NSA web/phone records collection

Jonny7

KyussBishop wrote: »

As opposed to mainstream news media?

Like the Guardian and the Washington Post?

Can you please point me to one single "alternative" news site that has one fraction the credibility, accountibility and accuracy of either of those press outlets and I will be impressed to say the least.

KyussBishop

Jonny7 wrote: »

Like the Guardian and the Washington Post?

Can you please point me to one single "alternative" news site that has one fraction the credibility, accountibility and accuracy of either of those press outlets and I will be impressed to say the least.

What do you even define as 'mainstream'?

Glenn Greenwald had been writing for Salon.com for about 5 years I think, before switching to the Guardian, and before Salon.com he wrote on a blog.

You don't judge the quality of journalism, based on loose concepts like 'mainstream vs alternative', because the vast majority of mainstream news out there is utter garbage, as likely is much alternative news - you look for the exceptions in both areas, and you judged based on writers themselves not news organizations.

Jonny7

In context of the previous comment

The White House controls the US mainstream media, this is the reason why the story has been suppressed. If one wants to hear more of the truth on this matter you would be better sourcing it from Alternative Media channels.

The general definition is that "mainstream" media comprises of the everyday outlets and newspapers, ranging from reputable press subject to industry standards all the way down to tabloid rags.

Some choose to tar the "mainstream" (consisting of thousands of outlets) as somehow behaving uniformly or under the control of government/corporation or for a specific agenda.

When the "mainstream" generalisation is used, usually the "alternative" news cliche is also present as in the above comment.

In this context, "alternative" generally refers to internet sites, propaganda news (from e.g. Russia, Iran) and blog sites that certain individuals believe is the "real truth" simply because they produce information that is, what they deem, different from "mainstream" media.

The reason this info is different is usually because it's either a) bull**** or b) stories that are either true/exaggerated/embellished to suit a certain agenda.

I've spent several years reading self-styled "alternative" news sites - most make the Daily Mirror look like a bastion of free and credible press.

esteve

Jonny7 wrote: »

Interesting! can't wait to see all the examples of this..

lets choose a very mainstream site, www.bbc.co.uk/news, over the last week.

What?!

Jonny7

esteve wrote: »

What?!

I don't recommend "mainstream" media sites, few if any have any credibility, and are often just ''corporate'' websites filled with blogs and heavily editoralised stories with a clear agenda.

Off the top of my head I can think of dozens of "mainstream" news sites where I think it would be quite difficult to demonstrate the above (if at all)

Alternatively I can think of dozens of popular "alternative" news sites, which demonstrate it pretty well.

So, taking what I said and reversing it doesn't really work.

esteve

Jonny7 wrote: »

Off the top of my head I can think of dozens of "mainstream" news sites where I think it would be quite difficult to demonstrate the above (if at all)

Really, you dont think that mainstream corporate media may have its own agenda, and in fact reports objectively and fairly. Wow, please tell me how you can come to such a blissfully ignorant conclusion, i'd love to be able to do the same, although i can't.

I agree, it would be difficult to demonstrate such, which is entirley the point.

Jonny7

esteve wrote: »

Really, you dont think that mainstream corporate media may have its own agenda, and in fact reports objectively and fairly. Wow, please tell me how you can come to such a blissfully ignorant conclusion, i'd love to be able to do the same, although i can't.

Well I didn't really claim the bolded part now did I - shady reporting there


I have heard the above a lot. There are some outlets e.g. Sky News and it's sister Fox News, several US outlets and of course a whole raft of pseudo-tabloids that could be said to fall under this umbrella to varying extent.

However to classify "mainstream" media either as the above or in the way you used to describe it before is not really true at all. There are many more examples of reputable newspapers exposing government and corporate fraud and corruption than covering up these incidences.


Taking the original comment from the other poster (I was replying to) that the "mainstream" was controlled by the White House - well that's not true.

That the story was suppressed? no

and that more truth would be found on alternative media on the matter? again, not true, Snowden went to the Guardian and Washington Post precisely because most "alternative" media is much less credible.

esteve

Jonny7 wrote: »

Well I didn't really claim the bolded part now did I - shady reporting there

You kinda did claim that, in fact I was stating the opposite when i edited what you had said, and you said that this was not true/demsonstratable.

Jonny7 wrote: »

I have heard the above a lot. There are some outlets e.g. Sky News and it's sister Fox News, several US outlets and of course a whole raft of pseudo-tabloids that could be said to fall under this umbrella to varying extent.

Agreed.

Jonny7 wrote: »

That the story was suppressed? no

Well it was a somewhat unsurpressable story, but it is more how it is reported that I am talking about. I read some articles in the NY Times, Time, The Economist, The Financial Times, Forbes, to name a view, and the 'objective' coverage of this story was startling.

Jonny7 wrote: »

Snowden went to the Guardian and Washington Post precisely because most "alternative" media is much less credible.

I don't think it was credibility as much as the audience that these media outlets could reach, as oppossed to some guys blog or personal website. It was clear though why he went to The Washington Post as oppossed to the NY Times.

MadYaker

Bumping this as more info has come to light. Article.

It seems they are colllecting location data from cell phones all over the world and not just American citizens on US soil. Pretty incredible stuff.

Be like Nutella

Of the 67,844 people killed in acts of terrorism from 2008 - 2012

84 were Americans

2008: 33 of 15,709
2009: 9 of 15,311
2010: 15 of 13,193
2011: 17 of 12,533
2012: 10 of 11,098
(Micah Zenko Council on Foreign Relations)

To lose 84 people to terrorist acts is of course sad.

That's 0.1 of 1% people killed in acts of terrorism in 5 years.

9/11 was a 1 in a million thing... and now with altered airport/flight security the chances of another attack anyway similar to 9/11 is even smaller.

Not because of the NSA listening to everybody's calls reading everybody's emails all the time everywhere. Simply because the guy who planned most of 9/11 was a 1 in a million himself and is now sitting in GITMO. 9/11 was a hugely audacious, complex and coordinated large scale attack formed in the mind of an evil genius KSM and now he's in jail. This is lost on most people IMO.

Terrorism is certainly not enough of a reason to justify the NSA in the form we are now suddenly aware of today, largely thanks to Edward Snowden.

The NSA is attempting to reach a point of Total Information Awareness - T.I.A.
- a point at which they can collect, store and process all communications all the time between everyone on earth. All calls, All Emails , All search, All social network data, All Cred Card transactions, All locations of everyone with a mobile device 24 / 7 / 365.

That's the goal.

Not because they want to know what porn sites I personally visit...

but because when you have EVERYTHING
you can potentially find something you want ! i.e. that needle in that haystack.

IF you build a smart enough NSA 'machine', with fast enough processing and smart enough algorithms, make enough back-doors into associated companies, tap enough cables, launch enough satellites, build enough data centers, employ enough people and spread enough fear and lies in the form of 'the 9/11 card' then you can actually reach that T.I.A. point and that is the their goal. I don't blame them at all why shoot low right? If you can actually have everything then why not? if nobody stops you... you might as well ! They think they're just doing their jobs. It's not up to them to oversee themselves. They want their haystack and they want to be able to find that needle it's as simple as that to the NSA and it's bosses.

If we want to play the numbers game then fine - IMO it is not worth giving up on privacy and possibly, very possibly putting too much information power into the hands of the NSA in order to 'only' possibly save some of those 84 American lives in the last 5 years... if I was American I would think this too.

There has not been one single case brought forward which proves that the T.I.A. approach of the NSA of today has specifically saved lives by simply collecting and detecting an imminent plot in communications and stopping it. There certainly is no evidence that they've done it many times.

With the Bluffdale data center coming online recently and with supercomputers of comparable power to 'Titan' becoming available to the NSA and with the total freedom which the Patriot Act and other 'powers' acts gives the NSA and the endless stream of staggering eavesdropping programs which Snowden has brought to our attention in the last few months there SHOULD be a massive national outrage and people in hundreds of thousands on the streets of Washington demanding the NSA be disbanded and re-targeted and re-tasked and completely culled and reshaped into an Intel Agency which investigates along with the CIA 'suspected Terrorists' starting from point A ...instead of the 'collect everything all the time' approach which the NSA is currently using.

It will require much much more public understanding than exists at present and will literally need a massive march on Washington 50 times greater than anything which has gone on so far and the media will play a huge role in this rising protest wave.

I am completely confused how Americans who understand this issue are not more outraged... being a country who purports to stand for Freedom more so than any nation ever did on earth and which tries to spread democratic freedom around the world.

House Permanent Intelligence Committee NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander

(TRY NOT VOMIT INTO YOUR OWN MOUTH)

"First, how did we get here? How did we end up here? 9/11 -- 2,996 people were killed in 9/11. We all distinctly remember that. What I remember the most was those firemen running up the stairs to save people, to then themselves lose their lives. We had this great picture that was created afterward of a fireman handing a flag off to the military, and I'd say the intelligence community, and the military and the intelligence community said: ‘We've got it from here.'"

- Not if the rising voice of Americans have something to say about it !

The whole NSA system needs shutting down and rebooting under a new mission and oversight regime. People aren't going to let this blow over and sink into the background, not this time. The volume of protest will just continue to rise and rise until they can't be ignored and their politicians have to do something or they risk losing elections... it's the only way.

The possibility of terrorism is simply not worth giving up your privacy and allowing so much power to be concentrated within one agency with total bullsh1t oversight.

It's complete overkill and far too dangerous to democracy now and most importantly... in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55D-ybnYQSs

MadYaker

Id admire your faith in peoples willingness to protest. While I don't disagree that it is whats needed I doubt it will actually happen. This is a start though. At least the NSA are being brought to light and have been forced to answer some questions. The whole "nothing to hide = nothing to fear" argument won't do imo. If these systems or the data they collect were to get into the wrong hands (some would argue the NSA are the wrong hands but that's for another thread) the potential for abuse is frightening.

Between this and Google/Facebook etc collecting huge stores of data on everyone I think in about 20 - 30 years time we'll look back on these revelations and we'll wish we'd done more about it and not have been so blasé.

You T.I.A point is interesting. I don't remember hearing him say anything about that on the campaign trail when everyone was cheering on Obama! Although I suppose it was a strategy originally implemented by his predecessors. You'd wonder do the US government actually believe that this is the best way to protect their country? Is that what they are really interested in or is all this for something else?

Whenever I'm thinking about this kind of stuff I always try to look at the big picture to try and understand it, but I always get the feeling that the US government are looking at a far bigger picture than anyone else.

Be like Nutella

basically no matter what we say now most people here will think we've gone into the CT side of things so there's no point in trying to have any sort of rational debate however I will say that the NSA was never set up to fight terrorism nor is anti-Terrorism it's central mandate even now. The NSA that we see today is simply a product of the cold war. Well it's slightly more complicated than that but basically you have to imagine a big scary enemy... which the USSR genuinely was for a long time.... and then it died and withered and imploded and disappeared almost overnight leaving an awful a lot of people 50-100 thousand people across all the agencies without a scary enemy. Lots of different things happened in the world since then including the rise of all sorts of crime and Islamic terrorism and all sorts of strange groups who hate this and that but nothing ever replaced the big bad USSR as an enemy to focus on in a world where the US was an untouchable HyperPower. In the last 15 years however that has changed and although the US is still totally untouchable militarily speaking it does have to contend with genuine rising power in China. At the end of the day the NSA people still wanted their jobs and their power and ultimately their funding and the thing with Intel spending is that it's like a ratchet - it rarely goes backwards in real terms... in fact it never does because all they have to do to lobby for no cuts in the sequester is shout '9/11' or talk about 'well we can't discuss the raw intel but if you could see what we see every day you'd be scared sh1tless and give us so much more money to protect you' etc etc... they can't lose. Until now - Until Edward Snowden took actual 'paper' evidence with him - not like the other whistle blowers of the last 10 years who's word of mouth can be discredited in any number of ways... easiest of all by saying they're crazy. Snowden is a smart fella... and he knows how the media game plays out so he's got a massive quantity of really juicy sh1t on the NSA and they can't touch him or it'll all hit the fan so he's playing the long game of attrition from the safety of Russia which is obviously so ironic seeing as Russia is one big police state run by a KGB thug as we all know, as does Snowden. So he's releasing document by document waiting for the protest to swell up and the articles to be written by the biggest papers and the interviews on the biggest shows and for the groundswell to reach a point where people are actually protesting on the streets which is what we're seeing begin recently hence the timing of this most recent 'NSA Tracks every mobile on earth' story.... it's a clever game he's playing and he's right to do it this way. To let it all sink in to people and to let people have a chance to understand the breadth of what is going on and to articulate their positions as pundits, writers, interest groups, ACLU and of course politicians. The NSA are sh1tting themselves because they will know what kind of things he could release but not necessarily know exactly what he got out of there with? which I'm sure we'll hear about at just the right time. That journalist Greenwald has left the Guardian to join the most single minded pitbull truth telling MOFO journalist to ever walk this earth - Jeremy Scahill and you can be damn sure that their new journalism project will center around the remaining juicy Snowden NSA Leaks.