Comment by dialup_sounds 10 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SHAMROCK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_and_Mitchell_defection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Et cetera. These aren't new issues. The obsession with Snowden as a messianic figure is unhelpful in contextualizing the information.
Weird take. You have all these aspersions to cast on me and saying I'm trying to "sway public opinion by minimizing" when I'm literally telling one person to learn more about these subjects so they'll be less ignorant.
>These aren't new issues. The obsession with Snowden as a messianic figure
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe we weren't communicating well, but I felt you were certainly minimizing it by claiming what Snowden revealed weren't "new issues," which they certainly were, and anyone who thinks different has an "obsession with Snowden as a messianic figure," which is an attempt to discredit. Was that your objective?
>The obsession with Snowden as a messianic figure is unhelpful in contextualizing the information.
Damn the gall, give it a rest. Again, methods and scope. Which one of those exposes PRISM, XKeyScore and the NSA infiltrating Google servers? Which one of those exposes the companies that willingly "integrated" with the NSA?
Which of those exposes US government spying on allied governments, recording private conversations, etc?
Saying Snowden didn't reveal anything is a silly hill to die on. What is your prerogative in minimizing the exposure? Do you work for one of the companies implicated in participating in prism or something?
Microsoft joined PRISM on 9/11/2007 (fitting)
Yahoo joined PRISM on 3/12/08
Google joined PRISM on 1/4/09
Facebook joined PRISM on 6/3/09
YouTube joined PRISM on 9/24/10
Skype joined PRISM on 2/6/11
AOL joined PRISM on 3/11/11
Apple, the last holdout on the list, joined PRISM 10/12 (after Jobs died).
OP, this is why it seems nobody cares, there's plenty of people trying to sway public opinion on the matter by minimizing it. Nobody wants to believe their government would do things like this, so when someone offers that, "hey it's not so bad," they want to believe it. We've always been at war with Eastasia.