The U.S. Government can have pictures of your junk.

[Merope]

I honestly don't have much of an issue with surveillance, I have nothing to hide.

This kind of thinking is 100% circular logic and completely ignores the Constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy that is being blatantly abused.

[Sliske]

Yeah this has been the case in America for years now. I'm pretty sure it was a 'thing' a few years back where everyone lost their minds over it. If American citizens are too cowardly to risk the like 0.000001% chance that a fundamentalist will hijack their plane in exchange for their family members and themselves not being groped and video'd then that's pretty fucked up.

Its like being sold a magic rock that keeps tigers away. Oh, my rock is bullshit? Well, do you see any tigers around? I rest my case. Magic Tiger Repelling Rock.

Really disgusting and truly cowardly.

[timberx]

It's important to remember, NSA doesn't record or keep much of anything, otherwise they'd have petabytes of people's junk. There's petabytes of data exchanged every day in the US, possibly hundreds of petabytes across the entire world. The storage capacity for a single organization no matter how large does not exist.

Well, from what I kinda gathered in the interview, the NSA doesn't have to store the information in its own databanks, they entrust the big tech companies like Google and Yahoo to police themselves. Also it isn't so much that the NSA has the files on you, moreso that they can request them from the relevant company virtually at any point they need to.

[Sliske]

While I don't like the idea of being watched, I feel compelled to point out that the manpower required to actually monitor and care about 400,000,000 people is far too much to put into practice. The data is just mined for specific things and then further investigated. It's not like someone is individually looking at each email, tweet, Facebook post, and image you put out there.

Its the principle of it, that and the fact that if you're going through one of the body scanners at the airport or whatever then someone is looking at your shit. And by saying "they don't look at every tweet etc" then by that logic, it isn't even serving its purpose: to minimize terrorist threat. The only way it COULD do that is if they did do that. Which gets back to the whole point that it is completely useless. Guys can run onto the white house lawn wielding knives, people still shoot up cinemas and schools, people still plant bombs at marathons. The system has not put terrorism at bay even a little bit. All it has done is remove rights from Americans, violate their privacy and comfort the cowardly "oh no a brown person got onto the bus" attitude that most supporters of this issue have.

[Conspicuous Cultist]

Guys can run onto the white house lawn wielding knives, people still shoot up cinemas and schools, people still plant bombs at marathons. The system has not put terrorism at bay even a little bit. All it has done is remove rights from Americans, violate their privacy and comfort the cowardly "oh no a brown person got onto the bus" attitude that most supporters of this issue have.

There seems to be a chronic case of people not accepting that nothing will probably ever happen in their lives on this earth.

[Daethz]

Your dick can be a national security risk.
It must be watched at all time, for it could be a weapon of massive "hiccup" mass destruction!

[Spraxle]

I honestly don't have much of an issue with surveillance, I have nothing to hide. If they succeed in stopping a lunatic before he kills a bunch of civilians then i'd gladly let them browse through my network traffic. Also, do you really think they would spend time looking at a million dicks? Sounds more like a story to get people to hate the US government.

EDIT: Can't watch the video at the moment so if my post is unrelated then my bad.

The problem with this line of thinking is that eventually even if you 'have nothing to hide' they can say you do. I can't understand why people always jump straight to the 'I have nothing to hide so strip me of my rights so you can catch some terrorists' line. So far they've stopped nothing that they will disclose which points more to them not stopping anything. Like the TSA who have stopped no one from doing something crazy on a plane (we've had underwear bombers under the TSA's heavy hand). You obviously feel the Government is running fine, but a lot of us don't think the draconian surveillance measure in place are needed. I mean if you read 1984 the British are living that (the surveillance pieces) and the data collection that goes on in the USA is the stuff of nightmares. Your government is there to build roads, schools, etc. Not patrol the world for 'terrorists' or tell their citizens they're all suspects of something maybe.

[zealo]

Privacy is a bit of an illusion these days to anyone who uses the internet to some degree, the only thing they really can't figure out about you is the things that are not being posted or searched for online and even that may be possible if you leave sufficient footprints.

[Zoldor]

I'm not questioning the existence of US international aid programs, what I wanted to say was that it really bothers me that a good percentage of US citizens can't even point towards the Middle East, China or Russia on the world map, despite many having opinions like "we should nuke that area", "communist shithole" or "evil non-christian doomsdaynation".

Nice hyperbole. Keep painting those broad strokes. It has nothing to do with the Middle East paying for the US to come over and fuck their neighbors up. Nah. Its the American Government listening to its people...of course...they do that so often.

[ringpriest]

I do not think the thinking is flawed. I think a system with an agenda that accumulates data on everyone is wrong. If you take away the agenda, the problem of corruption, etc, goes away.

If you have an impartial and secure entity that has access to the data we create, there is no real problem. It acts on the laws we have, with a certain leeway, or threshold of action.


Basically like an immune system. A person is not a problem till they start, and continue to aggravate your system, then they get the immune response.

There is no such "impartial and secure entity" this side of fiction. For example:
Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The DEA is taking intel data, and illegally using it for drug prosecutions - and they know its illegal, which is why they're specifically working to hide what they're doing, even from the rest of the law enforcement community.

[Frozenbeef]

It gets bigger i promise!