risking his life to tell you about NSA surveillance [ot]

Although I could never prove it, I feel certain that many people posting to this thread would change their position 180 degrees if there was a Republican administration in the White House.

I think it's certainly true. Republicans who are now bashing the Obama administration over this NSA data collection wouldn't be saying a damn thing about it if Romney was our president--except for fully supporting it, of course.

throw on his supporters (joe) inability to deal with responsibility of the prez office and you have zero credibility.

This is President Obama's spy program. It WAS President Bush's.

More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an
individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information
voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the
digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about
themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.
People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular
providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which
they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books,
groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. Perhaps, as
JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the “tradeoff” of privacy
for convenience “worthwhile,” or come to accept this “diminution of
privacy” as “inevitable,” and perhaps not. I for one doubt that people
would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the
Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or
month, or year. But whatever the societal expectations, they can attain
constitutionally protected status only if our Fourth Amendment
jurisprudence ceases to treat secrecy as a prerequisite for privacy. I would
not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of
the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to
Fourth Amendment protection.

Three weeks since news broke that the National Security Administration is conducting a massive international surveillance operation, the US corporate media is still largely consumed by the witch-hunt for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and smear campaigns against Snowden and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, to whom Snowden revealed the leaked documents.

However, the international community has reacted to the disclosures with alarm. Revelations that the NSA has been tapping the phone and internet communications of foreign individuals and governments has spurred world leaders to denounce the global superpower as a 'hypocrite' and, in a number of instances, offer asylum or assistance to Snowden.

...

"and stossel is nearly the biggest piece of evil sh#t that wall street has ever let suck its dick"

...the urgent need to protect our major population centers from terrorist attack...

A leaked executive order from President Obama shows the administration asked intelligence agencies to draw up a list of potential offensive cyberattack targets around the world. The order, which suggests targeting “systems, processes and infrastructure” states that such offensive hacking operations “can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance U.S. national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging.” [...]