"To these entities, our lives are an open book. But if citizens want to take a look at what the government is doing with this information, or how it obtains it, these entities do all they can to ensure the flow of data remains strictly one way."
Cannot think of a better description of how things work in a fascist system of public control.
"To have a functioning judiciary in an open democracy..."
Well that sums it up pretty well I'd think.
You no longer have a functioning judiciary or an open democracy.
Now if only folks could actually admit this fact, perhaps then some steps might be taken to fix things. After all, you cannot fix something if you refuse to admit its broken.
That's because there is very, very, little money in honesty, but organized crime via fascism promises everyone involved a huge payday every day, until the cash cow runs dry.
You have allowed a society based on ruthlessness and self-aggrandizement to flourish and thrive, where only the most corrupt, self-serving and opportunistic individuals might rise to the top.
What the hell did you expect would be the result??
"It's only a matter of time before the card house falls."
Unless the Fed can get another good old fashioned WAR going somewhere, and do the old "Look Over There" routine that always ends all investigations into wrong doings by the fed and its friends, because "enemies".
Let's face it folks. They are protecting their own asses, because they've been breaking the laws and thumbing their collective noses at "your" constitution and at the laws of the land.
My guess is that this is just another blackmail program and they simply have to keep the public from learning what they really do with all that surveillance data, because otherwise the cash cow dies.
Remember. In an "ownership" society, the laws only pertain to the common (resource) citizens. The rulers and their control infrastructure personel are always exempt from such restrictions.
Surely you're not still wondering why this man is being so handsomely paid by what used to be "your" government....
He, like Obama, has a unique talent, necessary to the proper functioning of any fascist business plan.
They can both lie right to your face, even when you already know the truth, and actually appear to be sincere. And when even the best lie simply won't do, they both know how to create any number of important sounding straw-men, so the rubes will keep on believing.
Use to be called Snake-Oil Salesmen. Not sure what to call them today. Snake-Oil Salesmen perhaps.
I find it kinda odd that nobody has yet offered the simple idea that maybe, just maybe, the 2 girls are lying. They wanted to off the girl they stabbed and decided that they could get away with it if they blamed it on the internet.
"And then the question is pretty straightforward: do they really support innovation, small business and entrepreneurship? Or do they support the big telcos looking to set up tollbooths to make innovation more expensive?"
Methinks ye might have asked the wrong question.
Try this one.
"Do they really support innovation, small business and entrepreneurship, or do they just want to put a few hundred thousand dollars away in their off-shore accounts and snort coke with semi-naked bimbos on their new yachts?"
I think the answer is pretty obvious, but naturally, all the rest of you true-believers will have to wait till the politicians actually shit on your shoe - again - before you "get it".
I really wish that what you say was true but, sadly, the internet public is not the general public.
Most of this will happen - the reported crimes and the eventual fines - without the general public ever becoming aware of the perpetrator of the crimes or the existence of the fines, due entirely to a controlled, or "truth-free" press that will report nothing at all, or mis-report the facts at best.
In Canada, the courts struck down the laws against cannabis around 2001, because the government could not bring forward a comprehensive Medical Marijuana position. The laws were stricken from the books after a one year wait during which the government did nothing. The laws were never re-instated to the law books, but the Canadian public does not have a clue about this as the police still arrest smokers and growers and the only coverage of the court case was on the internet, transcribed from recordings by a man named Turmel. The totally-controlled Canadian Truth-Free press dutifully pretended that this more than year-long court case never happened, never mentioning it once in any paper, or on any tv channel. Canadians generally still have no idea that cannabis has been Not-Illegal in Canada for more than a decade, save those few who followed the case on-line.
That's all it takes to keep the public in the dark - a complicit press.
The US has that in spades.
The Fed also does not actually have to report honestly what costs the taxes are being raised to cover, so when it costs more to pay for these criminal activities of its agencies due to fines, it can simply state that its raising taxes for national security reasons, or road building for that matter.
Only an informed public can make informed decisions.
There is no "informed public" outside of the internet.
This is why there is so much desperation at high levels of government and commerce to end Net Neutrality, or as it has recently been relabeled, to allow corporate and government fuckery.
The Secret Ballot, so sacred to Americans, just got a face-lift.
A tiny camera placed in a concealed position that can view the voter's choice on the ballot, connected to a database of triple redundant (driver's licence, passport, and social media) citizen photographs for that vote station area, gives a remarkably clear report of exactly who voted and who they voted for.
This method literally eliminates the need to bribe or coerce anyone associated with voting security and ballot transportation safety and makes the complete eradication of the secret ballot possible without any citizen having any chance to discover the loss of secrecy.
It is also, once established, nearly cost free.
Of course, everyone knows that the CIA/FBI/NSA/HLS machine would never do such an underhanded thing as this.....
They would, but they still do not know exactly what documents Snowden confiscated from their computers.
Making shit up might just force the Guardian to disclose stuff they would not have disclosed, due to its sensitive nature, just to prove the NSA shit was all standard lies.
You can absolutely bet your last dollar that they considered it though.
Posting a single email as the ONLY email, is in fact, as close as they're willing to get to total bullshit.
You see, should the Guardian have and publish other emails from Snowden to various links in the chain of command, the NSA can always just say;
"Oh. Those emails must have been erased, after they were dealt with. So we could not have found them. Sorry about that. Again."
Just curious, but precisely WHO are you planning to DEMAND change from??
Surely you don't still think that the mob that runs the USA from Washington will actually hear your demands, or that, if they did, they would do anything other than laugh hysterically at your antics.
Such determined loyalty to a dead system should be rewarded - but of course, it will only get more of the same.
I suppose you could always, hehehehehe, cast a vote, hehehehe, and get "change", hahahahahaha, that way, hohohohoho.... you know, use that dead system that got you here to get you out of here. That should work well eh.
Demand all you want to your heart's content - you'll not get anyone's attention - because the Fed and your local politicians are only listening to the guys waving fistfuls of money.
Now if you happen to have a yacht or two you can offer, you might just get someone's attention. Mind you, they will very likely just lie to you to get the offered yacht, unless your demands are the same as the one's their other "benefactors" are demanding.
hmmmm..... apparently the king of Spain has just quit his job.... I wonder if he'll be retiring in California....
Oh well, once the American Government; commonly referred to as Wall Street, finishes buying the Spanish politicians off, I guess it really won't make any difference what form the Spanish government takes. It'll be just another department of the American Fascist Business Bureau, like the governments of so many other countries around the globe.
Look, you appear to be genuinely concerned that the Vote System and You actually need to fear the notion of a signed vote becoming the way of the world.
Please be advised that the chances of such a voting system ever being introduced, or even considered by any nation on earth is absolutely zero - actually more like -500.
If the vote was capable of creating honest elections, it would be illegal, and the current voting system is favored by all criminals and career politicians as the best way to placate a public while maintaining access to their wealth, so it will never go away.
You have nothing to fear from the idea of a signed vote as it will never ever be allowed to exist by the power that be.
Your Secret Ballot is safe as long as criminals ride the top of the food chain.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
"How touching. Clearly in the 21st century we now have Human Race 2.0, in which everyone is enlightened and no-one would ever seek to turn someone out of a job for voting for the wrong candidate, and anyway we don't need jobs as we can all live off the trees and the flowers. Come off it, who's the one with blind faith here?"
Enlightened? Wrong candidate? Live off trees and flowers?
OK. I can see this is indeed a religiously adhered-to fanatical belief system you're supporting here, when you start throwing whole buckets of straw-men into the ring.
People are not as easily coerced as they used to be. So many of us now make our livings outside the system through non-traditional means that the old "lost job means death by starvation" syndrome you cling to is no longer sufficient to keeping all people silent.
Of course, this may not be the case in your country, I don't know.
Such things as - the Web - make it easy to report wrong doing by employers, and forensics tends to make your old-style club-wielding brown-shirt tactics a tad over-obvious today.
I can see however that you cannot be convinced to examine your position by either logic or facts, so I will stop bothering you about that which you obviously hold sacred, lest you start accusing me of threatening to harm children and puppies in order to make you say bad things about voting.
"If the labels feel that the courts still won't twist the law towards their own views, it seems likely that we'll soon see yet another attempt to change copyright laws in Spain."
That, or just as likely, another attempt to change the government of Spain.
I would assume UPS Corporate knows absolutely everything that the Federal Government does in its "interdiction" operations on UPS property, upon to-be-UPS-delivered products belonging to American citizens. The examples given were about UPS doing its part to assist the fed in the War on Drugs.
How much more so would UPS be willing to assist/allow federal "interdiction" operations that pertained to the War on Terror?
The question now, is Why?
---
However, I still think the really important aspect of this situation is as John Fenderson noted:
"Whether or not UPS is involved in the situation, this brings up an excellent point about NSLs: that they exist mean that no denial any company issues actually means a thing."
NSLs change the whole playing field completely.
That the federal government can now legally force a company to lie to the public means that the apparently honest companies and the obviously dishonest companies are now indistinguishable and that nobody should really accept what any company says in its own defense when it comes to assisting the federal government in clandestine operations.
It would appear that the NSA, CIA, FBI, HLS and the US Fed are hell-bent on utterly destroying any remaining trust between global citizens and all US companies, by every means at their disposal.
On the post: District Court Judge Orders Last-Minute Sealing Of Documents Related To Stingray Devices And Cell Tower Data Dumps
Cannot think of a better description of how things work in a fascist system of public control.
On the post: Secret Trials: UK Holds A Secret Terror Trial, As US Appeals Court Holds Secret Hearing In Terror Case
constitutional repairman needed.
Well that sums it up pretty well I'd think.
You no longer have a functioning judiciary or an open democracy.
Now if only folks could actually admit this fact, perhaps then some steps might be taken to fix things. After all, you cannot fix something if you refuse to admit its broken.
On the post: US Marshals Step In To Keep Florida Police Department's Stingray Documents Out Of The Hands Of The ACLU
Re:
You have allowed a society based on ruthlessness and self-aggrandizement to flourish and thrive, where only the most corrupt, self-serving and opportunistic individuals might rise to the top.
What the hell did you expect would be the result??
On the post: US Marshals Step In To Keep Florida Police Department's Stingray Documents Out Of The Hands Of The ACLU
Re: Add the US Marshal Service to the list of of SlimeBalls
Federal Agencies answer only to their federal masters.
They couldn't give a shit what you; the public, thinks about them, or about anything else for that matter.
You're just a resource and in most cases, the enemy of the state.
Why would they care what the enemy thinks of them?
On the post: US Marshals Step In To Keep Florida Police Department's Stingray Documents Out Of The Hands Of The ACLU
Re:
Fascism
On the post: US Marshals Step In To Keep Florida Police Department's Stingray Documents Out Of The Hands Of The ACLU
Re:
Unless the Fed can get another good old fashioned WAR going somewhere, and do the old "Look Over There" routine that always ends all investigations into wrong doings by the fed and its friends, because "enemies".
Let's face it folks. They are protecting their own asses, because they've been breaking the laws and thumbing their collective noses at "your" constitution and at the laws of the land.
My guess is that this is just another blackmail program and they simply have to keep the public from learning what they really do with all that surveillance data, because otherwise the cash cow dies.
Remember. In an "ownership" society, the laws only pertain to the common (resource) citizens. The rulers and their control infrastructure personel are always exempt from such restrictions.
On the post: NSA Chief Defends Facial Recognition Database By Denying Claims That Weren't Made
A little more snake-oil please
He, like Obama, has a unique talent, necessary to the proper functioning of any fascist business plan.
They can both lie right to your face, even when you already know the truth, and actually appear to be sincere. And when even the best lie simply won't do, they both know how to create any number of important sounding straw-men, so the rubes will keep on believing.
Use to be called Snake-Oil Salesmen.
Not sure what to call them today.
Snake-Oil Salesmen perhaps.
On the post: Creepypasta Feels Compelled To State That Its Stories Are Fiction & It's Not A Satanic Cult; Thanks Everyone...
The internet made me do it...
Just a thought...
On the post: Entrepreneurs Explain How The End Of Net Neutrality Would Mean Their Startups Don't Exist
Wrong question
Methinks ye might have asked the wrong question.
Try this one.
"Do they really support innovation, small business and entrepreneurship, or do they just want to put a few hundred thousand dollars away in their off-shore accounts and snort coke with semi-naked bimbos on their new yachts?"
I think the answer is pretty obvious, but naturally, all the rest of you true-believers will have to wait till the politicians actually shit on your shoe - again - before you "get it".
C'est la vie eh.
---
On the post: EFF Tells Court That The NSA Knowingly And Illegally Destroyed Evidence In Key Case Over Bulk Surveillance
Re:
Most of this will happen - the reported crimes and the eventual fines - without the general public ever becoming aware of the perpetrator of the crimes or the existence of the fines, due entirely to a controlled, or "truth-free" press that will report nothing at all, or mis-report the facts at best.
In Canada, the courts struck down the laws against cannabis around 2001, because the government could not bring forward a comprehensive Medical Marijuana position. The laws were stricken from the books after a one year wait during which the government did nothing. The laws were never re-instated to the law books, but the Canadian public does not have a clue about this as the police still arrest smokers and growers and the only coverage of the court case was on the internet, transcribed from recordings by a man named Turmel. The totally-controlled Canadian Truth-Free press dutifully pretended that this more than year-long court case never happened, never mentioning it once in any paper, or on any tv channel. Canadians generally still have no idea that cannabis has been Not-Illegal in Canada for more than a decade, save those few who followed the case on-line.
That's all it takes to keep the public in the dark - a complicit press.
The US has that in spades.
The Fed also does not actually have to report honestly what costs the taxes are being raised to cover, so when it costs more to pay for these criminal activities of its agencies due to fines, it can simply state that its raising taxes for national security reasons, or road building for that matter.
Only an informed public can make informed decisions.
There is no "informed public" outside of the internet.
This is why there is so much desperation at high levels of government and commerce to end Net Neutrality, or as it has recently been relabeled, to allow corporate and government fuckery.
On the post: UK Gov't Tries And Fails To Hide Details Of GHCQ/Telecoms Tapping Fiber Lines
jerks have knees
On the post: NSA Intercepting 'Millions Of Images' Per Day In Order To Fill Facial Recognition Database
Face-Lift
A tiny camera placed in a concealed position that can view the voter's choice on the ballot, connected to a database of triple redundant (driver's licence, passport, and social media) citizen photographs for that vote station area, gives a remarkably clear report of exactly who voted and who they voted for.
This method literally eliminates the need to bribe or coerce anyone associated with voting security and ballot transportation safety and makes the complete eradication of the secret ballot possible without any citizen having any chance to discover the loss of secrecy.
It is also, once established, nearly cost free.
Of course, everyone knows that the CIA/FBI/NSA/HLS machine would never do such an underhanded thing as this.....
right?
On the post: Google Asks Users To Demand Congress Pass Real Surveillance Reform
Re: Google Do The Right Thing
That's probably been made illegal by Executive Order.
We just don'y know it yet because nobody has done it yet.
After all, only Terrorists would need a secure system of communications, right.
On the post: Snowden: NSA Revealed Only One Email, Shows NSA Lied Before... Also: None Of This Matters
Re:
Making shit up might just force the Guardian to disclose stuff they would not have disclosed, due to its sensitive nature, just to prove the NSA shit was all standard lies.
You can absolutely bet your last dollar that they considered it though.
Posting a single email as the ONLY email, is in fact, as close as they're willing to get to total bullshit.
You see, should the Guardian have and publish other emails from Snowden to various links in the chain of command, the NSA can always just say;
"Oh. Those emails must have been erased, after they were dealt with. So we could not have found them. Sorry about that. Again."
On the post: House Reauthorizes Intelligence Community Funding; Refuses To Consider Amendments To Limit Domestic Surveillance
Re:
Surely you don't still think that the mob that runs the USA from Washington will actually hear your demands, or that, if they did, they would do anything other than laugh hysterically at your antics.
Such determined loyalty to a dead system should be rewarded - but of course, it will only get more of the same.
I suppose you could always, hehehehehe, cast a vote, hehehehe, and get "change", hahahahahaha, that way, hohohohoho.... you know, use that dead system that got you here to get you out of here. That should work well eh.
Demand all you want to your heart's content - you'll not get anyone's attention - because the Fed and your local politicians are only listening to the guys waving fistfuls of money.
Now if you happen to have a yacht or two you can offer, you might just get someone's attention. Mind you, they will very likely just lie to you to get the offered yacht, unless your demands are the same as the one's their other "benefactors" are demanding.
----
On the post: Labels Decide Not To Appeal Spanish Court Ruling That Found P2P File Sharing Software Perfectly Legal
Re: Re: New Regime Time
Oh well, once the American Government; commonly referred to as Wall Street, finishes buying the Spanish politicians off, I guess it really won't make any difference what form the Spanish government takes. It'll be just another department of the American Fascist Business Bureau, like the governments of so many other countries around the globe.
One World Government, one government at a time.
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Re: Re: Re: Re: True tally
Please be advised that the chances of such a voting system ever being introduced, or even considered by any nation on earth is absolutely zero - actually more like -500.
If the vote was capable of creating honest elections, it would be illegal, and the current voting system is favored by all criminals and career politicians as the best way to placate a public while maintaining access to their wealth, so it will never go away.
You have nothing to fear from the idea of a signed vote as it will never ever be allowed to exist by the power that be.
Your Secret Ballot is safe as long as criminals ride the top of the food chain.
On the post: Proud Voters Tweeting In The UK Could Receive Jail Time And A Fine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Verifiable vote is not allowed
Enlightened? Wrong candidate? Live off trees and flowers?
OK. I can see this is indeed a religiously adhered-to fanatical belief system you're supporting here, when you start throwing whole buckets of straw-men into the ring.
People are not as easily coerced as they used to be. So many of us now make our livings outside the system through non-traditional means that the old "lost job means death by starvation" syndrome you cling to is no longer sufficient to keeping all people silent.
Of course, this may not be the case in your country, I don't know.
Such things as - the Web - make it easy to report wrong doing by employers, and forensics tends to make your old-style club-wielding brown-shirt tactics a tad over-obvious today.
I can see however that you cannot be convinced to examine your position by either logic or facts, so I will stop bothering you about that which you obviously hold sacred, lest you start accusing me of threatening to harm children and puppies in order to make you say bad things about voting.
May your children live in interesting times.
On the post: Labels Decide Not To Appeal Spanish Court Ruling That Found P2P File Sharing Software Perfectly Legal
New Regime Time
That, or just as likely, another attempt to change the government of Spain.
On the post: UPS Insists That It Is Not Helping The NSA 'Interdict' Packages To Install Backdoors
Re: Re: does UPS necessarily know?
How much more so would UPS be willing to assist/allow federal "interdiction" operations that pertained to the War on Terror?
The question now, is Why?
---
However, I still think the really important aspect of this situation is as John Fenderson noted:
"Whether or not UPS is involved in the situation, this brings up an excellent point about NSLs: that they exist mean that no denial any company issues actually means a thing."
NSLs change the whole playing field completely.
That the federal government can now legally force a company to lie to the public means that the apparently honest companies and the obviously dishonest companies are now indistinguishable and that nobody should really accept what any company says in its own defense when it comes to assisting the federal government in clandestine operations.
It would appear that the NSA, CIA, FBI, HLS and the US Fed are hell-bent on utterly destroying any remaining trust between global citizens and all US companies, by every means at their disposal.
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