Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Markham
Do you prefer 9/11 attacks?
Until the West pulls out of fucking up the ME. It will always be at risk with 9/11 style attacks. Paris, Ohio, Orlando, San Bernardino, Garland, Boston, etc. Were ones the security forces failed to prevent.
How many of these were because of information the security force gleaned from, reading text messages or listening to phone calls, or reading emails?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego...orist_attempts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ates_post-9/11
Let's be honest no one is looking at what you do. It would take a staff of 10, million to look at every individual. Computers employ bots to trawl for keywords that flag certain people and habits. Then a human looks at it and a warrant is minutes away if required.
The problem for those collecting this information is not revealing how they do it or that it works. No point in telling the enemy you are watching them.
But and it's a big one. The people trawling for this information have to answer to the President to ensure they're effective. |
Therein is the problem. There are rules in place that these people are supposed to follow and they are not. Snowden proved this with what he leaked and nothing has happened to change that. The only one punished was Snowden himself. Add in that there isn't any credible information that proves these programs even work and it makes is scary to me.
No, they likely don't give a shit about an average person, until that average person fits a keyword profile. There was a guy here in Portland not too long ago who was arrested and held without any charges filed against him for three weeks. He was suspected of being a terrorist. Turns out he was a college student researching terrorism. He lost his job and had serious issues catching back up at school, not to mention all the idiots who now think he actually is a terrorist.
I look at it like this. If you give the government a little power they will want to take a lot and once they have a lot they aren't going to give it back. With no checks and balances, the power can be easily abused. There are plenty of ways for our law enforcement officers to keep us safe without these crazy invasions of privacy.
Also, we had plenty of warning about a 9/11 type of attack. Our intelligence agencies told Bush and Ashcroft that Bin Laden was planning an attack many times. They ignored the information. Ashcroft even told them to stop bringing Bin Laden up to him. Had they listened to the intelligence they may have been able to stop it without a massive NSA data mining campaign.