Land of the Free

[lxskllr]

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...nsadatacenter/

[sgreger1]

I know someone who is in the military that works in intelligence, he is at the top of the top in terms of the things he has access to and he never speaks about his work directly. He was on the team that identified where Bin Laden was though, the guy has access to data on the ****ing power consumption of each house in pakistan for God's sake. All I have gotten out of him is that the technology that they currently employ at the place he works is outrageously advanced compared to anything on the commercial market. Minority report shit (his words). I never could get too much info of anything in particular but what I gathered is that the government is already a long ways ahead of what you think they are capable of. Someone would say, "It's impossible to log EVERYTHING that happens on the internet in real time and be able to filter through it to mine anything meaningful from it, I mean it's petabytes of information created daily!". Apparently while even a company like Google would say it's impossible, it appears to be not only possible but in use currently.

They started tapping underseas lines and reading all telephone and digital communication back during Clinton's years, then 9-11 provided near infinite resources and clearance to expand the system they built with the patriot act, and now they are building another nearly $3 billion data center in Colorado which even congress is beginning to ask questions about. I have read up on all the various intel programs that have been happening since the clinton years and they are at the point now where I don't even know if SSL encrypted traffic is safe anymore, even things that should take supercomputers years to break are fair game if I were to take a guess. This is going to be an interesting century that's for sure.

[Bigblue1]

More sh!t becomes more real everyday. People really need to reconsider the term conspiracy theorist. Maybe just maybe that they/we/I am/are conspiracy realists........

[bpc720]

[truthwolf1]

It could soon if not already be dangerous to even be on a forum discussing these things.

[sgreger1]

I think the best offense is by ruining the signal to noise ratio. If everyone just talked about what they wanted openly and never let fear dictate what they wrote, than they would never be able to marignalize peoples opinions. If They start rounding up people who say "**** Obama", than everyone should start saying **** obama. They cana lways marginalize a small group and label them, but it's harder to arrest everyone or convince the majority of people that they are the enemy. The germans didn't round up the germans into camps, they rounded up the jews, they were the minority. The US government didn't round up americans and throw them into gitmo, they went after the "terrorists" and rounded them up because they were a smaller group who could easily be made out as the enemy.

Now, they aren't trying to censor EVERYONE on the internet, they just want to stop those darn pirates and child pornographers.

See the trend here?

And I agree with Blue, conspiracy theory is turning out to be conspiracy reality in many cases.

[Roo]

I'm just going to play devil's advocate for the hell of it. I certainly don't condone tighter gov't monitoring, so now that I've made myself clear about that...

What is everyone upset about exactly? Using the internet to communicate then getting pissed because your message could be intercepted is like talking loudly in a room full of people and getting upset because one of them is eaves dropping. The internet does not belong to you, by nature it is a public resource. Likewise, the mechanisms by which you communicate using telephones don't belong to you either. So if someone is listening, including the feds, and you're upset about it, it could be argued that you should have chosen a private mode of communication. Talking face-to-face or by physically delivering notes and letters are the only means of communication which we can 100% control. Now, I don't think the govt *should* listen to my phone calls or read my emails. But if I were to communicate something via those channels that would get me in a whole lot of trouble, in the end I have only myself to blame for using a public medium to communicate something that absolutely had to be private at my peril.

Just a thought. Now tear me a new one.

[Premium Parrots]

I'm just going to play devil's advocate for the hell of it. I certainly don't condone tighter gov't monitoring, so now that I've made myself clear about that...

What is everyone upset about exactly? Using the internet to communicate then getting pissed because your message could be intercepted is like talking loudly in a room full of people and getting upset because one of them is eaves dropping. The internet does not belong to you, by nature it is a public resource. Likewise, the mechanisms by which you communicate using telephones don't belong to you either. So if someone is listening, including the feds, and you're upset about it, it could be argued that you should have chosen a private mode of communication. Talking face-to-face or by physically delivering notes and letters are the only means of communication which we can 100% control. Now, I don't think the govt *should* listen to my phone calls or read my emails. But if I were to communicate something via those channels that would get me in a whole lot of trouble, in the end I have only myself to blame for using a public medium to communicate something that absolutely had to be private at my peril.

Just a thought. Now tear me a new one.

ok then Roo. If thats the way you want it. Then theres.....



for you dude

[truthwolf1]

ROO, Because this is the future of that open discussion on the internet with that kind of attitude.

[sgreger1]

Using the internet to communicate then getting pissed because your message could be intercepted is like talking loudly in a room full of people and getting upset because one of them is eaves dropping

This would be more like if the government installed cameras and speakers in every public place and then monitored/recorded everything you said and did (including every private conversation), and then didn't make any of it publicly available or let you know what they do or do not know about you.

So if someone is listening, including the feds, and you're upset about it, it could be argued that you should have chosen a private mode of communication

Except that they are also monitoring private modes of communication. If I get into an encrypted anonmyous chat than it should be assumed that what I want to talk about with the people there is intended to be private. The government will now make it so that nothing digital is private, therefore leaving me only with the ability to have private convos with those in my immediate area (Until eventually they do install cams and even that becomes subject to surveilance). It's 2012, I may want to have a private business meeting with someone in Japan, the government is saying that nothing should be private and that they should have access to everything. You can see how this is a slippery slope.

But if I were to communicate something via those channels that would get me in a whole lot of trouble, in the end I have only myself to blame for using a public medium to communicate something that absolutely had to be private at my peril.

This is a fine line of thinking in regards to doing illegal things, until one day the wrong kind of president/congress comes around and decides to declare a certain ideology as illegal or a certain political group as terrorists. By the time that happens, they already have the power to marginalize you as you can't organize anything in private.

[lxskllr]

Sgreger covered the issues pretty well. If I yell something on a crowded city street, 100 people might hear me, and it'll be soon forgotten. That's a far cry from having every whisper recorded, and kept in a neat database for future use. Aside from the (il)legalities, it's just wrong for the government to track the people that are paying for them to exist. AFAIC, everyone involved should be tried for treason, and executed upon guilty sentence. That includes the telecom officers that allow their equipment to be bugged, and anyone within the government that's involved in this violation of trust. Violating the trust of people who put you in office to do a job is the worst crime that can be committed. It's a few orders of magnitude over the criminal that shoots a 7-11 clerk during a robbery. A violent robber is true to his nature when he's violent, and it's expected behavior. The betrayal of trust, and the violation of this country's most important document is unforgivable.

[sgreger1]

Sgreger covered the issues pretty well. If I yell something on a crowded city street, 100 people might hear me, and it'll be soon forgotten. That's a far cry from having every whisper recorded, and kept in a neat database for future use. Aside from the (il)legalities, it's just wrong for the government to track the people that are paying for them to exist. AFAIC, everyone involved should be tried for treason, and executed upon guilty sentence. That includes the telecom officers that allow their equipment to be bugged, and anyone within the government that's involved in this violation of trust. Violating the trust of people who put you in office to do a job is the worst crime that can be committed. It's a few orders of magnitude over the criminal that shoots a 7-11 clerk during a robbery. A violent robber is true to his nature when he's violent, and it's expected behavior. The betrayal of trust, and the violation of this country's most important document is unforgivable.

The idea of government was that everyone pays into it and in return they get an etitty to protect them and generally look out for the welfare of the poeple via defense, infrastructure, etc etc. It's such a flagrant abuse of our money for government to be spending billions of dollars to record my every thought and movement for later analysis (especially while people still go to bed hungry in the US). And trust me, once we invent tech that can hear thoughts, they'll start monitoring those too. We have to stop it before it gets to that point, while it's still early. The problem is that many don't care about privacy and are willing to give it up without so much as a complaint, so it will be given up and that's what I really fear.

[Monkey]

I hope they make Victory snus to go with the gin....

[Roo]

yeah I agree, I was just bored of sitting around all battered and bruised and wanted to see how my (fake) weak arguments would be received. My apologies, I believe the term for that is "trolling".

[Darwin]

Well Roo-man you set the hook nicely despite whatever meds they may have you on. Get frackin' well and endeavor to persevere.