Monday, April 06, 2015

Edward Snowden and "dick-pics"



Funny, sad, brilliant. 

John Oliver has done a very clever thing here ... and that's all I'm gonna say - just watch it.

Bonus: Ex-CIA John Kiriakou on Canada's intelligence safeguards: "You're kidding me."

Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati, whose privileged conversations with his clients were wiretapped three years ago : "It’s all a smokescreen. SIRC isn’t there to do anything but make it look like it’s doing something to oversee CSIS. Nobody is doing anything to oversee CSIS. They’re out-of-control renegades."

 "If CSIS can get away with bugging a lawyer’s phone calls with his client, imagine what the spy service will do when Bill C-51 becomes law."
Update :  Anon in comments : The photos of your junk will be publicized 
and also Boris' brilliance from comments below, reposted here. :
"2015 turned out to be a bizarre year for the surveillance state. 
In April, John Oliver interviewed Edward Snowden about the spy agencies spying and used a "dick pic" to make his point. Later, the Canadian government passed Bill C-51 giving its spy agency free reign. 
The "Dick Pic Revolution" began shortly thereafter and by December googling "dick pic" brought up over 500 trillion hits. It was estimated that 25-35% of all the penises in the world were now digitized and that fewer than 1% of searches would now be free of dick pics within the first 25 hits. 
Rebel hacker group Anonymous joined the fray by hacking into government and corporate email programs and installing a virus, later made available freely for any disgruntled government or corporate employee to install at their workplace, that would attach a random dick pic to every email sent from those addresses."
Heh. 
.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Saw this earlier. It is indeed a brilliant strategy on Oliver's part - bringing the surveillance convo to people who think it doesn't apply to them. We need something like this for C-51 in Canada.

btw How many regular journalists have gone to Moscow to interview Snowden?

Boris said...

2015 turned out to be a bizarre year for the surveillence state. In April, John Oliver interviewed Edward Snowden about the spy agencies spying and used a "dick pic" to make his point. Later, the Canadian government passed Bill C-51 given it's spy agency free reign. The "Dick Pic Revolution" began shortly thereafter and at by December googling "dick pic" brought up over 500 trillion hits. It was estimated that 25-35% of all the lpenises in the world were now digitised and that fewer than 1% of searches would now be free of dick pics within the first 25 hits. Rebel hacker group Anonymous joined the fray by hacking into government and corporate email programes and installing a virus, later made available freely for any disgruntled government or corporate employee to install at their workplace, that would attach a random dick pic to every email sent from those addresses.

Anonymous said...

Edward Snowden: "You shouldn’t change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing. If we sacrifice our values because we’re afraid, we don’t care about those values very much."

Bingo

Alison said...

Boris : Friggin' brilliant comment!
And as of tonight within a day of the broadcast, a google search of 'Snowden dick pics' brings up over 3M results.

Anonymous said...

The photo of your junk will be publicized.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=aPJHI0VYVJo

thwap said...

Saw that last night. It is apparently not that hard for journalists to interview Edward Snowden.

But just imagine the hash corporate television "journalists" would make of the opportunity.

It makes me cringe just thinking about it.

The government can see and save everything we do online. They engage in active cover-ups of their own crimes, but they have given themselves the capability and the regulatory power to see everything you do.

They go after the charitable status of bird-watching groups for innocuous opinions on environmental issues. That's the CRA. Imagine out-of-control CSIS getting legal immunity for everything except raping you and killing you afterwards.

Boris said...

Thwap, given CSIS cover like that means that the spies will now train and recruit people who are able to do this to others. That always gets missed in all this, but it ends up leaving the spies themselves with deep mental health issues. People who brutalise and lie to others for a living are pathologically unwell or will eventually become so. There is no way to do this other than to train a cohort of particularly dirty and unprofessional players.

Anonymous said...

Alison, as of this morning 4 million and counting. This could work.

thwap said...

Boris,

Good observation. It makes sense. What would be the point of empowering CSIS to abuse eople if you weren't going to have them abuse people?

Anonymous said...

A large part of the issue could simply be resolved by doing the following...

In order for something to get either of the "Top Secret" or "For your eyes only" labels, the government department in question would have to make their case in the "Fisa" style court

ie. they would have to prove the requirement before labeling secrecy. Onus would be where it should be. Accountability would then be at the court stage.

MyPetGloat said...

Encourage everyone to listen to this hour-long interview with Rocco Galati who says Harper govt has lost 41 out of 42 constitutional court challenges over the last 8 years and discusses his current fight.

http://consider-this.ca/?p=3728

He has a lot to say about Harper's contempt for the rule of law.

Alison said...

Thanks, Gloat.
Lost 41 out of 42, you say? Anyone would think he doesn't give a flying shit. Or rather is attempting to score a very dangerous point. Not much removed for arrogance from that Baird invu with Don Newman in 2008, is it?

Anon: Smart way of resolving it.
How many amendments to fix this thing did they shitcan before grudgingly accepting 3 of their very own? Over a hundred. Not hopeful, somehow.

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