On Sat, 15 Jun 2013 09:13:18 -0700 (PDT), in alt.war.vietnam Ben
<
pb5...@gmail.com> wrote:
>What Obama should do is to shut down NSA eve dropping program and let
>several major terrorist attacks to happen without interfering. When
>thousands of Americans died like in 9/11, then the government can
>propose a bigger and more extreme Patriot Act which allows US
>government to have more power to control its population. Once
>Americans have great fear of the invisible enemy, they will allow
>government to have more power! And vigilantes may take up arms to
>assassinate enemy. During the Vietnam war, North Vietnamese civilians
>armed with sticks and knifes swarmed to beat up and even kill many
>downed American pilots without any punishment from North Vietnamese
>government. In 1965, John McCain was beaten severely by the mob until
>NVA officials rescued him and sent him to Hoa Lo. So far no one In
>North Vietnam was ever charged for beaten up the enemy!
I don't think that he "shut down" shit. Snowden did two things:
First, he brought the matter into the public's awareness... this is
good.
Second: he gave the other guys (OG) specific information about our
eves dropping capabilities... this is bad.
Well, it's not good; however, the gummint has a nearly total ability
to read your email/text messages/Usenet postings. If you didn't know
that, then you should. The question is: Given the huge volume of data
derived, how does one resolve a specific target? I doubt that Snowden
had any information about that.
If I'm allowed to sit on Google's server, I can easily give you
terabytes of data... that's the easy part. How do you mine those data
for the particular bit of valuable, actionable information? It's like
one gold nugget in 5,000 tons of worthless rocks or sea water... we've
known the gold was there all along; we just don't know how to tease it
out.
Jones