Technology? Yes, some of it really did, but not everything (e.g. the first multistage rocket as well as the first space capsule for a human was invented by Korolev). On the other hand, the scientists (not just technologies). All the US space program was done by the Nazi SS officer and had no relation you at all. Wernher von Braun did everything you are proud about. Not the US scientists :2 cents:

P.S. Once again, congrats on your "epic win" of the space race :thumbsup

they seized the photo-op to embarrass us. that's my take on it. they are both snickering right now about how easy it was too. hahahahah

If you were planning a crime on a large scale where would the evidence come from?

Would this be accidentally gathered? Would it come from your own admission?

The challenge I see is that there are many individuals and groups that do want to do harm on a massive scale. To expect our governments and law enforcement to protect us from this by waiting for a clumsy terrorist to drop his "Secret Jihad Business Plan" isn't reasonable.

There is certainly a balance, however I agree with what Richard said in this thread, nothing Snowden has presented has been the least bit mind blowing.

If Snowden is protecting me from the big Bad U.S. government then give me an example of someone whose has life has been affected by this. Give us a case study and then we have a conversation.

if you hear a loud knocking then it's my head on my desk...

I do have a perspective on what the rest of the world thinks. But I don't look at one country and say "that's bad". The United States is not the only one who does this. Every country does this on some level. Fuck, someone else is bitching about the Space Race in this thread, so let's compare the US space shuttle to the Russian space shuttle and you tell me who hacked who?

China is hacking the US daily; China has an entire division of it's army dedicated to hacking.

He doesn't care. CNN and Fox bring him everything he needs to know :2 cents:

Until they need us to step up and solve a real problem. :thumbsup

WWII
The Balkans in the 90s
The First Gulf War

Heavy is the head

If the US knows where he is, on what airplane, he would never land in the destination he wants.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh :disgust

a few comments

1. i'm stoked the info was revealed, we can scale back the project now by simply keeping the metadata on the provider side and providing it on a as needed request.

2. we really need to clean up the hiring process and prolly even the entire contracted out intelligence, this is ripe for abuse.

3. snowden needs to present himself to a trial of his peers and let them sort out what is right and wrong in this specific espionage case

4. we need new laws to define whistle blowing, leaking, etc.

do you think the communist hunt in the McCarthy era was justified from todays point of view - including death penalties that later turned out to be judicial errors - and even though your family might not have been affected personally?

He was supposed to be in that flight from Russia to Cuba, but when US officials who were waiting for that flight to arrive checked the seat was empty. EMPTY!

Damn, someone is sure pulling the wool over someone's eyes.

I can't wait to see what happens next. It's like watching a movie unfold live, before the movie has been made.

The less secrets the better.

He is transit, and for a reason. These countries were carefully planned out, each step of the way. Don't fool yourself. He's not winging this.

A guy who spies on people for a living and had access to the type of data he had access to, knows a thing or two about how to disappear through cracks, and who can help him do so. All of this was well thought out long before he opened his mouth.

If he gets caught by US authorities, it will be dumb luck on behalf of the USA.

Yea the entire world is over the USA's::2 cents:

well, tbh, i'm going on what i learn about international intrigue as i read more about this story.

quite a few seem to think iceland or ecuador, etc would have made much more sense and not created this very debate

but yeah, again, i have to go on what i read about such things but the above view makes sense to me.

What death penalties were a result of the McCarthy hearings?

If this thread was about the actions that took place in the McCarthy era I would have a different opinion. Why? Because that was a completely different situation.

What if they had this system in place during 9/11?

Same relevancy. The McCarthy situation was wrong, 9/11 would have been fantastic.

But what you have with both of those situations now is hindsight to see who was hurt, how and for what or what could have been prevented. The information Snowden has now is all he will ever have. To be clear the leak is shut and Snowden knows what he knows. We can look back now.

So what is there?

Let's get the perspective. Who was hurt, how and for what?

What I have heard is something I have always assumed. If I started planning a major attack and I use electronic means to discuss and plan it, some light in a government office underground will blink and someone will put on their "headphones".

Is there more?

But I haven't seen this yet? He has documentation doesn't he? Does he have documents saying that someone in charge at the NSA come to his company and demanded information without a warrant? Who did this, what was demanded, and from whom? Would Snowden even be in a position to see the warrant? (I used to work at the phone company, FBI showed up weekly to tap phones, I never saw a warrant but instead got an order from my boss saying they had warrants.)

Why haven't we seen this yet?

I need to hear him say "Bob Johnson at the NSA ordered me to search email records for Tim Smith without a warrant". We need names. We need dates.

Sure thing - He went China. Because, you know, their human rights record is so great.

I'm surprised he was allowed to leave the country.

he went to Hong Kong which, yes, technically is China but the human rights record is a lot better there than the mainland.

For example http://www.google.cn/ is a cencored version of google whereas http://www.google.com.hk/webhp?hl=zh-CN&sourceid=cnhp is a lot more open.

The latest I read on the Rosenbergs seemed to indicate they were in fact guilty.

I have no idea where he will end up, but I don't think he chose the countries he is visiting at random. He also had to know beforehand that those places would let him leave. Someone in his shoes, knowing what he knows, isn't going to take such a risk otherwise. That's why I think every step of this was planned out, including who to talk to in each country.

are you purposely being obtuse?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-spy...apping-program

if this doesn't make it through your 'filter'.. we'll try the original article where you have the actual companies talk about the info being grabbed without a warrant, but also when they say it was ILLEGAL FOR THEM TO EVEN TALK ABOUT THE OCCURRENCE TAKING PLACE

OK I'll make it easy... Rosa Parks..

update, from 4 hours ago:


Any one of Snowden?s revelations would have been a big story in its own right. But the news has been coming so rapidly that it?s difficult to keep track of it all. So here?s a handy guide to the recent revelations about what the NSA has been doing.



Phone records
The first revelation by Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald remains the most significant. Under a controversial interpretation of the Patriot Act, the NSA is vacuuming up information about every domestic phone call of every Verizon customer in the United States.

What information is collected and how is it used?
Information collected includes the phone number dialed, the time and duration of the call, and information about the cell phone tower used to make each call. The NSA?s request for tower information makes it a de facto location tracking program, as the government can use that information to figure out where the call came from. While Snowden?s leak only pertained to Verizon, it?s likely that other major telecommunications providers also participate in the program.
The NSA puts all this information in a vast database, but the agency claims that access to the database is strictly limited. The agency says that only 22 Obama administration officials have the authority to authorize searches of the database, and only about 300 Americans have had their phone numbers queried.

Is that legal?
The court order revealed by Snowden cites Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which gives the government the power to obtain any ?tangible thing? from third parties relevant to a terrorist investigation. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), the lead sponsor of the Patriot Act, has denounced the Obama administration?s interpretation of Section 215 as ?a bunch of bunk.? He argues that Section 215 orders were only intended to be used for information relevant to specific investigations.
What about constitutional?
The Fourth Amendment requires search warrants to be specific about who is to be searched and what information is to be seized. There?s nothing specific about the Verizon order. However, the government is likely to cite a 1979 Supreme Court ruling holding that the Fourth Amendment doesn?t apply when the government seeks calling records. At least one Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor, has suggested the high court should reconsider that holding. Perhaps the furor over the phone records program will spur the courts to revisit the issue.


What kind of oversight does the program have?
The Verizon order was good for three months, so presumably the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reviews the orders periodically. But because one order covers everyone in the country, it doesn?t contain the kind of details that would allow the courts to find specific abuses.
Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have also been briefed on the programs. The chairmen of these programs have defended them. But two Senate Democrats, Mark Udall (D-Colo) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore), have denounced it. Months ago, they were saying that the American people would be ?stunned? by the government?s interpretation of the Patriot Act. But secrecy prevented them from sharing the details with the public.

PRISM
In 2007, Congress gave the government broad powers to engage in warrantless surveillance for intelligence purposes. But until this year, the details of how the government was using those powers was a closely held secret. We now know that the NSA has a program called PRISM, which allows the agency to obtain private information about users of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and other Internet companies.
What information is collected and how is it used?
Early reports suggested that the NSA had unmediated ?direct access? to these companies? servers. But companies have flatly denied this, and more recent reporting suggests that PRISM is a system for expediting the delivery of private information after company lawyers have scrutinized a government request.

Last week, the Guardian revealed the procedures the NSA uses to decide who to target for surveillance as well as the ?minimization? procedures the government uses to deal with information that?s accidentally collected by Americans. This information is generally destroyed, but there are some important exceptions. For example, if an intercepted communication contains information about a crime being committed, the NSA may retain the information and turn it over the law enforcement.

Is that legal?
The government says PRISM is authorized by Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, and critics of the program generally haven?t disputed that. The more controversial question is whether Section 702 itself is constitutional.
FISA orders are not search warrants. But the government argues the Fourth Amendment doesn?t apply because it is only spying on non-Americans. But critics disagree. They say the ?targets? of NSA surveillance may be foreigners, but the surveillance may still collect information about Americans, and even use that information for non-intelligence purposes. They argue that doing that without a warrant violates the Constitution.
Can PRISM and other FISA programs be challenged in court?
Civil liberties groups have tried but they have not succeeded so far.
In February, before information about PRISM was made public, the Supreme Court ruled against plaintiffs who were challenging the FISA Amendments Act. The ruling did not reach the constitutional merits. Rather, the high court held that since the plaintiffs couldn?t prove that they had personally been the targets of surveillance authorized by Section 702, they didn?t have standing to challenge the law.
It?s not clear if Snowden?s leaks have created an opportunity to revisit that holding. His leaks only disclosed general features of the programs, not information about specific targets. So in principle, the revelations shouldn?t change the legal outcome. But public outcry over PRISM could cause some justices to rethink the issue. It was a 5-4 decision, so only one justice would need to change his mind to get a different result.
One possible avenue for challenging Section 702 is a Chicago terrorism case. Late last year, Sen. Dianenne Feinstein (D-Calif.) cited the case as a successful use of the powers granted by the FISA Amendments Act. But when the suspect sought details about how the evidence against him had been collected, he was told that information was secret. His lawyers argue that the government is hiding behind secrecy to avoid a constitutional challenge to the FISA law.

What kind of oversight does the program have?
The program?s targeting and minimization procedures are submitted to the FISC for review. But these documents, which were released by the Guardian last week, do not name the specific individuals whose communications will be intercepted. Instead, they give general criteria to be applied by the NSA. Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have also been briefed on the program.

Fiber optic eavesdropping
In 2006, Mark Klein, an AT&T technician turned whistleblower, told the Electronic Frontier Foundation about a secret, NSA-controlled room in a San Francisco facility. He testified that optical splitters were being used to copy data flowing through AT&T?s network and send it to the secret room.
At the time, most observers assumed this room was part of a broader surveillance program, but they couldn?t prove it. But one of the slides from the PRISM presentation provides confirmation that the NSA has a broad program (actually, several of them) to sweep up Internet traffic from fiber optic cables.


What information is collected and how is it used?
We don?t know the extent of these programs, but in principle, this kind of fiber optic tap should make it possible to collect almost all Internet traffic. The question is which cables the NSA has tapped into. The fact that the Internet developed first in the United States gives the spy agency a big advantage because it means that a lot of foreign traffic passes through major interconnection points in the United States. The nuclear submarine Jimmy Carter is also rumored to have the capability to tap directly into undersea fiber optic cables.
But even if the NSA tapped into every fiber optic cable in the world, it would only be able to read unencrypted traffic. And the most popular Internet services (including high-value sites like webmail providers) are increasingly using encryption. For those kinds of sites, the NSA needs a program like PRISM to get the data directly from the site operator.
The NSA isn?t the only spy agency tapping into communication lines. The agency?s British counterpart, the General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), also taps fiber optic cables too, according to a Friday Guardian report based on documents provided by Snowden.


Is that legal?
That?s still being litigated. The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued to stop the program revealed by Klein?s disclosures in 2008. That case is ongoing. The government has argued that the state secrets privilege protects it from having to respond to EFF?s lawsuit.
The Snowden slide suggests the government believes its fiber-tapping program are, like PRISM, legal under Section 702 of FISA.

What kind of oversight does the program have?
We don?t know. If the program is based on FISA, then the government presumably has submitted a general description of the program to the FISC court for review, but those documents have not been leaked to the public. The government also likely briefs the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on the programs.

Why RUSSIA refuse to hand him over?

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

the english report of that has been front page news for >7 hours now, it was what i was referring to whan i mentioned russia is snickering over making usa look silly over this.

putin: snowden? pffft. we already know what he knows, he's a tool.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2...-russias-putin

#1. I think you are stretching it to give credit to McCarthy.
#2. What judicial errors were revealed after their execution that would have changed anything?

The difference being that she did not avoid arrest, but rather got arrested so she could make a statement and get something done about it.

Is he living in China, no. He passed through Hong Kong. And for the record, Hong Kong is not China.

If you think a guy with access to that kind of information, someone who had the authority to read the President's email, didn't line up the right people to talk to in advance each nation AND know how to do it, getting in and getting out, you're dreaming.

This guy knows exactly what he is doing. Whatever media is coming out is a smoke screen to keep everyone guessing where he is now and what he is doing next. He's smarter than you, me, and everyone else here. That's how he got that job. He's not a backpacking tree hugger who's winging all of this.

because the US has refused to hand over countless people

this is such a drama queens perspective on things..

revolutions don't start over piddly shit like this, not now, not ever. Nobody is starving in the US and until that starts to happen there isn't going to be that long awaited motivated by the couch potatoes revolution that people keep TYPING about on the internet. The only difference between now and before is that now we have more uninformed fools chiming in on the subject matter via fb and twitter. (not that i'm lumping you in with that, but I'm sure you would agree there are many that do)

it's all in the article - Google translate will help

none of that makes any sense when applied to his own words.

Outstanding. So it still doesn't say no warrants were issued, still doesn't give exact details, and everything seems to be perfectly legal under multiple laws.

The best details it gives is "300 Americans have had their phone numbers queried". Is this NSA, terrorist related, or local police departments investigating local crimes? Seems like a mighty low number to me...

he's a sys admin bra.

that's like saying a lawyer is smarter than everyone else because she's a lawyer.

we already know how lax the nsa and booz hiring requirements were, he didn't even have a fresh background check done.

i'm not convinced he's smart at all. the government is not smart as you frequently point out, the government is comprised of snowdens, it doesn't make any sense he's the smart one.

correction: he's a low-mid level sys admin fugitive on the run who had to ask julian assange where and what to do next, and that's according to assange.