Remaining Snowden docs will be released to avert 'unspecified US war' – Cryptome All the remaining Snowden documents will be released next month, according to whistle-blowing site Cryptome, which said in a tweet that the release of the info by unnamed third parties would be necessary to head off an unnamed "war". Cryptome said it would "aid and abet" the release of "57K to 1.7M" new documents that …
"....Let's say some crazy ISIS Jihadi blows up New York. They don't gain anything by this. They don't fracture the USA, sow terror or otherwise do anything but kill a few infidels. What they absolutely will do is cause the entire rest of the world to unite against Islam...." Well, yes and no. You could say exactly the same about the idea of crashing airliners into city center offices, but one group of jihadis thought it was a great idea. You also don't seem to realise that there are jihadis that want a war with 'the West', they see it as necessary in uniting the Islamic people and ensuring what they see as Islam's rightful rule of the World. You are making the mistake of thinking those with a different upbringing and culture will weight up situations and make the same judgement calls as you.
".....But you can't control knowledge. The genie, once out of the bottle, doesn't go back in. There are literally millions of people on this planet that could build you a basic gun-type fission bomb from memory. Hundreds of thousands that could design you a fusion bomb with a little effort. Any wacko at any time can kidnap and torture these people until they give up the how...." True. The problem, as Saddam found, was merely gaining access to the high-tech materials for the high-tech delivery system his ego required, not the knowledge. Had Saddam put the same efforts into 'suitcase' nukes we would have really been in trouble.
"....A terrorist with a nuke will only get himself and his entire religion wiped off the face of the Earth...." Unlikely. For a start, our own democratic laws would not allow us to blame all of a particular religion for the acts of a small group of adherents. All out war works best against other nation states, not multi-regional terror groups. As was pointed out around the time of 9/11, despite the atrocity, it did not justify dropping a nuke on Mecca just because AQ were Islamists.
Ahhh!!!!
First Matt agrees with Trevor and now I am agreeing with Matt!
On Matt's first point - that some in the Islamic world want a war with 'the West' - I would add that a good portion of those people not only believe that an Islamic state is ordained by heaven, but are willing (even eager) to die to help fulfil that goal.
The argument that a jihadi wouldn't risk bringing the ire of the rest of the world down on Islam simply doesn't work when discussing people for whom a martyr's death is not merely a price to pay but a goal in itself.
Now, those organising and leading these groups may well make more sober assessments but if they've done their job well enough in convincing their followers that a martyr's death is desirable, how will you prevent them from seeking that which you have promised them will be glorious?
"The argument that a jihadi wouldn't risk bringing the ire of the rest of the world down on Islam simply doesn't work when discussing people for whom a martyr's death is not merely a price to pay but a goal in itself."
I never said that you would have trouble finding jihadis willing to blow themselves up. You seem to be conflating the willingness to die of footsoldiers with the willingness to sacrifice their entire cause.
A jihadi believes that if he dies, he goes to heaven, but as a general rule they are fighting to spread the influence of their culture and religion throughout the world. That is what is worth dying for, and why they're getting into heaven.
If Jihadis nuke a western city then I fucking promise you that all our treaties and social progressiveness, the Geneva convention and the laws of war will amount to nothing. The world will unite as it never has before and expunge those fuckers from the planet. We may not wipe out Islam in it's entirety, but we absolutely would wipe out every single fundamentalist Islamic on the face of the Earth. Every single last fucking one of them.
Understand that there are tens of millions of westerners ready to pick up the sword right now, today and make that happen. And we haven't even had a nuclear incident. If a fundamentalist Islamic group nuked New York, or London, Tokyo or Seoul the public's tone would change from conciliatory to "bloody vengeance" in less time than it takes to flip a transistor.
Remember: 50% of the UK wants to bring back the death penalty. 50%! The numbers in Canada, NZ, Oz and so forth are not that different. We're willing to compromise our morals for petty crimes of passion.
8 million dead in an instant, 25 million more slowly dying of radiation poisoning and the economy collapsed to the point that an entire nation has suddenly hit an additional 15% unemployment?
Yes, we'd kill for that. We'd kill hundreds of millions to avenge that. We would kill and kill and kill some more until the threat posed by those who believe the same as the bastards who used the nuke was 100% completely eliminated. We might even be willing to live in Matt's desired dystopia of zero civil liberties. All given up in exchange for the illusion of freedom.
But do not kid yourself - any of you - into thinking that we westerners are so much more highly "evolved" than the same nutjobs murdering women for going to school. Push us far enough and we are every bit as savage and brutal as they are.
So I stick by what I said:
You can find an infinite number of peckerheads willing to blow up a nuke in the middle of downtown New York, but the kind of people who can actually get hold of the good to make it happen are absolutely not crazy enough to actually do it. They know that they will gain nothing and lose everything.
For those who want to die, there are any number of methods available, ones that don't involve everything they believe in being expunged from the earth in an act of overwhelming vengeance.
I only used nukes as a example of information that should'nt be on general release
What if the NSA secrets to be released shows their technical capability to stuff up anyones cell phone network? and worse still it discloses the methods used?
Would a jihadi be interested? perhaps .. perhaps not, an enemy country? of course in a passing manner.
Who would be interested? why the spotty 17 yr old moron* keen to impress the other 17 yr olds infesting an IRC chatroom.
"I took down O2's network all day today hur hur " sort of thing
Boris
*I say moron, more like an IQ of 145 and the maturity of a 3 yr old
Absolutely correct, but the ability to stuff up O2's network is not on the same scale as a nuclear attack, and you fucking know it.
Worst case scenario, a few people die because they can't reach 911 and a small hit to the economy as corporate chaos reigns for a few hours. That's not even on the same level of risk or threat as millions dead and tens of millions more dying horribly and overwhelming the medical systems of entire nations.
I am entirely willing to risk some spotty teenager stuffing up the phone network in order to know what my government is up to. Quite frankly, I think someone has to stuff up the phone network from time to time so that we don't get complacent about technological security, and pay the coppers to protect critical infrastructure. (See: asshats attaching SCADA systems on the interbutts without UTMs in the middle.)
Liberty isn't an acceptable price to pay for the illusion of security.
There is, of course, a balance. We shouldn't make fissionable material available to anyone who asks. We shouldn't be selling strychnine or TNT to those who don't have a damned good reason to use it, and preferably licensing and safety training. Guns should require licensing and safety training to acquire and guns that have no purpose other than war (such as full auto rifles, rocket launchers, etc) absolutely shouldn't be allowed in the hands of civilians. (Or even Police!)
It is a question of risk management. Public safety is important, at a large enough level. By the same token, civil liberties are not "mere conveniences," but of fundamental importance. That means we must find a balance.
Absolute security is impossible. So is absolute liberty. So we must take a pragmatic approach to finding the balance. Restricting the availability of fissionable material is not a major restriction on liberty: it's dangerous even to those who know what they are doing, and there are very few legitimate uses for such material in the civilian sphere. By restricting the availability of fissionable material we gain a huge amount of security, and we do so by giving up virtually nothing.
This story changes dramatically when we talk about government surveillance. Knowing that you are watched at all times is a massive psychological burden. It absolutely changes what you are willing to say or do. Anyone with even the most basic understanding of history lives in fear because we know that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and those in power do not tolerate dissent.
So allowing our government to surveil us - and more horribly, allowing them to do so utilizing unknown methods at unknown times, with unknown capabilities - places the entire citizenry on the defensive against their own government, even if we aren't rounding up jews in the streets quite yet. It becomes an exercise in terror by the state when suddenly those who are rounded up using these secretive powers are tried in secret courts and given unknown sentences, especially when combined with laws that allow the police to pick up anyone they want and detain them without arrest (or the right to call family/employer/etc) for 30 day. Or 90 days. Or more!
The "security" purchased here is minimal, but the loss of liberty is profound. In the name of "protecting" us, the government has created an environment in which the only thing that prevents them from rounding up every political dissenter and "dissapearing" them is the magnanimity of those currently in power.
And those currently in power have absolutely no moral qualms about sending UAVs to kill people. By the thousands, if necessary. Death by robot without trial, a judgement made at the executive level, in secret. The claim is that they are killing to protect us, but there's no way to be sure. It is one more example of "the citizenry are allowed to exist and go about their lives only because the state chooses to allow them to."
Do you not understand the difference? One thing - restricting access to fissionable materials - is clearly a very minor loss of liberty for a very clear security benefit. The other amount to the use of secrecy and murder-without-trial by the state to generate terror amongst the citizenry in order to keep them in line out of fear. That is the exact opposite of liberty.
And Obama is one of the good guys.
If McCarthy or Hoover were alive today with the sort of power now held by the American government that society - all our societies - would be much, much darker.
So who's next? Every 2 years congress shuffles. Every 4 years the executive does. If we give up the liberty of "knowing what the hell our government is up to, why it is up to that and how it is accomplishing that" then we are handing a cowed and defeated citizenry to the next group of power hungry narcissists that happen to buy their way into the beltway.
What would you call an Islamic nation with that kind of control over it's people?
Now, imagine that the next president - and most of the next Congress - were ultra-right-wing fundamentalist Christians. How is that any different?
We probably shouldn't tell the people the exact model number and firmware of the devices used by the NSA to scan the stream for keywords. We probably shouldn't tell the citizenry the details of how the FBI pull up phone records at a moment's notice.
We absolutely should tell the people that it is being done, why, and with a general idea of how. That way the people can have an informed discussion about the risks, pressure their representatives to set limits, create oversight and demand adequate transparency. We can build a society where we are all aware of the compromise between liberty and security, and where we don't have to live in fear of the government listening to everything we say, where dissent isn't suppressed and the ghost og McCarthy will never again be allowed to haunt us.
If the risk taken for that level of liberty is that some spotty teenager might be able to down the cell network for a few hours, so be it. We'll figure out how he did it and prevent him from doing it again.
But I, for one, do not acknowledge the "right" of the state to incite terror amongst it's subjects in an effort to cow them into submission. I will not allow my nation the ability to spy on me without a warrant in the name of protecting me.
If you cannot understand the difference between the levels of risk discussed then quite frankly you shouldn't be allowed anywhere near government. Or computers, for that matter. Your ability to understand the basic concepts of risk management are at best compromised...but in reality, damned near non-existent.
".....Absolute security is impossible. So is absolute liberty. So we must take a pragmatic approach to finding the balance...." Agreed, so what you need to do is calmly and rationally convince the majority of where you want the balance to be set. Simply screaming and bleating like headless sheep that 'EVERYONE'S coms are ALL being listened to ALL the time' is neither rational nor calm, merely amusing.
".....Knowing that you are watched at all times is a massive psychological burden. It absolutely changes what you are willing to say or do....." Only if you wear tinfoil. The rest of us, especially those that understand the technical and manpower limitations, just shrug as we realise there is very little chance of anything Joe Average says or does ever gaining even passing interest to the spooks.
"..... It becomes an exercise in terror by the state when suddenly those who are rounded up using these secretive powers are tried in secret courts and given unknown sentences...." And this has happened where? Not in the US or UK. If you wish to pretend otherwise then please supply a ref, otherwise admit that is just a melodramatic 'worst case scenario'.
"......especially when combined with laws that allow the police to pick up anyone they want and detain them without arrest (or the right to call family/employer/etc) for 30 day. Or 90 days. Or more!...." I think what you mean is without charge, they have to be arrested at least on suspicion of having committed a crime before they can be held for questioning under terror laws, and they are allowed legal representation from the moment they are arrested. Sorry, but again, if you want to pretend otherwise has happened in the US, UK or even Canada, please do give a ref.
".....The "security" purchased here is minimal...." The people that attended the Christmas lights ceremony in Portland in 2010 might want to argue against that (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/25/us_judge_rules_warrantless_snooping_okay_in_terrorist_bomber_case/). The victims of 9/11 can't argue anything anymore.
".....And those currently in power have absolutely no moral qualms about sending UAVs to kill people...." Yeah, like all those drone strikes in the UK and USA I'm always not hearing about. Drone strikes are used by the US for very specific targets in areas where there is no practical chance of capturing the target without significant loss of life to both the attackers and locals. I'm beginning to think your viewpoint has been totally formed from watching "The Bourne Legacy" whilst stoned.
".....the government has created an environment in which the only thing that prevents them from rounding up every political dissenter and "dissapearing" them is the magnanimity of those currently in power....." Well, that and the fact we have a legal system that would send them to prison, you mean? Seriously, are you posting from an alternate reality? Your view of the US seems to be extremely distorted or just plain irrational.
Boris, you did not read the articles published 20 years ago on how to build a nuclear device published in USA and copied in Oz among others. Data came from publicaaly released information. The point was just how hard and dangerous it is to make nuclear devices for the builders, not targets. No way to tell, but I suspect it might have encouraged non-nation actors to skip the idea. Meanwhile, while nations can make such devices I wonder what the effect of using a nuclear device by anyone in the Middle East might do to the various fighting groups there ? My enemies enemy is my friend is a stupid idea, but a common threat can create the oddest bedfellows.
The Sept 11 attacks don't even count as a skirmish. A couple thousand people died. Minor infrastructure damage. The difference between that and a nuke is something you are obviously completely incapable of comprehending.
Yes, the Sept 11th attacks didn't catalyze the west to retribution, because they weren't that big a fucking deal. Americans were shocked out of their belief that their vaunted exceptionalism protected them from the consequences of their own foreign policy hitting them on their soil. That's unfortunate - and it really sucks for the families of those killed - but it is not even remotely, not even within several orders of magnitude - close to a nuclear attack.
America got pushed into the dirt by the nerd they were busy bullying. The rest of the world pretty much said "saw that coming" and went on their merry. American then killed one million people in Iraq in retribution - a nation that had nothing at all to do with the Sept 11 attacks - and got bogged downing in Afghanistan getting it's ass handed to it by a bunch of cave-dwelling lunatics. (To be fair, we ALL got our asses handed to us in Afghanistan, including Canada. Mind you, at least some of our war dead are because the Americans decided to bomb us.)
When America actually identified the people responsible - the whackos in Afghanistan - for Sept 11th, her allies rallied to her side and we marched on the people responsible. We did it according to the rules of war because the act in question - the Sept 11th incident - did not in any way warrant an abrogation of the various treaties that determine those rules of war. Put simple: Sept 11th wasn't a big enough deal to warrant tearing down hundreds of years of international agreements about conduct during a war. The threat was not big enough.
Nuke a city, and that changes. In an instant the threat moves into the realm of "absolutely must be terminated at all costs." With a nuclear attack - and only an attack of that scale - would western nations be willing to switch from "defensive aggression" to "conquer with an eye to eradication."
If you cannot see the difference between the two levels of incident, there is something very wrong with you.
==-
> "If Jihadis nuke a western city then I fucking promise you that we will expunge those fuckers from the planet."
Oh that were the case, my angry little warmonger! But alas, it will not be so. Not as long as Obama runs this circus.
He will publicly disapprove of the nuking of NY in no uncertain terms, then assure us that his harsh words will get the suicidal insaniacs to see the error of their ways, lay down their arms, and with a tear in their eye, join hands with him across the Table of Brotherhood so that we may, together, build a new future for all the Children of the Earth.
He's not only a campaign-liar; he's also criminally naive and totally ineffective.
-- faye kane ♀ girl brain
sexiest astrophysicist you'll ever see naked
Anyone consider that someone with a nuke would use it 50 miles over South Dakota? One weapon, massive EMP impact of a scale most civilian and even some military tech wouldn't be able to withstand (it's plain hard physics in the way, pal). THEN you rush in like a nightmare.
Until someone finds a way to use a nuke to set off a supervolcano, this is probably the best bang for the buck you can have with one weapon.
"How do you get it 50 miles up without an AEGIS cruiser picking it off?" Or, hopefully, how do you gather the tech and people to build a launch platform that can put your device 50 miles up without coming to the attention of the spooks? Saddam tried to get round the CIA's attention by buying medical equipment (lithotripters) from Siemens to strip down to build nuclear triggers, but it didn't work, the CIA found out and stopped the sale at the supplier (Thomson-C.S.F.).
Boris, Boris, Boris. Spook troll are you ? You should know that competent spies assume that all comms may be tapped and agents followed. NSA et al is nothing new for the bad guys. The few new bits like remote turning on of mobile phones on was spotted soon after the first drone strikes. The degree of surveillance of people who have nothing to with war de juer is the issue Snowden blew whistle on.
I thought Cryptome was mirrored to hell and back anyway? Are all of their older mirrors suddenly not good enough (even though they were fine for Cryptome for years)? Or are the mirrors gone nowadays? There used to be a Mirror I used more than the actual domain because it was much faster for me but I haven't used it in years and I don't even think I still have the URL or ipv4 address anyway, since my internet speeds got better after many years and thousands of dollars, and Firefox came out which seemed faster than IE and Opera at loading basic pages back then, which is what Cryptome is really, a bunch of text and some hyperlinks with an image from time to time, so I didn't need the mirror anymore. But at one time they did exist and there were a number of them. And the USB stick isn't a new idea either, they've had DVDs with every article ever published by them for quite awhile. The USB stick would be better for users, including myself, though so I hope they do indeed change formats.
But what gets me is that I'm honestly kind of (very) surprised George Young made a statement like the war thing though, thats pretty fucking delusional sounding and based on his past writings he doesn't seem to be too prone to delusions of grandeur, he actually seems to be very modest about the service that cryptome provides and not overly paranoid though he's been in nearly every federal agency's crosshairs at one point or another, if you've followed his organization for any length of time. So either he's really got something big, like as in bigger than anything anyone's ever leaked before or else someone's doing a lousy job of attempting to discredit them by trying to make them sound insane. A bunch of 18 year old Privates and Specialists fresh out of Psychological Operations AIT being led by a 22 year old 2nd Lieutenant could do better, so if anyone's trying to discredit Cryptome, its probably no one any good at this sort of thing, which suggest a whole host of "hacktivist" organizations who are still sippin' on Julian Assange's Kool-Aid to me.
A remote possibility also exists that he's actually trying to sound delusional and insane, which is a type of game theory strategy where leadership appears to have gone completely off the deep end and starts acting bizzare and unpredictable, his advisors start making public noises about the same, and it forces an adversary into negotiating from an unprepared position to try and hold off the unstable leader which usually doesn't go well as the adversary who's been acting crazy has been in preparation for negotiations the entire time and already knows what they're doing, allowing them to exploit any slips from the adversary who isn't prepared for it. Kissinger and Nixon managed to pull this off several times with the Chinese, the Vietnamese and the Soviets so there's historical precedent for successful application of that strategy at least with States and their leadership.
While I felt the U.S. government overreacted to Snowden's initial revelations, some later ones have included information that would tend towards damaging legitimate U.S. intelligence capabilities.
As I believe the U.S. is a democracy and not an aggressor, I find this distressing. This announcement that efforts will be made to cripple the NSA in order to prevent the U.S. from launching a war of aggression next month does not, therefore, strike me as either a good thing or justified. Instead, it seems to me that the cause of freedom is going to be harmed for the sake of paranoid fantasies.
On the other hand, if Cryptome was simply fooled by an NSA plant intended to discredit Snowden, that wouldn't exactly be something I'd have hoped for either.
A list of informants names and addresses could still put them in danger many decades in the future, so should never be published.
Proof that the NSA was spying on the leaders of friendly nations would still be relevant for as long as people identify with those nations - which is longer than the nation itself continues to exist.
If proof was published showing that the French secret service had detailed knowledge of everything most US citizens were doing last decade, would they be happy about it?
"A list of informants names and addresses could still put them in danger many decades in the future, so should never be published."
Probably true.
"Proof that the NSA was spying on the leaders of friendly nations would still be relevant for as long as people identify with those nations - which is longer than the nation itself continues to exist."
Maybe, but people need to know the harm their governments have done if we are to learn from the mistakes of the past and correct them. Would you prefer the Germans covered up WWII, denied the holocaust and the existence of the Nazi party?
"If proof was published showing that the French secret service had detailed knowledge of everything most US citizens were doing last decade, would they be happy about it?"
No. And they'd demand reparations, or at the very least promises it wouldn't happen again, with some form of monitoring that would ensure this. International policy regarding privacy might very well move forward at that point,and we might see positive social change.
We need to know the ills our governments have done in our name so that we can prevent them from being repeated.
I'd say "how the state uses dragnet surveillance to monitor everyone, everywhere and ultimately is allowing entire nations to sleepwalk into McCarty's wet dream of suppressing dissent almost before it happens" is both something that is important forever and must be published. Not only is it relevant today, but our descendants will need to know exactly how the fuck we let it get to this point, why we let the coming dark era of state terror (in the name of "protection") ever happen, and how they can prevent that from ever happening again.
We study the Nazi rise to power for a reason: this cannot be allowed to happen again. Our descendants will study the mistakes we are making today for the exact same reason.
Earlier WikiLeaks got into a spat with Greenwald over not naming a country in one of the NSA-stories, and threatened that they would publish these files.
Could this be about that?
I wonder where WikiLeaks got the files if that's the case. I think Snowden decided to go to journalists after the cack-handed way the Iraq- and diplomatic files were handled.
”I have their plans for invading Mars!!!!"I didn't know they had found oil on Mars? …. TheVogon
Greetings, TheVogon,
Can you imagine the enigma and Mars invaders’ dilemma in discovering their more valuable intelligence an Earthly treasure more sought after and powerful than wealth with command and control of oils and gold, and the rare gems and intricately manufactured and expense laden baubles which are supplied to have something designedly new for native purchase? The enigmatic dilemma being, the intelligence discovered is most adept at uncovering any and all information IT needs to feed and seed for effortless resourceful maintenance of alien8dD source security and positive mutually advantageous reinforcement of universatile virtual protection forces …. and thus is quite independent of Earthed Control and both Primitive and Sub-Prime Optimal Command.
Do you imagine it would be a monumental and quite titanic global mistake by Earthed networking systems to try to implausibly deny and practically prevent Key CodedD messages with Freely Available Information from and/or for such a more powerful and valuable intelligence source and otherworldly resource? A global mistake which would extract and exact upon its leading proponents, the necessary penalty to ensure such will never ever be considered in any way an APT ACT to be applied again?
Recently Cryptome have been a bit paranoid about site access, etc, though maybe with good reason. …. Paul Crawford
Hmmm? One might like to ponder on the site’s success being responsible for a bit of Cryptome’s paranoia.
of Intriguing Engagement for Creative Productions
That statement sort of implies that Democracy requires an electorate capable of making decisions based on hard data in order to work. If so, it's fundamentally fucked and we should get rid of it now. ….. Tee Cee @Re: Paul Crawford Cryptome
Okay TeeCee, who is qualified to lead us as a benevolent dictator? McCarthy? Bush the lesser? Gandhi? Kofi Annan? Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Tony Abbot? What about Matt Bryant? You? Personally, I vote Elon Musk.How are we to decide upon who's magnanimity we are to rest our future? In whose hands do we balance between liberty and security if not those of the people who must live with the consequences? …. Trevor_Pott replying to Tee Cee @Re: Paul Crawford Cryptome
[And oh how do I miss here, the ease of the old days, whenever every Registered posted communication was individually effortlessly date and time stamped for simple clearer and highly accurate referencing, and it did provide one with so much more revealing informative latent metadata for inclusion in deeper analysis of both post and poster. Any chance of that mega feature being relaunched, El Reg]
The bottom line, T_P, is that the masses don’t get to decide, but are fed and watered and sprinkled with the fairy dust that is called democracy and fairly elected representation, to deliver to them the illusion and delusion that they do. Those and/or that which think they be qualified [for who is to say that it is not a virtual computer machine algorithm fronting for and running democracy in the same way as it is running electronic trading market bourses] autonomously assume and presume command and control in silent stealthy secrecy and in order not to be held personally responsible and accountable for corporate failings and crimes against humanity, invest heavily in all manner of practical and virtual security and military protection and try to protect themselves in veils and layers of obfuscation and prevarication/exceedingly slow and preposterous judicial procedure and national security letter and matter invocation …. which all be only smoke and mirrors to hide the truth of the fiction from the reality of facts.
If systems are hiding from the masses the reality of the way they are governed and provided for, are the masses living in false world and alternate virtual reality space aided and abetted by media moguls and minions. And that is a/the fact which spins the fiction of there being a physical reality hosting their existence and over which they can exercise power and future direction with democratically elected representative control, rather than it being a virtual reality play and Great IntelAIgent Game stage for leading media players and they be just the audience in the pits and grandstands suffering their indulgences and follies.
And this be a teaser trailer for ITs AI Mega Media Mogul BlockBuster and Big Brother Dam Buster Games Franchise ….. for Political Systems Virtual Makeover and Takeover with Deep Pools and Dark Webs of Astute Active Adept Adaptable Apps.
All enquiries please to GCHQ IC Enterprises. The natural first stop and prime shop for all things smarter in enterprises with intelligence communities and IntelAIgent Communities and answers for your questions. Agents are available to take your calls whenever not otherwise engaged in listening to your calls.
No, we don't need to know everything our governments are doing in our name. We do, however, need to be able to know anything our governments are doing in our name. Transparency doesn't mean forcing everyone to constantly monitor governments' actions, it means having the ability to expose any action that people would have a good reason to object to.You might not want to know the details, but those who have the means to stop the government from acting unjustly may need to know the details in order to prevent it from doing so. …. Steven Roper
Quite so, Steven Roper, and they do have that facility and are now better able and enabled to exercise it, and it is causing quite a stir and more than just a kerfuffle for the powers that be and used to be all powerful but not now all knowing. Hence all the crazy growing idiotic chaos of late.
"The bottom line, T_P, is that the masses don’t get to decide, but are fed and watered and sprinkled with the fairy dust that is called democracy and fairly elected representation, to deliver to them the illusion and delusion that they do. "
You're at least partly right, alien man. But the key to understanding here isn't that the illuminati are running the world, or that each nation is a dictatorship. It's far simpler - and more terrifying - than that.
The truth of the matter is: noone's in charge. That's sort of the point. Yes, the masses are malleable; anyone who knows a damned thing about group dynamics knows just how vulnerable we are to psychological manipulation, even when we know we're being played.
This is offset to some extent by genetic factors: we're not all equally vulnerable, and some of us are more genetically inclined towards risk aversion and hatred of change. It's also offset to some extent because there are multiple parties all pulling us in various different directions, so in some small ways the various powermongers cancel eachother out.
There's also the part where the real power is exercised not by the elected official, but by the civil servant, the appointed judge and other elements of the bureaucracy that we don't directly select.
Despite all that, we do select our leaders, and our leaders ultimately select the bureaucracy. If - and I realise the unlikeliness of this - we could all come together and elect a completely new group of politicians with a mandate to clean house we could in fact force radical change. Not bloody likely, but the possibility exists. If something truly horrible were to happen we may just exercise that option.
What are the alternatives? Abject submission? At least the illusion of control over our government gives some hope that if someone were to seize the reigns outright we might fight back.
If we simply roll over and let a corporatocracy take over, or a dictator, or even an insane machine...we lose the illusion, and with it, hope.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in a worth with hope than without. Even if that hope is ultimately an illusion.
But me, I don't buy the illuminati theory. The more time I spend with people who are worth millions and billions of dollars the more I realise that most of them have outrageous egos. They won't work together. Not to rule us, not for any reason. They could - the technology and the science exist to allow the well resourced to dominate us utterly - but their own raw ambition and fractious nature will keep them fighting eachother instead of coalescing into the super secret boogyman of peasant-squishing doom.
Unless, of course, that's just what they want us to believe... :)
Great thoughts indeed, Trevor_Pott. With one small, and maybe not so meaningful add-on.
This is Criminal. Everything you criticise, everything you are voting against - on and on, resultlessly - is done to you and yours by the Criminal - a faceless, but having oh so well known names a person. We write books abouth these oh good fellas, and make films about them. We are proud to be familiar with them. We happily lend them a couple of bucks when they can't find a handkerchief. And at the same time we prefer not to notice that we are being fcuked by the Criminal - not in what ports many would think in a second, no - the Criminal are the greatest perverts ever, and they are using the fissures of our cowardly souls. A simple workout, as they say in gyms. And while we deliberately fool ourselves and our next generations with arguing whos democracy is better or whos autoritarian ways are worse, the fissures become yet wider.
Fear of truth this is. Bullied sissy pants. Just do it.
http://youtu.be/PNCtySFhz0U
is the USA or its owners planning another war. ? What issues could assist in deciding this ?
Economy: recovery and no jobs for the proles, so an external enemy is needed to pacify the peasants into dying for the good of military industrial complex CEOs to bring an old cliché up to date..For a little while crude oil supplies improved as demand reduced due to other energy supplies coming on-stream. Who does that bother ? Crude prices seemed to drop also.
So now Iraq Mk3 is on and oil prices are up, a nice shiny new enemy that fits all the Hollywood ideals of bad guys has appeared and strangely, the fuzz and spooks main response is more spying on citizens using new disturbance in middle East as justification. For a conspiracy theory, it can hold water. Lastly, all those nice new killing machines that the US congress wont buy.
Given that no spook operation can be said definitely to have stopped terrorist attacks anywhere, and the spookeries and FBI ignored the data they had, it makes me wonder what is so important about maintaining the ineffective expensive mass surveillance. Have the new aristocrats decides the peasants can be fooled all the time and the return of absolute monarchy by another name is coming real soon now ? This would need mass control and the spooks seem to doing just that.
The NSA abused the privilege of "we won't tell you, but trust us". Now they will get it taken away for a while.
If America's reputation is damaged by the truth, then they deserve it. (I live here, BTW). Hopefully, one final, huge docs-infomation explosion will reign in the bastards and force the politicians to move their attention away from the bribery trough and towards passing restrictions on the NSA. The spooks will have shamed this country in the face of the world for the last time.
faye kane ♀ girl brain
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