Snowden was Right!

[JackLuis]

Three New Scandals Show How Pervasive and Dangerous Mass Surveillance is in the West, Vindicating Snowden

While most eyes are focused on the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, three major events prove how widespread, and dangerous, mass surveillance has become in the west. Standing alone, each event highlights exactly the severe threats which motivated Edward Snowden to blow his whistle; taken together, they constitute full-scale vindication of everything he’s done.

Earlier this month, a special British court that rules on secret spying activities issued an emphatic denunciation of the nation’s domestic mass surveillance programs. The court found that “British security agencies have secretly and unlawfully collected massive volumes of confidential personal data, including financial information, on citizens for more than a decade.” Those agencies, the court found, “operated an illegal regime to collect vast amounts of communications data, tracking individual phone and web use and other confidential personal information, without adequate safeguards or supervision for 17 years.

And Canada has their own problems

So just this month alone, two key members of the Five Eyes alliance have been found by courts and formal investigations to be engaged in mass surveillance that was both illegal and pervasive, as well as, in the case of Canada, abusing surveillance powers to track journalists to uncover their sources. When Snowden first spoke publicly, these were exactly the abuses and crimes he insisted were being committed by the mass surveillance regime these nations had secretly erected and installed, claims which were vehemently denied by the officials in charge of those systems.

Yet with each new investigation and judicial inquiry, and as more evidence is unearthed, Snowden’s core claims are increasingly vindicated. Western officials are indeed addicted to unaccountable, secretive, abusive systems of mass surveillance used against their own citizens and foreigners alike, and the more those systems take root, the more core liberties are eroded.

 

[Hard_Rom]

And Canada has their own problems

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montr...listen-to-journalists-conversations-1.3838410

They were not illegal. The warrants were legally obtained. They were obtained as part of an investigation of other Montreal police who may have lied to obtain warrants. But the warrants to monitor the journalist phone were completely legal.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-government-trudeau-first-year-1.3834324

Earlier this year reports came out of a group of rogue Mounties who illegally put a journalist under surveillance back in 2007. This was a local or provincial matter not federal.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-metadata-ruling-1.3835472

CSIS has been found to have broken the law by retaining metadata over a 10 year period.

These are low priority stories to Canadian citizens and voters. Government surveillance of private citizens does not get the same hype as it does in the US. Up here we figure if your not breaking the law, so what. If you are then you deserve it.

Having the government waste time and money on tracking citizen social media posts is more of an issue than invading our right to privacy.

Peace, order and good government. We are quite far right of the US on issues of law and order. Our police and intelligence agencies have a much freer hand than any US department.

More important things to worry about like jobs than government spooks.

 

[underguy1]

I just love the way you think you speak for all Canadians.

Not all Canadians are high right wing authoritarians like you.

"Up here we figure if your not breaking the law, so what. If you are then you deserve it."

Childlike trust in authority.

 

[Tigersman]

Snowden may have been right but that does not mean what he did was right. He still is a traitor.

 

[BotanyBoy]

The second we didn't vote everyone out of office and put an axe in the PATRIOT act's face in defense of our rights we invited it all in.

We agreed to the invasive police state, just another layer of socialism.

Enjoy, the cancer has now fully metastasized and will just continue to be a bigger control freak entity. Thought police are just around the corner.

 

[Hard_Rom]

I just love the way you think you speak for all Canadians.

Not all Canadians are high right wing authoritarians like you.

"Up here we figure if your not breaking the law, so what. If you are then you deserve it."

Childlike trust in authority.

Of course not all Canadians think alike. But generally we do have a much greater deference to law and order than you Yanks down south.

We do not rant and rave over the fact that we have no right to be armed. In fact we like it. We are entitled to 'heritage activities' including hunting. So guns do have their place but not in the bedroom. But under lock and key to be brought out during various hunting seasons.

Blackberry is a Canadian company and has fully admitted it has no problem with working with police agencies. The police are trusted.

Peace, order and good government are our catch phrase. Maybe not for everybody but for the vast majority it is.

We have no issues with a government that combines the executive and legislative branches. Get a majority in the Commons and ram through any legislation you want. No one can stop you. That's how responsible government works.

You know nothing about us. You are just a lying troll. Your opinions are of no importance as you can't even be honest with your profile. A complete hoser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_identity

In defining a Canadian identity, five key distinctive characteristics have been emphasized:

1.First, special emphasis is placed upon the bicultural nature of Canada and the important ways in which English–French relations since the 1760s have shaped the Canadian experience.[7]

2.Second, Canada had quite a different historical experience in resisting revolution and republicanism compared to the U.S., leading to less individualism and more support for government activism, such as wheat pools and the health care system.[8]

3.Third, British parliamentary system and the British legal system, augmented by the conservatism associated with the Loyalists and the pre-1960 French Canadians, have given Canada its ongoing collective obsession with "peace, order and good government".[8]

4.Fourth is the social structure of multiple ethnic groups that kept their identities and produced a cultural mosaic rather than a melting pot.[9]

5.Fifth, the influence of geophysical factors (vast area, coldness, northness; St. Lawrence spine) together with the proximity of the United States have produced in the collective Canadian psyche what Northrop Frye has called the garrison mind or siege mentality, and what novelist Margaret Atwood has argued is the Canadian preoccupation with survival.[10] For Herschel Hardin, because of the remarkable hold of the siege mentality and the concern with survival, Canada in its essentials is "a public enterprise country." According to Hardin, the "fundamental mode of Canadian life" has always been, "the un-American mechanism of redistribution as opposed to the mystic American mechanism of market rule." Most Canadians, in other words, whether on the right or left in politics, expect their governments to be actively involved in the economic and social life of the nation.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace,_order,_and_good_government#Sociological_value

Despite its technical purpose, the phrase “peace, order and good government” has also become meaningful to Canadians. This tripartite motto is sometimes said to define Canadian values in a way comparable to “liberté, égalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, fraternity) in France or “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the United States. Indeed, peace, order and good government has been used by some scholars to make broad characterisations of Canada's political culture. US sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, for example, contrasted POGG with the American tripartite motto to conclude Canadians generally believe in a higher degree of deference to the law.

 

[Hard_Rom]

Three New Scandals Show How Pervasive and Dangerous Mass Surveillance is in the West, Vindicating Snowden

And Canada has their own problems

Think how invasive the Five Eyes are looking at our enemies! No rules or bleeding hearts there.

 

[underguy1]

Snowden may have been right but that does not mean what he did was right. He still is a traitor.

Pathetic.

 

[1sickbastard]

Snowden may have been "legal" but that does not mean what he did was right. He still is a traitor.

"Treason never doth prosper and what's the reason?
If it doth prosper none dare call it treason."

Of you want to get into the nitty-gritty, the American Revolution was an act of treason.
Except those engaged in treason and terrorism won.

he facTt is that saying "Fuck You" to authority is the most "American" thing a citizen/patriot will do.
It's part of that whole "consent of the governed" principle, particularly that a government must earn (or manufacture) that consent.

There is a huge difference between the love of one's country and the love of said country's government.

 

[underguy1]

"Treason never doth prosper and what's the reason?
If it doth prosper none dare call it treason."

Of you want to get into the nitty-gritty, the American Revolution was an act of treason.
Except those engaged in treason and terrorism won.

he facTt is that saying "Fuck You" to authority is the most "American" thing a citizen/patriot will do.
It's part of that whole "consent of the governed" principle, particularly that a government must earn (or manufacture) that consent.

There is a huge difference between the love of one's country and the love of said country's government.

Odd thing for a racist nazi America firster to say.

 

[1sickbastard]

Odd thing for a racist nazi America firster to say.

Ah yes, assign a position to anyone who doesn't march lockstep to your bullshit, build a convenient we/they construct, and don't bother with dealing with an individual.

Way to engage!

Ad Hominem much?

 

[Tigersman]

"Treason never doth prosper and what's the reason?
If it doth prosper none dare call it treason."

Of you want to get into the nitty-gritty, the American Revolution was an act of treason.
Except those engaged in treason and terrorism won.

he facTt is that saying "Fuck You" to authority is the most "American" thing a citizen/patriot will do.
It's part of that whole "consent of the governed" principle, particularly that a government must earn (or manufacture) that consent.

There is a huge difference between the love of one's country and the love of said country's government.

I see Snowden as no better than the newly elected Congressman that blabbed to a reporter the location of a multimillion dollar nuclear bunker designed to house the entire Congress, the Supreme Court, the Cabinet plus the President, VP and Joint Chief of Staffs. In one moment the bunker became worthless. This Congressman was a traitor and should have been dropped in a bottomless hole.