US public hate Snowden - but sexpot spy Anna Chapman LOVES him The American public is turning against NSA leaker Edward Snowden, with increasing numbers of people now believing he was wrong to reveal details of secret US government surveillance, a survey has found. But you shouldn't feel too sad for the geeky whistleblower, because sexpot Russian spy Anna Chapman has said she would …
I have serious doubts about polls claiming to accurately gauge what "Americans" think. It's a big and diverse country. If you canvass Washington, DC you will get one answer. Call people in Seattle, WA and you will likely get another. Approach people in San Francisco and you will wonder if you are still in the US or Fantasyland.
Everybody I know is happy that Snowden spilled the beans with a lot of "better him than me". My money is on a smear campaign organized by "The Man®" and all of his prime contractors.
The only way to combat the US government's intrusions is likely to be a grass roots effort to excommunicate people that work for the NSA and related agencies. I wonder how many people working at the new data center in Utah would quit or request a transfer if they were refused service at restaurants and shops. How about neighbors shunning them? Even more disconcerting would be for people to just blankly stare at them whenever they and their families are out in public. How about if their children couldn't make any friends at school and neighbor's children were told not to play with them. I would bet that filling staff positions and hiring services locally would get very difficult.
Seriously?? Talk about a population deeply entrenched in propaganda. I do seriously wonder whether so many fools are even worth fighting for anymore. I do feel for Snowden as possibly his worst nightmare, that is, his message falling upon on deaf ears, appears to be becoming reality.
Deeply troubling.
Not just his message falling on deaf ears, but him becoming the story rather than the intrusion of the NSA on the world's communications being the story. I get the impression that unlike Draco Malf^H^H^H^H Julian Assange, Snowden wasn't super keen to be the centre of attention, though I guess it makes him harder to render if he is high profile.
Meanwhile in Egypt, according to the army generals who took over there, Morsi support is in decline from the 51% he got at the last election, and totally justifies their coup.
The people they shot who protested, they were terrorists, all 40 + of them so far.
And the roundup of supporters of the former elected government using communications metadata in no way makes collection of meta data a problem for democracies.
William Hague was quick to approve of the military government, and Tony Blair says the coup was necessary.
It's interesting that very few are calling the military takeover in Egypt a coup. By definition, it is, but then sends all the wrong messages. How can the western countries then back the action. After all, they constantly bang on about democracy (and the military did depose an elected leader) and bleat about coups in general.
The whole world is being run on soundbites. Issue is; too many of the world's population is taken in by such things.
A former colleague spent 6 months working in a university department in Russia where one of the staff was very definitely a dissident. He discovered that the others didn't care for him because his banging on about the wonders of the West was boring, and the local KGB rep wanted him to shut up so that he didn't hear anything that would have to be reported. Just like us really...
They didn't even know or cared about a word "dissident", equally they didn't care about having enough money for sending their children to college, university, doctorship or having surgery or cancer therapy unlike people in "democratic countries" did.
And Russia can still intercept incoming ballistic missiles unlike The USA BTW.
The truth isn't setting them free, though, is it?
The truth is showing them that if they want the things their constitution claims to guarantee they will have to fight for them long and hard through every avenue as the two-party hegemony ( when the two parties are so politically close they have to use vocal media divisiveness to distinguish themselves from one another is it even really two-party? ) has already identified them as the enemy.
Nobody likes to be told they need to do work to get something a little bit amorphous like "freedom" or "democracy", not when they are having to struggle to pay the rent and feed their families. I can understand that. Nobody, especially here in the privileged, comfortable, west likes to be told we might have to make sacrifices of any kind.
People would rather be comfortable in a spacious cage than struggle and sacrifice to live under the free sky.
"Nobody likes to be told they need to do work to get something a little bit amorphous like "freedom" or "democracy", not when they are having to struggle to pay the rent and feed their families. I can understand that. Nobody, especially here in the privileged, comfortable, west likes to be told we might have to make sacrifices of any kind.
People would rather be comfortable in a spacious cage than struggle and sacrifice to live under the free sky."
The short version.
"Freedom is the right to be uncomfortable. "
WTF?! It wasn't (allegedly) AMERICAN lives, you (...). it was to spy on the rest of the world, you know, this place that you (don't) go to with your passport an they speak English funny, so funny that you have to ask them to repeat, and those morons still can't do it right. What's a passport? Well, you have seen a passport, haven't you? I mean, you go to the movies, etc? Yeah, well, they show the passports IN THE MOVIES. Sometimes. A piece of cardboard they show to those uniform officers when you get off a plane.
On the use of passports in America:
J.D. Tuccille on How Our Right To Travel Became a Bureaucratic Ordeal
Anna is THE HOT, though.
As the NSA story was unfolding, Labour & Conservative Home Secretaries, were writing letters (more like propaganda) to the Times pushing for more surveillance of Brits. Here the thing, THEY WERE IN ON IT.
13th June: Former Home Secretaries call for snoop law:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22891845
"The letter was signed by former Labour home secretaries Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Alan Johnson, along with former Conservative home secretary Lord Baker and defence secretary Lord King, and Liberal Democrat Lord Carlile, who until 2011 was the independent reviewer of government anti-terror laws. "
All of them ALREADY KNEW GCHQ WAS DOING IT ILLEGAL ALREADY! The GCHQ leak hadn't yet come out. Not one of them mentions it when writing to the Times demanding more surveillance.
17th June, GCHQ leak:
http://theweek.com/article/index/245699/new-snowden-leak-nsa-britains-gchq-eavesdropped-on-foreign-leaders
See? They knew, they withheld the information, were complicit in the coverup, and demanded laws to make it legal.
"The letter was signed by former Labour home secretaries Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Alan Johnson, along with former Conservative home secretary Lord Baker and defence secretary Lord King, and Liberal Democrat Lord Carlile, who until 2011 was the independent reviewer of government anti-terror laws. "
You see, how duplicitous it's become. The British law is clear, yet they do it anyway illegally in secret and the people in on the lie, push a fake agenda to get their masters bidding.
ElReg, do us a big favour, make the link above yourself.
Go ask Jack Straw,/David Blunkett/Alan Johnson, /Lord Baker /Lord King, /Lord Carlile, if they knew about Tempora, the GCHQ spy program before it was leaked on 21st June.
Go ask them if they wrote the letter in the knowledge of Tempora?
Ask them if Tempora is legal. Ask them if it is why they were asking for new laws?
Ask and ask and ask. Because these people knew, were complicit in it, and were pushing for laws that would have made it legal.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22891845
"Senior politicians from across the political divide have united to call for UK security services to be given greater internet monitoring powers."
GCHQ keep it *all*, Tempora means they intercept *everything* how exactly could they get greater surveillance powers than *everything*??
"Instead, referring to the recent murder of Drummer Rigby, they write: "When such a threat reveals itself, government has a duty to ensure they can do all they can to counter it."
THEY KNEW IT WAS ALREADY HAPPENING! This is mainly the people who planned the 'Mastering the Internet' surveillance.
If they knew it was happening then they knew IT DID NOT STOP THE MURDER OF DRUMMER RIGBY! And was a false justification leveraging the death for their agenda.
There's a story there, a big big story.
Which is this BS has persisted through eight of these oxygen thieves.
Now this letter int he Time
What's really despicable is Lord Carlisle, whose supposedly reviews "anti terror legislation" is in favor of it.
Britain. You've been here before. RIPA. "Only going to be used against paedophiles, terrorists and serious criminals" (oh and the odd fly tipper, and perhaps a family sneaking their kids into a good schools catchment area and....).
£500m/year and alleged savings of £150m (WTF from?).
Build your own coalition. If your MP is Liberal, tell them you support Cleggs stand, and explain why MI5 stated roughly 2000 Islamist suspects (suspects, as in viewed/posted on website, spoke to an informant, not actually making a bomb vest). That's 0.003 percent of the UK population. Or £5.3 (excluding that alleged savings of £150m) for every man, women and child in the UK.
Oh, that's simple.
The EU privacy commissioner should fill his/her boots with Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook et al, those who collaborated with the NSA to give them backdoors into their systems.
The EU fined Microsoft 561 million Euros for not putting a browser selection screen on Windows as promised.
I think wholesale violation, wilful, of user privacy, sending everything to the US spooks. Call it a billion each?
> They were spying on citizens of their closest allies
So what's new? After WWII, one of the of the reasons Churchill wanted Bletchley Park kept secret was that he was giving Enigma machines to allied countries like France, as the bleeding edge in encrypted comms. He didn't want them to know that all their traffic could be read by their 'friends' in the UK & US.
Spies spy. On everyone.
Not all in the US feel that way. I think the US needs to focus on fixing our own house and leave the others to do the same. We do not/should not want to be the worlds babysitter and the world should not want us to wipe their noses. Of course many of your nations are more than capable of taking care of yourselves and the UN needs to step up and stop being a complete joke IMO. I wish the US would boot the UN out of New York and out of the US. Time for another nation to babysit this wreck of an organization IMO..
I can understand how many resent the US.....It's arrogant to think you know how others should be/live, when your own house is in such a mess.
I think the US needs to focus on fixing our own house and leave the others to do the same. We do not/should not want to be the worlds babysitter and the world should not want us to wipe their noses.
Err.. Most of us DO have our 'houses' in order, we don't spy on tens of millions of private citizens of other nations, our governments need... ya know WARRANTS to spy on our own citizens.
How about you freaking yanks get your noses OUT of our private affairs huh? How about you deal with your shitty third world hellhole, you gun crime, homelessness, shitty healthcare, and other bollocks first.
Where the HELL do you get off looking into the private information of Australians, British, French, Germans, etc.
And you wonder why the rest of the world hates you...
"Err.. Most of us DO have our 'houses' in order, we don't spy on tens of millions of private citizens of other nations, our governments need... ya know WARRANTS to spy on our own citizens."
I'd be curious to know what country you live in. Because it's apparently not anywhere in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia or Oceania. Is there some sort of libertarian enclave in the Antarctic maybe?
"Is it worth it to point out yougov's political affiliations - for instance to the Murdoch press, and its directors who are conservative supporters? Wikidea 15:08, 9 April 2010 (UTC)" --Talk Page, Wikipedia.
The main page transparently promotes youGov's supposed 'accuracy' by selecting only those predictions that are...accurate. Of course, it works for psychics, why not pollsters?
"Based on what you've heard, do think Snowden's leak of top-secret information about government surveillance programs to the media was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do?"
Note the "Based on what you've heard" bit. They're not trying to see what the population thinks. They're trying to see if their propaganda is working.
There are many people in the U.S. who think what Edward J. Snowden did was heroic. They cite the oath, with the part "from all enemies, foreign and domestic" recognizing that what the men and women of the U.S government, NSA, and other related entities, are doing is wrong, illegal, and should be exposed.
The U.S. and the world needs a lot more people with the courage of Edward J. Snowden to step up and speak on the injustices being perpetrated at large and in grand fashion against the world's citizenry.
I had a think.
How is it, that all the NRA-nuts, (not the 'normal' people who might have a hunting rifle, a revolver and a shotgun because they're living in the sticks; I'm talking about the guys with the M16s, MP5s, the .50cal and the Grenades) who usually bring the 2nd Amendment in to justify their toys, don't stand in front of the Capitol right now and demand the Government hung?
Amongst other things:
"The concept postulates that the Second Amendment was intended to provide the means by which the people, as a last resort, could rise in armed revolt against tyrannical authorities."
Col. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr. (1995)
I actually had to look that up.
But no, not really. He's just having some fun there.
The nuts are the one that really believe that they need all this to defend Gods Own Country™ and themselves from the Chinks, if they try to bomb Pearl Harbour again*, Muslim terrorists, Puerto Rican thieves, rebelling niggers, Nazis, Commies, Bolivian drug dealers, British gay TV hosts, zombies and mutant jackalopes.
*I know, and I know that you know. Billy Bob Redneck** doesn't, though; Chinamen, VC, Khmer Rouge, Norks: all Chinks to him.
**My apologies to all decend rednecks and guys called William Robert who aren't twats.
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Because it's a choice of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
1) attempting to show up anywhere NEAR the Mall (Congress and the White House) with anything more weapon-like than a spoiled banana will get you arrested if not shot.
2) Even if you could arrange a peaceful demonstration of armed people, then everybody will be saying "Dem Dere crazy gun nuts want to overthrow de govmment! Dey is bad peeplez!"
3) If we do nothing (as we should - we have not yet exhausted the first three of the 4 boxes to use to protect liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo) then we are criticized for doing nothing.
Your point 1.) proves to me that that particular 2nd amendment reason for owning, for example, an assault rifle, is invalid.
Your point 2.) shows, again: to me, that it would also be pointless because it would not even be appreciated.
I start to think that the people of the United States have, after 225 years of working towards an ideal state, lost.
It's over. Feudalism has won.
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