[Klaustrophobia]

a bunch of pictures of obama standing around computers.  how witty. 

[haloboy100]

Cracked just wrote a nice little article about this.

[castor]

Because evil presidents either turn into dictators, or get voted out of office early.

This works, as long as the ruling power isn't given complete control of information. Not saying this it it, but it is a building block.

[Phantom Hoover]

What, no, you-- look, 'the government' is not remotely equivalent to the president. Or even the set of elected representatives.

[haloboy100]

What, no, you-- look, 'the government' is not remotely equivalent to the president. Or even the set of elected representatives.

So, wait - if the government is not the executive or half of the legislative branch, then what is it, the senators?

Maybe american senators are vastly different than my country (canada)'s, but senators typically don't excersize much power in my experience.

[SpardaSon21]

Phantom Hoover's point is that the vast majority of people in the government aren't actually elected politicians.  They're appointed bureaucrats we the people have no direct ability to oversee or hold them responsible for their actions.

[Klaustrophobia]

there are 537 elected officials at the federal level (major, there's probably some other than pres/vp/congress i'm forgetting).  the rest of the federal government is appointed.  the entire judicial branch.  almost all of the executive branch.  all the various government agency positions (like, for example, the NSA).  the general population has no means of recourse against these offices.  we rely on OTHER government cronies often appointed by the same administration to deal with them.  and then the only action that comes is someone near the top "resigns" and is quietly given some other high position, and the guy that fills the old spot keeps right on doing the same **** until HE gets caught.  there's no such thing as a career-ender anymore.  at least by doing nasty highly illegal things.  there's always the good old affair. 

[Apollo]

I find it highly irritating that the Republicans, after all their talk of Obamacare being unconstitutional, are willing to defend him on something that actually is.

Well, they have a stake in this too. *cough* PATRIOT Act *cough* Neocons *cough*

[Nakura]

Looks like they have been doing a lot more then just getting phone data:  http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/06/politics/nsa-internet-mining/index.html

And yet the Obama apologists continue to deny that any of this is going on. Incredible.

[Flipside]

To be honest, I'd like to know when this monitoring started before blaming any specific political denomination or leader. I suspect phone details have been analyzed en-masse since the Reagan era or possibly before.  Computer information may be more recent, but I think this is not a Party-Political decision, but an over-arching federal one.

[NGTM-1R]

And yet the Obama apologists continue to deny that any of this is going on. Incredible.

I haven't seen that denial offered by anyone, and certainly not in this thread, so why you trolling bro?

[karajorma]

Indeed. Blaming Obama or Bush is the reason this kind of stuff gets forgotten about.

[jr2]

Batman had the right idea about surveillance.  Small problem: there's always more baddies to track.  Perhaps instead they should have asked for the records of all phone calls to / from known terrorists instead of staggering amounts of metadata just begging to be abused?

[Phantom Hoover]

that metadata is most likely being poured into some analytics software and being used for a bunch of profiling, i doubt anyone's actually reading it

[Flipside]

From a purely data-mining perspective, the problem with that is that it is possible to build up a good idea of who the unknown terrorists are by seeing who else these people phone.

The thing that confuses me, though, is that it is surely more efficient to start building the network from a small number of known individuals and construct the network based on those communications alone, rather than adopt a blanket technique as they have done. As the content of the telephone calls are not known, it would seem to be that it would be very difficult to identify new Terrorists from anything other than a connection to known ones anyway.

[BloodEagle]

The thing that confuses me, though, is that it is surely more efficient to start building the network from a small number of known individuals and construct the network based on those communications alone, rather than adopt a blanket technique as they have done. As the content of the telephone calls are not known, it would seem to be that it would be very difficult to identify new Terrorists from anything other than a connection to known ones anyway.

But say you want to define 'terrorist' to include ecosystem activists....

[NGTM-1R]

The thing that confuses me, though, is that it is surely more efficient to start building the network from a small number of known individuals and construct the network based on those communications alone, rather than adopt a blanket technique as they have done. As the content of the telephone calls are not known, it would seem to be that it would be very difficult to identify new Terrorists from anything other than a connection to known ones anyway.

You're assuming contact between known and unknown groups. This does not have to be the case; indeed, most people with a modicum of espionage knowledge or having read a Tom Clancy book know that proper insulation from others like you is one of the few meaningful defenses against discovery.

And in this case it's traffic analysis, which as I noted before is an old and respected method of intelligence-gathering. You can find cells by their internal communications activity because it will have certain characteristics that can be filtered for with enough number crunching; the real issue is it probably generates false positives with some legitimate or criminal organizations and a more thorough method of surveillance would be required to determine what something really is.