Quoting Martin Behrendt <martin-gnupg-us...@dkyb.de>:
Sorry if I sound cynical but the bogeyman says hallo [1]:
Strange: when my nephews were young they would also pass on messages
from the Thing That Lived In The Closet. (They never called it the
bogeyman. Just "That Thing That Lives In The Closet.") Despite all
the times I opened the closet to look for it, I was never able to find
it.
Let's look at some of the problems here.
(1) Given how many flat wrong things get printed in the newspaper,
believing this reporting may not be wise.
(2) Let's assume it's true. The story only says it can record 100% of
a foreign country's telephone calls for up to a month, not that it can
store *all* telephone calls for an indefinite period of time. There's
still a lot of targeting that has to go on here. Claims of worldwide
surveillance are still overblown.
(3) The capability may exist, but the story never claims the system
has been used. We've had nuclear weapons sitting idle in their silos
for decades: this capability may be the information equivalent of a
nuke in a silo.
(4) Your "yes, they used that system," I simply can't believe, not
without seeing supporting evidence.
My uncle, a Korean War veteran, tells me that at one point during the
war U.S. troops reported they were witnessing tactical nuclear
strikes. It turned out this was just the 16-inch guns of the _U.S.S.
Iowa_ battleship. Apparently, it's pretty easy to mistake a 16-inch
shelling for a tactical nuclear strike. The relevance to our present
situation is this: just as it was very easy for troops to see
mind-blowingly huge explosions and to conclude the war had just gone
nuclear, it is very easy for us to look at fragmentary and
often-inaccurate news media reports and leap to conclusions about
"that system must exist and it must be in use!"
Be careful. Carefully separate out what you see from what cause
you're ascribing to it. If you see X, I'm willing to accept that you
see X. But so far you seem to be leaping towards "... therefore Y!",
and there I think you're on much weaker ground.
And I don't don't know what it
takes, but if you still don't see logic and reason in taking the
assumption that there is a mass and wide-scale surveillance also of
also E-Mail content as fact, than again, I so would like to life in
your world.
I never said we should not be aware of the possibility, nor have I
ever said that such a thing cannot happen.
I said that we should not treat it as fact, because facts are things
which can be proven, and so far there's no proof here.
Anyway. I've said my peace. I'm done here.
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