Quote from Racer X NZ :

While I'm quite happy to let the US devolve into a stasi state, blah blah blah
.

The Drug war (mentioning the drug war is on the list too ) our government created and your government blindly obeys to set a series of things in motion that pretty much will start our second civil war. When this war happens, it won't be a simple blue versus gray thing. It will be multi-factioned and full of fleeting alliances. The problem with the NSA monitoring and other crap the powers that be do is that it costs money. Lots of money. And forget about the economic polls. That money is running out. They can't afford to do what they want and they know it. You wanna try to monitor the activities of 300 plus million people on a shoe string budget? Go ahead and tell us how that works. Or would it be better to have "leaks" that imply you have that power? The CIA, NSA, DIA (oops!) and ICE are masters of dis-information. Using idiots like the cable guy in Hong Kong helps to inflate their perceived powers. And that inflated power helps keep people in line.
Anyways, if you think that when this civil war occurs that your little Island will be safe from its effects, guess again. If you were smart, you'd quit bothering with these same ol same ol conspiracy theory rants and use that energy to make the right connections and get yourself armed. I know that even paint ball guns are illegal in your nanny state. But so are narcotics. And you can get those easy enough. You have a market for firearms too. So you can sit there and keep on keeping on typing gibberish until the internet runs out and the state comes bashing in your door or you can get prepared for what's to come.

What's the NSA budget ?, whilst its 'secret' 10 to 20 billion are the range of figures I've seen, that's not including the other alphabet soup agencies or the massive black ops funding from drug running or the other criminal acts the farces of law and order are engaged in.
And wars are great for bankers, they get both sides in debt.
Most people know that the US is not run by or for the people, it's run by and for bankers and corporations.
Hell, in the US complaining about your water is now a terrorist act. And, FYI, even rainwater belongs to the state.
No, guns aren't illegal here, and its surprising how many people are armed.
We also do have a history of getting upset and making it clear to the govt what the people want. We did ban nuclear ships, not just the US's, and got booted out of ANZUS for our principles.
The US has only got desperate enough to talk to us recently, a free trade agreement with China seemed to help there......

Edit: Without NZ, Aust (a)N(d) US - Check the acronym.

Dude, if the US people want an ally, give us a txt. Or, watch "The Mouse that Roared", we are on your side..........

Snowden is not revealing information that places the national security of America at risk, but information revealing the NSA has instead been tracking enemies of the national security state.

Those who seem to be the real targets of this surveillance program include Veterans, Constitutionalists, NRA members, 9/11 Truthers, Ron Paul supporters, and any one else who might have both the courage, the integrity and the ability to resist the imposition of a new military police state under the DHS.
The latest figures about the “Main Core” list of political dissidents stands at around 8,000,000 today.

I knew this thread will appear in here. But it's absolutely pointless to discuss anything. Everyone knew this was happening all the time and no one cared, now when it's public, still no one cares. Poeple are too lazy to care about their privacy and also 'why care when you have nothing to hide?' - this is actually partially true.

Spying on citizens has absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, etc. If you know a bit more about the Internet, you also know criminality doesn't happen on Skype, or Facebook, or Gmail, or LFSForum...some people like to call it the 'dark side of the Internet', which are basically websites you never heard of, accessible usually only by TOR client. It's obvious they're trying to make a profile about ordinary people like us. For prevention? Maybe.

If you actually have nothing to hide you shouldn't also mind. One thing is that it's not very comfortable to know that someone follows each your step on the Internet, looks your Google searches, reads your Skype messages... But also if you're really not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about because...what can they do with information you searched 'gay buttplug' last night? Chances that someone will actually read your profile is almost nothing.

People don't care about their privacy at all. DDG increases its daily visitor count from 30 mil to 90 mil I think (lazy to find source), which is absolutely nothing compared to any other search engine. The thing is - when you're used to something for years, you won't do something else. I also tried to use DDG but the search engine itself is just shit. That's why I won't use it, until it improves and I'm still using Google, but I never sign in.
You also won't stop using Skype or Facebook so easily if all your friends are using it. I'd love to switch to secure alternative like Jabber but what's the point when I have no friends over there?
Millions of people also don't mind using Chrome, majority don't eve know all their data are sent to Google, minority probably don't mind. But why they don't mind if they can use browser like Iron which is Chrome spy-free, I have absolutely no idea. And people don't even bother to use Ghostery while browsing.

TL;DR: people don't care about their privacy online even when they know they're watched all the time.

I stopped using my Hotmail account in favour of Google’s service, but I made sure to login every month to keep it going, and to preserve all those old emails.
And then one month, in around 2007, I forgot and the whole thing was wiped.
I was upset to lose all that correspondence, that history with some people who had now passed on, even a genuine death threat from someone who really should have known better. All those moments… lost in time.
But then I heard this week about the NSA’s extensive history, getting access to Microsoft’s servers, tracking and recording people’s actions and I thought… maybe they backed up my Hotmail account. I’m sure I emailed about terrorism during that period. From discussing the similarities between the events of Starship Troopers and 9/11, to the relevance of V For Vendetta to the activities of the Bush administration, and the rationale behind Joe Quesada being a communist sleeper spy. And I’m a foreigner, all very suspicious stuff. I bet they were all over that.
So, dear NSA, dear Prism, I’m happy for you to read all my emails, all my instant messages, all my Facebook posts. But if you did back up my Hotmail account – twisting@hotmail.com – could I have it a copy? It would really make my day.
Thanks!

Yes, thats a joke !
And no terrorist ( who isn't employed by the US ) ever expects the net is safe, so who are they getting information on ?

There are many ways to keep information private, BUT, if you run a company in country X and have a delusion that your business info is safe when you use email, the cloud, etc then don't be surprised if suddenly a US company has access to your business information.

Whilst none of my business clients use the US controlled cloud it's harder preventing info leaking with emails.

And, for anyone who has legitimate info that they don't want to release convincing them to use steganography for all business communication is much harder.

My advise is forget the web, go back to secret ink in a bland business letter. It really is simpler.

Quote from Rappa Z :

..Anyway, if you don't have anything to hide, why care at all?

This. And keep in mind that they DON'T know anything about you. Your data is just registered and IF they want to know about you, they can, which is different than having someone working 24/7 reading all the emails or hearing conversations around the world.

Quote from Rappa Z :

Anyway, if you don't have anything to hide, why care at all?

The right for privacy allows you to not disclose arbitrary information about your life. If someone has an uncontrolled access to your personal data, this right is taken away from you. That's why you should care.
It's also rather naïve to think that you have nothing to hide, because you do. Everybody does. I'm not talking about large stashes of weed or semtex in the basement here you're looking to sell, I'm talking about stuff that cannot put you behind bars but still can harm your public image. For instance, I'm pretty sure someone could paint me as an über psychotic monster if they got their hands on some of my drunken IM chats history. I think this sums it up very well:

Quote from Cardinal Richelieu :

Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.

Quote from NitroNitrous :

And keep in mind that they DON'T know anything about you. Your data is just registered and IF they want to know about you, they can, which is different than having someone working 24/7 reading all the emails or hearing conversations around the world.

They don't have to assign a person to monitor you 24/7. We have pattern matching algorithms for that. If an organization with access to the kind of data PRISM allowed had the capacity to go through all the data, what makes you think they wouldn't do it?

Happy Independence Day from Eygpt

Lets see who's actually paying attention.
Given the Rolling Stone cover etc, what isn't said in this article is in some ways more interesting than what is.
http://rt.com/usa/leaked-images-tsarnaev-capture-287/

Shades of Hastings.

America, the best 'democracy' money can buy..........
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/money-nsa-vote/

Quote from Racer X NZ :

America, the best 'democracy' money can buy..........

People that live in glass houses shouldn't throw rocks.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23475583

I'm not too clear what the link is between 217 US senators selling out the US's constitution for bribes and an overweight South African.

Considering that Kim Dotcom is now a NZer I think you may find that there's more behind the story than the headlines.

I think it may have something to do with the expected flood of US refugees

Anyway, it's interesting to watch the US's descent into a police state, Especially the complete silence over the treason of these senators.

Mind you, I think your constitution died a while ago, did you realise what Eric Holder actually said last week ? He wrote to Russia and promised that Snowden wouldn't be tortured or killed ( yeah, right )
As surprising as this may be to Americans, your constitution actually guarantees this, however your Attorney General clearly feels differently.
And still Americans sleepwalk their way through life.

Quote :

New Zealand has one of the highest obesity rates in the developed world, with nearly 30% of people overweight.

Obesity rate in Connecticut in adults

Quote from CDC :

22.5%

Go away fat man racer X

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

I prefer to think of it as the stig and his American cousin

Quote from Bmxtwins :

Obesity rate in Connecticut in adults
Go away fat man racer X

Now, thats an interesting response, I'm very careful of online images posted of me so I doubt that you know what I look like.



(Note for the NSA, check Alabama 3 at Womad 2012, I'm in the mosspit.)

I'll take NZ figures regarding obesity for this conversation as they will make my point quite adequately, When our figures are broken down there is a clear relationship between education ( knowledge, imho ) and obesity.

In the 2008 report, adults of Māori and other Polynesian descent had a much higher rate of obesity than white New Zealanders.[1] The rate for the Pacific peoples were nearly triple the white average, while Māori reported nearly double the white rate. 65% of adult Pacific New Zealanders and 43% of adult Māori were obese, compared to 23% of white adults.[1] 12% of Asian New Zealanders were obese. Out of all the ethnic groups surveyed, only the Asians reported a large increase in obesity from the 2002 statistics.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_New_Zealand

So, it all comes down to knowledge about healthy foods, excercise, etc. I'm also confident that when all countries figures are broken down a similar correlation will be found.

How to resolve this issue ?

Education is the simple answer, avoid your GM 'foods', Macca's, KFC, and other crap. Try eating real food, exercise and trying to G.A.F. about your body will probably help a lot.

Now, getting back to my original post, I strongly advise reading the following;

So it has come to this: That the United States has to promise (to Russia!) that it will not torture a prisoner in its control -- a US citizen at that -- and so therefore that person, Edward Snowden, has no basis for claiming that he should be “treated as a refugee or granted asylum.”
Why does Holder have to make these pathetic representations to his counterpart in Russia?
Because Snowden has applied for asylum saying that he is at risk of torture or execution if returned to the US to face charges for leaking documents showing that the US government is massively violating the civil liberties and privacy of every American by monitoring every American’s electronic communications.
Snowden has made that claim in seeking asylum because he knows that another whistleblower, Pvt. Bradley Manning, was in fact tortured by the US for months, and held without trial in solitary confinement in a Marine military brig for nearly a year, part of the time naked, before being finally put on trial in a kangaroo court, where the judge (a mid-ranking officer surely thinking about the impact her verdict will have on her promotion prospects) is as much prosecutor as jurist, and where his guilt was declared in advance by the President of the United States -- the same president who has also already publicly declared Snowden guilty too.
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1888

And now we go full circle.

I didn't posted a comment with the above as I felt that people could make their own decisions about what was said.

Perhaps it's information that makes people think.

I really am undisturbed about posting things like this as the whole Snowden info thing is actually old news.

In NZ, we've been spying on our neighbours since 71, there's an excellent book by Niki Hagar published in 95 outlining whats happening, but whenever I post on it, I'm a looney conspiracy theorist.

Quote from Racer X NZ :

I prefer to think of it as the stig and his American cousin

{This whole obesity nonsense was created by skrawny skinniy skanky people to justify their anorexic lifestyle. }

How to resolve this issue ?

Education is the simple answer, avoid your GM 'foods', Macca's, KFC, and other crap. Try eating real food, exercise and trying to G.A.F. about your body will probably help a lot.

Now, getting back to my original post, I strongly advise reading the following;

So it has come to this: That the United States has to promise (to Russia!) that it will not torture a prisoner in its control -- a US citizen at that -- and so therefore that person, Edward Snowden, has no basis for claiming that he should be “treated as a refugee or granted asylum.”
Why does Holder have to make these pathetic representations to his counterpart in Russia?
Because Snowden has applied for asylum saying that he is at risk of torture or execution if returned to the US to face charges for leaking documents showing that the US government is massively violating the civil liberties and privacy of every American by monitoring every American’s electronic communications.
Snowden has made that claim in seeking asylum because he knows that another whistleblower, Pvt. Bradley Manning, was in fact tortured by the US for months, and held without trial in solitary confinement in a Marine military brig for nearly a year, part of the time naked, before being finally put on trial in a kangaroo court, where the judge (a mid-ranking officer surely thinking about the impact her verdict will have on her promotion prospects) is as much prosecutor as jurist, and where his guilt was declared in advance by the President of the United States -- the same president who has also already publicly declared Snowden guilty too.
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1888

You know. I been thinking about this. I think we've sorta missed the plot here. If the bone headed organization called the NSA has all this access, Who else does? And again, look at who works there. If they're stupid enough to have some rocket scientist like Snowden on the payroll, what other stupid things have they done and how many other incompetent employees do they have?
The really scary thing about this isn't really a "Big Brother" issue. These clowns aren't smart enough to deal with what they have. Kinda like a chimpanzee with a smartphone. No the real threat is various sorts of hackers from the private sector now honing their sights in on getting that technology.
And since our little rebel without a clue Snowden let the cat out of the bag, those guys in the private sector now know where to start.
Forget about Uncle Sam knowing every little online move you make. Nope think Employers, Marketers, Perverts and Spouses
Yeah, I think that's the REAL threat of all this.

Completely right.
It's important to remember that Snowden WASN'T employed by the NSA. He was employed by Booz Hamilton, who you say ?, a company contracted to the NSA.

Clearly a fact unknown to many in the US.

So, who else has access to all this information ?

Well, after 2 and a 1/2 years of creating a human extinction event we get this.....
http://rt.com/news/fukushima-i ... e&utm_campaign=chrome

Anyone want to post about the safety of nuclear power ?

Anyone ?

Come on, lots of people did prior to Fukushima,.

Quote from Racer X NZ :

Anyone want to post about the safety of nuclear power ?

Anyone ?

Come on, lots of people did prior to Fukushima,.

To be fair, Fukushima tells us a lot more about short-sighted disaster planning, inept regulators and criminally negligent operators than it does about the inherent dangers of nuclear power.

Considering that the destruction of many species, ourselves included is the result of ' short sighted disaster planning, inept regulators, and criminally neglectful operators ' then how is nuclear power 'safe' ?

There is more death pouring into the air and sea daily than occurred at the time of the meltdown, there are no ideas how to contain it or even recovour the fuel. They don't even know where the fuel is. They talk about 40 years to clean it up, without any plan of how to do it.

And there are a number of other plants around the world just waiting to do the same.

Quite an achievement of humanity, managing to achieve our own extinction for the sake of money.