What are you doing that you're so concerned with NSA listening in on your calls ?

Article = none, personal opinion

"What are you doing that  you're so concerned with NSA listening in on your calls ? "

This is the kind of question that you normally dismiss as a debating trick. It's an ad hominen attack (attack on the person giving the argument , not the argument itself) , accusing him of some secret wrong doing and thats why he's taking this side of the debate.

But I suppose it is also a fair question. What am I doing that this whole Edward Snowden NSA thing bothers me so much ?

In 2011 I received a phone call from a machine. The call went roughly like this "Press One if you support the Liberals. Press Two if you support the Conservatives. Press three if you support the NDP" . My first reaction was ... arn't you supposed to tell me who you are ? Who's running this poll ? It didn't even do that. I looked at my phone and I said "Who the (bleep ! ) are you ? " and I hung up on it without entering any response.

Six or eight months later , the news broke in Canada of the Robocall Scandal. Apparently , someone had programmed a machine to call up lots and lots of people and ask them who they were going to vote for . Apparently anyone who indicated they were going to vote for some particular party got a call back from a human being telling them the polls had moved. And when they went to the new polling station , they were told this is not your polling station , you can't vote here. Most of them didn't bother going back to the old polling station , they just went home and forgot about it.

Which means that one particular party got robbed of a lot of votes , enough to cost them the election.

This happened because some politicians got themselves a list of voters , their phone numbers, and their political affiliation. I'd say some untrustworthy politicians , but that would be redundant. Politics is a dirty game and they're all untrustworthy.

How does this relate to the NSA / Edward Snowden thing , you ask ?

NSA now has a big honking list of voters, their phone numbers , and their political affiliations. But not just for America. They have it for lots and lots of other nations. And they're shooting for every nation in the world.

If some politician came along and started running on an "I hate the NSA" platform , and NSA has a list like this for that district , do you really trust them *NOT* to interfere in that election ? Keep in mind this is the organization that by Fisa rule 702 has been granted permission to spy on every non-american in the whole wide world , just because they're not an american. Do you think they'll hesitate for an instant before deciding to rig some election in some foreign country in their favor ?

What am I doing that I'm so concerned with the NSA listening in on my calls ? On everyone's calls as a matter of fact ?

I'm casting my vote for who will rule my country. And I'm expecting it to actually be worth something.
That's what I'm doing.
 

Fisa : Section 702

Article  

Passed in 2008, Section 702 retroactively gave cover of law to a post-9/11 effort permitting the NSA to collect phone, email, internet and other communications content when one party to the communication is reasonably believed to be a non-American outside the United States. The NSA stores Prism data for five years and communications taken directly from the internet for two years.

 



Apparently it is perfectly legal , in america , to spy on non-americans. Just because they're non americans. Not because you suspect they're terrorists or anything , but simply because hey , they're not americans , go for it.



I'm going to store this little tibit here where I can find it any time I need.

(Video) Live Crabs

Taken at the Kowloon food mart in Ottawa, Canada.

Yep. They're live.

Isn't that against some kind of Animal Rights thingy or something , selling live animals in a market down on Sommerset ? 

Internet Cable from Brazil to EU

article = none , personal opinion


In the age of NSA ticking off all the non-americans greatly (especially Brazil, they got caught helping an american company try and win a bid on a contract ... we call that industrial espionage , not fighting terrorists) , Brazil has decided to run an internet cable from Brazil to Europe directly , without going through the USA at all, and thus avoiding NSA.
   There have been several responses to this , on the web , recently , one being the USA will just tap the new wire and continue business as usual (apparently a Sub named Jimmy Carter has already been trained and equipped for this particular mission) , another being that this is just a smoke screen , the cable through the USA has degraded to the point that it can only support voice calls so they would have had to replace it anyways, and a third objection commonly raised is that the lowered latency for a direct cable means data centers in brazil will be very useful to people in europe, very responsive, able to move a lot of data ,etc , thus they're competing for USA business.

As a Canadian who doesn't much like the NSA , and openly confesses to feeling shame over the actions of NSA and it's little tiny Canadian brother CSEC who apparently is following faithfully in the footsteps of NSA , I would like to make a few comments.

One . You can't just go tap an undersea data cable. In this day and age of outrage at NSA ? They are watching you. What exactly do you think is going to be the political consequences of you getting caught tapping a brand new cable ? They won't be war, USA is the largest military power in the world, but you can expect trade boycots galore. 
   Having already been caught red handed in industrial espionage , in helping americans win commerical contracts , USA is not far from a situation where European (and Brazliian) Governments simply start adding a clause to their contracts that USA based corperations need not bother to submit a bid , they are not eligable to win this contract. 
   If the fight for contracts is not a fair fight , if one side is cheating so that they always win , and everyone else always loses, everyone else is going to pick up their marbles and go play somewhere else , and leave the "winner" to go play with himself.

I would like to say Canada will follow this tactic , but I'm probably wrong. The government and both major opposition political parties (ie: all three front runners) have been amazingly quiet on the entire issue. The only hint we have is one of the governments ministors bad mouthing Snowden as a traitor and saying he deserves to be thrown in jail for a really long time.
   If this is the Canadian Government's opinion , it's pretty obvious they're obediently falling in line behind big brother USA and arn't going to lift a finger to protect even their own population. And threatenning to vote for the opposition gets you no where.

   So what do you do ?
   You must assume the attitude "If it's electronic , it's bugged" , "If you're competing with an american corperation , NSA is helping them". "If the product manufacturer is based in the USA , NSA owns their little behind and there's probably a back door, though they will deny that. They are legally required to for the first two years of any new prodect they come out with " (Obama's great "compromise" with american corperations ... not much of a compromise if you're non-american)
   Put dirt on your face book. Claim to love knitting , make friends with a few people you hate , mess up their metrics , and if the cops come calling , tell them you deliberately threw dirt in your profile because you knew they were watching. What can they do ? They're on your doorstep because they're watching ...

   Confusion to the enemies  !
   And stop buying American. We can't really stop them from spying on us , but we can at least hit them in the pocket book.