Why do you keep retroactively deleting and modifying your comments after other people have started commenting on them? It's like you think that you're the u.s. government.
Tomorrow, after your meds, read what you wrote and you will see that you are arguing against yourself. I'm only responding to you so that others here can see how insane you are.
Tomorrow if you wish to continue this debate we can do so in person with Roberts rules of debate, the loser with their head between their knees.
You just spout a bunch of rhetoric and nothing substantial. All of your comments here are the same. You shill for the u.s. the government.
Swiss intelligence is not idle. They were the group that leaked the report on the cia rendition programs, yet another illegal act by the u.s. intelligence community, but in this case by the CIA and not the NSA.
U.S. intelligence has not made an effort to uphold the law. How could you even say that? They have only worked within the law retroactively - they've had to change the law retroactively to make what the NSA has been doing not illegal.
If only Qwest took this route. Instead they rejected the government wiretap requests and the CEO went to prison for insider trading because he announced that they would probably lose their government contracts...
There is probably a good reason for monitoring of AT&T's internet traffic. We should all support our government in their efforts to detect terrorists through their communications.
This was an interesting and early revelation, but it wasn't until the Snowden documents that we understood what this closet really meant. We had no idea the government was recording every phone conversation in the u.s., every email, etc... We still had some hope that the rule of law as being followed and that this closet was just a way to make targeted surveillance easier.
First, I'm American. I've worked on NSA and DoD projects, and I've worked for PGP. I now live in Switzerland.
You only have to look at the consequences of the Snowden revelations. Nothing has really changed - some meaningless legislation was passed that moves the phone metadata recording to the phone companies from the NSA, but even then it's not clear that its stopped - the NSA data center in Utah where those conversations were recorded doesn't seem to be shutting down. I would bet the phone conversation, skype conversation, etc recording is still going on since it was never explicitly addressed anywhere in legislation.
And my comment about Americans being Authoritarian is nothing new - they've long considered to be Authoritarian.
The spying outside the u.s. is nothing like the corporate-government partnership spying in the u.s.
You can go to any Western country besides the u.s. and not be subject to indiscriminate spying.
What's funny is that if you're an American in the u.s. you have other governments in Europe, Australia, Canada, etc spying on you on behalf of the u.s. government and sending all of your information back to the u.s., but they're not spying on their own citizens to the same extent.
Really weird downvotes on this topic. I love it! I really wish we could see who votes on what topic. Part of me wishes the u.s. has its own government supported web-brigades like Russia so that they can be exposed and ridiculed. But the sad truth is most of these are probably coming from the HN readers that have drunk the u.s. government cool aide.
No, not really with ECHELON. That would have required all phone calls in the u.s. to be routed outside of the u.s., and really the only cooperating country was the UK, even though Canada was part of the group. It wasn't practical to route all communications from the u.s. through the UK, and it probably would have been noticed.
Spying on the u.n. based on terrorism legislation is a revelation. Recording of all telephone conversations in the u.s. is a revelation. Recording of all emails, skype, sms, etc is a revelation.
Before discovery of that room everyone knew that there was close cooperation between the telecoms and the government, but we had no idea it was this close and we were shocked at especially the recording of all phone conversations in the u.s.
Hopefully companies and organizations like the UN start moving away from AT&T. AT&T is a publicly traded company and so the only thing they understand is profit and loss.
The snowden releases cost u.s. tech companies $100B+, including a 10% drop in Cisco quarterly revenues. Hopefully this continues as multinationals continue to move their business outside the u.s.
Let the u.s. government spy on Americans all they want since Americans seem to like being spied on, while the rest of us move on. I know that mindset doesn't match many of the people here on HN, but Americans are mostly Authoritarian and seem to like the comfort they feel from programs like this.
The FCC has been cracking down on companies using long codes for SMS services because those long codes aren't required to follow the normal SMS rules concerning opting in, opting out, opt less keywords (help messages). For short codes the phone companies each test the short code to confirm it's following the rules.
Further, these long codes switch companies frequently as they get reused when they're no longer in use, and SMS user numbers have been spammed with sms messages as a result.