruined when their legal involvement with the Communist Party in the Thirties and Forties pushed them onto a blacklist for much of the Fifties sand sixties.

This is off Juan Cole's website:



Everything you wanted to Know About NSA Surveillance *but were afraid to ask (Stray)

gmoke 06/29/2013 at 8:13 pm with 1 replies

Jay Leno interviewing Shia LeBoeuf about his new movie, "Eagle Eye" on the Tonight Show 9/17/08:

Shia LeBoeuf: I remember we had an FBI consultant on the picture telling me that they can use your ADT security box microphone to get your stuff that is going on in your house. Or OnStar, they can shut your car down. And he told me that one in five phone calls that you make are recorded and logged and I laughed at him. And then he played back a phone conversation I had two years prior to joining the picture, the FBI consultant...

Leno: They had a record of you from..

Shia: Two years prior to me joining the picture...

Leno: That seems creepy.

Shia: Extremely creepy.

link to dailykos.com

The FBI consultant on the picture, Thomas Knowles, denies this happened.
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However, here's another part of the surveillance state story from historian Rick Pearlstein (link to thenation.com):

"We have been here before.

"In the fall of 1975, when a Senate select committee chaired by Frank Church and a House committee chaired by Otis Pike were investigating abuses of power by the CIA and FBI, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, the loaded pistol from New York (she had introduced a resolution to impeach Richard Nixon on her first day in office in 1971) dared turned her own House Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights to a new subject: the National Security Agency, and two twin government surveillance projects she had learned about codenamed “SHAMROCK” and “MINARET.” They had monitored both the phone calls and telegrams of American citizens for decades.

"At the time, even political junkies did not know what the NSA was. “With a reputed budget of some $1.2 billion and a manpower roster far greater than the CIA,” the Associated Press explained, it had been “established in 1952 with a charter that is still classified as top secret.” (Is it still? I’d be interested to know.) President Ford had persuaded Frank Church not to hold hearings on the matter. (Ford had something in common with Obama: hypocrisy. “In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end,” he’d said in his inaugural address, the one where he proclaimed, “Our long national nightmare is over.”) So Abzug proceeded on her own. At first, when she subpoenaed the executives responsible for going along with the programs the White House tried to prevent their testimony by claiming the private companies were “an agent of the United States.” When they did appear, they admitted their companies had voluntarily been turning over their full records of phone and telegram traffic to the government at the end of every single day, by courier, for over forty years, full stop. The NSA said the programs had been discontinued. Abzug claimed they still survived, just under different names. And at that, Church changed his mind: the contempt for the law here was so flagrant, he decided, he would initiate NSA hearings, too."

So, it seems that almost all communications have been monitored from the 1930s on, except for maybe a few minutes in the late 1970s when things got a little too hot and before Reagan's morning in America reinstalled the wiretaps.