Jan 27, 2014: Exclusive TV interview of Edward Snowden

[Art Blade]

I haven't got any cars at all. :)

[PZ]

I haven't got any cars at all. :)

City boy!  ????

Spoiler

[Binnatics]

Our minister of Home Affairs is one step from falling due to an NSA-related scandal here in Holland. He lied in public about our own secret service providing phone tab info (1.8 million calls) to the NSA

[Art Blade]

we'll see a lot more of that. The only problem: it doesn't solve the problem.

[fragger]

We're seeing some of that here. Relations between Australia and Indonesia are on shaky ground as a great deal of evidence is emerging that our government has been spying on, and wire-tapping, Indonesian government figures for years. There's nothing like forging cordial relations between nations... and this is nothing like it.

The only thing you can trust politicians to do well is to make it impossible to trust them.

I haven't got any cars at all. :)

You've had plenty of virtual ones! :-D

If only some of the drivers here were merely virtual... I'm thinking about acquiring a second-hand tank. It may take me a bit longer to get to w@&k, but there'd be no argument over who has right-of-way >:D

[Binnatics]

If only some of the drivers here were merely virtual... I'm thinking about acquiring a second-hand tank. It may take me a bit longer to get to w@&k, but there'd be no argument over who has right-of-way >:D

And you could probably drive in a straight line as well >:D

[fragger]

Hehehe :-D :-D

There's a McDonald's which pretty much lies along that straight line between home and w@&k. If I ever did choose to eat from the dreaded "Slack Mack's" (as if) I could make my own drive-through window >:D

[Binnatics]

Hahaha :-X

That would be a good Burger-Shot :-D

[Art Blade]

New interview uploaded yesterday March 10, 2014

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPrDqoaHHSY#t=25

and the a better cut version / audio

Edward Snowden and ACLU at SXSW

[Art Blade]

Snowden's testimony as requested by the European Parliament for their inquiry into the Electronic Mass Surveillance of EU Citizens, uploaded as of March 7, 20014

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/201403/20140307ATT80674/20140307ATT80674EN.pdf

[Art Blade]

More on the NSA subject at ACLU.org (American Civil Liberties Union)

https://www.aclu.org/time-rein-surveillance-state-0

[PZ]

Big brother is watching...

[Art Blade]

"1984" -- it used to be almost unthinkable.

[fragger]

I was exploring a few of the other articles at the ACLU website and was quite taken with this statement in one of them:

"Privacy is a fundamental part of a dignified life".

I don't think it gets much simpler than that.

[Art Blade]

indeed  :)

[mandru]

Big brother is watching...

Only it turned out "Big Bro." 

That would be funny except for the fact that Bro being raised in Hawaii (two eyes (ii) watching) a real hotbed of racial tension by his white grandparents and went from being a pot smoking, crack using school skipper to being slipped straight into an Ivy League College by some invisible string pullers through impossible to investigate means.

Really?  ????

I'm saying this cat's share of the American Black Experience is shallower than the reflective coating on a cheap dime store pocket mirror.

A couple days ago I had a passing stray thought:

It'll soon be the ides of March + The steps of the Senate + "Et tu Biden?"


Ah well.  It gave me a good laugh.  ^-^

[Art Blade]

 :-D

[fragger]

Nice :-D

[fragger]

The unconscionable practice of governments covertly spying on their citizens on the grounds of "protecting" them, or even of simply upholding the law, isn't anything especially new.

I was just watching an episode of one of Ken Burns' wonderful documentary programs, this one from his Prohibition series, and in light of the discussion going on here I was struck by the following account:

During the Prohibition era in the U.S., Roy Olmstead was a very promising police officer in the Seattle Police Department, attaining the rank of lieutenant until he lost his job in 1920 as a result of his bootlegging activities. Once he'd been kicked out of the force he began trafficking illegal liquor in earnest, becoming one of the most successful booze-smugglers in the Pacific Northwest. He became known as "The Good Bootlegger" since his grog was undiluted and, unlike many others in his line of w@&k at that time, refused to become involved in any of the more nefarious illegal activities such as prostitution, gambling or drugs and insisted that his employees not carry firearms, telling them that he would "rather lose a shipment of liquor than a life".

The police knew what Olmstead was up to but he was too slippery for them to catch out, so eventually in order to nail him the police resorted to a new form of evidence gathering - wire-tapping. This was brand-new technology back then and nobody was really sure if the evidence so gathered would hold up in court, or even if it was constitutionally sound. When Olmstead was finally arrested, his lawyers were confident that the case would be thrown out, declaring that the police's wire-tapping activities constituted "unreasonable search and seizure" and that it would indeed be unconstitutional for Olmstead to be convicted on the strength of them, especially since the wire-tap was carried out without a warrant.

To cut a long story short, the authorities did in fact convict Olmstead after reviewing the transcripts produced by the wire-tap. However, before handing down sentence, the justice presiding over the case, Louis Brandeis, made the following pronouncement to the court:

"Embedded in the American Constitution is a right to privacy... The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal - well meaning, but without understanding, to declare that in the administration of the criminal law, the end justifies the means. To declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal would bring terrible retribution".

I point out that this declaration was made in 1926. And I believe that what Brandeis meant by "terrible retribution" was that such arrogant violation of an individual's constitutional rights would, one way or another, come back to bite the insidious encroachers big-time, and in some way that they haven't foreseen. In Snowden's case, we can but hope...

So has anything changed since 1926? Not enormously, it appears.

As it transpired, Olmstead was eventually granted a presidential pardon in 1935 by none other than FDR and not only had his constitutional rights restored to him in full but even had his original $8,000 fine remitted to him (plus court costs).

Can Snowden expect to receive such contrition or remuneration from his government in the future? Not bloody likely, I'd say. Like technology itself, the blind zealousness of those in power has progressed somewhat since then.

[Art Blade]

interesting post, fragger. In addition to your comment I would like to quote Mr Snowden (quote taken from his testimony to the European Court this month, see the link in one of my previous posts)

US government officials have declared me guilty of crimes in advance of any trial,
they've called for me to be executed or assassinated in private and openly in the press, they
revoked my passport and left me stranded in a foreign transit zone for six weeks, and even used
NATO to ground the presidential plane of Evo Morales - the leader of Bolivia - on hearing that I
might attempt to seek and enjoy asylum in Latin America.

That is very shocking and not inspiring confidence. All this reminds me very much of what happened when the Third Reich was being installed. Step by step laws were altered, revoked or issued and powers were shifted until the entire system was undermined and people would still think, "it's not going to be that bad, we are in control of this." The outcome was a bit different, though. The system systematically erased all opposition.