Hey, anyone has Telegram app and profile here? I might like to have some of you around there too.

I can't see any color coating on my end, but I did re-read your post and come mostly yo the same conclusions.

1st paragraph - foreign countries don't aim for personal information. FALSE: just look at the big Anthem and OPM breaches this past year, carried out by Chinese cyber thieves. This was personal data, such as home addresses, medical claim information and social security numbers, not national secrets or classified documents. These types of data attacks, directly harming normal consumer citizens, are the targets of foreign governments and terrorists just as much (if not more) than missile designs or clandestine intelligence reports.

2nd paragraph - there is no benefit to blanket digital surveillance, since intelligence agencies don't have the manpower to work the viable intelligence they already have. I disagree - a failure of intelligence and proper funding should not justify further failure of intelligence and proper funding. The US arrests and prevents numerous attacks internally through its robust intelligence programs, something that has been suggested by some as the reason why terrorist groups have begun attacking European nations more in the past decade rather than "the Great Satan" in America.

3rd paragraph - a surveillance system does not benefit a nation's citizens, but rather the nation that does the surveying. This is where my "bullshit" comment came in, where I go to make the point that not a single government worker or member of the support structure was hurt last Friday in France, not a single military or institutional resource was hit... heck, even the stock market didn't take a dive on Monday. "The government" was not hurt by this attack. "The people" were. And if greater surveillance was implemented to prevent it happening again, it would be in everyone's interest, assuming shadow government trials or being able to be convicted without presenting evidence is in place. Again, if all other methods of judicial civil rights are upheld, why should it matter how the evidence is gained?

4th paragraph - again, stating surveillance would only help the government, an entity that is dangerous when it is self-serving. See above.

5th paragraph - all governments do this, not just America... again, see both my original response as well as the third paragraph response of this post.

Whoever they are

Raise all the levies and start hiring as many mercenaries as possible! The House of Karen will not fall!

No one is breaking in. That's what people don't seem to understand.

You are using public networks to transmit data. You are voluntarily giving it to privately held companies. If I accidentally mailed a plan to bomb a major city to AT&T's mail room, they would be expected (and legally required in many cases) to report this to the authorities as something to investigate. But when I do the same thing digitally through AT&T's data network, that's somehow a sacred cow that shouldn't be looked at?

My religious "viziers" did change the religions of every region, one by one. I did the same in India!

No, foreign countries do not aim for personal informations of a bogstandard person working at a bookstore somewhere. There is such a thing as datamining and social engineering to infiltrate high security systems. You breach what you can and then comb through the data to see if you got anything you can use to get a level deeper into your targeted system. Or those millions of data packages, what they are actually interested in are a mere handful if any depending on what they got. Also, the stored data was not encrypted. Had Anthem encrypted its data, having it dowloaded by cyberattacks would've meant next to nothing unless they can also breach the encryption (which is ludicrously tough and even bruteforcing that will take decades if the encryption is even halfway decent). Something which the US government is feverishly working to spread, not eliminate. You create more vulnerabilities, you make the system unsafer, not safer! What those cyberattacks are after can be seen in the OPM breach: personal informations of security cleared personel -> social engineering, aimed to exploit and attack vector into the system not via software vulnerabilities, but the people who access it making mistakes. Again, they don't care what your run-of-the-mill average joe is doing, because he doesn't have access to any actual valuable information.

But intelligence doesn't get the funding they'd need to deal with the informations they claim they need. They don't even have the manpower/funding to deal with the amount of informations they have right now. You don't fix a problem by throwing more problems at it. Also, note that all those fewer terrorist attacks on the USA are a thing already, evidencing they don't actually need a blanket surveillance to get results as those fearmongers are trying to convince people.

Likewise the prospect of a blanket surveillance system is irrelevant to the example of France. Spying on every person they possibly can means nothing if they don't recognize a threat they've been warned about repeatedly by other nations, months beforehand. What France's example is relevant for is the point that the intelligence system failed and needs fixing first, not mindless kneejerk reactions about expanding its network when it obviously can't handle the current workload. Compare with above point.

And the response to the last three paragraphs shows you didn't understand my point at all:


This is one seperate argument. A self-serving governmental body that regards its citizens as a liability rather than a responsibility is a perversion of the ideal it's supposed to uphold. A nation's goverment exist to lead and defend its people, not lead and defend itself from its people. And yes, it's not only the US doing that, I am perfectly aware of that:

Except with this debate over backdoors in encryption like in current smartphone software, and wanting to force companies to hold onto data on the off chance they want to sift through it, what they want goes well beyond this analogy you've set up.

I can understand collecting actually public information like stuff you post on facebook or twitter, but the notion that any digital communication, regardless of recipient or encryption level is public data and subject to search without a warrant is perverse. You could use the same logic for telephone conversations, which also go through public utilities, but as far as I know the need for a warrant to tap phone lines is still in effect.

It's also a felony to open someone's mail, and those go through public facilities.

I don't see much of a difference between opening other people's mail and hacking into their e-mail for America's safety.