It’s A Message Problem … Again
Zero thinks that he has a message problem, because people don’t believe him when he lies about spying on us. He wants us to believe that he is lying with our best interests at heart.
NPR has the transcript of today’s news conference.
Marcy was all over Zero’s failure to tell the truth.
Digby went after the mythical review that was going to take place, ‘real soon now’, the review that Mark Udall & Ron Wyden have been calling for for years, the review that Edward Snowden was in fact waiting for when he voted for Zero. To emphasize – Edward Snowden voted for Obama in the HOPE that Obama would CHANGE what was going on, and decided to leak when it became obvious that things were getting worse.
Zero’s plan obviously has to start with “a blue-ribbon panel” to study the issue. That is the standard stall of governments at every level when they are caught screwing up. But he is also talking about appointing a ‘civil liberties advocate’ to the FISA court, who will be in exactly the same box as Senators Udall & Wyden, knowing that evil is occurring but unable to say anything because it’s all classified. There is also going to be a ‘civil liberties watchdog’ at NSA who will have no one to watch as everything is being done at remote locations by contractors.
The American people got the real message from the documents that Edward Snowden provided – our government is spying on all of us, and the only message we want from the government is that the spying has stopped.
As the owner of Lavabit writes “This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”
5 comments
Of course, the fact that a mail provider is overseas is not a guarantee either. The EU may have the most stringent privacy laws on the planet but there’s a big caveat to them — they apply to private citizens invading the privacy of other private citizens, not to governments invading the privacy of their citizens. The only reason action to take, when it involves email, is to either a) assume it is being read, or b) PGP-encrypt it with a public key that was transmitted via a secure channel from the other end (to prevent man in the middle attacks). Or with your public key if you want to insure that only you can read it :).
Personally, I’ve declared defeat in the privacy wars. Nobody seems to care that their email is being read by the government, they value convenience over privacy, so… (shrug). Don’t worry. Be happy. La la la la la. Sigh.
Well… It is a message problem. 😉 But he has it backwards. He’s the one not getting the message! (And what a surprise…)
Same old, same old…
I used to do the key exchange on diskette sent First Class mail. It made people much happier.
Sooner or later, someone will create a data haven, just like the tax havens that currently exist. It would be a nice niche for a small country with few natural resources.
Zero does this crap to ‘prove he’s tough’, and doesn’t care about anything else. This will be a huge part of his ‘legacy’, but he doesn’t seem to understand that.
Another 8 years wasted by the US government.
Bryan, back when I cared, I would do the key exchange in person. Now… eh. Nobody seems to care, so I don’t either. The end result is that we’re all screwed. So it goes.
– Badtux the Defeatist Penguin
Too many people have given up the fight, so it’s hard to get them to push back.