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ok ill be the one to say it then: the NSA are fascists. the NSA is evil.
What is your definition of Fascist, here?
It seems to get tossed around at everything, these days. Not a fan if the NSA either, nor the Patriot Act, either.
fascism is capitalism showing its teeth, like what trump is doing more overtly now. one part of it involves enforcing a bolder and more baldfaced surveillance/police state.
the NSA is literally one of the intelligence arms of said surveillance state. they help manipulate people, find and disappear dissidents, suppress resistance and such. not unlike a few other 3 letter agencies.
they’ve been quacking like fascists way before trump, they have feathers like fascists and swim like fascists. hence why i call it fascist.
fascism is capitalism showing its teeth, like what trump is doing more overtly now
AFAIK that is not the definition of fascism
But I’ve seen a TikTok of someone who is studying politcal doctrines (IDR if their level was Major or PHD) and what is currently going on was ticking off all the boxes
there are many, sometimes conflicting definitions. this one sums it up.
i focus on the police state and militarism part of it because thats what the NSA is for.
and if it ticks all the damn boxes, thats wtf it is. your phd person on tiktok is probably referring to the 12 early signs. its been ticking them for decades now.
but please don’t rely on tiktok to get informed and read up on it, regardless of what qualifications tiktokers claim to have. its slop that barely clears the basics at best.
Lol i really cringed at that phrasing about “good people doing bad things”. Theyre literally fascists doing fascism to advance their interests, it really doesn’t matter if they are vegan and have dogs.
the quote in question is over a decade old…
So? The US was still spying on it’s citizens and murdering people abroad at that time.
i assumed you were making a comment on the modern (fascist) administration. there’s a difference between shitty politics and fascism. :P
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Je was a contractor for the NSA, sis you think he was going to say anything different?
Goebbels certainly didn’t believe in the right to privacy but there is nothing connecting him to the “if you have nothing to hide…” quote. He certainly wasn’t the first to come up with it, as it can be found in a 1917 piece by Upton Sinclair.
It seems like Goebbels’ connection to the quote is one of these “it feels so true that it has to be true” misattributions that floats around on the internet and in popular culture.
And by the way, the NSA are Nazis, they are bad people doing bad things for evil reasons.
Snowden doesn’t even think the NSA is evil:
The lesson of 2013 is not that the NSA is evil. It’s that the path is dangerous. The network path is something that we need to help users get across safely. Our job as technologists, our job as engineers, our job as anybody who cares about the internet in any way, who has any kind of personal or commercial involvement is literally to armor the user, to protect the user and to make it that they can get from one end of the path to the other safely without interference,” he told an auditorium filled with the world’s foremost computer and network engineers at a 2015 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in Prague.
He reaffirmed his view a year later at Fusion’s 2016 Real Future Fair in Oakland, California. “If you want to build a better future, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving the effective change.… They’re not gonna jump up and protect your rights,” he said. “Technology works differently than law. Technology knows no jurisdiction.”
We desperately need a constitutional right to privacy, but I doubt that will happen in my or our country’s lifetime.
Which country? Plenty of countries have at least a nominal right to privacy, but it doesn’t end up meaning much when US companies own your country’s communications platforms.
I’ll let you guess, although you probably only need one guess.
My response to this is usually “Do you have curtains?”
My response is similar, usually the good old ‘Do you shut the door when you shit?’.
When we start getting specific, I’ll often try and frame data harvesting in a much more visceral way. If they say they don’t care that xyz keeps track of everyone they talk to, I ask them to imagine an actual person standing behind them, making notes on a clipboard about every interaction they have with someone, and how that would make them feel.
“The early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.” ~ Permanent Record, Snowden.
The answer to that Reddit post is to delete your account on Reddit.
I have “nothing to hide” but I STILL like privacy tyvm. Hence I’ll shit in public with the stall door closed, and not disclose my wank schedule on Facebook
What did she say after Snowden dropped that bomb?
I’m gonna guess a whole lot of flustered backpedaling amounting to not a lot of anything, but I’m willing to be surprised if someone wants to dig up the video.
Just because an interviewer brings up a point doesn’t mean they agree with it.
Thus my skepticism that she had anything useful to say in response.
I don’t think this image shows her being in a position to backpedal from. I see her providing him with a platform to counter some points that were made elsewhere; she has not necessarily taken a position one way or the other.
I meant backpedaling in the journalistic way of ‘Oh you seem to actually know more about what you’re talking about than I do and have a lot to say on the subject, I should, uh, redirect to a different topic where I can catch you out for that sick sound bite’ or whatever. Maybe that’s not what was going on in that interview, Iono, I haven’t seen it.
We’ll be right back after these messages
Weird how Edward Snowden is basically a Boddhisatwa and Julian Assange
Retaliation for exposing the truth, likely to never speak the full truth again.
Weird how Edward Snowden is basically a Boddhisatwa and Julian Assange
Defining someone a Bodhisattva is complex. Snowden & Assange acted with potential benefit & harm. True Bodhisattvas act from pure compassion & wisdom, embodying equanimity. Their actions offer reflection on truth & consequences.
Where is the harm?
Exposing truth can often get people killed, especially if the liars are in the government, want to kill witnesses or rats, or at least make their lives hell for betraying the state. Depending on the severity, livelihoods are often at stake. That’s why very few people engage in whistleblowing. They’re aware that it will not get better for them.
Self harm then? I think it’s not only fine but also heroic.
Where is the harm?
Snowden’s disclosures, while aiming for transparency, risked national security, compromised sources, strained relations, & potentially enabled misuse of info. Buddhist principles emphasize avoiding harm & maintaining order, aspects potentially impacted by his actions. A balanced view acknowledges both benefit & risk.
Maintaining order in this context would mean letting some people harm other people’s privacy though.
termights replies to you make me agree with your original statement. any harm was to things that are themselves overall harmful. Now that I look at it, it feels like between what we saw with snowden and schwartz it was 2013 when I really realized things are really really messed up.
Maintaining order in this context would mean letting some people harm other people’s privacy though.
You’re right to question “order” at the expense of privacy. Buddhist principles highlight interdependence & ethical action. Security shouldn’t erode fundamental rights. Privacy & security are interconnected, not opposing forces.
Could you explain what you mean by that please?
Snowden is very zen and I don’t know what Assange but it’s not zen
Fuck me, the last part hit me HARD. I won’t get into the details why because it is painful for me to talk about it.
Nah the NSA are nazis
Snowden is a brave guy in some ways, but even in spite of his leaks, he’s remained a naive US-supremacist libertarian, who evangangelizes tech over political action, defends the OTF, silicon valley, and US-DoD funded crypto tools and privacy apps.
The lesson of 2013 is not that the NSA is evil. It’s that the path is dangerous. The network path is something that we need to help users get across safely. Our job as technologists, our job as engineers, our job as anybody who cares about the internet in any way, who has any kind of personal or commercial involvement is literally to armor the user, to protect the user and to make it that they can get from one end of the path to the other safely without interference,” he told an auditorium filled with the world’s foremost computer and network engineers at a 2015 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in Prague. He reaffirmed his view a year later at Fusion’s 2016 Real Future Fair in Oakland, California. “If you want to build a better future, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving the effective change.… They’re not gonna jump up and protect your rights,” he said. “Technology works differently than law. Technology knows no jurisdiction.”
Once a fed, always a fed…
Yeah famously no nazis were ever nice to their friends and families (“good people”) while doing bad things for what they thought were good reasons. Like… Snowden, bro, what the fuck are you talking about
Well he worked there, so he might know.
Still stupid as fuck to compare the Stasi to the Nazis.
Only to a moronic hexbear or ml users like you
Since the Stasi were one arm of an authoritarian government and the Nazis were the whole-ass authoritarian government, including Stasi-like arms, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. But I mean if you’re just here to conflate fascism and communism then you are probably immune to nuance and subtlety anyway, so by all means, don’t let me stop you.
What the fuck is an authoritarian government? The entire point of government is to wield authority.
authoritarian /ə-thôr″ĭ-târ′ē-ən, ə-thŏr″-, ô-/ adjective
Characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority, as against individual freedom.
“an authoritarian regime.”
Look, it’s right there in the example even.
If you would like to argue definitions I encourage you to spend some quality time with a dictionary. Google can point you to several.
“Authoritarianism” is usually just coded language to demonize anti-colonial countries. It’s almost never used to refer to the “civilized” capitalist metropoles like the US and Europe, who have done their best to strangle every country that dares to exist outside their orbit.
Yes, I too am aware that people often misuse words. It might be safe to assume that the guy who just demonstrated that he knows how to operate a dictionary probably isn’t one of them though. Especially if you had read my comment that they were replying to, because then you would have seen that the nation I was calling an authoritarian regime (in fact, a ‘whole-ass authoritarian regime’) was Nazi Germany, so I don’t think we were in any danger of not labeling Western colonial powers as authoritarian in this thread.
Yeah, it would be more correct to compare the to the gestapo and the SD instead of the whole party.
the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: “theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron”
Why is the Stasi, a state organ responsible for countering all the fascist groups the US was still backing, comparable to the state organs of the Nazi Germany that the communists were intent on destroying?
Who you say you are fighting is irrelevant. It is how you do it.
The first comparison wasn’t about ideologies, it was about spying the population and the stasi took it to a whole new level.
Those governments weren’t trying to destroy nazi organizations, they were trying to destroy anything that it wasn’t them and people suffered for that.
Libs be libbin
This is your brain on liberalism
Let me check your Attic why not, you’re not hiding any jews are you?
Don’t post screenshots of text
I really hope that, within my lifetime, the CIA, FBI and any other state spy apparatus will be correctly seen as the evil, irredeemable orgs they are.
Capitalism’s Invisible Army often acts as the propaganda arm of the US hegemony, so it is in a very real sense a part of their job to make sure this doesn’t come to pass. Sadly they seem pretty good at it.
