Instead of being buried at the end of the article, Bamford's penultimate paragraph<p><pre><code> In Moscow, Mr. Snowden told me that the document
reminded him of the F.B.I.’s overreach during the days
of J. Edgar Hoover, when the bureau abused its powers to
monitor and harass political activists. “It’s much like
how the F.B.I. tried to use Martin Luther King’s
infidelity to talk him into killing himself,” he said.
“We said those kinds of things were inappropriate back
in the ’60s. Why are we doing that now? Why are we
getting involved in this again?”
</code></pre>
... should be cut-and-pasted into any comment thread where a security-state apologist is trying to make people believe that Snowden is anything other than a patriot.<p>We <i>can't</i> fix this by working within the system. That's what the Church Committee tried to do. They failed. There is no reason to think their twenty-first century counterparts will not fail again.
I think this is the most damning leak to date. There is no justification for freely giving information to Israel. And the part about people's porn habits being tracked is even scarier. That could be used to discredit virtually anyone (well, any male at least). Who hasn't visited an embarrassing porn website at least once in their life ? Now imagine your name being publicly associated with that website.
The way Israel <i>owns</i> American military and foreign policy should be a national shame. Reminds me of this other story about Israel going behind Obama's back to get weapons straight from the Pentagon. <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sway-over-israel-on-gaza-at-a-low-1407979365" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sway-over-israel-on-gaza-...</a>
I think this all is going to take time to sink in, but in the end, Americans will do the right thing, which has been the overwhelming trend in the past. Think slavery. Think women's suffrage. Think civil rights. Think gay marriage.<p>This one is a little tough because the targets are unsympathetic and the anecdotes of specific harm are non-existent. It's difficult to argue against fighting dirty as a principle; it's much easier when you can point to a specific person (like MLK) and say, "That dude was clearly wronged."<p>I wish it was different. I wish people got more upset about government fighting dirty against <i>anyone</i>[1], even against the enemies that we ourselves agree are despicable and evil. Fighting dirty hurts us far more than it hurts them, because it damages our moral identity.<p>[1] The one exception is if there is an existential threat to the US. However, terrorism has never been, and will never be, an existential threat to the US[2] - except insofar as, in a fit of epic but unfunny irony, they manage to manipulate us into destroying our own moral fabric.<p>[2] The same argument applies to Israel. Israel playing dirty against state actors like Iran would be far more defensible, because Iran really could wipe Israel out.
This was not a one-sided trade. You can be sure the NSA received similar feeds from Israel on targets of great interest to US national interests. The inherent problem in these NSA debates is the inability of the NSA or policy makers to give the American people believable metrics that describe the value received for the effort. Could it be the US received important intel in return for its feeds? Yes. By not articulating a believable ROI on collection or sharing its looks increasingly like there wasn't one.
Sounds like U.S. has not been a sovereign country for sometime. It's intelligence service has been working for another country, passing sensitive information of its own citizens to Israel. Interesting. Even more interesting is that the bulk of the comments are on somewhere else whether this is a witch hunt or not, if it resembles to what Mr. Hoover did or did not do, if the committee in the past succeeded or not.
Why was the title changed? Here's the operative paragraph from the article below - there is a document that indicates the NSA is spying on porn visits of ordinary Americans to use against them in intimidation for exercising their rights to free speech. It doesn't get any worse than this.<p>"It should also trouble Americans that the N.S.A. could head down a similar path in this country. Indeed, there is some indication, from a top-secret 2012 document from Mr. Snowden’s leaked files that I saw last year, that it already is. The document, from Gen. Keith B. Alexander, then the director of the N.S.A., notes that the agency had been compiling records of visits to pornographic websites and proposes using that information to damage the reputations of people whom the agency considers “radicalizers” — not necessarily terrorists, but those attempting, through the use of incendiary speech, to radicalize others. (The Huffington Post has published a redacted version of the document.)"<p>[Edit] For reference, the original title was: "NSA spying on porn visits of ordinary Americans" - which is exactly what they seem to be doing.
A discussion of Unit 8200 I read today: <a href="http://strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20140923.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20140923.aspx</a><p>(I read other sources because my Swedish media is like some inverse of Fox News. Stories like that Hamas had admitted murdering the three teens that started the last war is not... emphasized. The biggest morning newspaper didn't even mention that the accused murders of those teens died in a firefight today. Pallywood was never mentioned. Neither torture between Palestinian groups. Etc.)
> it would first be “minimized,” meaning that names and other personally identifiable information would be removed.<p>minimized?? Im pretty sure he meant Anonymized
Israel's Arab civilian's regularly attempt to blow themselves up in public places (believe me, I've stopped a few on them myself). Meanwhile the Palestinians gleefully lob rockets at populated cities in Israel. Of course Israel would want to monitor them as much as possible, and corroborate with the NSA to get as much data as possible. If that monitoring saved YOUR child from getting blown up on a bus, wouldn't you support it, or would you prefer your kid gets blown to smithereens so that social justice can be upheld? There's a big difference between America's domestic surveillance program and Israel's. Last time I checked, the central USA hadn't just recently been shelled.
The US is a close ally of Israel for obvious reasons. Israel wants to better defend itself, so it co-operates with the N.S.A. This is what Israel needs to defend itself, and Israel probably does the same thing to help defend the US.<p>There will always be a conflict between privacy and security, you can stick to one on expense of the other, but you will never be able to "fix" things.