Posted on 12/26/2013 3:43:52 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
... Hi, and merry Christmas. I’m honored to have a chance to speak to you and your family this year.
Recently, we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance watching everything we do.
Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book: microphones, video cameras, TVs that watch us —are nothing compared to what we have today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go.
Think about what that means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters.
Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.
The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together, we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government if it really wants to know how we feel asking is always cheaper than spying.
For everyone out there listening, thank you and merry Christmas.
(Excerpt) Read more at dissenter.firedoglake.com ...
What about the repeated lawlessness regarding the re-writing of Obamacare on the fly?
The president of - Russia - is protecting someone who is warning Americans about their loss of privacy to the total surveillance state.
I’m dizzy, I need to sit down.
I respectfully disagree.
They actually took care of that pesky lawlessness thing with the insertions of these words hundreds of times into that damned law: “...at the Secretary’s [HHS] discretion....”
“Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”
I respectfully disagree.
______________________________________________
Why? What does privacy in your life mean to you?
I would think that odd, until I think about Fast and Furious, Southern border, IRS, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, Benghazi, Obamacare, Afghanistan Rules of Engagement, Gays in the military, Protesters bussed into Sanford Florida--all intended to destroy the country. Putin is absolutely right.
snowden may have broken the law... but so has 0bama
why would one be hunted down while the other walks?
if we’re a country of laws, then BOTH should be persecuted. instead, only one is. at which point, the ‘law’ is fiction and is just a cute set of guidelines they inflict on those not in favor with the current admin
OK. Enough with this continual blather about Snowden the arch enemy of the law. When governments break their contract with the people those who expose it are not lawbreakers. You may not like him, you may believe him nieve, but Snowden is a patriot who has revealed the rotten underbelly of government tyranny.
Tell me why I have to listen to a 30 year old, know-nothing punk about.......anything?
"Es findet keinerlei Zensur statt;
nur wenn der Staat es nötig hat,
auch Kunst und Wissenschaft sind frei
Das Nähere regelt die Polizei".
--Erich Bernhard Gustav Weinert
“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.”
The naivete of youth, I suspect. The concept of privacy will not die. If anything, the LACK of privacy will keep the concept alive.
I would submit, however, that coming generations will grow up with NO EXPECTATION of privacy.
And, it will all be thanks to the advancing socialism that we seem unable to halt.
I agree. At great personal sacrifice to himself, he took the extreme measures that were necessary to get the conversation going. We have no privacy, our lives are manipulated, our opportunities to develop our full potential are being obliterated. Without privacy, how can we really know who we are?
Snowden's a whisle blower who deserves a medal for his patriotism. The ptb whatever their politics still regard him as a vile criminal to be hunted down and strung up. That in itself says it all.
“There is no censorship instead;
only if the state is in need,
also art and science are free
The arrangements made by the police. “
- Erich Bernhard Gustav Weinert
Self-identity derives from a much wider spectrum than mere privacy. Else we’d all be aboriginal hermits. I was born in a public hospital to a family that participates in public life. I have no inclination to move to some remote island and live alone, though I respect those who might want to do that. Besides, it is not my own life to begin with, as if I may do as I please with no accounting.
1O LORD, You have searched me and known me.
2You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
You understand my thought from afar.
3You scrutinize my path and my lying down,
And are intimately acquainted with all my ways.
4Even before there is a word on my tongue,
Behold, O LORD, You know it all.
5You have enclosed me behind and before,
And laid Your hand upon me.
6Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is too high, I cannot attain to it.
7Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
8If I ascend to heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.
9If I take the wings of the dawn,
If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
10Even there Your hand will lead me,
And Your right hand will lay hold of me.
11If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me,
And the light around me will be night,”
12Even the darkness is not dark to You,
And the night is as bright as the day.
Darkness and light are alike to You.
13For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
14I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
15My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
16Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.
17How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand.
When I awake, I am still with You.
19O that You would slay the wicked, O God;
Depart from me, therefore, men of bloodshed.
20For they speak against You wickedly,
And Your enemies take Your name in vain.
21Do I not hate those who hate You, O LORD?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against You?
22I hate them with the utmost hatred;
They have become my enemies.
23Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
24And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way.
Thank you for such an intense reply. I am now off to bed.
Snowden had just as much right to expose NSA as the NSA has to spy on the American People: absolutely none. Either they are both traitors or neither are traitors.
I guess you missed all the stories about the nudge squads.
Such policies — which encourage behavior subtly rather than outright require it — have come to be known as “nudges,” after an influential 2008 book titled “Nudge” by former Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein
This NSA stuff is far superior to opinion polls. I wager all those 0bama e-mails asking for 2 or three dollars were in fact a phising type operation to feed metadata to the NSA
Tell me why I have to listen to a 30 year old, know-nothing punk about.......anything?
____________________
Because he saw something evil, illiberal and illegal and took personal risks to make his findings public. He did know something few others knew with certainty and he proved it.
We used to characterize such actions for the common good in the face of personal risk to life and freedom as bravery.
You don’t have to listen. But you can no longer say you didn’t know your government was spying on you and on its own former allies and was using the results of that spying to punish its detractors and increase its own tyranny.
I read a little bit about those nudge squads. Creepy, to be sure. Laughable as well. One can always nudge back.
Why does anyone who can prove illegality have no more right than the criminal? Is it as criminal to fight State crime as to enforce it? What makes the NSA or any organ of government sacrosanct? Is the power of the state to suppress its citizens morally equal to the sovereignty of the individual and to the inalienable rights of the people to resist?
Define hero. Tell us why the NSA is heroic. Why is tyranny not treasonous against a free Republic and the concept of individual liberty? Are all laws just, by virtue of their existence. Do laws exist in a separate space with no relationship to concepts of justice?
Will you go quietly when personal information gained covertly is used against you, rather than commit *treason* against The State? What prompts such rigid obeisance to oppression?
IMO, your statement of equality of treason between NSA and Snowden is simply facile. This is not an abstract argument. It impacts the entire world and every individual in it. Advocating allegiance to any act carried out under color of law is demanding victims participate in their own abuse.
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