It is beyond ridiculous at this point. This is not a hunt for terrorists or terrorism. This is mass spying on US Citizens for what can only be nefarious purposes. They are spying on your children, and you. Bin Ladin was not playing fantasy realm MMORPGs. Over the weekend, Google Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL and LinkedIn joined forces to create this website, an open letter to the US Government, and indeed world governments comprising the 5 eyes, to cease and desist their practices... while surrupticiously encrypting their networks prior to NSA taps and changing protocals to defeat the agencies cyber attacks on their networks. http://reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/ A good article in the NYT explains the unique leverage these companies have in effecting change. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/t...government-surveillance-of-users.html?hp&_r=0 Considering the scope, and malice of our government against its citizens, in violation of the constitution... the NSA is the greatest threat to liberty this nation has ever faced. It is clear that Snowden is a whistleblower. I understand the initial compulsions to label him a traitor, and those who have argued such for as long as these documets have been leaking, I want to understand that. I get it. However as more and more depth is explored I think my friends in opposition must re-evaluate their positions. Nobody is asking you to lablel him a hero, though he is to a great many... but taking a stand to stop this corrupt group of government agencies that cooperate outside of the laws which made our nation so great is clearly a noble pursuit to me, and not intended to damage our nation, but allow it to persevere under the ideals and laws of her inception.
Haha so terrorists are paying their bills with WoW gold? $100 says some NSA agent trolled his boss so he could play WoW all day at work.
All joking aside I think it is also interesting that they set up a "deconflict group" to avoid spying on each other. I guess THEY would find such an intrusion. Funny that.
MOAR POSTS!!! This affects every single person. We do not need to rehash old arguments. I require no acts of contrition. Please for the love of country engage. Stop ignoring this tyranny.
The government does not enforce its laws for nefarious purposes, most evil doers play violent video games because that radicalizes them into maniacs. Most of these 'kids' have mental problems, like the one from Sandy Hook and Colorado, and it would be easy to spot their tendencies online when they are playing those shooting games.
Spying on gamers? Who doesn't this voyeuristic federal monstrosity consider worthy of snooping upon? Is there anyone??? Don't ya just love all this security that our loving Uncle Sam so graciously provides its people? I wonder how many government hard drives internet political forum posts reside upon... And an NSA in the hands of those psycholoons that are enamored by government and its potential for mass control represents a double threat to America's liberty. America - the "land of the free"... Land of the free my ass! Half the nation would install a dictator in a heartbeat and hand him unquestioning allegiance no matter what kind of hokus-pokus bullsh!t he and his cohorts decide would make for a new and improved America. We've already gotten a glimpse of that reality.
Like I have been saying I am not surprised. But here's the thing, these telecomms have been complicit in helping the NSA, there is no way they could capture near real time streaming data, unless it was stored by the telecomm, or the telecomm configured the routes to them.
Good, hopefully we can start locking up all the 12 year olds that have been having sex with my mother recently.
The Ameristasi at "work" Yes, they are that paranoid and, well, over-powered and under-supervised. Of course, I expect the trained sheep response to be the same here as it's been anywhere else - to laugh at it and jokingly invite these creeps to spy on them as they play.. I mean, the creepiest thing is just how accepting Americans seem to be of all this, like it's harmless and their rights really don't matter when there are big bad terrorists to be hunted down.
Got any statistics to back your retarded comment up? Last time I checked people have been shooting themselves up way before Atari 2600 was invented. And before that people were blaming their violence on Heavy Metal. And before that they were blaming Elvis for violence.
There are ways, actually, PRISM is likely a fiber optic splitting technology that allows the creeps to capture a copy of all of the data traffic without any effort on the part of telecoms or other companies. The NSA just sets up the splittler and forwards all that data to its little closet facilities, and of course ultimately to Utah or where ever it's all stored. This story is something slightly different, though. This is Ameristasi agents actually spying on players in these games in some more directly involved way. But, oh well. It's easier to accept this massive abuse than to take a stand against it, isn't it? You know that your vote won't change it. You know that nothing short of bloody revolution will change it.
Great... Now I'll have NSA goons mocking me for my terrible K/D ratio on CoD, since I'm always gettin pwned...lol - - - Updated - - - Um, no... Just, no...
Listen I don't like it either, but this is what the NSA and these people do, this is what they live for, right, wrong or indifferent. The FBI and IRS have been profiling people for almost a century now, this is the same just using different media. The fact is they have the tools to profile in greater detail a far greater pool, and as in their nature, they are taking advantage of it. I wish they wouldn't and give us the benefit of the doubt, but I don't expect them to stop even if there is a law against it.
Agreed.. In fact, it might be argued that with modern technology offering the opportunities that it does for surveillance, it has essentially created a power vacuum of a sort that someone is bound to fill. That is, because it's possible for someone to gather all of that data, even if the expense is massive, someone will likely do it. However, I still think it's one of those things that constitutes a greater violation of our rights than anything this country's founders rebelled against. We're also pretty much back to taxation without representation..
It is not taxation without representation, it is more of 4th amendment issue, of illegal searches. Legal semantics aside, this is what these people do, and with the resources they have, they are going to gather all the info. Info on people is power, J Edgar did it. What needs to be done is proper oversight, nothing else will change.
This isn't taxation without representation, no, but that's yet another abuse, and an old one we've managed to return to.
So let me get this straight....our tax dollars went to fund NSA agents to play...WoW? First of all I just want to know...where they any good? Second..WTF...seriously...just wtf. Do they actually believe that well populated games like MMORPG's are really the best place for terrorists to share info? With the logging system in games like this it wouldn't be hard at all to pull up supposed "secret" chatter. Every time I think that the NSA spying scandal can't get any worse and any stupider...I reaches out and slaps me in the face with the next level of idiocy.
THis is such a fascinating response. Last decade, when the telecoms were caught piping ALL their internet and phone data through NSA specially built snoops facilities, that president and Congress rushed to write a special bill to retroactively absolve the phone companies from ANY and ALL criminal and civil liability from ANYONE, government or private citizen) for breaking federal laws, state laws, and their customer agreements by handing over ALL our date to the government. What more of a "go ahead and bend over for the government" message do we need to give these companies? I was dissed over and over by so many for making a big deal of these "poor patriotic companies" who tried to "help us catch terrorists". Well, all of you now reap what you sow. A decade of indifference to a government out of control in this fashion simply grew a monster.
I have not been indifferent. You will find posts from me concerning room 641a prior to the Snowden disclosures. I believed that it was guaranteed to bring some legislative change at the time... little did I know it would go the other way. I admit that I trusted the spooks, and congress as a whole were EITHER completely corrupt, or had knowledge I did not which kept them in check as per the access they had to it. I tended not to buy conspiracy theories about Orwellian uses of that access... but that in a Tsarnev situation, they would have a secret warrant to troll for an emergent situation. I expected that machines might monitor streams for clear threats of grandiose proportions to alert an human to oversee. While I still (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)ed about it, I did not (*)(*)(*)(*)(*) that hard. I wanted people to know about it, because such has to be watched... because scope creeps. I expected their access was like echelon... mined for keywords to alert a person by machines, not people. That tech was from the 70s. I have been having trying to raise awareness for a long time, without demanding change. In this way I guess you can say I was complicit. Beowulf and Carnivore... Shamrock... I tried to raise awareness. There are also spooks in my extended circle. Analysts... agents. I know they do dirt, but I trusted the organizations and congress to keep it in check, because of my trust of them. I assumed targets were real, not so... casually chosen... I assumed the scope was available to bumrush data in an emergency... not a 24/7 trawl, store, and convalescence of everything everywhere all the time. I was clearly naive. I just didn't think it could happen, and that the capability they have was science fiction. Most importantly... I really believed their targeting was bonafide. Around 2000 those beliefs began to shatter. Then 9/11 happened... and the insane intelligence failures renewed my faith that they couldn't REALLY be doing the Orwell thing... and I wanted them to be Orwellian in the ME. I wanted intelligence to find the bad guys, and protect the good guys. I wanted our troops as safe as possible. So in a sense, though I think your comments are misdirected in large part at me... I do own my nationalistic faith in our intelligence. My criticism wasn't harsh enough. I always expected they COULD do it (but even I didn't think on this scale) but would only use these powers for good... and I wanted them to use them for good. Now I will take the perfect privacy model and take my chances (better than the lottery) that I will not be the victim of a terrorist attack. Perfect security or perfect privacy? Burn it all down, and roll the dice.
