Out of Pod Experience

show of hands, who thinks he should go to russia because they'll love him for sticking it to USA

the only world where he's the good guy and you're an american is in Hollywood.

cuz unless you label surveillance as "bad" you can't have an easy to understand plot.

I'll admit, at this point I'm just being cryptic on purpose because it's obvious you lack the perspective to grasp the reality of things. and I think it's funny.

man, I want to make a difference. when's the next occupy rally?

btw, CCP can read your ingame messages, but don't worry they're only looking for RMT activity.

that was a good laugh

I've contracted you a fine piece of livestock and 20 singles in jita. might wanna install a pole in your CQ

This made me LOL hard.

Kudos to you, sir.

that it's news to anyone, that lying is the cheapest way to string people along... makes me smile.

You do sound quite emotionally upset about all this. Is it hurting your patriotic feelings that much? Don't worry, soon most people and the media will forget and stop talking about it, just as they always do after one of these "scandals" surfaces, and your pain will go away.

'They' have been monitoring us forever.

US Librarians See 'Big Brother' Monitoring - January 25, 2003 - AP What is really funny, the Movie Se7en brought up that this has been done for decades and that movie was released in 1995

I know I have been monitored. And I am pretty sure I am on a 'list'. I have been pulled to the side, frisked, searched, and hassled every time I have flown since well before 911. I will say since about 1998. Interesting as that is about the time I used the internet to look up the Anarchist's Cookbook. Dooh!

EDIT: It does not help that during the winter I look like a skinhead and during the summer I look like I come straight out of somewhere in the realm of Eastern Europe/Middle East/West Asia

Well this is interesting.

Seems the public mood is now towards backing strong data protection acts in Europe. The result would effectively be companies working in the US forced to hand over data to the NSA, and be denied access to the EU. Or vice versa, support privacy and be denied access to the US market.

I wonder if Google and Facebook would get an exemption, or would have to operate a subsidiary bound to EU law to operate if it passes? That or a competitor with the backing of the EIB, could get interesting. The French have a state backed French language search engine already, Dassault are making it if I remember right, my Google-fu is in progress.... erm... Dassault-fu...

Call me naive maybe but the French haven't been either cowards or a walkover that pretends to be something they are not.

The French have not, it seems to me, been acting as if it is their responsibility to police the planet. Perhaps it comes from their lack of technical capacity to do so and ultimately any nation with the resources to pull it off would do so and damn the consequences.

They have the area's they are interested in, namely their former Empire they police such as Mali with known quantities of Islamism, a known quantity. However I doubt that they actively lobby other nations to make it easier for them to spy on their supposed allies, for corporate benefits or political. I have no doubts they have embedded personnel in allied and foreign governments including the UK and the USA, but there is a large distance between verifying your allies positions and wholesale blanket surveillance of the general civilian population.

There is a balance between liberty, and security, and somewhere along the way I feel a line has been crossed, even if GCHQ was reaping the benefits of such a program.

I realise I might be coming across as a political activist or someone likely to go to the Occupy movements, quite the contrary. I am pissed off at this but for reasons that I enjoy my privacy. It might be a culture issue, over here we have a saying that every Englishman's home is his castle. I cannot help but feel this has breached the walls of even a veil of privacy and watching the keep with unseen eyes.

My apologies if I've been somewhat more passionate in my responses than usual, but this is something that I can see myself having a personal file on their servers.