Out of Pod Experience

but to pull your point ..on the two examples you posted .where did the money go ? ...more farming subisidies ?. or in someones back pocket ?. enquiring minds would like to ask ?.

PS we are derailing this thread

Wait what? Does that mean people will no longer call me a paranoid crackpot if i tell them it's not a good idea to upload their whole life to some cloud storage? For how long? A Week?

To play devils advocate, every time there is a successful terrorist attack the public & press turn round to the government & security services and ask 'How could you let this happen? What did you do wrong?'. We expect the state to provide a level of protection against terrorists, sex offenders and so on, this requires a certain amount of surveillance to do effectively. And because they often don't know who should be under surveillance, without a certain amount of surveillance, we are all subject to, lets be honest, pretty limited surveillance.

There is a balance between safety and liberty, and you will rarely find two people who agree on where the correct balance lies. In this case it's a government organisation collecting information that private companies hold, private companies who wouldn't hesitate to sell this information for targeted advertising purposes if they though they could get away with it.

Honestly, unless you are plotting to kill people, you have nothing to worry about. The state doesn't care that you spent a whole afternoon on lolcats, that you like asses big and black or you only call your mother once a month. Yes they could take on a more malevolent agenda in the future, but that could happen regardless of if they were monitoring internet use now or not, as the technology exists anyway and you can't un-invent the wheel. Have a message you want to communicate, or material you wish to view and don't want the state to find out, or indeed for a corporation to sell that information to the highest bidder, don't use the internet or a phone to do it.

Canada and new zealand

When's the last time anybody handed down criminal sentences with prison terms for that?

Yeah, 10 years in prison for forcing Netscape Navigator off the market.

right? it's just a news fad. a nice high speed chase will pull people's attention back where it usually is.

also, candleja

protip: it detects keywords in your speech and text.

take those buzzwords, include languages other than English, and finally ip addresses and phone numbers linked to names of people unknown to the general public. then you have your results.

I would allow people 20 seconds to accept the fact Google has helped with the algorithms/datamining. if not directly, then as a result of headhunting.

if people will get their panties in a bunch over what is being monitored in their own country, well, they aren't cut out to work in national and foreign intelligence.

when there are crazies running around, cooperation between first world countries is beneficial. have you been to iraq or afghanistan? I have. forget privacy... what people are suggesting is removing the benefit of a global data network infrastructure. probably the same people who have an issue with military casualties. and that is ironic.

it ain't gonna happen, and this isn't jousting in the middle ages.

ITT: privacy tears, and ibtl. meanwhile, my grandmother loves Person of Interest

//also: first I heard of a maybe true underground server farm was '98. and. it's not the NSA's job to crack down on illegal downloads, so everyone can calm down.

//PPS: if you have a problem with it, TOR. I mean, if you really want to level the playing field, since that's what some people think this is: a game (which you just lost). I wonder how many people commented in this thread not knowing what TOR is, or without having used it evar.

yeah, I've been an exit node. like a baws

People need to watch the full interview with Edward Snowden here.

This guy is not a crazy. Or a partisan. He's not some bitter traitor like Bradley Manning. He warns about exactly the concern I had earlier in the thread.

This is not just a surveillance system. This is the greatest tool of blackmail ever engineered.

If you're high enough profile and **** off the wrong person at the NSA and they can go through your digital history and devastate your life. You don't have to be under suspicion today. Since everything on everyone is being stored, all you have to do is get on somebody's bad side tomorrow.

Fortunately, there are ways to bring this system to a screeching halt that are *entirely* out of the NSA's control. Three things need to happen:

1. Browser and chat program plugins need to be created that will do occasional searches in the background or automated chatter involving known NSA watch words and bizarre behaviors and sexual fetishes. The purpose of this plugin is to overwhelm the system with false positives and to immunize users against the potential for blackmail - after all, you can just say the plugin searched for that kinky stuff.

2. Webmasters need to purposely litter their webpages with watch words to generate as many false positives as possible. Make the system worthless.

3. We must propagate the idea that anonymous or government sources making claims about someone's digital paper trail are inherently untrustworthy and likely manufactured for political gain or lies resulting from axe grinding.

You are free to do as we tell you!