hatrickpatrick

The NSA has spent the last year claiming that it only spied on valid surveillance targets. In your (in my view excellent) co-ordination of one story after another, you gave officials a chance to deny one story, before your next story directly contradicts their denial of the previous story. In the same vein, this story directly refutes a year of "it's only about keeping people safe" claims from the US government.

Now that such lies have been directly exposed, do you expect any sort of political upheaval? For instance - do any politicians have what it takes to demand an explanation? Will James Clapper ever be prosecuted for lying under oath? Will the American people finally realize that none of these people can be trusted?

In a nutshell, apart from the actual content of this story, do you think people will wake up to its secondary 'point', that being to underline and expose the direct, blatant and repeated lies from those in power about the last year of NSA reporting?

I think if you compare the global outrage over the last year to the NSA revelations to how people reacted to the COINTELPRO story, there is at least as much anger, if not more, now than there was then.

Sadly, the US government seems to believe that foreigners have absolutely no rights at all, and therefore are not concerned with any global reaction. Change will only come if people inside the US get angry.

Excellent story today, while I've only had a chance so far to read the summary I intend to read the full article in the next hour :D

My question is this: Cryptome has recently made the astonishing claim that somebody else with access to the Snowden archive intends to dump the entire thing raw. Presumably this points towards one of the sources Snowden used for his "dead man's switch" essentially breaking their agreement with him and publishing anyway. Does this claim concern you, or is it likely a hoax?

If you consider that Aaron Swartz was targeted partly because of his political manifesto, the answer to this question seems a foregone conclusion.

Something I've long felt has gone over the heads of both US politicians and some journalists is that collection from innocent people counts as abuse. Their argument that "they only LOOK at targeted comms" ignores the rights of innocent people not to have their private communications stored indefinitely by government - regardless of whether anyone looks at it or not.

Seeing as how most of the "reforms" outlined revolve around access to the information rather than about whether it should be retained at all, do you see any hope for more purist privacy activists who desire not just to have their permanent record "safeguarded", but simply not to have any such permanent record in the first place?