http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2013/06/a-letter-to-verizon-customers.html
:tif:
Couple other fun facts
"NSA head 1 week ago told @Reuters “We’re the only ones not spying on the American people.”
And my favorite tweet of the day
“U.S. Dept. of Fear @FearDept
So far this week we’ve secured your DNA, your Verizon phone records, and your Google accounts. And it’s only Thursday. #NSA”
Read about this in a few articles. This country is getting scary.
I typically don’t go crazy over this privacy stuff. I don’t do anything that’s going to catch their attention so I could care less, especially if it makes us safer. However, at this point it’s getting ridiculous and I’m quickly changing my position.
I just saw an article that had the Obama administration claiming it was to combat terrorism…Great fucking excuse.
Might as well just burn down houses until we find a terrorist.
<DISCLAIMER>
I’m am not pro or anti Obama or republican or democrat or any of that politcal fuck shit.
My argument about combating terrorism like this is wide spread surveillance like this creates so much data you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Take what happened with the Boston bombing foreign governments warned the US and still the bombed slipped through the cracks.
Yea this really isn’t about any one political party or president its just a broad overreaching of the government
I have come to develop 2 main issues with this mindset, I used to say the same things. I used to say “those who have nothing to hide, hide nothing”.
My first concern is this all kind of assumes everyone is GUILTY before innocent, the opposite of freedom and what America claims to stand for.
My second concern is…who’s to say what can/will catch their attention going forward? If you are an activist in the least and speak out against their policies you could be considered a “terrorist”.
Times are scary and it’s not getting better, it’s getting much worse rapidly.
Completely agree. Which is kinda why I’ve always hated those videos where people recite the bill of rights at a border checkpoint and give the guards a hard time. If you’re not hiding anything why not just say yeah I’m an American and move on.
Then there is the other side of it. Why are you checking my phone records if I’m not a terrorist suspect? Do you have a legitimate reason to believe I’m planning terrorist activity? Clear violation of privacy.
I love those videos. You have a right to travel unmolested and an interior checkpoint violates that right. They could set them up in buffalo if they felt like it and I bet that you would change your mind then.
“Thirty-six 2014 model year GM vehicles are compatible with the RemoteLink mobile app,” says GM is a press release, meaning that most of GM’s new cars are permanently on-line, can be reached, tracked, can reveal their locations, OnStar, or not, ignition or, or not.
“OnStar data [is] transmitted via wireless data, which is wide open to the government and criminals alike.”
The blame really doesn’t belong on Verizon, this is all on the federal government.
This may make some of you feel slightly better, but we don’t actually monitor Mobile to mobile calls (we don’t have the capability to do so at our MTSO in buffalo), but there is record of all calls made (which is used for billing purposes). This is what the government allegedly has requested, although in our buffalo switch I haven’t seen any formal requests yet. Talked to some coworkers and they mentioned when the patriot act originally came into place the FEDs and local police would come knocking with a sup.
I agree that this this is all wrong, like the majority of you, but please don’t blame us at Verizon.
EDIT:
Co-worker also mentioned to me that the FEDs have some really complex software that will map all your calls into something like a “spider” diagram. The can then use this to see what the relationships are between users. Pretty much like an totalitarian “6-degrees from kevin bacon” :tdown:
Just wait until they really start their push for the new automobile fuel tax. They are trying to figure out ways to tax per mile rather than per gallon. This would mean that every vehicle would have a GPS enabled box in there to track your every movement and that when you filled up, you would pay your tax on it.
There are many flaws about it right now, but they are looking into it.
I can see this much data being used to find patterns in calls when there is some sort of terrorist activity and see if it can be detected. My guess is we’ll never really find out something like that though as they’re already pretty tight-lipped about even doing it.
This is what they will tell you it is for all day long:
(Reuters) - The Obama administration on Thursday defended its collection of a massive amount of telephone records from at least one carrier as part of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, re-igniting a debate over privacy even as it called the practice critical to protecting Americans from attacks.
This is what gets me upset:
The admission came after Britain’s Guardian newspaper published on Wednesday a secret court order related to the records of millions of Verizon Communications customers. The surveillance appears to have involved the phone records of millions of Americans.
Why is it that a British newspaper has to break the story? Are all news outlets here in the states in bed with the Obama administration?
Fact: Over the past few weeks, four major scandals have broken over the Obama administration, and it is a very sad (and frightening) truth that our pathetic, American, lapdog mainstream media is not responsible for breaking even a single one.
Verizon? Nope, not our guys. That was the Brits over at The Guardian.
IRS? Nope, not our guys. The IRS broke their own scandal with a planted question.
The Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records? Nope, not our guys. Believe it or not, the Associated Press didn’t even break that story. Like the IRS, we only found out because the Justice Department outted itself in a letter notifying the AP of what it had done.
Benghazi? Are you kidding. With a couple of rare exceptions (Jake Tapper, Sharyl Attkisson) the media has spent the last 8 months attacking those seeking the truth (Congress, Fox News) not seeking the truth. It was the GOP congress that demanded the email exchanges around the shaping of the talking points, not the media.
Left up to the media, we wouldn’t know anything about Libya. All of the media’s energy was collectively poured into ensuring the truth was never discovered.
And do you want to know what makes this realization especially pathetic? In three of the four scandals (the AP being the exception), had our media been less interested in protecting Power and more interested in holding Power accountable, these huge, career-making stories were right there for their taking.
For over a year now, conservative Tea Party groups have been complaining about IRS harassment. But because Obama told them to, the media hates the Tea Party. So in the face of these complaints and even a few Congressional inquiries, the media either ignored the harassment reports or openly sided with the IRS. (No joke. Click the link.)
Obviously, you can say the same about Libya. All the dots were there to connect: Security failures, two weeks of lies, the midnight arrest of some hapless filmmaker… But rather than connect the dots, the media played goalie for Obama against Fox News and Darrell Issa. Besides, there was a re-election to win and Todd Akin got something wrong about The Womanparts.
The irony of border checks is so many people scream & cry about illegals, essentially asking for more patrolling. Then they get the checks they ask for and bitch that they have to go through checkpoints. LOL
DO I LOOK ILLEGAL?
Oh and even more good news
U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program
What I think is the most fucked up part, is this is the stuff that we KNOW about… Imagine what we don’t…
This reminds me of the show “person of interest” . Whoever leaked that will misteriously die in the next few weeks.
Blame the voters. End of story.
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Wait until a biotech company patents YOUR DNA.
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Oh and don’t annoy a cop in NYS for if you do you could be a felon. Then of course you can’t vote or own a gun… how convenient.