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- What's the highest dollar price will Bitcoin reach in 2024? Posted on February 28th, 2024 | 68 comments
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Edison
Douchebag Hero (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really a "bad guy", not really a "hero". He did the right thing, for the right reasons, the wrong way. But then again, I'm not sure there was a better way to do it. Not really ambivalent, but not entirely on his side, and also not on the side of big government.
It needed to be done (expose the NSA), but then again, it only exposed what everyone with a brain already suspected. I mean really, who is surprised by this revelation?
Re:Snowden (Score:5, Insightful)
Both gun control and privacy are tough topics
No, they're not. Freedom is more important than safety, and Bill Maher is an imbecile. There is nothing wrong with the fourth amendment, and we should not violate it in an effort to 'protect' people from that which is a nearly nonexistent threat, nor should we violate it for any reason at all.
Re:Douchebag Hero (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, there really was no right way - at least three former NSA people have tried to whistleblow on this without revealing secrets to the press and failed. He certainly didn't commit espionage, as the US charged him with, and rightfully fears for his life as the US is pursuing the death penalty. This is clearly a case of a US agency that is not allowed to spy on US citizens by law breaking the law and the government covering up and saying it is justified. It is not justified, it breaks the law, and violates the fourth amendment.
IMO, impeach congress, the president, and the NSA and give them all the chair for grossly abusing the Bill of Rights. Yeah, I don't really believe we should be that extreme, but that is essentially what the US government wants to do to Snowden, and it is obscene. If the ever capture him, they will have a kangaroo court and convict him of all charges and give him the chair (due to a badly written, overbroad law written to fight opposition to World War 1), so why not accuse the NSA, congress, and the president of the same? By the same law, they have been committing espionage on us and deserve to die.
Hero (Score:5, Insightful)
He is a true hero. He put his safety and future, his whole life, on the line for the sake of everyone else so we could get the truth.
Re:Snowden (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Snowden (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason the Constitution is referred to as a living document.
Right - there is a process to change it. If we go through that process, fine, change it. Otherwise, let's live by it.
None of the above? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a bit indifferent to Snowden's actions, so I'm not sure if I'd qualify him as either hero or villain. Mostly because I don't think his actions _should_ have had any impact. Anyone who has been paying attention for the past twenty years was well aware that the NSA (and other information gathering agencies) spy on citizens. They've been pretty open about it for a long time. Well, open in the "Of course we can, but we would never do that, wink wink," kind of way. Privacy advocates and the FSF have been warning people about this sort of thing for years. The NSA (or CSIS or MI-5, or the former KGB) spying is not news and shouldn't be to anyone who was half awake for the past couple of decades.
Which makes me not really care that one more whistle blower came forward. I think it's nice Snowden wanted to tip off the population to what was going on, but there is the problem: Anyone who cared about privacy already knew and chances are anyone who didn't know about the NSA spying won't care now. (Or they will support the NSA spying.) This makes Snowden's move a bit naive, possibly with good intent, but he was spilling "secrets" anyone who cared to know already knew (or at least strongly suspected). I think he has basically thrown away his life and well being for nothing. I believe he wanted to be a hero, but really just wasted his time trying to inform people who either already know or don't care.
Re:Snowden (Score:5, Insightful)
No, please don't use that phrase to support your views. I agree with some of your original post, and support your right to your own philosophy about all this. But viewing the Constitution cheapens your argument.
The Constitution is a contract that specifies what the Federal government is, and what it can and can't do, as well as what the individual states can't do, such as print money. It can be Amended, by using the process imbedded within it. But calling it a "living document" implies that it changes on its own, that the words meant one thing when they were written and agreed upon, but now mean something else, something that you may or may not support. The changes were not agreed to by the people, or by the states, they just happened because time passed.
If you want the Constitution to be amended, push for an Amendment to be written and passed. That is the proper method to reflect a changing society.
Re:Douchebag Hero (Score:5, Insightful)
Them: "We stopped (X) Terrorist acts under this program, we just can't tell you about them."
Me: "Then, my dear comrade, you didn't stop anything, because without proof, it didn't happen. I cannot accept the word of someone who has lied and mislead me dozens of times"
The problem is, too few people will actually question authority, at least properly. Them telling me lies and then saying they lied to protect themselves and then lie some more doesn't really cut it. Too bad the press is the lapdog of the Demicans and Republicrats.
Re:Hero (Score:5, Insightful)
"But then he flees from a country that he exposed secretly spies on its own people, to a country that openly spies on its people."
No, you have that incorrect....
he FLED from a country known for torturing and permanently imprisoning people that go against the current leadership. He knew that computer crime is punished far more severely than murder is. and he knew that with laws signed by Obama, he can be called an "enemy combatant" without any proof and sent away to be tortured for the rest of his life.
That is why he ran, and I certainly would as well. Only a complete moron would stay where they could be captured, silenced and forced to pay for their insolence every hour of every day for the rest of their lives until they are broken and make a public statement as to how they were evil.
THIS is the US of A, we happily and openly use torture.
Re:Snowden (Score:4, Insightful)
The changes were not agreed to by the people, or by the states, they just happened because time passed.
I'm gonna get blasted for this, but its my view. I'd like to state beforehand that I do not agree with what I believe happened, this is just how I see it. We, the people (that's an important distinction, meaning the body politic), essentially asked for all this after 9/11. We didn't tell our government to surveil us, we didn't directly request the erosion of our rights and privacy, we simply said "we're scared, protect us from the evil people who want to crash all the things into our buildings", and the government did (whether or not they've been successful is a debate for another day). Now that we're starting to realize (through the actions of Snowden et al) exactly how this protection was put in place, and we're puffing out our collective chests and declaring how wrong it is, and it is, but that doesn't change the fact that we demanded it happen. That being said, yes, what Snowden did was morally correct, but that doesn't change the fact that if Uncle Sam manages to get their mitts on him he wont see the outside of a prison again until he is a very old man, if at all.
Re:Wrong by law (Score:5, Insightful)
He is merely wrong by law, not by morality. If I might remind the slashdot crowd: authority is doing what you are told, regardless of what is right; morality is doing what is right, regardless of what you are told.
Being an independent thinker, I side with morality, and therefore he is a hero.
I have to wonder how much greater America could be as a country if there were more of her employees and contractors not only refused to follow illegal orders, but blow the whistle on it. Politicians refusing to implement bad laws just because someone happened to donate lots of cash for future favors, security agents refusing to dig up dirt on people without probable cause, police refusing to march against a demonstration, teachers refusing to not teach safe sex, things like that.
Our current society really is quite efficient at breeding obedient robots that only think they have free will.
Re:Missing Option -- a Stooge. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me guess, you like reading spy novels?
There's literally no evidence for anything you say so "Everything about the Edward Snowden case" seems to be overstating it a bit. Nothing about the Edward Snowden case currently offers even a slight bit of evidence for your theory.
Like Assange, like Manning, like the Lulzsec kids, like the Arab Spring, he's just another of many who at a time of financial turmoil has finally been pushed over the limit of what he as a person is willing to take from global corporations and governments pushing way beyond their necessary remits. It's a kickback of a decade of post-9/11 destruction of government transparency and accountability sometimes backed up by worsening economic conditions leading to lower standards of living. People have had enough and have begun to snap, it's as simple as that.
Re:Dishonest (Score:5, Insightful)
If your information is from The Daily Mail then you're already misinformed.
The Daily Mail is notorious for outright lying to create inflammatory headlines just to sell papers and ad impressions.
For example, when Tiger Woods had multiple affairs the figure quoted was with 9 women, The Daily Mail took that number and doubled it printing a headline of 18 women for which there was literally no evidence. It was just an outright made up lie to try and make their headline look more juicy than the competitors who had supposedly only unmasked 9 women...
Re:Wrong by law (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets talk about the NSA (Score:4, Insightful)
Many people point out this discussion about Snowden is a distraction from the discussion of the information he reveled. Perhaps the same poll should be done about the NSA.
Re:Wrong by law (Score:4, Insightful)
According to whose morals?
Listening to the foreign telephone conversations is a normal spying business -- every country wiretaps for the purposes of spying.
Viewing metadata of the telephone calls is equivalent of noting sender and receiver address on an unopened envelope. We've been doing that since Kennedy administration. Nothing new here.
What Snowden did was expose this top secret program to the people who it was targeted against: the terrorists, and those who out there set to harm our national interests overseas. And if you don't think they are doing the same thing -- you are too naive to understand the world of politics, modern geo-politcial realities. Put your rose goggles back on.
Also he took with himself a treasure-trove worth of information on hard-drives and flash-drives. Possibly paper documents. He had access to the names of every single asset in every single country... You think foreign agencies would not love to get hold of that list and execute these traitors? Who knows what is happening in Moscow right now?
The guy should have been charged with treason because what he did is an equivalent of Julius Rosenberg's working Atom Bomb leak.
The "terrorists" already operate under the assumption that they are being watched. It's doubtful that this is news to them. What Snowden did was expose to the American people just how secretive their government is, how little oversight there really is, and that they're being lied to (James Clapper proclaiming *to congress* that there was no data collected on any Americans).
Re:Snowden (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the issue has become about Snowden rather than the facts that he uncovered. Very shrewd of those embarrassed by this discovery to spin the news that way.
Top secret or common knowledge? (Score:5, Insightful)
Listening to the foreign telephone conversations is a normal spying business -- every country wiretaps for the purposes of spying.....What Snowden did was expose this top secret program to the people who it was targeted against
Hang on - either this was a Top Secret program which nobody knew was happening OR it was just the normal, everyday spying which every country does. If the latter then how does the revelation really have much effect? The terrorists would already know this was going on and would take steps to avoid it. You can't have it both ways: either the US has an unusually invasive level of spying and so the revelations could be said to help the terrorists or else it is just "business as usual" in which case the revelations should not really surprise anyone, especially not terrorists who you would assume are worried about being spied on.
Re:Ambiguous in intent (Score:5, Insightful)
He said very clearly that he had a problem with what the NSA was doing for years while working there, so I think he's saying that he had felt obligated to do this for a long time, and so three months ago, he took a position that would give him the best access to the materials he thought we needed to see.
Re:Wrong by law (Score:5, Insightful)
Listening to the foreign telephone conversations is a normal spying business -- every country wiretaps for the purposes of spying. Viewing metadata of the telephone calls is equivalent of noting sender and receiver address on an unopened envelope. We've been doing that since Kennedy administration. Nothing new here. What Snowden did was expose this top secret program to the people who it was targeted against: the terrorists
I don't get it. Was it top secret or did everyone know about it?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong by law (Score:4, Insightful)
> According to whose morals?
Thomas Jefferson & John Adams
Re:Snowden (Score:5, Insightful)
The people didn't ask for any of this. Those in power were merely opportunists willing to exploit a tragedy in order to expand the powers of government past their legally mandated boundaries.
There was certainly a mass hysteria and those in power certainly exploited it.
Calling the end result "the will of the people" is just nonsense.
Re:Wrong by law (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
In a democracy, the PEOPLE got the last say, good or bad. Even the peoples choice the entire country is going to fry, that is the peoples choice. That is how a democracy works. We put up with a lot of shit because of democracies, what is the point of it all if the government then does what it wants anyway? Then we might as well have a proper dictatorship and have the trains run on time, allow some competent leaders to rule and not just the Mr Clean and Mr Popular.
A lot of people ain't all the upset about the privacy invasion perse, average people know they haven't really got any and that they are never going to be important enough for anyone to care about them anyway.
But they were NOT asked. They weren't ASKED "are you in favor of being spied on" they were spied on and then told they didn't mind by polls nobody polled them for.
And THAT is why Snowden is a Hero. NOT for exposing the spying but that democracy is dead. And democracy didn't even die because of the spying it died because nearly EVERY politician who should be against the spying is attacking Snowden and the few defending him are just upset it wasn't them doing the spying.
Frankly I doubt it will have much effect. The rumors of Echelon were bad enough but while me an others have claimed that total espionage would just be to costly and inefficient, we were proven wrong and it has been a bi-partisan effort. There is no alternative left anymore.
The system will continue for a long time simply because any alternative will be to costly and to much work but the democratic western system as we have known it since WW2 has come to an end. The semi-competent parties are all corrupt to the core and the outsiders are so fucking insane they make the corrupt people look wholesome.
Re:Wrong by law (Score:3, Insightful)
. If we the people have "spies" to keep tabs on our own government, I'm OK with that.
He may see himself as an operative for the US people, but did the US people appoint him, or elect him, or designate him so? Who gets to designate and assign these "spies"? What if the "corruption" he saw was merely playing along with the little fish in order to hook the bigger fish? Self proclaimed "spies" like this could endanger high level missions and put lots of lives in danger. He is a self appointed vigilante.
Re:Wrong by law (Score:4, Insightful)
That, and the scale. Monitoring a few people with reasonable cause to suspect they are involved with terrorism (or espionage, or other crimes) is one thing - but monitoring half the population of the world, including a substantial chunk of the US, with no cause other than the fact that you can just on the off-chance that you might find something by luck? Different matter altogether, when you're treating everyone as a suspect by default.
Re:Wrong by law (Score:5, Insightful)
Vigillantes aren't a problem so much as a symptom: Their appearance tells of an underlying dissatisfaction with the process of law. I can imagine how this happened: He was raised on the traditional American rhetoric of liberty, independence, the value of the constitution in limiting government, and so on. He worked for a government contractor, and concluded that while the US government claims to embody those values in public, behind the scenes at least one agency is using the constitution as toilet paper. He felt it was his patriotic duty to reveal this to the people.
Re:Snowden (Score:4, Insightful)
He got out of the country before the leak. He of all people would know that there was no chance of escaping identification once the leak was done - all that hiding his identity would do is buy a little time. By going public he has earned a little political protection: No government wants to reveal their status as 'lapdog of the US' by handing him over without a fight. That's why China were so happy to let him run off to Russia and thus become Someone Else's Problem. Russia is letting him sit in the airport too, hoping he'll run off somewhere else again. If he were keeping his identity secret, he'd be quickly identified and disappeared to a secret prison somewhere with a phone call.
Re:Wrong by law (Score:5, Insightful)
In intelligence terms, what you are doing is called "Dead agenting". Attacking the moral credibility of the source, instead of the informational credibility. It's is a very powerful weapon, because people are social animals and this makes your enemy do your work for you. (Undermine his reputation, and countries are less likely to help him escape.) "His girlfriend is a stripper", "It doesn't matter what he revealed since he broke the law revealing it", "He chose to work at a place doing wrong, therefore is somehow responsible for the wrong-doing he exposed... somehow."
Re:Wrong by law (Score:5, Insightful)
where you swore under oath
"I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic"
Re:Wrong by law (Score:4, Insightful)
Except, nothing he exposed was illegal. It had all been cleared by FISA courts and Congress.
AND in violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution... Mr Soetero-Obama and a very large percentage of the
Senate and House of Representatives could care less about the Constitution, and THAT is a LARGE reason why things
are not going to end well for this country..
Re:Wrong by law (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging from some things he's said in the interviews I've seen, I think he feels a calling from a "higher power", namely the US Constitution.. I don't recall if government contractors take the same oath that actual government employees do, but you have to remember theres that pesky statement that seems to be ignored by a large part of Congress, the bureaucracy, and the Whitehouse, namely the "Protect and Defend the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and DOMESTIC" clause.. I'm betting he feels that alone overrides any laws he broke... at least that's how *I'd* feel about it...
Re:Wrong by law (Score:5, Insightful)
"...to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."?
I think a Government agency which is acting against the principles of the Constitution and its Amendments counts as a domestic enemy.
Ergo, Snowden did not violate his Oath, neither by extension did he break the Law, as the Constitution of the United States is the pinnacle and the base of all Law in North America.
Also Exposes Propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hero (Score:3, Insightful)
"This is true but irreverent."
If you think that then you are a fool. Why do you think you can only be charged for one crime and the prosecution has to say "Aw shucks, we can't charge him with everything under the sun."
They WILL charge him with it as a nice tasty add-on to hopefully increase the punishment.
The real hero is... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if Snowden is a real hero or not. But you know who is a real hero? Senator Mark Udall, who has been talking about this, legally, for years.
Re:Top secret or common knowledge? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, no, you really do not know what constitutes "business as usual" in the intel world.
True - but this just further undermines the OP's original point. The question really is whether this level of spying is acceptable not whether it is "business as usual". That's a question for the US to decide but, if you are going to accept a level of spying on your own citizens akin to a 21st century version of the Soviet Union, then you can kiss goodbye to whatever moral authority you have left as a champion for human rights because that level of hypocrisy would be unsustainable.
Re:Wrong by law (Score:4, Insightful)
Killing a person in self defense is certainly morally acceptable
For the record, there are people who would dispute that: absolute pacifists such as Jains, Quakers, and some Amish consider it immoral to kill a person even in self-defense.
Since we can't determine his intent, we cant determine his morality.
We can at least partially determine his intent:
1. He leaked it to the world, when he could have more easily sold it to the intelligence agencies of China or Russia.
2. He left a comfortable job for a life of running around the world trying to avoid getting caught and probably killed by the US.
3. The information he leaked was about organized criminal activity by people on government payroll, hidden from the public by classification.
So the only reasonable way to read this is that this guy risked everything in order to bring to the attention of the general public some massive criminal activity being perpetrated by the US government. His motivations might not have been completely pure, but he took on significant personal risk in order to attempt to right what millions of people see as a pretty serious wrong.