He's referencing what's been front-page news for the past month. Choose your favorite newspaper, turn on a TV, or type "NSA lie congress" into Google News. It's not even an assumed lie; the Director of the NSA admitted he lied.
Seriously though: If this guy thinks it's a good idea to "apologize" for working against the People behind their backs and then lying about it, it means they take the People for real dumb asses, IMO. For me, this behavior creates even more outrage.
Then again, since all info on everyone is stored, forever, you can be flagged and reviewed at any point in your life.
Even if you decided one day to not carry a mobile device, it wouldn't help, because that would also make you suspecious and they would have a drone track you 24/7
Then we should start an initiative to get everybody to request their file (it's the old "I would do it if you do it" problem).
IMO, the only way to make sure this kind of mass surveillance can be kept from happening again, would be to set up a new government structure that guarantees that budgets are kept so low that it's not possible to create it again and keep it running.
Of course, that would imply that this apparatus has to be stopped, first.
As for the kind of government structure required, I'm thinking:
Cut the central government to a strict minimum and give the states back their power: Decentralize as much as you can.
EDIT: As a bonus, this also leads us away from the single-point-of-corruption-and-failure which a powerful central government is (just like with the Internet).
I'd be interested to get my Dads FBI file. He passed away in November 2011 but he had an FBI file for when he worked at the 94 world cup. Is it possible to request FBI documents on foreign subjects?
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 37.7 ms ] threadSeriously though: If this guy thinks it's a good idea to "apologize" for working against the People behind their backs and then lying about it, it means they take the People for real dumb asses, IMO. For me, this behavior creates even more outrage.
"Look, I said I'm sorry, ok?!"
Then again, since all info on everyone is stored, forever, you can be flagged and reviewed at any point in your life.
Even if you decided one day to not carry a mobile device, it wouldn't help, because that would also make you suspecious and they would have a drone track you 24/7
IMO, the only way to make sure this kind of mass surveillance can be kept from happening again, would be to set up a new government structure that guarantees that budgets are kept so low that it's not possible to create it again and keep it running.
Of course, that would imply that this apparatus has to be stopped, first.
As for the kind of government structure required, I'm thinking:
Cut the central government to a strict minimum and give the states back their power: Decentralize as much as you can.
EDIT: As a bonus, this also leads us away from the single-point-of-corruption-and-failure which a powerful central government is (just like with the Internet).