If you think that’s wild, get a load of what the NSA and GCHQ do
While we most certainly should condemn NSA's actions and work for our own society to become freer, we must not equate the two lest we end up forgetting which direction is up - just like many have done with regards to Russia's war on Ukraine.
What Ennesay does is either illegal or secretly justified (take your pick), and they lie to the rest of government and the public about what they do.
At least NK is open and expliciedit: to the downvoters, trust this is not me saying we need to be like NK. It’s me pointing out a flaw of the US government
Disagreed, the secrecy is a symptom of desire to avoid public retaliation because they know it will affect those who sponsor such programs.
This highlights there is need to continue to expose such systems via strong journalism + protections of freedom of speech (as written in the 1st amendment).
Saying "at least NK is open and explicit" is because the government fears nothing with absolute control, and as the grandparent comment says - we cannot forget this key difference.
You see, another interpretation is that beating our chest about other peoples moral failing is inherently a narcissistic display since it cannot lead to any changes other than making us more apathetic and powerless.
You can see the same dynamic in work every year in our elaborate performance over the Tiananmen square massacre and the simultaneous complete lack of interest in the Gwangju massacre.
The only material difference seems to be that, in North Korea, the state is (feels) so insecure that it has to monitor what people say. Wheras in the US, they don't care what people say because there's nothing they can do to challenge corporate power anyway.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/intelligence-coup-how...
This thread started with "track and monitor its citizens" and continued "If you think that’s wild, ...", the latter of which was going for the tu quoque, i. e. "the US is worse than North Korea", for which the example is useless.
It would work well in supporting the argument that the NSA (or CIA) had some rather sophisticated technology all the way back in the 80s, at least compared to North Korea, which, frankly, wouldn't be very surprising but at least somewhat sane, which makes it a rather sad commentary on the state of discourse that there is zero doubt which argument the parent comment was going for.
the subs can't be remotely related to US citizens
In other words: most of the proper sense of proportion here is set by what reasonable expectations of privacy are.
I can certainly appreciate the merits of a communication channel that features secure messages in transit. But I don't expect that by default. Privacy expectations should be set by contract or statute.
On the other hand, I definitely expect that conversations in my residence or data on my device should be private by default.
Eavesdropping is a whole different category from intrusion, even if you find both unpleasant.
There's also a bunch of other arms of the USG that like to spy (both foreign and domestic) - the IC is more than just the NSA. The CIA is, for example, spying on domestic financial transactions.
The NSA monitors a lot of US citizens. So does the CIA. Verizon and ATT and T-Mobile also keep logs, which are available to DHS/FBI/CIA/NSA/et al on demand without warrants.
Also, saying that commercial data is available “without a warrant” is a strange framing of the issue. It’s available to anyone as long as the check doesn’t bounce.
They routinely operate outside of the law, using classified interpretations of what they believe the law allows them to do. This is not about what is or isn't lawful, they don't give a fuck about that. The CIA hacked American congressional computers to delete evidence (about the CIA torturing people), got caught, and lied about their deleting evidence, and nothing happens. What is or is not permitted "under the law" is completely, totally irrelevant and bringing it up is a red herring.
> Also, saying that commercial data is available “without a warrant” is a strange framing of the issue. It’s available to anyone as long as the check doesn’t bounce.
This isn't true.
This is an amazing sentence.
I think it evokes such incredulity that someone could point it out in good faith while also technically possibly being a correct statement that it's just humourous by itself.
It's got the irony that evidence is not evidence unless people know about it and the fact the agency is known for hiding what they do from even the institutions that are supposed to oversee it.
You've got the leap of faith to take at face value that an agency that denied a program existed for years, continued the program for years after it was pointed out it was illegal has said it's not doing it anymore.
The relative recentness of the actions by specifying 2019.
There's so much to unpack.
Prior to Snowden's leaks, I would have been more open to believing they were involved in the type of extralegal activities the CIA was notorious for, but after Snowden's leaks, it became clear that this wasn't the case. Suppose Snowden were the SharePoint admin at your company and leaked all its documents to the press. Do you think there would be only one questionably legal program in there?
I can guarantee you that 1 in 400 of our projects by budget at my work aren't ilegal or could even have questions raised about their legality. Like most companies if we found a project that was illegal or found an employee was routinely breaking local law to do his job that would be fixed immediately not in 4 years while we waited for it to become legal. And if it turned out I was wrong and people where purposefully commiting crimes against my fellow countrymen I'd be cheering the whistleblower who brought it to light while looking for a different job that wasn't such a cesspit of moral compromise.
The silliest part about your statements is you seem to be ignoring the problem by focusinng on only (I won't even say positives because your just saying it is no longer illegal and that there is no up to the minute evidence from inside a secret organization) the neutrals in the situation. You're doing the equivalent of saying yes the arsonist set fires and destroyed 1000s of acres but isn't the sunset pretty because of the smoke. Oh and look the firetrucks put out the fire after only a couple of hikers died. Plus people did want to do a controlled burn of that forest at some point so we shouldn't take away his lighter and certainly shouldn't charge him.
Smith v. Maryland makes it constitutional. Whether it was authorized by the PATRIOT Act was not clear, but their lawyers provided justification.
> I can guarantee you that 1 in 400 of our projects by budget at my work aren't ilegal or could even have questions raised about their legality.
Snowden could see the documents describing all the programs, but there was only one program that was questionably legal in there.
> And if it turned out I was wrong and people where purposefully commiting crimes against my fellow countrymen I'd be cheering the whistleblower who brought it to light while looking for a different job that wasn't such a cesspit of moral compromise.
What if the "whistleblower" also released the documents for all the other programs that were clearly legal? I guarantee you if the SharePoint admin at your company released all the internal documents, there would be at least one crime in there. Does that make it right for all SharePoint admins at every large company to always publicly release all the documents on their servers? I certainly wouldn't cheer them at my company, especially if they released documents helping competitors, like a list of compromised Chinese networks and when they were compromised.
> The silliest part
is that what North Korea is doing would be clearly illegal in the US, but pueblito claims that the NSA is doing worse without any evidence and with the evidence from Snowden's leaks showing that the NSA at least tries very hard to follow the law.