It truly is.
Q: "Do you know that the NSA is monitoring everything that you say online and even elsewhere?"
A: "Yeah, so? I don't have anything to hide."
Monitoring and access I don’t mind. Using the access for political reasons, or to go after political enemies- I mind. The Obama admin changed “unmasking” rules before the 2012 election. National security or spying on the Romney campaign! We know they spied on Congress. And we know that political operatives were given NSA database access by the FBI to spy on Trump and associates. The NSA shut this down, necessitating the Trump/Russia scam and FISA authorizations to keep the access alive. This is a huge and decades long conspiracy to violate the 4th amendment civil rights of Americans, and nobody in Congress or the media (let alone Durham at the FBI) seems to care
Absolutely. But also, the only reason they are "monitoring" is because they plan to use everything they learn about us with political goals. It is naive to think otherwise. We now know that the government does not occupy a neutral and fair position. On the contrary.
Look no further than the clapping Seals act for Zelensky on Thursday for the former and the operation Epstein and Maxwell were running (just the tip of that iceberg) for the latter.
A substantive and important part of what the NSA does is called, "social network analysis"
Social network analysis involves the use of visual and statistical techniques to represent and analyze the structure of these relationships. It can be used to study a wide range of social phenomena, including the spread of ideas, the formation of social movements, and the flow of information within a network.
In social network analysis, the relationships between individuals or organizations are represented as lines (called "edges") connecting nodes (which represent the individuals or organizations). The strength of the relationship between two nodes can be measured by the number of ties (such as interactions or exchanges) between them. The positions of the nodes in the network can also be analyzed to identify patterns and trends in the relationships between them.
This allows the NSA to ID networks and the hierarchies in that network. It does not matter if the targets use encryption. SNA still works.
Every single would be revolution network in America for instance, has been identified, their leaders are known, and all of them are under "ironclad surveillance".
That's certainly what "they" would like us to think.
I favor legal means, myself, if at all possible; but I also don't think "surveillance" has all that much effect on angry mobs in the street - which is what makes a revolution; that, and the military switching sides. They're working class, the rank and file, so that's who you have to appeal to.
Snowden reported that the panty sniffers were taking screen shots of couples having sex and women undressing and passing the pictures around the office.
We are dealing with criminals capable of any atrocity.
I heard from friends explaining that the NSA was "only" watching nude women and spying on their spouses and girlfriends years ago.
However everything in the federal government in DC is slanted toward nailing political opponents. Everything developed for use abroad against US "enemies" is now being used domestically against political opponents. While this has always happened on a small scale particularly against marginalized groups (anti-war, Black activists, White Supremacists, communists), now anything that questions the Official Narrative is minimally censored and harassed.
There is a reason for Posse Comitatus, the old Smith Mundt Act, and the CIA was not allowed to act domestically. That is all gone now, and Intelligence Agencies are the New Muscle of the Police State.
Not really just the NSA- they produce the data and do high level flagging, but it is other agencies that mine and query the database.
The purpose of good controls is to stop people from doing stupid or criminal sh*t, or at least catch them quickly. The NSA surveillance system exists for legitimate reasons but we should have known it was human nature for people to abuse it for selfish reasons. Obama and friends were just ahead of the curve in realizing its potential.
Every access from inside the government of a security intercept database, every unmasking, every access of a tax return should be flagged for oversight by two levels of management above (under penalty of dismissal of the manager if they miss nefarious activity).
Senior managers at financial institutions get this type of reporting on their employees plus all employee emails and chats are scoured by key word searches with potential violations flagged and sent to manager for oversight and approval daily. This has been put in place as a result of government regulation - ironic, no?
Sounds like “normal human behavior” when humans are given access to data. A ridiculously high percentage of NSA database searches were to look up info on the exes and significant others of FBI agents.
This is why database info needs to be on a need to know/permissiones basis with every access and key stroke logged (lots of corporate America does this). The US government has zero visibility and control, which is why low level drones like Snowden and Manning could access everything for criminal purposes.
One of the reasons I don’t use social media nor download apps. Give them less data and less reason to care.
They’re having the data and using the data are two different things. Just as in the UK your entire life outside might be on camera, but that doesn’t mean they are watching you actively - it means they can go back and track you. Probable cause is a vital concept (doesn’t exist in much of Europe). Once AI is viewing all the footage and intercepts it is a different story (a la China).
Substack is social media. They also monitor all telephone comms.
There is "no place to hide".
They use all the data, including yours. False positives are a bitch. Just ask my friend Mahar Arar who was rendered to Syria for torture on the basis of false positives.
"Church was so shocked to learn what he had discovered - the massive and awesome spying capabilities constructed by the US government with no transparency or accountability - that he issued the following warning, as reported by the New York Times, using language strikingly stark for such a mainstream US politician when speaking about his own government:
"'That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.'
"He added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA 'could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.'"
The conditional part of Church's warning - "that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people" - is precisely what is happening, one might even say: is what has already happened. " - The Greenwald
Congress basically let intel tell them ‘ok we won’t do it again’ without putting any meaningful accountability in place. So here we are. Intel just learned how to cover it all up better. Hence the hatred of the true whistleblowers.
The Deep State has dirt on everyone in power. They literally own them.
As Schumer said, on behalf of his shadowy masters, "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,".
With one notable exception. I don't think Obama was being blackmailed, I think that Obama was literally the "Candidate from Langley".
We must mind monitoring and access. The next step is monitoring money, income and expense. The only reason to monitor what you say is to limit what, where and when you speak and listen. Monitoring what, where and when you spend is next and for the same reason. If we don't mind, our freedoms are done for.
Monitoring money and spending is inevitable - Obama and Biden both pushed legislation forcing banks to disclose all transactions over a de minimus threshold. There will be a digital dollar (with physical cash eliminated) in our lifetimes - making every transaction visible, except barter. Crypto will be regulated and activities fully transparent to authorities in the US and EU.
This will put a big crimp on tax evasion and criminal/black market activities, which is fine by me. We will not be able to stop transparency nor monitoring (all will be done by AI)- the writing is on the wall. What is essential is bolstering probable cause thresholds and ensuring equal treatment under the law rather than selective prosecution.
The Dems want transaction reporting to go after Republican contractors and small businesses for tax audits while ignoring drug dealers and gangs. If AI is doing the flagging it should be easy to have equal treatment for any suspect transaction. Human follow-up on flagged transactions must also be monitored and evaluated to ensure no bias is at work, and all communications of these humans with outside parties must also be monitored. That is, government actions should be monitored more intensely than citizen actions, and citizens should be subject to probably cause thresholds while employees actions would not be.
It has nothing to do with tax evasion. Tax evasion is written into the tax code. It's about controlling the proletariat. If you're ok with any of it, we've already lost the fight.
I wouldn't mind if there weren't a thousand reasons to NOT trust our government. But all it's done is lie to us since 1963, and then it's lying went into overdrive in 2001.
There are a million reasons to monitor communications other than limiting speech, from trying to track down nefarious groups like terrorists, to preventing the trade of child porn, and many other reasons.
The obvious problem is that such a system is rife for abuse and eventually will be abused. But that doesn’t there are literally no valid reasons to do it.
Power corrupts. Monitoring & access enables encroachment. Human nature, without draconian checks and balances it is virtually assured.
At the time of the Patriot Act, we had a spirited debate as to whether the FBI/CIA should be able to access the list of books suspected terrorists were checking out of the public library.
Look at how far things have slid in the interests of "safety".
knowing the depth of evil and corruption at the deep state, most congress people are either direct hires or compromised through frame jobs, wrongdoing or extortion. our hope is not in government. it is in the destruction of this government, whose power lies in its ability to counterfeit money on demand. when we stop paying taxes, the government loses its ability to counterfeit (i.e. borrow from federal reserve) and we get a meaningful reset.
Observation changes the behavior of those being observed. You may not think you have anything to hide, but their observation and you knowing that someone is or could be watching changes your behavior. That is evil.
I'm embarrassed to respond that this "which is worse" statement doesn't deserve a response, but here I am responding. I'm filled with self-loathing as a consequence of responding. I'm going to go take a hot shower and a nap. Actually it might be a cold shower, because the same self righteous assholes who think government censoring free speech is a good idea have caused the electricity grid to be unstable, as they don't understand the negative effect of intermittency downrange of the twin idiocy of renewables policy and the shut down of pipelines/ natural gas plants. If you are bothered by the incivility of my tone here, you may not understand that the only things that make humanism and western civilization possible are a) abundant cheap energy and b) our ability to make such assertions publicly without fear of censorship or persecution. This Christmas, our freedom to be generous to each other and sacrosanct in our person is thin on the ground.
As president, Trump was vested with full declassification privileges - even if he continued to have classified documents from his presidency, it would be essentially a technicality. There would be no more national security risk than there would be had he formally declassified them when he was president.
So do you believe that Trump made the decision that declassifying these documents posed no risk? No president can declassify documents without following a process of declassification. Obviously Trump did not do that. Many believe that he simply took them to be used for some future personal gain. But I guess you are okay with that.
The fact that Trump could have done it and that he doesn't need documents if he wants to sell out his country, is where I make my point that this is a technicality.
American presidents are privy to some of the most highly-guarded secrets the nation has to offer over the course of their term.
Here in America, we generally trust ex-Presidents and value their experience. As a courtesy, they are often given intelligence briefings, etc.
If Trump wanted to be a traitor to the nation, he doesn't need documents to do so. He has valuable information in his head from his time in office.
The "many believe" that these documents are for future gain is a baseless opinion formed by opponents on their belief that Trump is some kind of unique evil. In the main, that kind of thinking is akin to the Q anon stuff.
Most likely the "documents" in question are mementos. Maybe personal letters from world leaders. That kind of thing.
I understand your point that Trump wouldn't need documents to betray the country. But having them to sell to other countries which the US deems are not aligned with its interests certainly would be a help in his nefarious schemes, if he were to decide to indulge in them. I now get what you meant when you said that possession of the documents is a technicality, at least on a certain level. But it would establish a precedent, if the FBI had not bothered to get them back, that any future president could just ride roughshod over laws supposedly meant to protect secrets in the interests of our national security and everything becomes meaningless. It's mostly the conservatives who are always saying they are down with “the rule of law”. I seriously doubt that Trump has any “valuable information in his head from his time in office” as he is a malignant narcissist who is now only thinking of that time in relation to the fact that he was once the Supreme Ruler. That idea might even support your memento theory. And on second thought, Trump probably lacks the means and organization it would take to sell state secrets, but we can't be sure of anything. At any rate, if he stole for either nefarious or benign reasons, it's all quite pathetic. Any other president who did the same would have also triggered a “raid”. And demands from the right that they be immediately “locked up”. And I doubt if it were not Trump, you would have the magnanimity to call it a “technicality”, even despite the possibility of that being true. I know I may be entirely wrong as to your opinions, but that is the vibe I'm getting here, and so I'm stuck with it. And I have been willing to entertain your points.
There is no evidence that Trump is anything but a loyal American. I agree with you that the rule of law should be enforced, but the documents should have been obtained without a raid through more extended discussion. In general, there have been numerous heavy handed raids against people on the right, with very few raids of people on the left that were involved in similar issues. Having the FBI go through Melania's panty drawer is a bad look and exacerbates tensions in America beyond any possible harm the documents could likely cause.
I don't think any other president would have been raided. We didn't even conduct a raid on the former Secretary of State Clinton when she failed to produce her emails, had destroyed devices, etc.
Had Obama brought documents with him, I'd have the same reaction. I was concerned regarding Hillary's server because her personal server put it a) beyond FOIA requests and b) was unsecured and a magnet for international spies.
I do have concerns re the document safety (if they are sensitive) at Mar a Lago, but as there is Secret Service protection my concerns are mitigated somewhat.
I was very concerned when Sandy Berger stole documents from the archives and stuffed them in his pants, but less so if the intent was truly just to refresh his memory for his book.
My core bias is that I generally believe in transparency and that there is too much overclassification. The whole classification structure needs to be reformed so that only the absolute minimum is actually classified. I'm pro-Snowden and pro-Assange as well.
I couldn’t agree with you more that the classification system needs to be reformed. But with our entire government being as dysfunctional as it is, there's no chance of that happening. I find it hard to believe that Trump is a loyal American, being that he was willing to overturn democracy when he knew he had lost the popular vote. If you disagree with that point, just examine the J6 transcripts; the testimony of his own advisers. I lack evidence that the FBI went through Melania's pantry drawer, or anything else not related to Trump's office and storage closets so I can't argue with you on that point. I seriously doubt that happened, though. Trump would not have likely put them in her clothing drawers, but again, what do either of us know? Do you have proof? Hillary Clinton's emails were not top secret, except that I do not defend her actions in the least. Don't forget that she was grilled by several congressional investigative committees, one of whose hearings were televised, for a solid eleven hours. In the end they couldn’t come up with enough to indict her on. Also, Kevin McCarthy even admitted that it was all motivated for political gain as to her upcoming presidential campaign. Don't get me wrong, I am not defending her, but what in the end did the GOP get out of it? They never proved that her actions were as egregious as stealing top secret documents. There may have been state secrets contained in the emails, but if she deleted them, again, not defending her here, at least it wasn't like an enemy could get them, as potentially in Trump's case.
The main thing I want to focus on here is how you "find it hard to believe that Trump is a loyal American". I've watched most of the J6 hearings and seen highlights of the parts I missed. I've seen no evidence that Trump "lied" about the election to his followers. Let me clarify as I know you probably see that as a laughable statement.
Trump sees the world very differently than you do. Imagine for a moment that Trump knows he never colluded with Russia (no evidence so far), yet his entire presidency was mired in allegations that he did so. Then, people claim that he called neo-Nazis "fine people". His opponent, Biden, claimed that was the reason why he was running. Yet an objective analysis of the post-Charlottesville press conference indicates that this clearly didn't happen. Then, the dirty tricks (from his perspective) continue and the Hunter Biden laptop is suppressed on social media and in the national news. The cherry on top of it all is his opponents are calling him a Nazi.
From his perspective, his a priori beliefs are that if his opponents truly think he is a Nazi, why wouldn't they cheat to make sure he loses? It seems rational - I mean, many people would go back in time to kill baby Hitler. What's a little cheating to make sure he doesn't come to power? We know cheating has happened in this country before, with much lesser stakes.
With this world view, he is primed to think that he has been cheated. Then confirmation bias kicks in. You ignore people that the AJ (who were Bush people he never trusted anyway) and trust the loyalists that were confirming his bias. You listen to the lawyers that claimed a legal path to challenge the election via the state legislatures in order to *prevent* the overthrow of the election by the cheaters.
I feel that to understand people it is important to see the world through their eyes. To walk a mile in their shoes.
For example, I could say that Liz Cheney's role in J6 was craven and animated by her bitterness at seeing her father's work and the Bush legacy blown up in the Republican debates. But the reality is that these experiences likely created a perception of Trump as a unique danger to the country. How could one man so handily destroy the Bush dynasty with his rhetoric? With her experiences, I can understand why she would give Trump no benefit of any doubt and think she is supremely patriotic in trying to hold him to account.
Briefly re Hillary: even if they were deleted, we don't know that an enemy hadn't compromised her unsecured server. Has they done so, they would likely have emails upon send/receipt and we wouldn't ever know.
Have fun rooting around in Trump's head and trying to figure out his perceptions. I have better things to do. Loyal Americans don't knowingly commit criminal tax fraud, for one thing. And they don't come off sounding like they defend the violent militias and neo-Nazi groups as he did after Charlottesville. He should have vigorously condemned them, if he's so loyal. And if he honestly thought that he was cheated out of the election, he is delusional. There was no cheating that equaled the stealing of four million votes, the number he lost by. All investigations came up empty. It would have been impossible to pull that off without detection. Unless, of course, you believe in conspiracy theories. Damaging Americans' trust in this country’s democracy, which is exactly what he did by making millions of Americans believe that the election had been stolen from him, and refusing to turn over power without trying to mount a coup, is not what a “loyal American” would do. Insurrectionists are not loyal Americans.
"...Having the FBI go through Melania's panty drawer is a bad look and exacerbates tensions in America beyond any possible harm the documents could likely cause..."
Can confirm this. Where I live there were riots the cause of which were the exacerbated tensions from the FBI bad (bad, bad, bad) look into Melania's panty drawer.
The biggest national security risk ever to face America is taking place right now, and that's the massive military aggression being directed at Russia.
You are wrong about me. I am vehemently opposed to the war in Ukraine that we are propping up. I believe that the US should demand negotiations with Putin on the part of Ukraine, let Russia have the disputed territories and stop the ongoing mass murder now. You really assume a lot when you say I am “all for it”. You could not be more wrong about me. And please explain what you mean by Trump being a “tiny meaningless thing”. Your comments are confusing. So being opposed to Trumpism makes me tribal? Is everybody tribal now if they want something more decent than MAGA right-wing, largely evangelical Christian, so-called conservatism? I can’t oppose that without being labeled tribal? Are you not being tribal in your own opinions and prejudices? And yes, I believe that the entire foreign relations apparatus at the State Department under Biden are a bunch of boobs completely in over their heads. Antony Blinken is not qualified to be dog catcher. Still think I'm tribal?
I am not tribal. I understand the nefariousness of the national security state. I know our freedoms and privacy are being violated by constant surveillance. I only wish to point out that too wrongs, in this case Trump stealing documents that do not belong to him, and the spying on all of us that goes on, do not make a right. Trump did not go through any formal declassification process in relation to these documents. He broke the law. If you are okay with that, I don't understand why. It almost seems as if you are the tribalist here, because I doubt you would be so casual about stealing documents if Obama had done such a thing. And no, I have no respect for Obama either, so don't accuse me again of tribalism.
It truly is.
Q: "Do you know that the NSA is monitoring everything that you say online and even elsewhere?"
A: "Yeah, so? I don't have anything to hide."
Monitoring and access I don’t mind. Using the access for political reasons, or to go after political enemies- I mind. The Obama admin changed “unmasking” rules before the 2012 election. National security or spying on the Romney campaign! We know they spied on Congress. And we know that political operatives were given NSA database access by the FBI to spy on Trump and associates. The NSA shut this down, necessitating the Trump/Russia scam and FISA authorizations to keep the access alive. This is a huge and decades long conspiracy to violate the 4th amendment civil rights of Americans, and nobody in Congress or the media (let alone Durham at the FBI) seems to care
They are looking into your innermost thoughts. They are metaphorically looking into the bedroom windows of your home.
That's an outrage no matter what they do with those data.
I mind.
Thanks! :)
Absolutely. But also, the only reason they are "monitoring" is because they plan to use everything they learn about us with political goals. It is naive to think otherwise. We now know that the government does not occupy a neutral and fair position. On the contrary.
Keith Alexander, the former Director of the NSA said, "Collect it all".
*and then store it for analysis and future use if needed
c.f. Bluffdale Utah
https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff-nsadatacenter/
Blackmail is how the world works.
What did they have Clinton, Bush, Obama, et al?
!LOTS!
"You work for us now. Do. you. understand?"
Epstein was Mossad. Maxwell was Mossad.
The two B's. Bribery & Blackmail.
Look no further than the clapping Seals act for Zelensky on Thursday for the former and the operation Epstein and Maxwell were running (just the tip of that iceberg) for the latter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSxXiHRZTOY
A substantive and important part of what the NSA does is called, "social network analysis"
Social network analysis involves the use of visual and statistical techniques to represent and analyze the structure of these relationships. It can be used to study a wide range of social phenomena, including the spread of ideas, the formation of social movements, and the flow of information within a network.
In social network analysis, the relationships between individuals or organizations are represented as lines (called "edges") connecting nodes (which represent the individuals or organizations). The strength of the relationship between two nodes can be measured by the number of ties (such as interactions or exchanges) between them. The positions of the nodes in the network can also be analyzed to identify patterns and trends in the relationships between them.
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-nsas-secret-tool-for-mapping-your-social-network/
This allows the NSA to ID networks and the hierarchies in that network. It does not matter if the targets use encryption. SNA still works.
Every single would be revolution network in America for instance, has been identified, their leaders are known, and all of them are under "ironclad surveillance".
There will no revolution.
That's certainly what "they" would like us to think.
I favor legal means, myself, if at all possible; but I also don't think "surveillance" has all that much effect on angry mobs in the street - which is what makes a revolution; that, and the military switching sides. They're working class, the rank and file, so that's who you have to appeal to.
Snowden reported that the panty sniffers were taking screen shots of couples having sex and women undressing and passing the pictures around the office.
We are dealing with criminals capable of any atrocity.
I heard from friends explaining that the NSA was "only" watching nude women and spying on their spouses and girlfriends years ago.
However everything in the federal government in DC is slanted toward nailing political opponents. Everything developed for use abroad against US "enemies" is now being used domestically against political opponents. While this has always happened on a small scale particularly against marginalized groups (anti-war, Black activists, White Supremacists, communists), now anything that questions the Official Narrative is minimally censored and harassed.
There is a reason for Posse Comitatus, the old Smith Mundt Act, and the CIA was not allowed to act domestically. That is all gone now, and Intelligence Agencies are the New Muscle of the Police State.
Not really just the NSA- they produce the data and do high level flagging, but it is other agencies that mine and query the database.
The purpose of good controls is to stop people from doing stupid or criminal sh*t, or at least catch them quickly. The NSA surveillance system exists for legitimate reasons but we should have known it was human nature for people to abuse it for selfish reasons. Obama and friends were just ahead of the curve in realizing its potential.
Every access from inside the government of a security intercept database, every unmasking, every access of a tax return should be flagged for oversight by two levels of management above (under penalty of dismissal of the manager if they miss nefarious activity).
Senior managers at financial institutions get this type of reporting on their employees plus all employee emails and chats are scoured by key word searches with potential violations flagged and sent to manager for oversight and approval daily. This has been put in place as a result of government regulation - ironic, no?
That's true for sure.
Yet since people cannot see or feel them peering into our windows, they just don't care.
Sounds like “normal human behavior” when humans are given access to data. A ridiculously high percentage of NSA database searches were to look up info on the exes and significant others of FBI agents.
This is why database info needs to be on a need to know/permissiones basis with every access and key stroke logged (lots of corporate America does this). The US government has zero visibility and control, which is why low level drones like Snowden and Manning could access everything for criminal purposes.
@MikeR: And that's the relatively harmless stuff.
One of the reasons I don’t use social media nor download apps. Give them less data and less reason to care.
They’re having the data and using the data are two different things. Just as in the UK your entire life outside might be on camera, but that doesn’t mean they are watching you actively - it means they can go back and track you. Probable cause is a vital concept (doesn’t exist in much of Europe). Once AI is viewing all the footage and intercepts it is a different story (a la China).
Substack is social media. They also monitor all telephone comms.
There is "no place to hide".
They use all the data, including yours. False positives are a bitch. Just ask my friend Mahar Arar who was rendered to Syria for torture on the basis of false positives.
No one at the NSA cares about probable cause.
Why is it you think western countries aren't employing AI? Of course they are.
If they can do it and there a benefit for them to do it?
They will do it.
We know this from history and from human nature itself.
They are doing it! https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2022/12/23/former-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-is-funding-biden-admin-jobs/
Isn't that what Snowden showed us?
"Church was so shocked to learn what he had discovered - the massive and awesome spying capabilities constructed by the US government with no transparency or accountability - that he issued the following warning, as reported by the New York Times, using language strikingly stark for such a mainstream US politician when speaking about his own government:
"'That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.'
"He added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA 'could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.'"
The conditional part of Church's warning - "that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people" - is precisely what is happening, one might even say: is what has already happened. " - The Greenwald
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/25/frank-church-liberal-icon
Congress basically let intel tell them ‘ok we won’t do it again’ without putting any meaningful accountability in place. So here we are. Intel just learned how to cover it all up better. Hence the hatred of the true whistleblowers.
The Deep State has dirt on everyone in power. They literally own them.
As Schumer said, on behalf of his shadowy masters, "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,".
With one notable exception. I don't think Obama was being blackmailed, I think that Obama was literally the "Candidate from Langley".
The one time in his life Schumer shouted the truth from the mountaintop...but no one believe him because the mountain was made of his lies.
We must mind monitoring and access. The next step is monitoring money, income and expense. The only reason to monitor what you say is to limit what, where and when you speak and listen. Monitoring what, where and when you spend is next and for the same reason. If we don't mind, our freedoms are done for.
My computer has been controlled remotely w/o my permission more than once. I have nothing to hide, but still, it was an earie feeling.
Monitoring money and spending is inevitable - Obama and Biden both pushed legislation forcing banks to disclose all transactions over a de minimus threshold. There will be a digital dollar (with physical cash eliminated) in our lifetimes - making every transaction visible, except barter. Crypto will be regulated and activities fully transparent to authorities in the US and EU.
This will put a big crimp on tax evasion and criminal/black market activities, which is fine by me. We will not be able to stop transparency nor monitoring (all will be done by AI)- the writing is on the wall. What is essential is bolstering probable cause thresholds and ensuring equal treatment under the law rather than selective prosecution.
The Dems want transaction reporting to go after Republican contractors and small businesses for tax audits while ignoring drug dealers and gangs. If AI is doing the flagging it should be easy to have equal treatment for any suspect transaction. Human follow-up on flagged transactions must also be monitored and evaluated to ensure no bias is at work, and all communications of these humans with outside parties must also be monitored. That is, government actions should be monitored more intensely than citizen actions, and citizens should be subject to probably cause thresholds while employees actions would not be.
It has nothing to do with tax evasion. Tax evasion is written into the tax code. It's about controlling the proletariat. If you're ok with any of it, we've already lost the fight.
I wouldn't mind if there weren't a thousand reasons to NOT trust our government. But all it's done is lie to us since 1963, and then it's lying went into overdrive in 2001.
There are a million reasons to monitor communications other than limiting speech, from trying to track down nefarious groups like terrorists, to preventing the trade of child porn, and many other reasons.
The obvious problem is that such a system is rife for abuse and eventually will be abused. But that doesn’t there are literally no valid reasons to do it.
Isn't that why FISA courts exist? Probable cause to investigate someone?
The FISA courts have 99.99% approval rate.
FISA orders rubber stamps by the tonne.
“The human heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?”
-Jeremiah 17:9
True- though the current bureaucracy and leadership has proven they cannot be trusted with this power
The goal is compleat control in a panopticon.
We are almost there!
"VICTORY!"
Power corrupts. Monitoring & access enables encroachment. Human nature, without draconian checks and balances it is virtually assured.
At the time of the Patriot Act, we had a spirited debate as to whether the FBI/CIA should be able to access the list of books suspected terrorists were checking out of the public library.
Look at how far things have slid in the interests of "safety".
Look at how far things have slid in the interests of "safety". - Mark
I blame soccer moms! ;)
As I often say, "Never give a hairless ape untrammeled power. That never ends well."
knowing the depth of evil and corruption at the deep state, most congress people are either direct hires or compromised through frame jobs, wrongdoing or extortion. our hope is not in government. it is in the destruction of this government, whose power lies in its ability to counterfeit money on demand. when we stop paying taxes, the government loses its ability to counterfeit (i.e. borrow from federal reserve) and we get a meaningful reset.
Observation changes the behavior of those being observed. You may not think you have anything to hide, but their observation and you knowing that someone is or could be watching changes your behavior. That is evil.
So then which is worse, “spying on Trump” or Trump stealing highly classified documents and creating a potential national security risk?
I'm embarrassed to respond that this "which is worse" statement doesn't deserve a response, but here I am responding. I'm filled with self-loathing as a consequence of responding. I'm going to go take a hot shower and a nap. Actually it might be a cold shower, because the same self righteous assholes who think government censoring free speech is a good idea have caused the electricity grid to be unstable, as they don't understand the negative effect of intermittency downrange of the twin idiocy of renewables policy and the shut down of pipelines/ natural gas plants. If you are bothered by the incivility of my tone here, you may not understand that the only things that make humanism and western civilization possible are a) abundant cheap energy and b) our ability to make such assertions publicly without fear of censorship or persecution. This Christmas, our freedom to be generous to each other and sacrosanct in our person is thin on the ground.
Thanks for this.
Will Joni listen?
Can she listen?
Spying on Trump - and it isn't close.
As president, Trump was vested with full declassification privileges - even if he continued to have classified documents from his presidency, it would be essentially a technicality. There would be no more national security risk than there would be had he formally declassified them when he was president.
So do you believe that Trump made the decision that declassifying these documents posed no risk? No president can declassify documents without following a process of declassification. Obviously Trump did not do that. Many believe that he simply took them to be used for some future personal gain. But I guess you are okay with that.
The fact that Trump could have done it and that he doesn't need documents if he wants to sell out his country, is where I make my point that this is a technicality.
American presidents are privy to some of the most highly-guarded secrets the nation has to offer over the course of their term.
Here in America, we generally trust ex-Presidents and value their experience. As a courtesy, they are often given intelligence briefings, etc.
If Trump wanted to be a traitor to the nation, he doesn't need documents to do so. He has valuable information in his head from his time in office.
The "many believe" that these documents are for future gain is a baseless opinion formed by opponents on their belief that Trump is some kind of unique evil. In the main, that kind of thinking is akin to the Q anon stuff.
Most likely the "documents" in question are mementos. Maybe personal letters from world leaders. That kind of thing.
"...He has valuable information in his head from his time in office."
That's funny...
Absolutely agree! His head is a sewer pit filled with lies, delusions, and malignant narcissism. Totally worthless.
I understand your point that Trump wouldn't need documents to betray the country. But having them to sell to other countries which the US deems are not aligned with its interests certainly would be a help in his nefarious schemes, if he were to decide to indulge in them. I now get what you meant when you said that possession of the documents is a technicality, at least on a certain level. But it would establish a precedent, if the FBI had not bothered to get them back, that any future president could just ride roughshod over laws supposedly meant to protect secrets in the interests of our national security and everything becomes meaningless. It's mostly the conservatives who are always saying they are down with “the rule of law”. I seriously doubt that Trump has any “valuable information in his head from his time in office” as he is a malignant narcissist who is now only thinking of that time in relation to the fact that he was once the Supreme Ruler. That idea might even support your memento theory. And on second thought, Trump probably lacks the means and organization it would take to sell state secrets, but we can't be sure of anything. At any rate, if he stole for either nefarious or benign reasons, it's all quite pathetic. Any other president who did the same would have also triggered a “raid”. And demands from the right that they be immediately “locked up”. And I doubt if it were not Trump, you would have the magnanimity to call it a “technicality”, even despite the possibility of that being true. I know I may be entirely wrong as to your opinions, but that is the vibe I'm getting here, and so I'm stuck with it. And I have been willing to entertain your points.
I appreciate it that you entertained my points!
There is no evidence that Trump is anything but a loyal American. I agree with you that the rule of law should be enforced, but the documents should have been obtained without a raid through more extended discussion. In general, there have been numerous heavy handed raids against people on the right, with very few raids of people on the left that were involved in similar issues. Having the FBI go through Melania's panty drawer is a bad look and exacerbates tensions in America beyond any possible harm the documents could likely cause.
I don't think any other president would have been raided. We didn't even conduct a raid on the former Secretary of State Clinton when she failed to produce her emails, had destroyed devices, etc.
Had Obama brought documents with him, I'd have the same reaction. I was concerned regarding Hillary's server because her personal server put it a) beyond FOIA requests and b) was unsecured and a magnet for international spies.
I do have concerns re the document safety (if they are sensitive) at Mar a Lago, but as there is Secret Service protection my concerns are mitigated somewhat.
I was very concerned when Sandy Berger stole documents from the archives and stuffed them in his pants, but less so if the intent was truly just to refresh his memory for his book.
My core bias is that I generally believe in transparency and that there is too much overclassification. The whole classification structure needs to be reformed so that only the absolute minimum is actually classified. I'm pro-Snowden and pro-Assange as well.
I couldn’t agree with you more that the classification system needs to be reformed. But with our entire government being as dysfunctional as it is, there's no chance of that happening. I find it hard to believe that Trump is a loyal American, being that he was willing to overturn democracy when he knew he had lost the popular vote. If you disagree with that point, just examine the J6 transcripts; the testimony of his own advisers. I lack evidence that the FBI went through Melania's pantry drawer, or anything else not related to Trump's office and storage closets so I can't argue with you on that point. I seriously doubt that happened, though. Trump would not have likely put them in her clothing drawers, but again, what do either of us know? Do you have proof? Hillary Clinton's emails were not top secret, except that I do not defend her actions in the least. Don't forget that she was grilled by several congressional investigative committees, one of whose hearings were televised, for a solid eleven hours. In the end they couldn’t come up with enough to indict her on. Also, Kevin McCarthy even admitted that it was all motivated for political gain as to her upcoming presidential campaign. Don't get me wrong, I am not defending her, but what in the end did the GOP get out of it? They never proved that her actions were as egregious as stealing top secret documents. There may have been state secrets contained in the emails, but if she deleted them, again, not defending her here, at least it wasn't like an enemy could get them, as potentially in Trump's case.
The main thing I want to focus on here is how you "find it hard to believe that Trump is a loyal American". I've watched most of the J6 hearings and seen highlights of the parts I missed. I've seen no evidence that Trump "lied" about the election to his followers. Let me clarify as I know you probably see that as a laughable statement.
Trump sees the world very differently than you do. Imagine for a moment that Trump knows he never colluded with Russia (no evidence so far), yet his entire presidency was mired in allegations that he did so. Then, people claim that he called neo-Nazis "fine people". His opponent, Biden, claimed that was the reason why he was running. Yet an objective analysis of the post-Charlottesville press conference indicates that this clearly didn't happen. Then, the dirty tricks (from his perspective) continue and the Hunter Biden laptop is suppressed on social media and in the national news. The cherry on top of it all is his opponents are calling him a Nazi.
From his perspective, his a priori beliefs are that if his opponents truly think he is a Nazi, why wouldn't they cheat to make sure he loses? It seems rational - I mean, many people would go back in time to kill baby Hitler. What's a little cheating to make sure he doesn't come to power? We know cheating has happened in this country before, with much lesser stakes.
With this world view, he is primed to think that he has been cheated. Then confirmation bias kicks in. You ignore people that the AJ (who were Bush people he never trusted anyway) and trust the loyalists that were confirming his bias. You listen to the lawyers that claimed a legal path to challenge the election via the state legislatures in order to *prevent* the overthrow of the election by the cheaters.
I feel that to understand people it is important to see the world through their eyes. To walk a mile in their shoes.
For example, I could say that Liz Cheney's role in J6 was craven and animated by her bitterness at seeing her father's work and the Bush legacy blown up in the Republican debates. But the reality is that these experiences likely created a perception of Trump as a unique danger to the country. How could one man so handily destroy the Bush dynasty with his rhetoric? With her experiences, I can understand why she would give Trump no benefit of any doubt and think she is supremely patriotic in trying to hold him to account.
Briefly re Hillary: even if they were deleted, we don't know that an enemy hadn't compromised her unsecured server. Has they done so, they would likely have emails upon send/receipt and we wouldn't ever know.
Have fun rooting around in Trump's head and trying to figure out his perceptions. I have better things to do. Loyal Americans don't knowingly commit criminal tax fraud, for one thing. And they don't come off sounding like they defend the violent militias and neo-Nazi groups as he did after Charlottesville. He should have vigorously condemned them, if he's so loyal. And if he honestly thought that he was cheated out of the election, he is delusional. There was no cheating that equaled the stealing of four million votes, the number he lost by. All investigations came up empty. It would have been impossible to pull that off without detection. Unless, of course, you believe in conspiracy theories. Damaging Americans' trust in this country’s democracy, which is exactly what he did by making millions of Americans believe that the election had been stolen from him, and refusing to turn over power without trying to mount a coup, is not what a “loyal American” would do. Insurrectionists are not loyal Americans.
Mark, baby, you're on a roll!
"...Having the FBI go through Melania's panty drawer is a bad look and exacerbates tensions in America beyond any possible harm the documents could likely cause..."
Can confirm this. Where I live there were riots the cause of which were the exacerbated tensions from the FBI bad (bad, bad, bad) look into Melania's panty drawer.
Very funny. A real hoot.
The biggest national security risk ever to face America is taking place right now, and that's the massive military aggression being directed at Russia.
And you are all for it Joni.
You are wrong about me. I am vehemently opposed to the war in Ukraine that we are propping up. I believe that the US should demand negotiations with Putin on the part of Ukraine, let Russia have the disputed territories and stop the ongoing mass murder now. You really assume a lot when you say I am “all for it”. You could not be more wrong about me. And please explain what you mean by Trump being a “tiny meaningless thing”. Your comments are confusing. So being opposed to Trumpism makes me tribal? Is everybody tribal now if they want something more decent than MAGA right-wing, largely evangelical Christian, so-called conservatism? I can’t oppose that without being labeled tribal? Are you not being tribal in your own opinions and prejudices? And yes, I believe that the entire foreign relations apparatus at the State Department under Biden are a bunch of boobs completely in over their heads. Antony Blinken is not qualified to be dog catcher. Still think I'm tribal?
The biggest threat to America is shitty, clueless, ahistorical tribalism Joni.
I am not tribal. I understand the nefariousness of the national security state. I know our freedoms and privacy are being violated by constant surveillance. I only wish to point out that too wrongs, in this case Trump stealing documents that do not belong to him, and the spying on all of us that goes on, do not make a right. Trump did not go through any formal declassification process in relation to these documents. He broke the law. If you are okay with that, I don't understand why. It almost seems as if you are the tribalist here, because I doubt you would be so casual about stealing documents if Obama had done such a thing. And no, I have no respect for Obama either, so don't accuse me again of tribalism.
Wrong again. Obama is a warmonger and a literal baby killer.
The example you chose, "TRUUUMP!!" - a literal nothing, a tiny meaningless thing, shows who your tribe is.
"National security"?
What does that even mean? (for sure you have never asked this question)
Wow.
What does a chicken have to hide from a fox? The chicken isn't doing anything wrong.
Probably more than monitoring.