Time Mag Person Of The Year

Well, I never even thought of the Pope. I think it was a good selection. Hip,hip, hooray!
 

Di said:
How can people in the US who are okay with blowing away intruders get all gaspy when it comes to their spooks doing it? I don't quite get that I must admit.

If I were on a jury trying Snowden, I would vote not guilty. I suppose it's all this stuff about the Patriot Act and all this NSA snooping and spying on it's own citizen and all this police state stuff and all this lack of trust between our peoples, and lack of trust of people for their government, seemingly making the government an enemy of it's own citizenry, I can only wish Snowden well. I neither hold nor wish Australia any ill will.
 
I disagree... He pointed out where this country has gone haywire. I suspect we've more more spy's in our own government spying on our own people than there are terrorist in the world.
 
What about your home-grown nutters who want to participate in mass murder and bombings ... who's going to keep an eye on them? :confused:
We don't know how many "bad things" have been foiled, do we?
 
drifter said:
Di said:
How can people in the US who are okay with blowing away intruders get all gaspy when it comes to their spooks doing it? I don't quite get that I must admit.

If I were on a jury trying Snowden, I would vote not guilty. I suppose it's all this stuff about the Patriot Act and all this NSA snooping and spying on it's own citizen and all this police state stuff and all this lack of trust between our peoples, and lack of trust of people for their government, seemingly making the government an enemy of it's own citizenry, I can only wish Snowden well. I neither hold nor wish Australia any ill will.
Click to expand...

I can't disagree about your view of the NSA or for that matter our own ASIO spying on their own citizenzry.... to a point.
I do though take exception to anyone's Spooks involving friendly Nations in intelligence sharing operations and then failing to protect those allies with a reasonable degree of security.

Had Snowden done a neat sniping job on the domestic spying aspects of the NSA then fine, your business to sort out.
But he didn't, he chose to fire a shotgun, loaded with other Nations' secrets, with his eyes shut and with no regard to who was in the line of fire internationally.
His actions could only hurt his own Country and it's Allies so what was his agenda exactly??

Angela got antsy about her phone being hacked but how much did Germany suffer financially over the whole fiasco?
We never got an apology for our trade deals dunking by the NSA's stuff up, we just got shrugged off as collateral damage by Obama. Not headline worthy enough? Or doesn't it matter when it's only your friends who get hurt?

I don't think Assange is any too popular in the US is he?? He's one of our ferals who spilled America's beans, was Snowden payback??
How the US views Assange is how we feel about Snowden!

Assange though is at least a civilian! He took no oaths of allegiance. He was a serving member of nothing but himself.
He hacked bribed and coerced his own way into information, which is yet another embarrassment to US intelligence security wallahs, but he wasn't simply handed access to it by a security chief. Snowden was misjudged trustworthy enough to access and give whatever he wanted to whoever he pleased when had a bad hair day.

Assange was never trusted by anyone, since he was caught hacking as a teenager. But obviously Snowden was.
Assange got into their data banks despite their prior knowledge of him, his agenda, and his skills over decades.
It's mindblowing that they couldn't stop him! If he can get through the firewalls and loyalty of security forces then how much do you think China knows??

The only favours these two have done us it to disabuse us of the notion that our spooks are as good as they'd have us believe and that they have things under control. That only happens in novels, TV and movies. They're struggling, and the last thing our 'team' needs is their own side handicapping them with goody 2 shoes fantasies of fair play.

Like many I wavered on judging Assange, hero or villain. Logic wanted to hang him, the faint glimmer of rebel went Yea. Leaning towards hanging lately.

If the information either of them released ever stood a chance of altering attitudes globally then maybe a point could be made. But it didn't. I was disastrously damaging to only one bloc, ours. It was treason/betrayal/pure bloody minded egotistical and malevolent one-upmanship or whatever, but a 'good thing?' NO, I can't see it as that, sorry.

It isn't only all about the US' domestic Government policies, this stuff-up goes a lot wider than that.
 
dbeyat45 said:
What about your home-grown nutters who want to participate in mass murder and bombings ... who's going to keep an eye on them? :confused:
We don't know how many "bad things" have been foiled, do we?
Click to expand...

The NSA, the government to keep an eye on them...or indirectly be the cause of the mass murders and bombings? We know very little of what bad things have been foiled, along with the bad things that have been carried out by the "watchers".
 
Most of the home grown nutters as you call them are not known until they pull the trigger some where, usually in schools where the only ones who can know are fellow students. You down under know about as much abut these a we do. On the other hand, anything our feds say they have prevented is merely an attempt to justify all the expense of this listening in everywhere. I doubt they prevented anything. I think we had a better system before we created the Homeland Security.
 
Now back to Di and all the damage Mr Snowden had done to her and her country. This might be a good place to point out that I am not all knowing nor all seeing even though I may sometime project that I have that ability. I didn't realize the fallout would be so wide, the collateral damage so great. I thought the most that would happen is that some countries would suffer a little embarrassment. So in view of that oversight and in view of the fact I could not convict Mr. Snowden, should I be called to serve on a jury of his peers. I stand defenseless and may be in for a good tongue lashing or a few strokes of the cane.
 
I wasn't 'having a go' at you Drifter, never, just pointing out that not all sides of things are aired fairly very often, they sure weren't in this case. Not in the States anyway, but then that is what you are all antsy about in the first place isn't it?

It's a vexed question and the baby and the bathwater are damned hard to separate when you want to throw the system out.

SB that is all very fine for Snowden to spout lyrical about his good intent but much of the information released had little to do with 'home' security and more to do with stirring up ill feelings and extortion opportunities among foreign Nations.

America is only the centre of the World to Americans, the rest of us aren't all marching to the same drum. Close, but the beat differs sometimes.

This is why a forum like this is so damned valuable. It allows us to understand viewpoints and how and why different opinions are held beyond what we are being fed by our own puppet masters and media. We can discover what they're up to via roundabout chatter, that's why the Internet is banned in some places. Make the most of it while it lasts.

But there's a limit to everything, even to freedom of the press if a scoop brings disastrous consequences to the community as a whole. Who gets to arbitrate on that? That is the crux of it all isn't it? I doubt we'll have a say in that for long.

The Snowden's of the world seem to think that other Nations will all have some kind of enlightened epiphany and suddenly start playing by their 'nicer' rules. (of Queensbury?)
That ain't gonna happen! Ever. That's Pollyanna stuff. No Nation can afford to be Pollyanna.

[ramble]
Was focus on M.E. bomb fetishes a cause or an effect? I think we all suspect that the 'War on Terror' is a cover for a far more complex agenda, but what ya gonna do about it? Call it off? Let 'em think they've 'won'? How much cheekier will they get then? Or go in harder and lose more lives and spend more money we don't have? Or settle for relying on espionage to keep us at least in touch with what might be going on, or down?

You think you have a problem with Mexican drug runners? Try living next door to 220million Muslims who hang Australians for carrying dope but allow terrorist bomber's bosses who orchestrated blowing 82 of us away in Bali to get away with 2 years in jail because they did it for Allah.

We aren't supposed to spy on them?? Really? They are sending boatloads of unidentifiable, majority Moslem refugees down here now.
Only by closely working with them on an intelligence level allows us to at least know who is heading here. Snowden blew that tenuous and hard won collaboration to pieces. They can't be seen to be working with us now or their own touchy populace would be outraged. they've withdrawn their own surveillance of refugees now and will let them all go unchecked. I might add that's despite us throwing them the lazy billion in 'foreign aid' to cover their expenses.
Thanks a lot Snowden.

Is it just me or does this homeland surveillance thing seem to be ramping up in relation to population density and mixing and the speed of global transport? Would you have this problem if it wasn't for the terrorism card? Was it the cause, or the effect?

The bigger the crowd, the harder it is to control. If you have a sparse and/or reasonably homogenous population you are are only going to need a 'Bobby' with a night stick. Condense them into bigger, mixed agenda and harder to control crowds and you breed SWAT squads.

Same with the spooks I'd guess.
Spies ain't spies if they are at home are they? They're 'investigators.' So where do you draw the line about finding foreign spies? If (I'm not sure who's who over there so forgive errors in acronyms)... Say the CIA knows Charlie, a Maester bombmaker's little cousin, is flying in.
Are they supposed to stand idly by at the airport because it's not their territory any more? Don't they then have to involve the FBI to take care of local baddies? How would the FBI know who his contacts were if the CIA weren't allowed to tell them? There has to be an overlap in jurisdiction. It can't work without that. They can't stop Charlie coming in if he's got no form, that wouldn't be 'ethical' or PC by Pollyanna rules. So, how would any of them know where Charlie's old boyhood pal lives so they can keep an eye on Charlie if they weren't 'spying' locally? How would they even know that his pal was in the States?

So what's the next move? Turn loose a new Security Authority who can work unilaterally? There lies dragons! But what's the alternative?
I think we need to get over the fantasy that rights, ethics and principles are the sole reason for existence or that premise will be tested by those Nations who don't think so. Pollyannas will not fare well.

The world is too far gone to expect those old biblically ethical values to control it, they simply won't. Adapt or die. None of us want to live in Big Brother World but it's going to be that one or Mad Max's. Take your pick and place your bets folks.

Civilization isn't what it was a century ago we have to acknowledge that. Technology alone has changed us beyond what our great grandparents could have ever imagined. Their rules worked for their world, and although their World had remained largely unchanged for centuries, we must recognize that it has changed drastically in this last one. We may dream of better kinder times but should remain aware that the odds are against them returning. The Snowdens are simply fanning the flames on a wildfire.

Go watch Blade Runner and Gattica and maybe Soylent Green again and get used to the idea.

[/ramble] I've run out of cynicism, I'll have to go and reload.
 
Funny that you mention Blade Runner ... when it came out in '82 I was shocked at how much the street scenes looked like NYC. The fashions were a little off and of course they weren't selling replicant snakes - but people WERE wearing veils and they WERE selling cheap knock-offs of brand-name electronics.

Alas, my search for Pris was a failure, but I did run into a couple of Rachaels. ;)
 
I think of Blade Runner and those 'sky ads' whenever I see a laser show on a building or artificial smoke or water mist screen. I think the in-your-face ads bothered me more than the replicants and 'lifestyle'.
 
Yeah, like that.

Is it just me or is that just illuminated graffiti? It's every bit and more annoying to look at, desecrates architecture and trashes the landscape.
So why just pick on graffiti taggers?
 
Diwundrin said:
Yeah, like that.

Is it just me or is that just illuminated graffiti? It's every bit and more annoying to look at, desecrates architecture and trashes the landscape.
So why just pick on graffiti taggers?
Click to expand...

Well, it's corporate-sponsored, electronic graffiti - all the difference in the world. :rolleyes:

I have to admit that, at least back in the day, walking through there at night was like attending a light show at a concert. Even better if you were under the influence of any one of several easily-procured psychotropic compounds at the time - you could stand in the middle of 42nd Street and Broadway, watch the pretty lights and listen to all the car horns going off at once ...
 
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