On Jun 11, 2013, at 2:26 PM, Pam Ochs <[email protected]> wrote: > ...We elect the members of Congress who permit, fund, and oversee these > programs and we can vote them out of office and vote someone in who will > eliminate the programs….
Only if we know the programs exist. If we don't know the nature and extent of the programs we can't very well hold the politicians who (theoretically) oversee them accountable. Bringing these to programs to the public's attention has apparently started a "public debate" that our President "welcomes". I wonder if he'll welcome the opening of the debate with a medal of freedom or some such? > And, as people have pointed out in this thread, this sort of scenario could > be imagined and the privacy issues can be brought up (and have been and will > be again) without an action like this. There's a big difference between knowing that monitoring like this could theoretically be authorized and might occur occasionally and knowing it's actively going on, on a massive scale, *right now*. I think many members of the public assumed that--although there was likely active communications monitoring going on--the only people being actively monitored were those where there was some reason to suspect that they were "bad guys"… rather than tracking every piece of communication passing through the US, whether from suspected terrorists or just regular us citizens not suspected of anything at all. ++++++++++++++++ A related security question that should be on the public's mind--as all as our own group--is how lower level functionaries like Edward Snowden and Private Bradley Manning apparently had massive access to what are claimed to be extremely confidential pieces of vital intelligence information. Shouldn't such information be compartmentalized and encrypted so that only those with very specific authorization to access very specific types of data be able to access such confidential information? Arthur _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
