Spy Games - Prism

[Kurt.]

I think it's wrong that a man now fears for his life for outing a corrupt organisation.

 

[Baines' left foot]

I don't know an awful lot about this besides bits in the news I've read and the OP in this thread, but you've got to give this guy a bit of credit, he's been pretty bloody brave doing this.

 

[Deleted member 28206]

Shared a class with this guy at class I took at Uni.

 

[manxtoffee]

Two guys 'coming out' against the system, besides the initial furore and embarrassment, isn't really going to upset the 'Applecart' is it?

 

[Bluenose1995]

Two guys 'coming out' against the system, besides the initial furore and embarrassment, isn't really going to upset the 'Applecart' is it?

the days of uprisings and revolutions are over in the west mate the media and celebrity culture we live in means more people care about what Kim Kardashians baby's called than knowing they are being spied on by their Government

 

[EvertruvianMan]

What is really scarey is the capacity for the authorities to use an awful lot of technology to get to know more about your life than even you do. Its all ok so long as they have a valid reason?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/23/stephen-lawrence-undercover-police-smears
How long before even more examples of criminal conspiracy against the judiciary by serving criminal investigators/police/prosecutors - how much evidence tampering and perjury has already been swept under the carpet. That the scum involved in the destruction of life at Hillsborough have been allowed to serve out their time and retire before the investigation was launched is yet another grave indictment of just how maleovalent and corrupt those with "our best interests at heart" actually are.

 

[Kurt.]

It also ( if you believe ) highlights how far a Government will go to protect certain info from being leaked. The young lad from around here who was found in the holdall in his flat in London.... he was a maths genius .. worked at GCHQ as a code breaker... my honest belief is he was seconded to MI5/6 to crack some intel they had recieved,,,, i believe once he had managed to crack it he then became a casualty of his own brilliance and people higher up decided he had important info which if leaked could have serious consequences ... I honestly believe the British Government murdered him for what he knew and the rest of the story was a huge cover up... call me a conspiracy theorist if you like but these people live in this world of secrets and double crosses everyday... life becomes less important when placed against information.

 

[formerly manx toffee]

NEA..

 

[Bluenose1995]

 

[davek]

Worse than them are the media who are complicit in it all. The free press. Lol! And the 'quality' papers are the worst of all (see how the Guardian hung Assange out to dry...after they'd exploited the cables info like).

 

[steken1]

He's supposedly gone missing in Russia.

He'll be very lucky to make it out of there in one piece if that's his intention. He'll now have two of the worlds biggest nations chasing him. Can you imagine how keen the ruskies'll be to get a hold of him and how much that'll panic the americans.

Be interesting to see how this pans out.

 

[davek]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters

The Guardian editor reporting the action taken by Government to destroy the Snowden info in their possession.

A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.
The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."
During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks – the thumb drive and the first amendment – had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?
The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

 

[Deleted member 28206]

This isn't the end of it.

 

[davek]

This isn't the end of it.

You were right. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23776063

Doesn't look great like does it? British PM instructs agents to intimidate a newspaper and get it to smash up their own computers.

EDIT: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london

The intelligence men stood over Johnson and Blishen as they went to work on the hard drives and memory chips with angle grinders and drills, pointing out the critical points on circuit boards to attack.