Is this how it began in nazi Germany?

[Stephen Eisel]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investiga ... print.html

Documents: U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge
By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, Updated: Thursday, June 6, 9:09 PM
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track one target or trace a whole network of associates, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

[Sandra Donnelly]

Snowden is no hero...
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/c ... -hero.html

Collection of metadata does not constitute profiling. This narcissistic evil punk genius was planning his trip to China for months, and used his "free speech/protection of privacy" ruse to dupe gullible Americans into thinking he was some kind of bastion of civil disobedience.

[ryan costa]

the Gnatzees weren't known for their network monitoring abilities.
often times, resistance cells in countries occupied by NAZIS were better at it than they were.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5399 ... ge_Too_Far

data monitoring is what we invest up the stock values of companies like Google for.
people love data mining. it is a technology of the future.

what is obvious from data mining is that it doesn't work very well, and the results are usually meaningless.

search for anything in Google. most of the results are irrelevant or meaningless or redundant or useless.

[ryan costa]

America has always struggled with how to react to new technology and new opportunities.

For example, from the very beginning of colonialization and settlement land and food was so cheap and plentiful, we made it a custom to spend very much time drinking alcohol. that is why we talk so much slower and louder than our European forebears. and that is why various temperance movements sprung up in different parts of the country.

eventually we ended up being the first country where a large segment of nearly every class was driving automobiles. Rather than reflect on how this was an enormous cultural change, we just passed Prohibition instead. because it was a lot more annoying when drunk people were showing up from all over. automobiles can't be the problem. everyone enjoys driving. therefore it must be alcohol.

and now we have the internets. civilization isn't quite sure what to make of it. mostly, it is used for advertising and marketing campaigns.

I try to use technology to find answers to life's persistent questions.
For example: why are the shoelaces always too long? Every time!
I asked this question to the Google website. I found that I am not the only one with this question. But nobody had the answers!
It is safe to conclude there are no answers, and the shoe oligarchs will continue with this practice until the end of human history.

the internet is a great forum for terrorists and wingnuts and psychos to meet and share ideas and become much bigger terrorists or wingnuts or psychos than they otherwise would have been. and so the government has some vague automated software that probably doesn't notice much of any of it. it is no worse than google or facebook's marketing research software.

[russell dunn]

50 years ago the postmaster took off the green eyeshade and stopped the
pigeonhole sorting of regular stamped mail. Optical Character Readers were
now able to read recipient destinations on the envelopes, maybe sender, too.

Unless these machines were hooked up to giant bananas or something, I'm going
to guess that computers were involved to an extent that maybe who we have
been "mailing" all these years has not been a sacrosanct secret.

I don't know enough about the current controversy to contribute anything beyond
some sophomoric bleat, so I won't.

Should my parents have flipped out because some machine was reading the outside
of their envelopes ? I'm serious about the question, Thanks.

[Jim O'Bryan]

If Hitler had an IRS, it would have definitely looked like Obama's IRS...

Really?

We do need to start another catch all thread. "Worst than Hitler..." We could use it for talking
about anything that has to do with Obama, and well, uhhh, errrr, uhhhh hmmmmm well for
all of that Obama stuff you bring up all the time.

Maybe some other stuff down the road.

.