>>No. The 'catching terrorists' angle is simply the cover story used to justify the construction of the surveillance state.

Not a chance that that statement is true.

Read my other post; I am well aware of this. But both can be true. The potential for unlimited blackmail and or targeted destruction AND the leaking of methods and tactics to the enemy. Both.

No one is helped and nothing is advanced by lying or going with a purely emotional (fear based or hate based) argument. As long as we don't tell the story ully in all its complexity , the other side" will detect our fundamental dishonesty and use it to dismiss our entire argument.

First, tell the truth.

t's not completely true what yo'reb saying. Many terrorists did NOT know about the extent of our capabilities. I am ot saying this as a rebuttal to your entire argument, just facts are facts and we shouldn't cloud them for any reason. Both things happened. Snowden blew the whistle on illegal and unconstitutional practices AND ALSO terrorists were made aware of techniques and methods that otherwise would have been used to catch them. Both. Are. True.

FTFA:
What Snowden revelaed is just too much unchecked power waiting to be abused. It's a structural flaw in how governments operate that one day is going to cause catastrophic damage to democracy.

I would not have done what Snowden did just because think of the damage to national security and where's the evidence this power is currently being abused to stifle democratic liberties?

Where are the bodies and innocent ruined lives?

Where's the influenced or rigged elections?

Where 's the blackmail of Senators and Congresspeople?

All of these crimes are the stuff a panopticon faciliates, but we find no evidence for them, at least yet.

The worst we know about was what Anonymous revealed- a despicable but private effort on the part of govt. contractors to smear and destroy Glenn Greenwald's career and ability to make a living.

But that was private actors, the Chamber of Commerce going to Stratfor looking to destroy him, not the government.

OTOH revealing what he revealed absolutely helps Very Bad People do Very Bad Things. So that is absolutely a cost to society that can't be just brushed aside.

Point is, this panopticon 1984 shit should never have been put into place without serious limitations and safeguards, ones which were not left in the hands of a small group of political lackeys like the FISA court.

Abusive panopticons are what develop in the dark when no one is looking. No one is above the temptation to create unlimited power and take it unto themselves "for the greater good". If it's not being abused, it will be.

We would never know about it- Wyden wasn't able or willing to get the word out- except for Snowden. So we all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude, even if his process was imperfect. He could not sort everything he took for relevance \ danger to national security \ criminality. It was a logisitcal limitation. So he left it to reproters to sort it out.

It's complicated and I dont feel a need to make is less complicated than it is.

He clearly revealed things that are illegal and dangerous to the point of killing the democracy- dangerous to the point of *clearly being a threat to national security*.

At the same time he clearly damaged national secuity.

Legitimate appeals to national security cannot be allowed to evolve into a democracy suicide-pact.

You can't be allowed to baby-step the democracy off a cliff. You built a dangerous system you can't legitimately claim you can control, that is ripe and aching for Stasi / Nazi / Soviet style abuse, which could be used to kill the democracy. Your otherwise legitimate claims to national security are severely undermined .

What Snowden means is the NSA et al were power hungry madmen building a democracy killing WMD and someone who was not brainwashed into the cult found out about it and blew the whistle, and damaged our national security in the process.

The scary thing is this- we're not any better than THAT at preventing group-think within the parts of government that might wield extraordinary power.

This is the professionalization and fineness of capability at keeping people with dissenting views out.

If our system worked, Greemnwald and Snowden would work WITHIN the NSA in watchdog capacites, not outside it, throwing a baby out with every bathtub of dirty water.

It's not their fault in that sense. It's ours. It our failure to demand that government condict itself in light of the science we have done; science about group think, science about exclusionary tendencies of teams, about mobbing within organizations, about the ways power becomes corrupted.

OK then.

Presidential pardon for Snowden- reinstate him and whomever he selects as watchdogs within the NSA. Let outsiders from academia , lawyers and scholars who understand civil liberties into the sytem in a formal way and give them real, unusurpable apolitical power.

We need to go radically outside the comfort zones of those currently in power. Give them their medals and pensions and honors and then retire them; times are changing faster than they can keep up with.

We're not dealing with treasonous traitors. This is an internal dispute betwen equally patriotic Americans.

SEe above. It's not about encrypting the story, it's about encrypting your connection so your anonymity remains secure.

FTFA:
  Last night, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times published their lead front-page Sunday article, headlined âoeBritish Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.â

This is the power relationship in this case:

Murdoch's papers are fundamentally criminal enterprises who have been caught tapping the phones of government officials and celebrities alike, among other crimes.

They also deny that man-made climate change is a threat to human civilization, a fact about them which bascially makes them mass murderers in a lot of people's eyes, including a lot of people in government.

So their entire existence is hanging by a thread of goodwill and if that thread ever gets cut, they're going to prosecuted out of existence and Murdoch is going to jail like the criminal he is.

Such an compromised entity is called "useful" in government circles.

"Please dont' prosecute us, we'll do anything you say any time say.. anything..anything!"

Thus this news story.

No one should take from this that I am specifically pro-Snowden.

What I am is anti-what-he-revealed. It's just too much unchecked power waiting to be abused. It's a structural flaw in how governments operate that one day is going to cause catastrophic damage to democracy.

I would not have done what Snowden did just because think of the damage to national security and where's the evidence this power is currently being abused to stifle democratic liberties?

Where are the bodies and innocent ruined lives?

Where's the influenced or rigged elections?

Where 's the blackmail of Senators and Congresspeople?

All of these crimes are the stuff a panopticon faciliates, but we find no evidence for them, at least yet.

The worst we know about was what Anonymous revealed- a despicable but private effort on the part of govt. contractors to smear and destroy Glenn Greenwald's career and ability to make a living.

But that was private actors, the Chamber of Commerce going to Stratfor looking to destroy him, not the government.

OTOH revealing what he revealed absolutely helps Very Bad People do Very Bad Things. So that is absolutely a cost to society that can't be just brushed aside.

Point is, this panopticon 1984 shit should never have been put into place without serious limitations and safeguards, ones which were not left in the hands of a small group of political lackeys like the FISA court.

Abusive panopticons are what develop in the dark when no one is looking. No one is above the temptation to create unlimited power and take it unto themselves "for the greater good". If it's not being abused, it will be.

We would never know about it- Wyden wasn't able or willing to get the word out- except for Snowden. So we all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude, even if his process was imperfect. He could not sort everything he took for relevance \ danger to national security \ criminality. It was a logisitcal limitation. So he left it to reproters to sort it out.

It's complicated and I dont feel a need to make is less complicated than it is.

He clearly revealed things that are illegal and dangerous to the point of killing the democracy- dangerous to the point of *clearly being a threat to national security*.

At the same time he clearly damaged national secuity.

Legitimate appeals to national security cannot be allowed to evolve into a democracy suicide-pact.

You can't be allowed to baby-step the democracy off a cliff. You built a dangerous system you can't legitimately claim you can control, that is ripe and aching for Stasi / Nazi / Soviet style abuse, which could be used to kill the democracy. Your otherwise legitimate claims to national security are severely undermined .

What Snowden means is the NSA et al were power hungry madmen building a democracy killing WMD and someone who was not brainwashed into the cult found out about it and blew the whistle, and damaged our national security in the process.

The scary thing is this- we're not any better than THAT at preventing group-think within the parts of government that might wield extraordinary power.

This is the professionalization and fineness of capability at keeping people with dissenting views out.

If our system worked, Greemnwald and Snowden would work WITHIN the NSA in watchdog capacites, not outside it, throwing a baby out with every bathtub of dirty water.

It's not their fault in that sense. It's ours. It our failure to demand that government condict itself in light of the science we have done; science about group think, science about exclusionary tendencies of teams, about mobbing within organizations, about the ways power becomes corrupted.

OK then.

Presidential pardon for Snowden- reinstate him and whomever he selects as watchdogs within the NSA. Let outsiders from academia , lawyers and scholars who understand civil liberties into the sytem in a formal way and give them real, unusurpable apolitical power.

This is what needs to be done. We need to go radically outside the comfort zones of those currently in power. Give them their medals and pensions and honors and then retire them; times are changing faster than they can keep up with.

We're not dealing with treasonous traitors ala Hansen here. This is an internal dispute betwen equally patriotic Americans.

\

In good stories, the verifiable facts speak for themselves . That is pretty much the definition of good journalism.

We don't believe journalist's stories because we trust the individual journalist. We believe their stories because of the evidence those journalists assembled in their stories.

I clearly need to be more detailed in my comments. My bad. See two comments aboe you for connection between encryption and anonymity.

Encryption -not of content (the story) but of internet connections- is what permits people to post and read online anonymously.

If people can find out what your IP address is or otherwise get at what computer you were using to author the story then they have an excellent chance at identifying you. To defeat this and remain anonymous, encryption is used by software like TOR to hopelessly obscure the actual source of the computer.

If you surf using some form of encryption to hide your actual IP address it makes it hard for low-level bad guys, even ones with govt. connections, to know who you are.

Of course very powerful goverments like the US can track you, absolutely using a VPN (we know this from Snowden) and probably even TOR can't protect you anymore - that is just my best guess given how TOR works and the what resources that government has at its disposal.

But it takes a nation-state level effort to do that. This guy was not killed by someone with access to that kind of power.

HTH

Exactly, for American readers, it's like the Wild West. Courts are literally packed smoked filled rooms filled with defendants, police, lawyers and a judge all shouting and screaming and the defendant is basically unable to decipher what or when the judge is handling his case except his lawyer comes up periodically and tells him something .

Cases take years and decades to go tot trial and in the meantime, anything goes usually, dependant on the connections and wealth of the defendant. IF yo're poor, you're fucked. If it's high profile, you have a right to a speedy kangaroo court. If you're rich with connections , you skate.

I know people who legally own homes and property that other just random people have taken up residency in and there's really nothing they can do about it. They can take them to court but it will take years and years for the case to be heard and in the meantime, those random people are just go non living there.

It's like that.

So seriously, you don't get the connection between non-attributability of authorship and encryption? You thought I was saying "encrypt the story", not "encrypt the source of the story"?

Seriously .. or this was a joke?

If only there weren't that damned anonymity then these drug dealers couldn't hide !

Really?

Let me refer you to nation of Mexico, post-NAFTA pre internet. An all-but-failed-state where entire swaths of the cnoutry aren't even under the control of the central government but are in effect narco-states.

Nothing to do with anonymity, everyone knows who they are, and everything to do with the larger but more boring issue of a globally equitable distribution of opportunity, decent wages and working conditions- all things we now know NAFTA blew all to hell .

Economic justice is the foundational justice upon which all others are built. This is exactly what King John had to sign the Magna Carta- because the lords and thanes were sick of living with no hope for lasting economic justice- property rights, a right to accumulate to yourself a measure of economic security that can't be just confiscated by the King,.

Ditto FDRs four basic rights-
1 right to freedom of thought and speech,
2 right to freedom of religion,
3 right to freedom from fear
4. freedom from want- economic security.

Human physiology is what breeds drug addiction- that is demand from drugs. it's just a chink in the evolutionary armour which otherwise protects us against Stuff That Will Kill Us,

But economic injustice is what breeds narco states.

And encryption breeds neither of those things.

" RICO Act, along with a long list of others"

I am not a legal expert so I'll accept correction but I can't think of a more flagrantly obvious application of the RICO crimes law than Google Apple Intel and about 50 ther SV and non-SV companies conspiring to create do not hire lists of their own employees.

Usually in white collar crime cases, (The Meltdown ) the govt. pleads things like "oh it would be so hard to prove that CEO Scumbag actually knew and condoned the decisions 'cause, golly, these corporations are so complicated it' s hard to prove anyone knew anything.." to excuse the non-prosecution of their political party's corporate donors.

But here we have Eric Schmidt and Serge Brin and the named head of HR and her henchmen and other named executives in all involved companies openly laughing about what they did.

There is zero doubt they conspired to limit, disable and otherwise ruin the careeer of anyone who attempted to bring market forces to the table to benefit themselves.

I remember reading about somewhere in Indiana I think where the govt RICOed a bunch of people who were attempting to fix the local price of concrete. That was nothing in scope or dollar amount compared to what Schmidt and Jobs and the rest of the CEOs did.

I hear people talk about the RICO Act as though it were a tool to fight corruption. Maybe it is. Too bad it can't fight the corruption of those charged with using the RICO Act to fight corruption. Then it might be good for something more than cement price-fixing .