Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it. Further, it’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.
Edward Snowden (via azspot)
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We waste so many days waiting for weekend. So many nights wanting morning. Our lust for future comfort is the biggest thief of life.
Joshuaglenn (via awakenedvibrations)
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(Source: joshuaglenn)
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you know that feeling you get when you’re at a party, and people start trickling away for some reason or another, and you have a voice in the back of your head asking ‘who’s gonna be here to get drunk with at 4am?’
i’ve been feeling that way for about a month, as more and more of my friends move away from this shit hole and off to brighter and better places. i miss them dearly, but i’m very happy for them and proud of them all.
▲11 | reblogyou know you’ve made it as a musician if there’s a separate wikipedia article for every song on one of your albums
Is it really the case that the government has entrusted our privacy to the good judgment of private analysts? Are there really no code-based controls for assuring that specific surveillance is specifically justified? And what is the technology for assuring that rogues paid by our government can’t use data collected by our government for purposes that none within our government would openly and publicly defend? Because the fact is that there is technology that could be deployed that would give many the confidence that none of us now have. “Trust us” does not compute. But trust and verify, with high-quality encryption, could. And there are companies, such as Palantir, developing technologies that could give us, and more importantly, reviewing courts, a very high level of confidence that data collected or surveilled was not collected or used in an improper way. Think of it as a massive audit log, recording how and who used what data for what purpose. We could code the Net in a string of obvious ways to give us even better privacy, while also enabling better security.
Lawrence Lessig (via azspot)
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