Edit: also, the transcript is incomplete and leaves out some of the best parts, such as Binney's story of how he called "Tom" (i.e. Drake, whose phone he knew was being tapped) to let the government know that he had evidence of malicious prosecution. Plus the endearing smile on his face as he points out that his prosecution was dropped after that.
USA Today should put up the whole unbroken discussion. Apart from the obviously important content and the obvious authoritativeness of the speakers, it's just a great piece of television—and it's not even television. It puts actual news TV to shame.
1. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd...
It is the second video down on your link and about 4 min in.
So, the ideal thing would be some kind of prize or other financial reward (or higher paying job) for Drake, or scholarships for his children.
Foreign intelligence services certainly have a far better picture of US intelligence capabilities than the American public. It is really of no help to them when NSA whistleblowers tell Americans "hey our government is illegally listening to your phone calls and reading your emails".
Albeit to be taken with a grain of salt, this is what I was supposing: you cannot have such a huge organization working "properly" on a day-to-day threat-response basis without some "elastic" access control. Even less if you are a contractor like B-A-H.
This, in a private entity, is less dangerous. You can have a lot of sysadmins with some access to Google's data because the data is properly partitioned and especially because there are no "targets". When each individual is a target, it is too hard to get proper partitioning.
Also, Google's employees have little to no incentives to make those data "public." And I guess direct access to the real emails is pretty hard: Google's money is not there but in the analytics. So internal anonymization may be not only performed but even easy to do. And this is good for Google & its clients.
The Federal government has the authority to create regulations, create laws, collect taxes, send people to your house to enforce those laws, remove/restrict your rights, sentence you to a prison term, send in armed officers to take down civilians groups viewed as dangerous, etc etc all the way to declaring full scale war. And, perhaps most importantly, the government has the authority to coherence third parties to cooperate in information sharing. Google will never be able to force Facebook to hand over their data, but the Federal government can force both of these parties to hand over their data to them.
The catch with having a monopoly on force is that your hands are supposed to be tied by the will of the people. There is a tremendous and intentional asymmetry in power. This necessitates an equally tremendous system of transparency, accountability and oversight.
I think once a day I hear "people willingly give all there data to facebook, why do they care if the NSA is listening", people need to understand what "monopoly on force" truly means.
But as you mention, that monopoly on force is tied to the will of the people.
If the government were to use force in a way other than approved by the laws setup by the peoples' representatives then you're already talking about something much worse on the totalitarian continuum than phone metadata.
And at that point, once the law has no limiting effect on the government anyways they could setup things hundreds of times worse. But they would hardly need to, as they could manufacture evidence of supposed "crimes" if need be and carry out sentences of their choosing for any reason at all.
They would only need things like Prism for dissidents, and dissidents would already assume that things hundreds of times worse were in place and take defensive measures accordingly.
So you're right that the monopoly on force is dangerous, but it has always been so. That's why it requires that tremendous system of transparency, accountability and oversight that you mention.
But given that we're able to provide those controls in the first place (controls which we cannot enforce on private companies, btw!) it makes sense again to ask the question of whether programs like these are both reasonable and effective, whether they can be properly supervised, and if so whether current systems are "proper supervision".
"Monopoly on force" is a warning about government, not the NSA. And especially not in the context of knowledge, where the government is mostly far out of its league compared with the private sector, and it's only getting worse.
He said its a myth they need all the data to make the connections in order to catch terrorists.
http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2475191994001/former-nsa-empl...
He starts talking about at the 2:57 mark.
"But now he is starting to talk about things like the government hacking into China and all this kind of thing. He is going a little bit too far. I don't think he had access to that program. But somebody talked to him about it, and so he said, from what I have read, anyway, he said that somebody, a reliable source, told him that the U.S. government is hacking into all these countries. But that's not a public service, and now he is going a little beyond public service.
"So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor."
"Second, let's be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people."
> one thinks he may have crossed a line by talking about surveillance on China
But you are correct about the politics, as it is politics that creates the loopholes to begin with. But that's a matter of annoyance, not illegality.
The best is to do exactly what the GP said: invade a popular existing party. Though, my choice would be the republicans because I anticipate backlash against the dems in the next election cycle.
But that's just hear-say.
Providing a "back door" to those systems is a simple as defining a user role.
ps. Can they start using other photos of Snowden? I mean come on, is that the only one the media has?
I just fear for him if he is caught, he will certainly be tortured by any side including USA.
