ripb

I want some of whatever their investors are smoking.

Edit: Is it the smoke from all those dollar bills going up in those flames?

I already acknowledged that I'm a virtual nobody to them. I just don't want to be a virtual somebody to them, even if it's just a raised XKeyScore rating.

>Will you join me?

I wonder how many people are genuinely afraid of raising their own profile in such a way. I'm not American, but I would certainly be partaking in any political action against the actions being discussed here.

Although as it is, I'm very hesitant to even level criticism at the CIA on HN. I'm by no means an important person, but from what we've learned I don't even want to register on the radar of these entities.

>The war on terror, like all the metaphorical wars, is really a civil war. It needs to stop now.

There's too much money at stake for those at the top for this to be stopped. Lucrative contracts for all their buddies whether it's in consultancy or providing military hardware and software.

I mean the fact that congress keep ordering tanks the military themselves have proclaimed loudly that they neither want nor need should be setting off alarm bells everywhere, and yet it seems to just get brushed over.

>This is not about you. This is not about your data. This is about our society's collective ability to think and act for itself. Blanket acceptance of surveillance is a dangerous attitude and shockingly common.

It's also about the future of our society, that which our children have to grow up in and deal with.

I don't know how we'll be able to turn to our children in the coming decades and tell them "the government is monitoring everything you say through voice and text on your phone, every keystroke you make on your tablet or computer, every purchase you make on your phone or through your card in this inevitably cashless society, every connection you make on a connected device, everywhere your devices check in, connect to GPS or triangulate... oh and every camera you see out and about is recording you and facial recognition software is tagging it as you" with the justification for their complete lack of privacy being "there were some guys in the middle east riding around in pickup trucks with AK47s so we needed this to protect us".

We're at a pivotal point now and it's very much up to us which way it goes. Our governments are supposed to serve us but instead we live in a society where we are very much ruled, where our rulers are the elite and their ruling mechanism is the complete charade of representative democracy.

We'll all be dead before it gets too bad, thankfully, but our apathy will condemn our children and their descendants to a life under tyranny which we ushered in through theatrical politics, fear mongering and a bizarrely held belief of There Is No Alternative.

Is it just me or does there seem to be significantly more of a recode.net presence on HN at the moment?

I hadn't heard of the site until recently and now I've seen a few fairly low-brow articles from it on the front page here in the last 24 hours.

For the company. Depending on how it is implemented, taking a cut of the first 2 years' salary could be very high risk. Intuitively there seems to be little to stop someone taking the education and then absconding abroad.

I really like the innovative funding model, although intuitively it seems pretty high risk?

>Or are attention spans so short and/or the agency so completely removed from the rule of law that we're going to let them get away with their crimes? If we're not even going to bother with the trial - acknowledging that we won't even bother trying to maintain the rule of law - then I guess that's sufficient proof that we have lost our republic, as we let it be replaced with feudalism.

No, there will never be accountability for any of the gross abuses of the constitution, people's rights (including all those in the USA) and foreign "captives" physical and mental wellbeing highlighted in the NSA and CIA revelations.

Let's not kid ourselves. Representative democracy has shown itself to be a charade, particularly in the USA where you've two very similar entities who have billions pumped into them at election time to ensure no other entities have a shot at power, and then once elected those two very similar entities spend their time serving and protecting those that pumped in those billions.

The worst thing about it that I can't see any way out of it for the American people. The system is now so thoroughly stacked against them that any attempt at radical change - whether it's passive through the political system or more active through protests or at worst a revolution - will be very rapidly quashed. As a European I absolutely loathe that this very same, corrupted, abusive entity - the US Government - is reaching its tentacles into our governing and is now vying for power here via the TTIP and similar.

>to drum up more support for killing people an ocean away

To drum up more support for pumping billions or trillions of dollars borrowed from America's descendants into the pockets of the US elite via the military industrial complex.

Don't like it? You're welcome to protest but make sure you do it in the designated "free speech zone" over there, well away from those you're holding the protest against.

Oh and while you're doing it we'll increase the attention we give your NSA profile, everything you look at online, your emails, everyone you've ever interacted with in a trackable way and more. Can't have you radicals trying to upset the system the elite rely on, after all.