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Knight to queen's bishop 3 - Snowden charged with espionage.

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wraith808:
^ The question I'd ask is ... why?  It seems like a lot to risk for little gain. So is it merely that the NSA is now a reasonable target for such allegations for other reasons?

Renegade:
It seems like a lot to risk for little gain.
-wraith808 (October 30, 2013, 09:32 PM)
--- End quote ---

But they spy on hundreds of millions of other people. What gain is there in that? A truckload of effort for what?

So is it merely that the NSA is now a reasonable target for such allegations for other reasons?
-wraith808 (October 30, 2013, 09:32 PM)
--- End quote ---

It could be bogus, but given how much they spy on everyone else, it would seem silly to think that they don't spy on religious leaders as well.

Will we ever know these things for certain? Well, in the sense of "know", then "no". Will we have reasonable information to believe these kinds of things? Yup.

Just a few years ago you were a kook if you talked about the NSA data centers, e.g. the mega-center in Utah. Now? Not so much. Seems the tinfoil hat crowd had a point after all.

TaoPhoenix:
It seems like a lot to risk for little gain.
-wraith808 (October 30, 2013, 09:32 PM)
--- End quote ---

But they spy on hundreds of millions of other people. What gain is there in that? A truckload of effort for what?
-Renegade (October 30, 2013, 09:51 PM)
--- End quote ---

Emotional gain?

Borrowing the Joker from Batman's epic speech, "old school" criminals wanted money or random stuff like weapons. But "some criminals just want to see the world burn".

Think for a min, the PG13 power rush of just seeing lots of little people's lives scurrying under your computer monitor / reports. It's a lot more like the Matrix minus the robots than we want to think.

For example if any one wants to do a mini proof of joke, because you know they have the GPS from our phones, so make a map with little scurrying dots of people "going about their puny little lives" (Q from Star Trek Next Gen).

TaoPhoenix:
I developed a "paradigm" - not exactly a theory - to explain all this called the "Fishbowl" way back about 2002 after the initial dot com crash. Of course I don't pretend to have known any details at all, but the gist is that the "excitement" of "cyberspace" per movies like the Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic left us, and essentially in certain ways depending when you start the clock, "no ultra game breaking tech" has arrived, and worse, *will arrive*, for X years.

So "out of existential boredom" all we can do is meddle with little things like social networks, and this year's Facebook posts aren't any more important than 2008's Facebook posts.

The Smartphone players have consolidated into iPhone and Android-clones. A few low end junk phones float around.

So we're getting bored. We've hit a wall. We haven't had anything really stunning to excite us like the old days in a decade. So we sit and stare at each other, and the Govt pulled several unfortunately devastatingly effective strings to sit on top of it all, along with your choice of 500 corps.

And there we sit FOREVER until someone with a BIG bankroll can smash it all to bits!!

"Snowden" started something ... (is he even real? The Spin doctors are trying to call him a slow leak plant).

Now we need about four more to seal it.

wraith808:
Just a few years ago you were a kook if you talked about the NSA data centers, e.g. the mega-center in Utah. Now? Not so much. Seems the tinfoil hat crowd had a point after all.
-Renegade (October 30, 2013, 09:51 PM)
--- End quote ---

I didn't think it ever was a tinfoil hat... they just weren't as paranoid as they should have been.

http://www.nsawatch.org/echelonfaq.html

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