James Bamford on Section 702 Extension
Longtime NSA-watcher James Bamford has a long article on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Comments
Clive Robinson • June 28, 2024 3:17 PM
James Bamford, I think has been watching the NSA from before the ink had dried on their charter…
I’m not sure he’s ever really had a good word for them you could print 😉
Erdem Memisyazici • June 28, 2024 6:38 PM
I love this quote:
The size of a small city, it is the largest, most secret, most powerful, and most intrusive spy organization ever created.
This is what anybody in the U.S. today that has any say over their life is trying to do. Increase your privacy and decrease everyone else’s. Unfortunately that prospect is unlikely for the average citizen. I spoke to one guy in 7/11 today who told me we had no privacy since we had the Internet.
Another person whom I’ve spoken to had the idea of having no privacy as simply being recorded through street cameras.
When I posed a scenario where you can root someone’s phone and narrate their dreams to insipre them to goals of your interest he cared a little more. After mentioning how A.I. is cheap when it comes to monitoring everyone he cared a little more. Truth is people don’t realize the influence you can exert efficiently over an unsuspecting person if you can allow them no privacy while having access to what they see and hear 24/7.
We are trying to say today through our educational apparatus, “let the medical industry have access to everyone’s mental profiles, surely they won’t misuse it” but then I am personally living the hell of being drugged against my will and coerced into an implant based PTSD program where I have speakers attached to my face that I can’t take off and the program involves precisely the sort of manipulation I described. Narrating my life, making sounds when I’m angry and narrating my dreams as I sleep. This can happen to anybody as such programs are administered federally. You could be traumatized intentionally then promptly implanted with a doctor on board to annoy you for the rest of your life.
Making strong privacy laws and openly enforcing such laws is the only way forward in my opinion but it must start with the public understanding more about why this is important. What can be done with it?
That being said those eavesdropper proof windows mentioned in the article cost quite a bit of money.
JonKnowsNothing • June 28, 2024 10:24 PM
@Erdem Memisyazici, All
re: No Privacy
Mark Zuckerberg also said this publicly once Facebook became popular. Something like
- “privacy is dead”.
re: Strong Laws
Laws are only “good enough” when the public majority abide by the law. When a law fails to garner public support strange things happen.
- In New Caledonia a French colonial holding, for which you will have to look on a map to find it, a fairly large percentage of the population was not best pleased with a new proposed law from the French Mainland. Macron had to withdraw the imposition of the law, temporarily.
Laws are only good enough when the country court systems uphold them.
- Laws that fail to garner judicial support or lose judicial support will not be applied in the same way. Rules are rules but rules can be bent.
Currently in many parts of the world there are discussions both peaceful and violent about how laws are applied. There are a variety of view points and a variety of issues. People are not monolithic in beliefs. How these beliefs will play out in the near-term and mid-term will determine much about how laws will be enforced for the next years.
example:
- In the middle east some housing is declared illegal through their court systems and legally bulldozed in alignment with the law. Lots of MSM reporting on this.
- In a small town in California, Bloomington, what was once a semi-rural area where people could have a home, some animals, grow crops, has now been almost completely bulldozed to make room for Amz style warehouse freeway interchange. What few homes that have not yet succumbed, are surrounded 24/7 by idling diesel rigs rolling into and out of the warehouse complex. All legally approved through the courts and the city.
- In Northern California, Solano County, a city not yet built, is in the planning and will be on the ballot. Quietly, the farm lands of the area were legally purchased by agents for Tech Oligarchs who plan to build a City of Tomorrow on the farm lands. It is all legally done similar to the way Los Angeles Department of Water and Power purchased the water rights to the Owens Valley and headwaters. All the Owens Valley water is piped by enormous aqueducts to fill the swimming pools of Los Angeles. This City of the Future has a similar problem: There is No Water. The Oligarchs have plans for a dedicated water delivery system to supply their tech city.
There are competing interests, which is why courts evolved. Not many of them are Salomon-Like. The rules they interpret are the rules made by selected interest groups.
- Links to source are not included / you will have to follow the breadcrumbs on your own.
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morris • June 28, 2024 10:48 AM
FISA has always been shockingly unconstitutional, but your Federal Government ‘representatives’ reallly like the broad power it conveys to them and their government operatives.