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[Brentai]

Nah, that's a generational difference, not a national one.  For all the crap we've been giving Tricky Dick today you have to kind of admire him for being a prime representative of the old guard of villainy, the kind of self-serving cretin who understood perfectly that the most personally gratifying action was often just to do the right thing.  He and his ilk were the reason the world ran so smoothly under the reins of a bunch of crooks and liars.  The current generation of villains don't understand that; they believe, and this is what people actually believe, that the only action that one can personally benefit from is one that entails being a perfect cockwipe to somebody else.

Your guy is no Tricky Dick; he's a Trickly Asshole.

[Mongrel]

I see that L.

[Thad]

We are talking about nothing less than the bedrock of the fundamental trust of the American people in the institutions of their government. That trust been under siege for some time, for nigh-on 40 years, arguably since or even before the watershed moment of Watergate. But wounded and battered as it is, that trust has more-or-less survived.

The value of these surveillance programs is dwarfed by the damage they do to the fabric of American democracy. Maybe that sounds trite? I don't know. Few things are as important as trust between the government and the governed; a nation without that ephemeral link will not stand for long.

Hard to judge.

First of all, I think I've proven over the past several years that I'm not very good at predicting what will and will not constitute a huge scandal in the minds of the American public at large.  I'm STILL baffled that people were surprised last year by a Republican saying poor people are lazy and want handouts.

On the one hand, I don't think the NSA scandal is foremost on most Americans' minds.  The thing that's foremost on most Americans' minds is how little money and job security they have.

On the other hand, when you don't have very much money or job security, you're MORE likely to be upset by -- well, absolutely anything at all than if you're secure and generally worry-free.

Stross recently pointed out that economic conditions like the ones we're in are exactly the time the government most WANTS to impose a police state, because an angry populace in an economic downturn is a powderkeg.

Meantime, though, while Congress's approval rating is in the twenties, individual congresscritters' approval ratings among their constituents are in pretty good shape; retention is still pretty high.  Hell, I'm no great fan of Sinema but if I don't vote for her the wrong lizard might get in.

The current generation of villains don't understand that; they believe, and this is what people actually believe, that the only action that one can personally benefit from is one that entails being a perfect cockwipe to somebody else.

I'll agree.  There's a whole lot of "If there for it, then I'm against it, just to piss them off" going around.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, I don't think we're talking about people burning down courthouses, but "we live in a (semi?)-police state" actually becoming an accepted part of the American narrative.

That's a long way to fall only two or three generations from the ethos of participatory civic duty that used to be a huge part of American life. Not that there haven't been streaks of anti-government sentiment in the past, but there are important differences between "Damn'd revenoors" and "Orwellian overlords".

[Mothra]

Edward Snowden's Dad, Lon Fires Back At Obama: My Son Has Sacrificed More Than The US President
Interview with Snowden's father. Nothing particularly new, but I thought it was worth the watch.

[Mongrel]

Surprising absolutely no one, internal audit finds NSA broke their own privacy rules thousands of times per year.

"Oh! Oh! It's okay! They have all these rules and stuff to prevent them from... wait..."

[Mongrel]

WSJ claims White House was given advance notice that Greenwald's partner would be detained

[Mongrel]

The Guardian claims the UK government sent bully-boys to get them to destroy the Snowden material

Here's an additional quote which is from the Financial Time article on the same event (it's here, but I can't see the article at all, because paywall).

A senior British government official demanded the destruction of files held by the Guardian newspaper related to the US National Security Agency’s mass monitoring of phone and internet use, the newspaper’s editor said.

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian which this year revealed a mass surveillance programme by US authorities, wrote late last night that two months ago he was contacted by an official claiming to represent the views of the prime ­minister.

“There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on,” he said. “The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.”

I wonder if any of these government idiots realizes how big the gas cans they're sloshing around are.

[Mongrel]

Now the posts are back.  @___@

Okay, who's foolin'?

[Mothra]

If... if nobody did that (I didn't), that is just the tiniest bit concerning.

[Mongrel]

Probably it was just Brent or someone fuckin' with us, or maybe Thad was going to do some post organization or something. The suggestion that an actual government would somehow be responsible for the careful excision of two posts (posts which link to public news sources, no less) is absurd.

But that constantly looking over your shoulder, even when there's logically no reason to?

That's what it feels like, living in a police state.

[Thad]

Don't look at me, I just got here.

I haven't checked the moderation logs but my money's on Arc.

[Mongrel]

my money's on Arc.

Don't I wish.

[Mongrel]

Holy crap Putin is the best fucking troll ever

He's defending the domestic intel programs and the like. And I'm DAMNED sure he knows how his "praise" will play domestically in the US. 

I’m sure the United States does not target civilians on purpose

I mean, you can SEE the trollface as he's saying it. Behind his deadly steel mask, I mean.

[Mongrel]

Whoops!

(Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency has bugged the United Nations' New York headquarters, Germany's Der Spiegel weekly said on Sunday in a report on U.S. spying that could further strain relations between Washington and its allies.

Citing secret U.S. documents obtained by fugitive former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, Der Spiegel said the files showed how the United States systematically spied on other states and institutions.

Der Spiegel said the European Union and the U.N.'s Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), were among those targeted by U.S. intelligence agents.

In the summer of 2012, NSA experts succeeded in getting into the U.N. video conferencing system and cracking its coding system, according one of the documents cited by Der Spiegel.

I mean, not that that really would surprise anyone with a pulse, but still. Airing dirty laundry in public and all that.

[Mongrel]

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/23/nsa-officers-sometimes-spy-on-love-interests/

NO ABUSE NO ABUSE LALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU (but I can tap your phone). 

EDIT: To be clear this actually isn't much of a story on the surface. People given tools like this abuse them and invariably get caught. Happens with cops, or even my own company. 

What's really problematic is the number. 3000! That's crazy. Someone I know pointed out that that's about 8.5 violations PER DAY, on JUST this one thing alone.

[Classic]

According to the report, that's the sum of violations not the number of "LOVEINT" violations in particular. Of course... The intelligence community has a name for this category of abuses so...

[Mongrel]

Whoops!

But yeah, the fact that they have a little silly name for it is not really reassuring.

[Mongrel]

More fun comes out.

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security

This really is shaping up to be something of an Igor Gouzenko moment, only in reverse. Of course the effect isn't quite the same, because Russia is just giggling about this and making fun of us, and while China's making notes for use later on, there's a bit too much pot-kettle there for them to speak up right now.

[Bal]

I mean, honestly, I don't think anyone should be surprised by this. Everyone has always been spying on everyone, including themselves, to whatever capacity was possible for the era. The problem is you're not supposed to get caught, because it's not just you getting caught, it's the whole intelligence community, everywhere, kind of implicitly getting caught, and nobody actually wants what they assume to be true proven to be the case.