Pretty much unique among nations, the United States asserts that its laws apply to the rest of the world, including to foreign nationals. How on earth can Julian Assange, a citizen of Australia who has never been a resident of the United States, face sedition charges in the U.S.?
Originally published at Breaking Modern:
This week it came out that Samsung was warning users of its new smart televisions to not discuss personal information around their TVs because it could be transmitted to a third party.
“Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition,” said the company’s privacy policy. A day after the so-called revelation, though, Samsung said it was removing the warning and that the Samsung TV doesn’t eavesdrop on or store conversations at all.
Many people say there’s no reason to worry about the NSA’s surveillance because their lives are so boring that they have nothing to hide.
After Apple announced that it would be hard for the NSA to hack into the new iPhone 6, angry government officials fumed that people who buy it would be trying to put themselves “outside the law.” Say what?
The USA Freedom Bill was presented as a means to rein in some of the NSA’s privacy violations. But when the Obama Administration asked nicely, a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans agreed to make the reform toothless and thus worthless. Who said bipartisanship was dead in Washington?
TALE is an awesome The Moth-like storytelling live show in New York City. If you know me personally, and you’ve seen me with beer inside me, you know I like telling stories. So anyway, TALE has launched storytelling podcasts! I’m in the first one, along with comedian Lynn Bixenspan and cohosts Harmon Leon and Alex Schmidt.
It’s about my personal experience as the target of post-9/11 government surveillance.
Even if you trust the Obama Administration with NSA programs that see everything we do online, drones that can blow us up and an executive order that allows the President to maintain a kill list of anyone he wants, anywhere he wants, they won’t always be in charge. How will you feel about those powers when someone like the paranoid Dick Nixon is in charge?
Drones work with deadly accuracy. The NSA has a limitless budget. Why not let these agencies that perform their duties well step in to help with the beleaguered Obamacare rollout?
Just think how many more victims the tyrants of the past could have racked up had they had the same toys and tools as President Obama and the NSA!
The NSA says we shouldn’t worry because they only “touch” 1.6% of Internet traffic on the Web. As it turns out, that really means all of it.
