NSA Director Defends Surveillance To Unsympathetic Black Hat Crowd 358
Trailrunner7 writes "NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander's keynote today at Black Hat USA 2013 was a tense confessional, an hour-long emotional and sometimes angry ride that shed some new insight into the spy agency's two notorious data collection programs, inspired moments of loud applause in support of the NSA, and likewise, profane heckling that called into question the legality and morality of the agency's practices. Loud voices from the overflowing crowd called out Alexander on his claims that the NSA stands for freedom while at the same time collecting, storing and analyzing telephone business records, metadata and Internet records on Americans. He also denied lying to Congress about the NSA's capabilities and activities in the name of protecting Americans from terrorism in response to such a claim from a member of the audience."
Re:Privacy concerns now outweigh terrorism in poll (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not much of a defense (Score:5, Funny)
Is it bad that I began reading that to the tune of "The Candy Man Can"?
*sings*
Who can find your Facebook chats? Private messages too? All of your e-mail and every search that you do? The NSA. The NSA can. The NSA can 'cause they look at everything to make the US stay safe!
*stops singing*
Ok, someone with more time on their hands.... rewrite the whole song.
Re:Not much of a defense (Score:5, Funny)
Even Snowden did not demonstrate how this was used against anyone except who it was meant to be used against except perhaps accidentally.
Exactly! Of course this capability will only ever be used against them - you know, those people, the ones not like us, the other ones, the ones it's meant to be used against. never use it against us - not unless one of us meant to use it against us. But even if we did use it against us, we'd be perfectly in the right, because at least we wouldn't be using it against us accidentally. We'd be using it against us on purpose and that would make it okay. It's meant to be kept a secret from us. If it wasn't for traitors like Snowden (who we thought was one of us but is obviously one of them) we'd never know if we did use it against us, and we shouldn't know that, either. Because then we might stop trusting us.
Look, it's really simple. It's us and them, and you're either for us or against us!