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[Another]

US/UK attempt to prevent Guardian publishing from the start - same information is still published from Brazil/Venezuela/whatever and US/UK gets much more ugly reputation than they got now.

[XXSockXX]

Yeah, the Guardian thing is all over the news here and it sure does make the UK look bad.

I'd like to add that i don't think you can control every single news outlet on the internet and beyond. The Guardian however, as one of the UK's most popular newspapers with a significant presence beyond, certainly could be.

How would it be easier to control a big established popular newspaper as opposed to the random noise that is the internet? The Guardian has infinitely more credibility than some blogger, better resources and significantly wider readership. It's actually easier as a reader to check a big newspaper for biases and sources than to determine how credible some relatively obscure internet news outlet is.
I'm all for a healthy dose of paranoia, but if a conspiracy theory is that complicated, it's probably just a conspiracy theory. Sometimes you just have to believe in the incompetence of government authorities and assume that a) stuff got leaked and b) they are now doing a poor job at covering it up.

[Scoops Novel]

The Guardian in terms of employees, size and centralization is much much much less then every random blogger on the internet, while giving you access to a larger readership then any random blogger. I would have thought that made more sense.

[XXSockXX]

Sure it would be easier to control a news organisation than random people on the internet. But news organisations are usually under a certain pressure to stick to certain standards of journalism, while bloggers are not. If you notice that a newspaper does not present facts that can be independently verified, and at least part of the readership will notice that, they lose credibility and relevance. A lot of people are probably too ignorant to think about that, like the Sun readers that are only interested in sports and gossip anyway, but a number of news outlets is expected to act as a check on government. Sometimes they fail at that job. But still they are more trustworthy than internet bloggers who for the most part just "report" hearsay, rarely check anything, are biased and can easily be bought (usually by advertisers, but why not by political groups). At least with a newspaper ownership and historical biases are public information.

Thinking the PRISM leak and now the crackdown on the Guardian are just part of a bigger government plot does not make any sense to me at all. If the government controlled the Guardian, we would not have heard about PRISM and we certainly would not have heard about their attempts to cover it up.

[GlyphGryph]

Especially since the government does actually intentionally leak things to the media pretty often, and it doesn't happen anything like the way this happened.

[Baffler]

It doesn't need to be a part of any sort of over-arching conspiracy. Just people with the means to do so advancing their own agendas, like anyone else would and does. They've made some mistakes in damage control, but all in all they were pretty darn successful. I have met plenty of people who actually follow politics who know next to nothing about the programs, or don't believe the Guardian for whatever reason. At least among people I know, folks like this are the majority; second only to the people who simply give no fucks.

My question then is, what can we do?

[misko27]

second only to the people who simply give no fucks.

I would go so far as to say that this is the majority, but then, in a larger view of things, this is true for most issues.

[Loud Whispers]

Especially since the government does actually intentionally leak things to the media pretty often, and it doesn't happen anything like the way this happened.

"An unnamed official source said [scandal] _{may have} happened. Shun [accused]."

[alway]

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nsa-has-access-75-percent-us-internet-traffic-says-wsj-6C10967780

[10ebbor10]

Only 75%. I'd expected better actually.

[Sheb]

I'm going to read the WSJ article, but so far it seems normal. It's normal for the NSA to have access to 100% of the Internet, as long as they only actually access it for specific investigations and with a warrant. After all, the FBI has access to 100% of the US territory.

On another note, Bradley Manning has been convincted to 35 years. Less than what the prosecution asked for, and he could be paroled in 8 years (although I doubt he will).

P.S. Okay, read the article on the WSJ and its mostly stuff that has been said already, actually a good summary of the whole NSA thing.

The only two point of interest:

a) the WSJ quote a lot of anonymous government officials, some of them saying stuff that's actually against the government interest. ("In practice, the NSA has latitude under that standard, and an American's communication could be read without a warrant") I'm wondering if Snowden is pushing some NSA agents to talk more to the press, to inform the public even if they're ordered not to.

b) The NSA actually logged all the communications coming from Salt Lake City for 6 months around the 2002 Olympics. This was during Bush's warrantless wiretapping, but it prove they are totally okay with conducting mass surveillance.

[Zangi]

The only two point of interest:

a) the WSJ quote a lot of anonymous government officials, some of them saying stuff that's actually against the government interest. ("In practice, the NSA has latitude under that standard, and an American's communication could be read without a warrant") I'm wondering if Snowden is pushing some NSA agents to talk more to the press, to inform the public even if they're ordered not to.

... I do not see how it would be possible for Snowden to effectively communicate with any NSA agents/government officials....  Not without those people getting relieved of their jobs or recording and passing the conversation on to the higher ups.
These people said stuff without Snowden nudging them to do so.

[GlyphGryph]

I don't think he meant personally. But rather that he's leading the way by example, and nudging them with his own released.

[Baffler]

b) The NSA actually logged all the communications coming from Salt Lake City for 6 months around the 2002 Olympics. This was during Bush's warrantless wiretapping, but it prove they are totally okay with conducting mass surveillance.

This doesn't really say much beyond that the NSA will follow orders, these were well within the law at the time anyway, and that security organizations payed special attention to the Olympics. Neither of which are particularly startling points. It does give an idea of the technical capacity behind their monitoring, and this was before the Utah Data Center and other big projects went into play. I don't imagine they dropped everything else to watch the Olympics, either.

[misko27]

I don't think he meant personally. But rather that he's leading the way by example, and nudging them with his own released.

Meanwhile, I'm sure the NSAis looking over their background check rules and tightening the hell out of it.