PRIZM and phone tapping

[escher7]

It is frequently said about advertising that half the money spent is wasted but no one knows which half. Much the same can be said about intelligence. . . .—J A M E S R U S B R I D G E

Secrecy is as indispensable to human beings as fire, and as greatly feared. Both enhance and protect life, yet both can stifle, lay waste,spread out of control.—S I S S E L A B O K

[rai]

@ xeo, not sure where you were going with the can of worms post, but let me explain what I meant with the quoted piece

terrorism, and perhaps school shootings while they are expressions of severe malajustment at the time of the action, are meant by the perpetrators to get the publicity, and terrorism by definition is about the affect on the population and also is meant to warp the governments relation with the people.
When the media cooperate in this purpose, and the government starts treating everyone like suspects, the terrorist has achieved what he set out to do. the media happily cooperate with the terrorists, by spreading the fear. magnifiying the impact of the attack.
packistan has a lot of terrorism, so do iraq and afganistan, and a lot of other places, it is fed by indoctrination and arms sales.
terrorism in the US is minor though a dozen years ago, the planes were a sucidal and spectacular, but should have been expected and probably were by some, the phillipine government cracked the bojinka plot to flie planes into tall buildings in the US years before that so we knew that thinking was out there in the islamic terrorist world. Israel had the perpetrators who lead it nearly surrounded by agents in bradenton florida before it happened, but they gained more by not stopping it.

[xeo]

@ xeo, not sure where you were going with the can of worms post, but let me explain what I meant with the quoted piece

What I was subtly hinting at is to look at events from an unbiased perspective. You need to drop all nationality, racism, religion, ideals and opinions and focus on just what occured. What you will discover when you analyze the relationship between the event(s) themselves and the reaction(s) that follow is a trending pattern over time (going back as far as 100 years ago) that seems to be inching slowly toward what you are describing: The decilne of our rights, the incline in restriction and financial strangulation, the destruction of the middle class, the incline in evil business practice and the incline of corporate sponsored politics to an extreme. From a purely factual analysis standpoint it is hard to avoid the conclusion that some of these events were and are too good to be true with respect to achieving these goals. It really makes you scratch your head. There have been countless people who have gone through all the analysis of history and have said the same thing. At this point the evidence is really just overwhelming. It is literally everywhere.

Who are the real terrorists? Probably the most dangerous question one can ask as the concept is almost always inconcievable by the average American. Most people just cannot accept the fact that those who lead them are capable of such betrayal.

[xeo]

As my previous post was a little offtopic, I'll throw my 2 cents in on the phone tapping and spying.

Technology and government. A dangerous mix. Do you really think that a government agency when given the tools that are capable of enabling spying would pass up the opportunity to use them? Eavesdropping is a natural side effect to any communication medium. The internet, email, phones, satellites, radio are all vulnerable to eavesdropping. It should be an automatic assumption that any given communication medium is at a bare minimum capable of being spied on. There are things that counteract this such as encryption, but we are getting dangerously close to breaking down that barrier. It is only a matter of time until the outrageously funded NSA produces the computational power to crack some of the top encryption algorithms. They are already building an extremely large underground facility in Utah capable of housing a mind-boggling amount of data and processing power.

The recent revelation of PRIZM and other activites is no surprise to me at all. Just by nature of technology itself it makes sense to create such tools and databases. Having the capability to log all phone call activity in the country is a priceless resource. Taking the next step and logging all internet traffic isn't possible with publically available resources as there is just far too much data however that isn't to say they cannot target an individual or small region or ISP and filter out what is needed. ISPs regularly comply with the federal government when required. They can just go to the ISPs routing center and filter the target traffic out. It would be unreasonable to say that they are doing this 24/7 to everyone as it is just far too much information and would require hundreds of supercomputers. 50 years from now? I can see realtime internet traffic monitoring occuring with AI analysis and trending. Tie that in with credit card transaction logs and all other points of data and you have a pretty solid technoprison. Don't even get me started on Facebook, Facebook is literally a willful submission of personal information. It is willfully submitting yourself to a public spy and data collection program. Facebook has arguably the juiciest database in the world with the only equal to Google. Sooner or later I can see Facebook and/or Google bending to the will of the government and allowing backdoor access to a treasure trove of data about citizens.

There definitely is a freightening future ahead. Just keep your head down

[escher7]

Xeo:

I can assure you that the NSA already has complete access to Facebook and Google, not to mention Microsoft and a host of others. They don't need a back-door if they are granted the keys to the front door.

[xeo]

Xeo:

I can assure you that the NSA already has complete access to Facebook and Google, not to mention Microsoft and a host of others. They don't need a back-door if they are granted the keys to the front door.

Source?

[rai]

Uh, OK, now I see where your going with that, but I still want my googleglass kinnected to liedetector....