i hear ya but snowden was investigated 5 years back from the date of his securty investigation and that was the end of it. and that was even before he worked for booz. so booz never checked him out, his one and only cia security check cleared him for the length of his stay in the intel bidness, based on what i've gathered.

moreover, that's not what oversight is. oversight is setup to double-check that process you just described.

also, by all accounts of the experts who have been paid to evaluate the intel community, there is no accountability and zero structure. this entire world exploded exponentially after 9/11 with billions & billions thrown at it. hard to keep track at that level of growth, based on the folks in the know looking at that aspect of it.

it's ~impossible to have oversight in an environment like that.




it's too big, it's too ineffective and it needs to be way way way scaled back

the top secret security clearance stats i provided here are from the intel community, not overall defense clearance.

850,000 top secret security clearances in intelligence. not pentagon.

well i am talking on a institution level.. these are the guys that thought HB Gary were the end all be all of security, who ended up getting hacked cause someone asked them for a password

so those guys answer is smear campaigns and 'disappearing'

there is far more effective ways to discredit someone.. completely

That's the thing.... its NOT illegal, that's the surprising part

Yeah, that was more of a poor "security policy" type-of-a-thing. (Social engineering lol)

I don't know if they could "disappear" Snowden now. I mean, who has motive to make him disappear. :winkwink:

I totally agree with the discreting angle. I mean, we are seeing that already and we totally expected it.

But really, I think that the exposure of PRISM will do no more than the exposure of the AT&Treason+NSA thing from a few years back.

I don't think this will get fixed with lawsuits and law in general. The tech to spy is just too cheap and the intelligence is too valuable.

People just need to start covering their own asses better by using technical means to protect their privacy. Ie: cryptography, don't use "cloud" services, use open source when possible, patch yer shit, etc..

:1orglaugh dang. short and sweet.
that's what i'm thinking to, it's too big to fail now. can't have an entire industry just go away. even if the government dumped all the booz's, those companies are required by law to operate with the bottomline in mind at all times, they will look for work elsewhere, applying their technology wherever they can make a nickel off it.

.. and move out on the 1st ....

lol I was trolling... :ugone2far

It's like a tumor that someone wrote with a felt pen "don't get any bigger" on.

Oh they can "disappear him" they are very patient and unforgiving, give it time he will be forgotten then he will die from a brain tumor or some such and itll be buried in the news behind some story about the little league world series winner

Oh and of course they will discredit him...I mean look what they did to Bin Laden on the porn angle nobody with half a brain bought that

but theres LOTS of Americans with less than half a brain...and most of em listen to sean Hannity

i think it's a generational thing too, i brought this up with my ~70 year old mom and it was entirely a non-issue in her eyes. she's not dumb per se, but i think has more of a patriotic view? maybe. something from growing up in her generation that creates an entirely different viewpoint. i figured she prolly represents most senior citizens on something like this.

Interesting. There is definately a generation gap at play here.

I once had an elderly bank teller tell me that she was glad that the naked body scanners existed and that the governments spy on the phones/internet because it would keep her grandkids safe from terrorists that sew C4 under their skin - no joke.

I couldn't help but just laugh at her and she started screaming at me about terrorists. Her supervisor watched from a distance.

the only certainty is that we will never know the full story, that's the state of the world. the best you can do is read and listen, consider the sources and the circumstances and decide for yourself knowing and accepting you may be wrong. conspiracy kooks aren't interested in the truth, they are interested in conspiracies only.

conspiracy kooks and people in general give government agencies and politicians way too much credit - they're incapable of putting together most of what they're accused of, often what looks like conspiracies, things that don't look right or add up is just pure ineptitude and incompetence inside government agencies.

Or that's just what they want you to think... *evil dog eyes*

Some VERY good points raised by former NSA telling it like it is..


The Future of the NSA

Jim Stone, June 10 2013, updated June 11

Forget the B.S. stories about Snowden, there is only ONE that applies and you will not hear about it in the press, which has protected the NSA with a great big white wash. Snowden worked out at Kunia. He had an extensive training program he had to go through before being allowed in. He HAD TO have been 99th percentile, the story about high school drop out is B.S, and so is the rest of the washing of his background. After hearing his conscience out at Kunia, he left Hawaii, defected, and told the truth.

There is also a rumor that Snowden worked for a contractor for $122,000 a year. I doubt that seriously because the NSA is so secretive it is extremely wary of contractors, and during my time with the NSA, I saw only 2 people EVER that were contractors, and they were never out on the operations floor. So yeah, I buy $122,000 a year, but NOT with a contractor. People who get to see enough to reveal what Snowden did have million dollar background checks, involving interviews with practically everyone in their past, and the interviewers do not identify themselves, they just talk as friends over a beer or whatever. So no one knows when they are being asked questions about someone the NSA intends to hire. These background checks take a year or so to complete and contractors can't afford to do that, the FED does. What Snowden revealed proves through emperical evidence that he was not employed by a contractor, he was just straight up NSA. The entire High School drop out story is pure B.S., because if during one of these checks any of the secret questioners comes up with even a little whiff of something wrong with your past, YOU ARE OUT.

Unlike the CIA, which has over a million spooks, the NSA is so secretive that very few people break the barrier to entry, which limits the size of the NSA to below 50,000 people total, a majority of which are highly talented super geeks. The expense of the background investigations alone seriously limits the number of people the NSA can hire.
Don't expect anything that is now claimed to be said by Snowden as actually coming from him. They are whitewashing this as fast as possible, while making false posts and statements to the web and media that claim to be from him. By now he has been replaced with the public image of someone else. For starters, it is ERIC SNOWDEN, not EDWARD as we are now told and this subtle name change will be used to deflect meaningful search into his past.

My own experience in the NSA is enough to prove what little I have said about Snowden to be true. There is ONE OPTION - Snowden was BRILLIANT, had extensive back ground searches done on him, went through a very difficult school, got assigned to Kunia where he lived in the same location as many other NSA people who have families do, drove to Kunia daily, and finally could not take what he was seeing there anymore and ratted them out. THAT IS THE ONLY STORY. Snowden did not have a girlfriend. He had a wife, and any reference to him "leaving his girlfriend behind" is another lie. You cannot live where Snowden did and have a "girlfriend", the NSA will not put you in the premium government family housing in Waipahu for only a "girlfriend". Furthermore, stories about the house being sold now are B.S., because Snowden was in government housing the same as all lower level NSA people are given. Unless you are an outside contractor (and those are very few in number), The NSA does not leave it's people to run with the general public, they all get assigned a living area where like minded people are. And from these few mistakes the press made, we can assume that the entire background they are presenting on Snowden is a lie. The house he was in was never owned by him and DID NOT get sold.

To see a long list of B.S. my own experience proves to be lies, just google "where snowden lived"

Furthermore, the "leaked documents from anonymous" are PURE B.S. and are all readily available public documents. I see this as an attempt to muddy the waters with regard to Snowden's legitimate leak.

Watch for story creep in the mainstream and portions of the alternative press regarding what I have said here, since I am former NSA telling it like it is I have noticed that the story keeps getting regular tweaks to counteract what I say here, the latest being "it was his girlfriend's house". Don't buy into the tweaks, what is above is a truthfully rational assessment of HOW IT HAD TO BE, from someone who simply knows how things are. Granted, when I was with the NSA they were not spying on Americans, but their procedures and methods were anchored in stone and for what I have said above to not weigh out now would mean something massive regarding hiring policy, housing policy, contractor policy and other things changed there, which I doubt, especially if this is the first big leak and Kunia is still misrepresented on Google maps, with the real entry obscured by a cloud.

continued ..lots more here

Obfuscation and Deflection. It's built into the Booz twitter troll bots why not use it in this case?

Thanks for the post. Interesting website. Forum has a few bombs in it too.

I know firsthand that half of what this guy says is fantasy bullshit. I'm sure there are plenty of people that believe it though.

This guy writes/sounds like a kook. He uncategorically asserts that the high school dropout story is BS and he has to have had a college degree. Um........so why hasn't this guy or anybody from any college popped up and said 'I went to (name of school) with Eric Snowdown'?

Your mother was born during WWII, and grew up in the 1950s. This was when our "greatest generation" - meaning our military - came back from war, went to work, and built the nation into what it was. She grew up in a society that has a lot of respect for the military, and also the government.

I just don't fear our government. I don't live in fear of the local police blowing down my door in the near future and hassling me for no reason. I'm 44 years old; They've never hassled me before. I don't care if the government knows where I eat every night for the past six years...

As for Snowden... So far the only laws that have been broken were by him, so that take for what's worth.

Just because someone didn't go to high school or graduate from college doesn't make them stupid. I didn't graduate from high school myself (although I did get my GED and eventually go on to college).

Verifying graduations from high school or colleges is really easy to do, and I am guessing even the NSA cannot locate and destroy hundreds of high school year books.... Someone would have come forward by now and said "this isn't true".

I'll just put this here...

http://www.itwire.com/it-policy-news...prism-facility

Anybody can get security clearance
 

Read the book "The Falcon and the Snowman" (it's also a movie). At 21 Christopher Boyce was hired by TRW and had the highest security clearance there is. Couple of years later he becomes a Soviet spy. Sentenced to federal prison for 40 years he managed to escape.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Boyce

moreover, he says categorically that the nsa is afraid of contract labor. it's well-documented they spend 80% of their budget on contract labor.

that fully discounts his view imo.

canada too eh.

Say you have the xbox, the roku and the plasma going. Your wife comes in and tells you your daughter became a woman today and started her first period. A minute later ads start popping up for feminine hygiene products on various devices...will you be scared then?

There are dozens of agencies that work under the NSA. Bush admitted he did not know all of them. Just sayin.

Show the documentation for the NSA budget. This I gotta see. :upsidedow:1orglaugh

That does not exist...:upsidedow:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

It's a violation of the 4th Amendment, making it unconstitutional. Warrantless surveillance is illegal.

The NSA doesn't have the largest datacenter in the world for harvesting only phone metadata. Do you know how small phone metadata is? It's tiny. It's nothing.

They have it for harvesting everything we're doing online.

And if it was something "the people" agreed with, it wouldn't be something they want to hide from "the people".

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...-on-china.html

They want to find out if he has a china tie:

http://rlv.zcache.com.au/chinese_sym...0en71g_216.jpg

what is it you want me to provide you here?

But that's already happening. The Internet has figured out that I owned a Jaguar and went to Hawaii. What the Internet hasn't figured out is that I sold the Jaguar, bought a new Jeep, and I'm looking to go to Italy.

But that's just it - Snowden hasn't said the US Government is doing warrantless surveillance on US citizens. What he has said is....

The N.S.A. has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife?s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

Well, yes. In order to access that information, you have to have a warrant. Snowden claims he could "do this from his desk". Well, maybe he could. At the end of the line, when a warrant is issued, someone has to have the ability to pull this information or data - but only in the event that a warrant has been issued.

If the US Government is getting such data we might have a huge issue. Then again, we might not - anyone can buy some of this data from customers.

It's estimated to be $10 billion a year. However, it's entirely possible it's twenty times that and hidden from the public.... We just don't know.

Thats actually a pretty good book (dreadful movie though) and I have a direct connection. Boyce was a customer contact for TRW when I worked as an analyst for a company called Chromatics here in Atlanta. I spoke with him many times before that whole thing went down also spoke with Andrew Lee.

small world I reckon....

its not blowing a whistle when they have been doing since 1975 and you can find it in a simple google search. Back then it was telegrams also.

In the fall of 1975, when a Senate select committee chaired by Frank Church and a House committee chaired by Otis Pike were investigating abuses of power by the CIA and FBI, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, the loaded pistol from New York (she had introduced a resolution to impeach Richard Nixon on her first day in office in 1971) dared turned her own House Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights to a new subject: the National Security Agency, and two twin government surveillance projects she had learned about codenamed ?SHAMROCK? and ?MINARET.? They had monitored both the phone calls and telegrams of American citizens for decades.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/174722...#axzz2WCq1iTqc
Read more: The NSA Doppelganger | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/blog/174722...#ixzz2WCq6is6y
Follow us: @thenation on Twitter | TheNationMagazine on Facebook

you are arguing semantics why?


so we should all just walk away from this because it's been going on? that's the logic here?

I arguing nothing , my point is this isnt new and it isnt going to change. As long as there are nukes in the world.

i guess i misread that you wrote this is not whistle blowing.

but from the article you cited, things did in fact change