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Thread: Snowden Bombshell Six Years On: Has Anything Changed?

  1. #1

    Snowden Bombshell Six Years On: Has Anything Changed?

    Snowden Bombshell Six Years On: Has Anything Changed?



    Six years ago undercover CIA officer and NSA contractor Edward Snowden came out from the shadows to reveal that he was responsible for the greatest leak of secret government information in US history. Americans learned that the government was not spying on terrorists to keep us safe, but was actually much more interested in spying on us. The revelations led to "reform" in the form of the "FREEDOM Act." But have we recovered any of our privacy protections...or are we worse off...?
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.



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  3. #2
    WE ARE less FREE?
    FLIP THOSE FLAGS, THE NATION IS IN DISTRESS!


    why I should worship the state (who apparently is the only party that can possess guns without question).
    The state's only purpose is to kill and control. Why do you worship it? - Sola_Fide

    Baptiste said.
    At which point will Americans realize that creating an unaccountable institution that is able to pass its liability on to tax-payers is immoral and attracts sociopaths?

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    Sure. Something changed. The Trump administration put pressure on Equator to evict Julian Assange.
    9/11 Thermate experiments

    Winston Churchhill on why the U.S. should have stayed OUT of World War I

    "I am so %^&*^ sick of this cult of Ron Paul. The Paulites. What is with these %^&*^ people? Why are there so many of them?" YouTube rant by "TheAmazingAtheist"

    "We as a country have lost faith and confidence in freedom." -- Ron Paul

    "It can be a challenge to follow the pronouncements of President Trump, as he often seems to change his position on any number of items from week to week, or from day to day, or even from minute to minute." -- Ron Paul
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    The road to hell is paved with good intentions. No need to make it a superhighway.
    Quote Originally Posted by osan View Post
    The only way I see Trump as likely to affect any real change would be through martial law, and that has zero chances of success without strong buy-in by the JCS at the very minimum.

  5. #4
    Article mentioned.

    Worth a read...

    Six years ago, the world was introduced to a previously unknown government contractor who revealed the National Security Agency (NSA) was conducting an unparalleled level of warrantless electronic surveillance. Edward Snowden’s explosive revelations about NSA’s telephone metadata collection program triggered an uproar at home and abroad, culminating in the 2015 passage of the USA Freedom Act—legislation that supporters claimed would “end” the kind of mass surveillance Snowden had exposed to the world.

    During the debate over Snowden’s revelations, federal officials (including President Barack Obama) asserted the surveillance program had saved lives—going so far as to claim, without any evidence, that the program had foiled dozens of terrorist plots against the United States. And even after Obama’s own hand-picked review group found the telephone metadata program not worth it (as did the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) in their report), Congress renewed the program in 2015 via the USA Freedom Act.

    Supporters claimed the new legislation would effectively end the NSA bulk telephone metadata program. Others, including myself, felt the bill was somewhere between terrible and disastrous, because its reforms didn’t go far enough. Last year, critics who predicted that USA Freedom Act would not end NSA’s telephone bulk collection were, ironically, vindicated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which admitted that in fact three times as much American telephone data was being collected than before the law’s enactment.

    Amazingly, earlier this year NSA recommended to President Donald Trump that the telephone metadata program be terminated, claiming the program was too cumbersome to continue to execute and not worth the effort—a tacit admission that critics were right all along.

    As it stands, the USA Freedom Act is set to expire on December 15 of this year. So, why not just let it die and move on? Because even if the USA Freedom Act expires, other vast—and in my view, unconstitutional—domestic surveillance powers and technologies will remain untouched and, in at least one case, completely unexamined publicly.

    ...
    https://www.justsecurity.org/64464/t...-six-years-on/
    Quote Originally Posted by Ron Paul View Post
    The intellectual battle for liberty can appear to be a lonely one at times. However, the numbers are not as important as the principles that we hold. Leonard Read always taught that "it's not a numbers game, but an ideological game." That's why it's important to continue to provide a principled philosophy as to what the role of government ought to be, despite the numbers that stare us in the face.
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    This intellectually stimulating conversation is the reason I keep coming here.

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by jmdrake View Post
    Sure. Something changed. The Trump administration put pressure on Equator to evict Julian Assange.
    Beat me to it.
    "The Patriarch"

  7. #6
    Everyone forgets that Glenn Greenwald himself said they were publicly releasing only about 5% of what Snowden allegedly leaked to them, calling the full trove of info a "ticking time bomb". I imagine the full trove showed just how far and wide the online shilling goes, mass manipulation, mass surveillance and data collection and probably info on what NSA really is for and who runs it. It would shock most Americans if they knew that the NSA works for the British instead of Americans, etc.
    "Let it not be said that we did nothing."-Ron Paul

    "We have set them on the hobby-horse of an idea about the absorption of individuality by the symbolic unit of COLLECTIVISM. They have never yet and they never will have the sense to reflect that this hobby-horse is a manifest violation of the most important law of nature, which has established from the very creation of the world one unit unlike another and precisely for the purpose of instituting individuality."- A Quote From Some Old Book



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