Class Action Lawsuit of Obama, NSA Over PRISM

Started by stromboli, June 10, 2013, 10:31:40 PM

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Colanth

Quote from: "FrankDK"> PRISM is just one more datum demonstrating that the Obama Administration is just like every other administration, hungry to expand the power of government at the expense of the rights of the citizenry.

I confess, I'm really disappointed in Obama, although the disappointment has been a long time growing.  As disappointing as this is, at least it puts the lie to those who claim he is the most liberal president in history.  In fact, he's right of center, like just about all of our recent chief executives.

Frank
Obama is left of center, but the center passed Goldwater on its way to the right.  Old Barry would have been a staunch leftist these days.
Afflicting the comfortable for 70 years.
Science builds skyscrapers, faith flies planes into them.

BarkAtTheMoon

Quote from: "Jmpty"
Quote from: "Jason_Harvestdancer"I see a lot of people saying they don't feel threatened because it's not happening to them.  Not a very good position in my opinion.

Ummm, what exactly is not happening to them? Or what is happening to anyone that is causing some sort of harm? Someone is saving data which contains the phone numbers you have called. So? My phone company does that already. Is that secret?

And they already sell it to any company who wants it for marketing and demographics purposes.

This whole thing is much ado about nothing. All of these so called scandals have been. When absurd rhetoric like "This could very well be our last chance to save the country" is tossed around as if it's a serious concern and all the completely wrong statements about what the PRISM program actually is overwhelms the facts it makes the whole discussion meaningless. Any real facts of the matter have been lost in a sea of bullshit. The fact of the matter is that nobody will ever listen to your phone conversations. I assure you and if they did they'd probably just be chuckling over some dumb shit you said to your girlfriend or whoever. Nobody will even ever look at the numbers and date/times of your personal phone calls. Anybody who knows a thing about large databases knows 99.9+% of this data will never be looked at by a human eye. It'll go through an algorithm that searches for patterns, phone numbers with known terrorist affiliations on watch lists, calls to flagged nations that support terrorism, etc and weeds out as many people like us and most of the world who do nothing wrong as possible. Anything else would be a GIANT WASTE OF FUCKING TIME. If some NSA geek is found to be fucking around with your phone calls, he's wasting his time at work, most likely breaking department regulations, and will most likely be punished for it up to and including being fired.

Over the course of my career I've had access to financial and personal information of somewhere in the range of 50 million different people between all the places I've worked. I don't look at individual records unless I need to for work reasons (or happen across one that's funny or interesting for whatever reason), and why? Because I don't give a shit about Joe Schmoe's credit card history, just like the NSA guys writing code to parse these phone records. I'm just a guy behind a desk just like the guys at NSA, I've no intention of using the information for illegal purposes and I'd obviously get fired and probably arrested if I did, and I have better things to do than wasting my time looking up some dumbfuck nobody in Shitdick, Arkansas. That's why I'm not at all worried about this.

The government isn't some singular hivemind evil entity. The vast, vast majority of federal employees (like virtually all, statistically speaking) are just like you and me, going to work and sitting in a cubicle every day for their 9 to 5, chit chatting with their coworkers over lunch, then going home at the end of the day to their family. They're not politicians. A lot of the ones at NSA and CIA aren't even really spies, just very intelligent analysts sitting at a desk in some office in Ft. Meade or Langley. This is why these grand conspiracies never come to pass. It takes many, many normal people, your neighbors, doing horrible evil, and depends on fictional dictatorial powers of the president and his administration, ignoring the checks and balances of the branches and regulations of these agencies, and the executive branch completely micromanaging every aspect of the government. It's absurd, it's naive, it's stupid, and it ain't happening.
"When you landed on the moon, that was the point when God should have come up and said hello. Because if you invent some creatures and you put them on the blue one and they make it to the grey one, then you fucking turn up and say, 'Well done.' It's just a polite thing to do." - Eddie Izzard


missingnocchi

Quote from: "BarkAtTheMoon"And they already sell it to any company who wants it for marketing and demographics purposes.
Marketing companies which, notably, do not have the power to arrest anyone without a trial indefinitely.

QuoteThis whole thing is much ado about nothing. All of these so called scandals have been. When absurd rhetoric like "This could very well be our last chance to save the country" is tossed around as if it's a serious concern and all the completely wrong statements about what the PRISM program actually is overwhelms the facts it makes the whole discussion meaningless. Any real facts of the matter have been lost in a sea of bullshit. The fact of the matter is that nobody will ever listen to your phone conversations. I assure you and if they did they'd probably just be chuckling over some dumb shit you said to your girlfriend or whoever. Nobody will even ever look at the numbers and date/times of your personal phone calls. Anybody who knows a thing about large databases knows 99.9+% of this data will never be looked at by a human eye. It'll go through an algorithm that searches for patterns, phone numbers with known terrorist affiliations on watch lists, calls to flagged nations that support terrorism, etc and weeds out as many people like us and most of the world who do nothing wrong as possible. Anything else would be a GIANT WASTE OF FUCKING TIME. If some NSA geek is found to be fucking around with your phone calls, he's wasting his time at work, most likely breaking department regulations, and will most likely be punished for it up to and including being fired.

Over the course of my career I've had access to financial and personal information of somewhere in the range of 50 million different people between all the places I've worked. I don't look at individual records unless I need to for work reasons (or happen across one that's funny or interesting for whatever reason), and why? Because I don't give a shit about Joe Schmoe's credit card history, just like the NSA guys writing code to parse these phone records. I'm just a guy behind a desk just like the guys at NSA, I've no intention of using the information for illegal purposes and I'd obviously get fired and probably arrested if I did, and I have better things to do than wasting my time looking up some dumbfuck nobody in Shitdick, Arkansas. That's why I'm not at all worried about this.
Yes, because it's the desk monkeys I'm worried about. I'm just so paranoid that they might take over America by listening to my conversations in their free time! This absolutely addresses anyone's concerns in meaningful way.

Seriously, though, do you actually believe that THIS is what people are worried about? We're worried about what their BOSSES will do with this power. The leaders of the country, not some lackey at a computer. How do you think dictatorships happen, Batm? Sometimes it's through a coup, sure, but other times it happens when a democratically elected leader uses his power to silence political opposition. Hitler is the obvious go-to example of this, but they exist in modern times as well. Vladimir Putin and Robert Mugabe both fit the bill. These are the kind of people we are worried about. If the president wants information on a specific political opponent, all he needs is the friendship of the Director of the NSA, his employee. If he wants to arrest said political opponent without a trial, he only needs to name him terrorist and order it to be done. This is the framework we're setting up here.

QuoteThe government isn't some singular hivemind evil entity. The vast, vast majority of federal employees (like virtually all, statistically speaking) are just like you and me, going to work and sitting in a cubicle every day for their 9 to 5, chit chatting with their coworkers over lunch, then going home at the end of the day to their family. They're not politicians. A lot of the ones at NSA and CIA aren't even really spies, just very intelligent analysts sitting at a desk in some office in Ft. Meade or Langley. This is why these grand conspiracies never come to pass. It takes many, many normal people, your neighbors, doing horrible evil, and depends on fictional dictatorial powers of the president and his administration, ignoring the checks and balances of the branches and regulations of these agencies, and the executive branch completely micromanaging every aspect of the government. It's absurd, it's naive, it's stupid, and it ain't happening.
It really doesn't require all that. Do you think every single member of the NSA knows exactly what ends they are working towards at all times? The fact that most of them are just regular guys like you and me would indicate that they do not. And frankly, if the NSA can set up an entire telecom surveillance system without anyone reporting it for 6 years, I don't think the people involved generally have an issue with taking orders and shutting up.

All this assumes that you really do need a lot of people to commit evil acts using this technology. Well, literally speaking, you do. Lots of people running tech support and whatnot. But once the data is there, it should only take a handful of people at the most to find out who the dissidents are and subjugate them.
What's a "Leppo?"