[quote=The-Shoveler]Not saying the guys an Idiot but kind of an expensive price to pay to tell everyone what us paranoid wacko’s would told you years ago,
(i.e.. you are always being recorded, videotaped and all your emails read, soon they will electronically read you mind).
also tracked via the GPS on your smartPhone.
Anyway that’s what paranoid wackos like me believe,
so am I a wacko ? just saying.[/quote]
Couple points….
I think calling the guy a whistle blower is a bit of hyperbole. A whistle blower would be someone who exposes illegal activities, or at very least policy violations. Snowden did neither. While I’m wholeheartedly supportive of what he did, everything he exposed is perfectly legal. Therein lies the problem.
The Patriot Act, and all its amendments, extensions, and modifications allows the FISA court to approve and allow this broad authority to require the telecoms to turn over all this meta-data. So congress passed the law. The executive branch continues to exercise its rights under the law, and the judicial branch approved that exercise.
Some of us were screaming about it more than a decade ago (and at every amendment, expansion and extension of that law) because we expected it to happen. Some disregarded those warning, and saw the broad expansion of executive powers as a necessity to fight enemies within our midst. But the fact is, it’s law, so the collection of this data is legal, and the revelations by Snowden are not.
This little rant isn’t directly responsive to the comment quoted……but this little part..
i.e.. you are always being recorded, videotaped and all your emails read, soon they will electronically read you mind…
kinda struck a chord with me. Last night, after arriving home from a long weekend in SD (celebrating the retirement of by brother, after 33 years as a good-for-nothing civil servant cop), the screen on my electronic thermostat controls was blinking “BATTERY LOW”. So I checked the little Honeywell manual that was buried in a drawer and figured out what kind and how to change the batteries. See that? I checked the manual. And then opened up some news site on the intertubes this morning, and up pops an ad. For Honeywell HVAC controls. What-the-F’ity EF EF? How do it know?
