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You guys seriously think nations don't spy on their "allies"? Your friends today might very well be your enemies tomorrow. It's a country's best interest to keep tabs on what their "enemies" as well as their "allies" are up to at all times provided they have the resources to.
Hell, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied during WWII and look what happened.....
+ Show Spoiler +Germany backstabbed Soviet Union
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On July 19 2013 03:58 ref4 wrote:You guys seriously think nations don't spy on their "allies"? Your friends today might very well be your enemies tomorrow. It's a country's best interest to keep tabs on what their "enemies" as well as their "allies" are up to at all times provided they have the resources to. Hell, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied during WWII and look what happened..... + Show Spoiler +Germany backstabbed Soviet Union
And the US was an ally with Japan. I think they gave us medals of friendship a few months before the bombing at Pearl Harbor.
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Everyone just wants to act like they are victims of some massive crime against humanity. People dying all over the world due to horrible circumstances and/or corrupt governments, but here they can act like their lives were violated. Most of the countries on here complaining are some of the biggest countries involved in piracy. They have no problem stealing everything they can, but oh my god someone is listening in on what the government is doing? RAAAGE.
Like I said earlier: this thread is a complete joke. The guy wanted attention, he wanted to act like a hero. He knows very well the positive impact the program he exposed has had at protecting public safety. Why not include that in his leaks? Hes a traitor, and I hope they get their hands on him and lock him up with Bradley Manning
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On July 19 2013 03:59 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 03:58 ref4 wrote:You guys seriously think nations don't spy on their "allies"? Your friends today might very well be your enemies tomorrow. It's a country's best interest to keep tabs on what their "enemies" as well as their "allies" are up to at all times provided they have the resources to. Hell, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied during WWII and look what happened..... + Show Spoiler +Germany backstabbed Soviet Union And the US was an ally with Japan. I think they gave us medals of friendship a few months before the bombing at Pearl Harbor.
I wasn't aware that the world was in a state of total war. In fact, it's interesting that you bring up WWII, since that is the most recent instance of the US being in total war with major European Union powers.
If the world were actually in a state of such uncertainty; if bombs were raining on London; if Germany had just taken over France; if Japan was ravaging China; and/or if there were powerful coalitions of serious, ideological, and threatening countries engaged in a campaign to take over Europe or North America (or anywhere, really) then I would have no problem whatsoever with spying.
But that isn't happening, and there's no indication that it's happening, and there's even less indication that, if it were happening, these major powers would be communicating with Skype rather than, you know, an intranet.
Everyone just wants to act like they are victims of some massive crime against humanity. People dying all over the world due to horrible circumstances and/or corrupt governments, but here they can act like their lives were violated. Most of the countries on here complaining are some of the biggest countries involved in piracy. They have no problem stealing everything they can, but oh my god someone is listening in on what the government is doing? RAAAGE.
Wtf does piracy have to do with this? Let me get this straight: it's not okay to copy data that someone else put on the internet, for your own personal use and without making any money from it, but it is okay to intercept any and all electronic communications made by private citizens anywhere?
Like I said earlier: this thread is a complete joke. The guy wanted attention, he wanted to act like a hero. He knows very well the positive impact the program he exposed has had at protecting public safety. Why not include that in his leaks? Hes a traitor, and I hope they get their hands on him and lock him up with Bradley Manning.
What impact has this program had? Nobody has provided any real evidence that huge conspiracies are being uncovered on a daily basis.
Yeah, Bradley Manning was so horrible. Never mind that he was mentally unstable and that his requests for counseling were basically ridiculed, or that the military/government actually did do some terrible shit for which there was little retribution. Manning was, by all means, a criminal, and he did put lives at risk. For that, he received a military trial and was convicted. But what about all the shit he brought to light? Why is there no pressing desire to convict anyone guilty of committing some offense over in Iraq or Afghanistan? Why isn't there even a public/serious investigation?
And Snowden is in no way similar to Manning except that they both leaked information. Snowden didn't really put anyone in any immediate danger (except maybe himself). Manning ostensibly did.
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On July 19 2013 03:56 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype, all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? I already live in that world. My texts go through a third party company, my emails go through google and any of these groups could look at them if they wanted and I would never know. One more set of people copying them isn't that big of a deal for me. I already understand that everything I put online isn't really mine any more. I can claim it and say I wrote it, but its not stored on my PC or on a system that I own. Even what we type here is stored on Team Liquids servers and if they lock this account, I can't force them to delete anything. Facebook owns everything you put up there and even if you delete something, they likley still store it. My skype calls could be recorded by anyone at Microsoft if they wanted to be creepy. I would rather people face the idea on what the internet is, a network of computers you don't know and storage that you don't own. None of this stuff is protected like physical things and may not be practial for it to have the same protections. Email is not the same as mail sent through the US postal service. Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 03:56 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:50 packrat386 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype (video or not), all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? they already are. Just not necessarily by the govt Like who? Like anyone to interact with on the internet. Amazon to Facebook to Skype. They all keep your data and sell your information to other companies, or sell ads based on your internet habits. The Government is late to the game, really.
Bullshit justification. Just another angle to float much like the "if you have nothing to hide, then why do you care" line.
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On July 19 2013 04:16 Shiori wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 03:59 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:58 ref4 wrote:You guys seriously think nations don't spy on their "allies"? Your friends today might very well be your enemies tomorrow. It's a country's best interest to keep tabs on what their "enemies" as well as their "allies" are up to at all times provided they have the resources to. Hell, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied during WWII and look what happened..... + Show Spoiler +Germany backstabbed Soviet Union And the US was an ally with Japan. I think they gave us medals of friendship a few months before the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I wasn't aware that the world was in a state of total war. In fact, it's interesting that you bring up WWII, since that is the most recent instance of the US being in total war with major European Union powers. If the world were actually in a state of such uncertainty; if bombs were raining on London; if Germany had just taken over France; if Japan was ravaging China; and/or if there were powerful coalitions of serious, ideological, and threatening countries engaged in a campaign to take over Europe or North America (or anywhere, really) then I would have no problem whatsoever with spying. But that isn't happening, and there's no indication that it's happening, and there's even less indication that, if it were happening, these major powers would be communicating with Skype rather than, you know, an intranet.
You clearly missed the point of that post in its entirety. Allies turn on eachother. It is a fact you cannot ignore. New people are elected, they do not agree with the previous leaders, they change the course of the government's foreign policy. Spying keeps an eye on that type of crap. I can't imagine any non-college student sane american would have a problem with our government spying on our allies.
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On July 19 2013 04:23 jeremycafe wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 04:16 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 03:59 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:58 ref4 wrote:You guys seriously think nations don't spy on their "allies"? Your friends today might very well be your enemies tomorrow. It's a country's best interest to keep tabs on what their "enemies" as well as their "allies" are up to at all times provided they have the resources to. Hell, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied during WWII and look what happened..... + Show Spoiler +Germany backstabbed Soviet Union And the US was an ally with Japan. I think they gave us medals of friendship a few months before the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I wasn't aware that the world was in a state of total war. In fact, it's interesting that you bring up WWII, since that is the most recent instance of the US being in total war with major European Union powers. If the world were actually in a state of such uncertainty; if bombs were raining on London; if Germany had just taken over France; if Japan was ravaging China; and/or if there were powerful coalitions of serious, ideological, and threatening countries engaged in a campaign to take over Europe or North America (or anywhere, really) then I would have no problem whatsoever with spying. But that isn't happening, and there's no indication that it's happening, and there's even less indication that, if it were happening, these major powers would be communicating with Skype rather than, you know, an intranet. You clearly missed the point of that post in its entirety. Allies turn on eachother. It is a fact you cannot ignore. New people are elected, they do not agree with the previous leaders, they change the course of the government's foreign policy. Spying keeps an eye on that type of crap. I can't imagine any non-college student sane american would have a problem with our government spying on our allies.
There's spying and spying. Nobody is saying America shouldn't keep its eyes open and quietly try to learn what the political beliefs of Japan's current leader are. But that's a lot different than a mass surveillance program which primarily affects private citizens (i.e. not government leaders). And it's pretty absurd to think that the current political climate is at all similar to that preceding WWII. Europe and North America aren't just incidentally stable. They're stable because there are a lot of things in place that make total war either unfeasible, unnecessary, or impossible to justify.
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On July 19 2013 04:22 AnomalySC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 03:56 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype, all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? I already live in that world. My texts go through a third party company, my emails go through google and any of these groups could look at them if they wanted and I would never know. One more set of people copying them isn't that big of a deal for me. I already understand that everything I put online isn't really mine any more. I can claim it and say I wrote it, but its not stored on my PC or on a system that I own. Even what we type here is stored on Team Liquids servers and if they lock this account, I can't force them to delete anything. Facebook owns everything you put up there and even if you delete something, they likley still store it. My skype calls could be recorded by anyone at Microsoft if they wanted to be creepy. I would rather people face the idea on what the internet is, a network of computers you don't know and storage that you don't own. None of this stuff is protected like physical things and may not be practial for it to have the same protections. Email is not the same as mail sent through the US postal service. On July 19 2013 03:56 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:50 packrat386 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype (video or not), all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? they already are. Just not necessarily by the govt Like who? Like anyone to interact with on the internet. Amazon to Facebook to Skype. They all keep your data and sell your information to other companies, or sell ads based on your internet habits. The Government is late to the game, really. Bullshit justification. Just another angle to float much like the "if you have nothing to hide, then why do you care" line.
It wasn't a "justification". The 'imagine this big bad world if we keep this up' comment was made, and he simply made the point that the end of the world prophecy of internet monitoring has been happening for years. And he is right. Rage on sir, rage on.
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On July 19 2013 04:25 jeremycafe wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 04:22 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:56 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype, all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? I already live in that world. My texts go through a third party company, my emails go through google and any of these groups could look at them if they wanted and I would never know. One more set of people copying them isn't that big of a deal for me. I already understand that everything I put online isn't really mine any more. I can claim it and say I wrote it, but its not stored on my PC or on a system that I own. Even what we type here is stored on Team Liquids servers and if they lock this account, I can't force them to delete anything. Facebook owns everything you put up there and even if you delete something, they likley still store it. My skype calls could be recorded by anyone at Microsoft if they wanted to be creepy. I would rather people face the idea on what the internet is, a network of computers you don't know and storage that you don't own. None of this stuff is protected like physical things and may not be practial for it to have the same protections. Email is not the same as mail sent through the US postal service. On July 19 2013 03:56 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:50 packrat386 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype (video or not), all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? they already are. Just not necessarily by the govt Like who? Like anyone to interact with on the internet. Amazon to Facebook to Skype. They all keep your data and sell your information to other companies, or sell ads based on your internet habits. The Government is late to the game, really. Bullshit justification. Just another angle to float much like the "if you have nothing to hide, then why do you care" line. It wasn't a "justification". The 'imagine this big bad world if we keep this up' comment was made, and he simply made the point that the end of the world prophecy of internet monitoring has been happening for years. And he is right. Rage on sir, rage on.
I'm not raging, sir. Just pointing out that what they're goal is won't fly with people, and nor will the propaganda they're spewing to try and sway opinions. Notice how the hate for microsoft has gone through the roof now that documents have come out showing they aided the NSA in cracking encrypted hotmail messages. Oh, and gave them direct access to skype calls including video chat. It's not gonna work. It's absurd they even tried in the first place.
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On July 19 2013 04:16 Shiori wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 03:59 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:58 ref4 wrote:You guys seriously think nations don't spy on their "allies"? Your friends today might very well be your enemies tomorrow. It's a country's best interest to keep tabs on what their "enemies" as well as their "allies" are up to at all times provided they have the resources to. Hell, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied during WWII and look what happened..... + Show Spoiler +Germany backstabbed Soviet Union And the US was an ally with Japan. I think they gave us medals of friendship a few months before the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I wasn't aware that the world was in a state of total war. In fact, it's interesting that you bring up WWII, since that is the most recent instance of the US being in total war with major European Union powers. If the world were actually in a state of such uncertainty; if bombs were raining on London; if Germany had just taken over France; if Japan was ravaging China; and/or if there were powerful coalitions of serious, ideological, and threatening countries engaged in a campaign to take over Europe or North America (or anywhere, really) then I would have no problem whatsoever with spying. But that isn't happening, and there's no indication that it's happening, and there's even less indication that, if it were happening, these major powers would be communicating with Skype rather than, you know, an intranet.
Yes we have moved beyond total war and most nations don't engage in all out conflict. But just because we dont do that doesn't mean we all just get along and are totally trust each other forever.
I remember readng this:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/shashankjoshi/100224247/france-should-remember-its-own-history-before-complaining-too-much-about-american-espionage/
From The Telegraph, where they bring up the fact that France was well known for industrial espionage in the 90s and 00's. We were all allies at the time.
Its fun to jump up and down and act outraged, but at the end of the day, we all have glass houses.
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On July 19 2013 04:25 Shiori wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 04:23 jeremycafe wrote:On July 19 2013 04:16 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 03:59 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:58 ref4 wrote:You guys seriously think nations don't spy on their "allies"? Your friends today might very well be your enemies tomorrow. It's a country's best interest to keep tabs on what their "enemies" as well as their "allies" are up to at all times provided they have the resources to. Hell, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied during WWII and look what happened..... + Show Spoiler +Germany backstabbed Soviet Union And the US was an ally with Japan. I think they gave us medals of friendship a few months before the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I wasn't aware that the world was in a state of total war. In fact, it's interesting that you bring up WWII, since that is the most recent instance of the US being in total war with major European Union powers. If the world were actually in a state of such uncertainty; if bombs were raining on London; if Germany had just taken over France; if Japan was ravaging China; and/or if there were powerful coalitions of serious, ideological, and threatening countries engaged in a campaign to take over Europe or North America (or anywhere, really) then I would have no problem whatsoever with spying. But that isn't happening, and there's no indication that it's happening, and there's even less indication that, if it were happening, these major powers would be communicating with Skype rather than, you know, an intranet. You clearly missed the point of that post in its entirety. Allies turn on eachother. It is a fact you cannot ignore. New people are elected, they do not agree with the previous leaders, they change the course of the government's foreign policy. Spying keeps an eye on that type of crap. I can't imagine any non-college student sane american would have a problem with our government spying on our allies. There's spying and spying. Nobody is saying America shouldn't keep its eyes open and quietly try to learn what the political beliefs of Japan's current leader are. But that's a lot different than a mass surveillance program which primarily affects private citizens (i.e. not government leaders). And it's pretty absurd to think that the current political climate is at all similar to that preceding WWII. Europe and North America aren't just incidentally stable. They're stable because there are a lot of things in place that make total war either unfeasible, unnecessary, or impossible to justify.
Honestly, everything you just said makes the need for a mass surveillance program more necessary. You are right, the days of WW2 are over. Now we live in a world of small terrorist cells embedded with civilians intending to kill as many people as possible. We live in a different time, new times call for new measures to keep us safe. People complain when they are not protected for not seeing the attack coming, but then the same people complain that government is going too far. Its one or the other.
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On July 19 2013 04:28 AnomalySC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 04:25 jeremycafe wrote:On July 19 2013 04:22 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:56 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype, all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? I already live in that world. My texts go through a third party company, my emails go through google and any of these groups could look at them if they wanted and I would never know. One more set of people copying them isn't that big of a deal for me. I already understand that everything I put online isn't really mine any more. I can claim it and say I wrote it, but its not stored on my PC or on a system that I own. Even what we type here is stored on Team Liquids servers and if they lock this account, I can't force them to delete anything. Facebook owns everything you put up there and even if you delete something, they likley still store it. My skype calls could be recorded by anyone at Microsoft if they wanted to be creepy. I would rather people face the idea on what the internet is, a network of computers you don't know and storage that you don't own. None of this stuff is protected like physical things and may not be practial for it to have the same protections. Email is not the same as mail sent through the US postal service. On July 19 2013 03:56 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:50 packrat386 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:
[quote]
As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype (video or not), all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? they already are. Just not necessarily by the govt Like who? Like anyone to interact with on the internet. Amazon to Facebook to Skype. They all keep your data and sell your information to other companies, or sell ads based on your internet habits. The Government is late to the game, really. Bullshit justification. Just another angle to float much like the "if you have nothing to hide, then why do you care" line. It wasn't a "justification". The 'imagine this big bad world if we keep this up' comment was made, and he simply made the point that the end of the world prophecy of internet monitoring has been happening for years. And he is right. Rage on sir, rage on. I'm not raging, sir. Just pointing out that what they're goal is won't fly with people, and nor will the propaganda they're spewing to try and sway opinions. Notice how the hate for microsoft has gone through the roof now that documents have come out showing they aided the NSA in cracking encrypted hotmail messages. Oh, and gave them direct access to skype calls including video chat. It's not gonna work. It's absurd they even tried in the first place.
That was not what you were pointing out in the post at all. You were attacking him for "justifying" things.
You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype (video or not), all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes?
they already are. Just not necessarily by the govt
Bullshit justification. Just another angle to float much like the "if you have nothing to hide, then why do you care" line.
If you want to change the subject and argue other stuff, fine. But I simply responded to that back and forth.
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On July 19 2013 04:22 AnomalySC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 03:56 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype, all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? I already live in that world. My texts go through a third party company, my emails go through google and any of these groups could look at them if they wanted and I would never know. One more set of people copying them isn't that big of a deal for me. I already understand that everything I put online isn't really mine any more. I can claim it and say I wrote it, but its not stored on my PC or on a system that I own. Even what we type here is stored on Team Liquids servers and if they lock this account, I can't force them to delete anything. Facebook owns everything you put up there and even if you delete something, they likley still store it. My skype calls could be recorded by anyone at Microsoft if they wanted to be creepy. I would rather people face the idea on what the internet is, a network of computers you don't know and storage that you don't own. None of this stuff is protected like physical things and may not be practial for it to have the same protections. Email is not the same as mail sent through the US postal service. On July 19 2013 03:56 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:50 packrat386 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype (video or not), all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? they already are. Just not necessarily by the govt Like who? Like anyone to interact with on the internet. Amazon to Facebook to Skype. They all keep your data and sell your information to other companies, or sell ads based on your internet habits. The Government is late to the game, really. Bullshit justification. Just another angle to float much like the "if you have nothing to hide, then why do you care" line.
No, thats not what I said. I said, "If you have something you don't want people to know, dont put it on the internet."
There was a similar phrase used before the era of the internet saying "If you have a secret, don't put it in a letter."
Of couse we should have some level of privacy on the internet, but its not unlimited. That is unreasonable. I don't even have unlimited privacy in my own home, and that is a physical real place that I own.
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On July 19 2013 04:33 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 04:22 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:56 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype, all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? I already live in that world. My texts go through a third party company, my emails go through google and any of these groups could look at them if they wanted and I would never know. One more set of people copying them isn't that big of a deal for me. I already understand that everything I put online isn't really mine any more. I can claim it and say I wrote it, but its not stored on my PC or on a system that I own. Even what we type here is stored on Team Liquids servers and if they lock this account, I can't force them to delete anything. Facebook owns everything you put up there and even if you delete something, they likley still store it. My skype calls could be recorded by anyone at Microsoft if they wanted to be creepy. I would rather people face the idea on what the internet is, a network of computers you don't know and storage that you don't own. None of this stuff is protected like physical things and may not be practial for it to have the same protections. Email is not the same as mail sent through the US postal service. On July 19 2013 03:56 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:50 packrat386 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype (video or not), all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? they already are. Just not necessarily by the govt Like who? Like anyone to interact with on the internet. Amazon to Facebook to Skype. They all keep your data and sell your information to other companies, or sell ads based on your internet habits. The Government is late to the game, really. Bullshit justification. Just another angle to float much like the "if you have nothing to hide, then why do you care" line. No, thats not what I said. I said, "If you have something you don't want people to know, dont put it on the internet." There was a similar phrase used before the era of the internet saying "If you have a secret, don't put it in a letter." Of couse we should have some level of privacy on the internet, but its not unlimited. That is unreasonable. I don't even have unlimited privacy in my own home, and that is a physical real place that I own.
And what about privacy when talking on your phone? That is all recorded and analyzed as well. Hell, what about privacy in your own living room. Such as if you were to buy an xbone which comes with an advanced mandatory camera backed by microsoft's own data center to store everything?
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On July 19 2013 04:39 AnomalySC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 04:33 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 04:22 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:56 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:Bluntly, the US seems to have an official opinion on every event that occurs anywhere in the world, As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype, all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? I already live in that world. My texts go through a third party company, my emails go through google and any of these groups could look at them if they wanted and I would never know. One more set of people copying them isn't that big of a deal for me. I already understand that everything I put online isn't really mine any more. I can claim it and say I wrote it, but its not stored on my PC or on a system that I own. Even what we type here is stored on Team Liquids servers and if they lock this account, I can't force them to delete anything. Facebook owns everything you put up there and even if you delete something, they likley still store it. My skype calls could be recorded by anyone at Microsoft if they wanted to be creepy. I would rather people face the idea on what the internet is, a network of computers you don't know and storage that you don't own. None of this stuff is protected like physical things and may not be practial for it to have the same protections. Email is not the same as mail sent through the US postal service. On July 19 2013 03:56 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:50 packrat386 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:48 AnomalySC2 wrote:On July 19 2013 03:34 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:19 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 02:55 DeepElemBlues wrote:
[quote]
As does everyone other country in the world... so what. What you mean is the US has the capability to do something about its opinion and get its opinion satisfied most of the time... which oddly only seems to really piss off people who also have an official opinion about every event that happens anywhere in the world and aren't getting their opinion satisfied most of the time. That's because everyone is entitled to an opinion, whereas the US seems to think that it's entitled to exercise its influence in other sovereign nations to coerce/demand them to do things. The problem isn't with having the opinion. It's with being arrogant enough to presume that your opinion somehow trumps sovereignty and/or shit that's none of your business simply because you're strong enough to make it so regardless. Compare it to the way politics plays out in America. Nobody really cares if Bob or Alice have differing views about gay marriage. They care if there are so many Bobs in high places that pressure starts to mount on people who disagree with them. That's the point. Nobody is mad that the US expresses a concern on a certain issue; it's when they have a history of doing shit behind the scenes outside of their jurisdiction that people call them presumptuous and/or arrogant. It doesn't really matter if other nations have strong opinions on things. Most of them are either too quiet to be of any serious concern or more or less fine with the fact that strong opinions on things are still opinions, and that if someone says "no," you take their answer and respect the sovereignty of their nation. For a country that was founded on the principle that foreign monarchs and powers shouldn't have say over sovereignty instead of the people, the US certainly doesn't seem to extend that courtesy to other nations. and they're not above telling other countries to do certain things. Like, oh, non-US countries do to the US and to each other all the time... Yeah: the US chooses to acquiesce or ignore those things, and the non-US countries deal with it. What's more, the US intervenes/puts pressure on countries even when the events in question have practically nothing to do with them (e.g. quietly pressuring Swedish authorities to raid The Pirate Bay way back when). This isn't even taking into account the number of foreign military actions that the US has engaged in since WWII. There is no other Western nation that does those kinds of things with any regularity these days. America does have a tendency to believe that it can do basically whatever it wants and everyone else will get out of the way. lolwut
9 times out of 10 America bends over backwards to get people to go along with it. Which has resulted in some bad relationships like say with the Egyptian government under Sadat and Mubarak or the Royal House of Saud. 5 times out of that 10 the American goal is maintaining the liberal internationalist order that gives most other countries influence far beyond their own national capability, and the 1 time out of 10 America actually does remember that it doesn't need permission to act in its national-interest, people get the vapors. America, acting without our leave? We are disappoint. "National interest" seems to be your catch-all for any action you wish to justify. Every nation has hypothetical "interests" that they can't realize because doing so would require them to do something really illegal, destructive, or immoral. Just because something plausibly benefits America in some way is not in any way moral justification for such an action. I'm not saying that America's actions always usually or even commonly immoral, but that something being a "national interest" doesn't make it justifiable alone. tl;dr who cares if other countries also spy? It's still wrong for America to do it. A country saying something possibly hypocritical doesn't invalidate the criticism itself. Besides, none of the people on this forum are governments or heads of state; we're criticizing America spying because that's what this thread is about. If a massive European spying program is unveiled, we'll criticize that too. Breaking out moralistic argument when dealing with nations and their safety, is frankly, naive. National intrest doesn't justify everything, but saying that spying is illegal, destructive, or immoral just comes across as some pie in the sky point of view. Hey, if people really believe that every nation is the would who are "allies" should never keep tabs or attempt to spy on each other, I guess they can believe that. History has shown otherwise and that even allies make efforts to find out what is happening behind closed doors, but maybe we are all beyond that. You want to live in a world where every phone call you make, every conversation you have on skype (video or not), all your emails/text messages - are recorded and stored indefinitely by people hidden behind the scenes? they already are. Just not necessarily by the govt Like who? Like anyone to interact with on the internet. Amazon to Facebook to Skype. They all keep your data and sell your information to other companies, or sell ads based on your internet habits. The Government is late to the game, really. Bullshit justification. Just another angle to float much like the "if you have nothing to hide, then why do you care" line. No, thats not what I said. I said, "If you have something you don't want people to know, dont put it on the internet." There was a similar phrase used before the era of the internet saying "If you have a secret, don't put it in a letter." Of couse we should have some level of privacy on the internet, but its not unlimited. That is unreasonable. I don't even have unlimited privacy in my own home, and that is a physical real place that I own. And what about privacy when talking on your phone? That is all recorded and analyzed as well. Hell, what about privacy in your own living room. Such as if you were to buy an xbone which comes with an advanced mandatory camera backed by microsoft's own data center to store everything?
My phone is protected by normal laws and they would need to get a wire tap to listen to my phone calls for any criminal case. If I was making international phone calls, I might be tagged by the prism system if I was somehow connected to one of the flagged phone numbers that they are watching. The rest of the time, they would need a wire tap, which requires a court order(which are also secret, FYI, because they don't issue public orders for wire taps, because that would be dumb). And even with the prism system, they only get the phone numbers not the names. Of course they can dig deeper if necessary, but that requires further oversite by the judge(from the reports on how the system works)
As for the Xbox thing, that isn't part of the issue. That system isn't going to be sending data back to some center or even be on. And if it does send data back at all times or something random like, there are people who will figure that out in 2 days of that system launching and I won't buy one.
But in generally, if you don't want people looking into your living room, don't put a camera there and then connect it to the internet.
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Beyond the moral implication of spying on foreigners in foreign countries (where the US has no jurisdiction), the US are also most likely violating international law both in the form of signed treaties and customary international law. Americans should remember that US law is (almost) entirely irrelevant when the issue is the US State interfering with the rights of people outside its jurisdiction.
I posted this link a bit back, it's short and doesn't require any background in law
http://arengel.edublogs.org/2013/07/02/international-law-american-law-and-the-legality-of-the-us-spying-program/
Edit: You have to understand that if my government starts invading my privacy I, as a citizen, can attempt to do something about it. If a foreign government does it, I have no direct means of interfering, especially if my own government doesn't have the resourses to stop it. In a sense, China's got this problem more figured out than every else.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/05/nsas-verizon-spying-order-specifically-targeted-americans-not-foreigners/
Just a little quote from that article.
“In many ways it’s even more troubling than [Bush era] warrantless wiretapping, in part because the program is purely domestic,” says Alex Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.”But this is also an indiscriminate dragnet. Say what you will about warrantless wiretapping, at least it was targeted at agents of Al Qaeda. This includes every customer of Verizon Business Services.”
You all can try to defend what they've been doing in any way you want, but the truth is they want complete and total surveillance on anything you do in your life whether you're deemed dangerous or not.
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On July 19 2013 04:28 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2013 04:16 Shiori wrote:On July 19 2013 03:59 Plansix wrote:On July 19 2013 03:58 ref4 wrote:You guys seriously think nations don't spy on their "allies"? Your friends today might very well be your enemies tomorrow. It's a country's best interest to keep tabs on what their "enemies" as well as their "allies" are up to at all times provided they have the resources to. Hell, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied during WWII and look what happened..... + Show Spoiler +Germany backstabbed Soviet Union And the US was an ally with Japan. I think they gave us medals of friendship a few months before the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I wasn't aware that the world was in a state of total war. In fact, it's interesting that you bring up WWII, since that is the most recent instance of the US being in total war with major European Union powers. If the world were actually in a state of such uncertainty; if bombs were raining on London; if Germany had just taken over France; if Japan was ravaging China; and/or if there were powerful coalitions of serious, ideological, and threatening countries engaged in a campaign to take over Europe or North America (or anywhere, really) then I would have no problem whatsoever with spying. But that isn't happening, and there's no indication that it's happening, and there's even less indication that, if it were happening, these major powers would be communicating with Skype rather than, you know, an intranet. Yes we have moved beyond total war and most nations don't engage in all out conflict. But just because we dont do that doesn't mean we all just get along and are totally trust each other forever. I remember readng this: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/shashankjoshi/100224247/france-should-remember-its-own-history-before-complaining-too-much-about-american-espionage/From The Telegraph, where they bring up the fact that France was well known for industrial espionage in the 90s and 00's. We were all allies at the time. Its fun to jump up and down and act outraged, but at the end of the day, we all have glass houses.
I am not the French government. Simply because "everyone else is doing it" doesn't mean that people can't object to particularly massive examples when they are exposed.
The argument you are making is a logical fallacy called tu quoque.
Honestly, everything you just said makes the need for a mass surveillance program more necessary. You are right, the days of WW2 are over. Now we live in a world of small terrorist cells embedded with civilians intending to kill as many people as possible. We live in a different time, new times call for new measures to keep us safe. People complain when they are not protected for not seeing the attack coming, but then the same people complain that government is going too far. Its one or the other.
But I thought we were spying on governments so that they don't stop being our allies! Now it's about terrorists (i.e. civilians who aren't affiliated with any army or particular nation)? Tell me: do you think that this program is going to catch a lot of terrorists? Do you think that terrorists, who are willing to wait years for a plan to come together, who are driven by religious fanaticism and ideological hatred of the West, are going to send Skype messages like "Hey, are you ready for tomorrow's operation "death to the infidels"? Are you looking forward to punishing American scum for its actions in [insert recent conflict here] and their ignorance of Allah's divine creation? Make sure you meet me in front of the White House at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, and bring the nuclear weapons you have acquired from the Russian government through Putin, who is, as we both know, a communist, and who said "I hate America and miss Stalin." May the Force be with you. If you need to contact me, my current address is [insert] and after the bombing I will be staying at [insert]."
Unless you think that terrorists are as moronic as the ones listed above (which doesn't seem to be the case considering that most of the organized terrorists like those responsible for 9/11 were meticulous and educated) they're not going to advertise their plans, contact bin Laden from their work e-mail, or have nightly Skype conversations about terrorism.
You know what would be even more effective at getting rid of terrorists embedded in civilian populations? Disallowing any and all foreign communications without a written request form and government permission. How about making it illegal to leave your house without a request in writing and without being accompanied by an FBI agent? How about installing security cameras in every house? How about permitting raids without warrants on anyone who is known to have bought any household product that could hypothetically be used to manufacture a weapon?
The things I just listed are all obviously fucking retarded. But this surveillance program is also retarded, and the justification that it'll somehow increase safety is dubious at best. Even if it did, that alone doesn't justify the program eliminating all electronic privacy.
And even with the prism system, they only get the phone numbers not the names. Of course they can dig deeper if necessary, but that requires further oversite by the judge(from the reports on how the system works)
You can literally find the location of a phone number, its carrier, and possibly the owner simply by googling it or snooping around. It's so trivially easy that I'd be very surprised if searching for a phone number didn't immediately list address and last known owner right next to it. It makes no sense not to do so, given how easy it is.
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On July 19 2013 04:50 Sbrubbles wrote:Beyond the moral implication of spying on foreigners in foreign countries (where the US has no jurisdiction), the US are also most likely violating international law both in the form of signed treaties and customary international law. Americans should remember that US law is (almost) entirely irrelevant when the issue is the US State interfering with the rights of people outside its jurisdiction. I posted this link a bit back, it's short and doesn't require any background in law http://arengel.edublogs.org/2013/07/02/international-law-american-law-and-the-legality-of-the-us-spying-program/Edit: You have to understand that if my government starts invading my privacy I, as a citizen, can attempt to do something about it. If a foreign government does it, I have no direct means of interfering, especially if my own government doesn't have the resourses to stop it. In a sense, China's got this problem more figured out than every else.
First off, you can't do anything about it. What are you as a peson going to do? You'd need a group of people behind you to do anything. The days of one man starting an armed revolt are over, they died a long time ago. Also, international laws are the ones that are violated most often; whenever I see people say "my international laws are violated" I just laugh. Few countries actually follow international laws, and even fewer attempt to hide the fact that they violate these laws time and time again. It doesn't matter if the spying program is legal, it's never supposed to be seen in the light of day.
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On July 19 2013 04:56 Shiori wrote:Show nested quote + And even with the prism system, they only get the phone numbers not the names. Of course they can dig deeper if necessary, but that requires further oversite by the judge(from the reports on how the system works) You can literally find the location of a phone number, its carrier, and possibly the owner simply by googling it or snooping around. It's so trivially easy that I'd be very surprised if searching for a phone number didn't immediately list address and last known owner right next to it. It makes no sense not to do so, given how easy it is.
I am sorry, you are full of shit on this one. I often have to employee PIs to find out who is connected to a specific phone numbers and other information. Google searches get you shit and information that is often outdated or just flat out wrong. It also doesn't help when they use other names or phone not connected to contract.
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