posted July 08, 2013 01:51 AM            

It didn't go well for them."
http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-recruiters-grilled-by-wisconsin-students-2013-7

Likely everyone has seen this by now, but in case not it's a fun listen if you have the 13 minutes to spare.

posted July 08, 2013 08:22 AM            

I heard on the news that the Postal Service photography every single piece of mail addressed to the recipient.

With their financial woes, it seems ludicrous at best spying at worst. Seems the mailed anthrax scare is the excuse.

Leaves me pondering why they are so interested in my bills and nursery flyers

posted July 08, 2013 03:07 PM            

The second NSA responder does a little better by trying to rebrand the term "adversary" as "target," specifying that it would be particular people, and not everyone.

The students actually make a lot of obvious assumptions that they don't know to be factual. They assume that despite being told that the targets are specific that they are not. They assume that NSA workers aren't cognizant of the context of the information that they're receiving. They assume that the NSA is using information collected in a misleading way. None of these assumptions is corroborated by the visiting analysts. When asked about the NSA leaders perjuring themselves before Congress, one analyst opines that she disagreed with that assessment. The student assumed it was because The Guardian was blacked-out on their computers. That's not really logical, however. There is no reason to assume that these people wouldn't have access to The Guardian.

Next a student asks if it's a job for liars, because she doesn't believe that they're giving forthright answers. The female NSA analyst is surprisingly graceful in the face of this accusation even allowing the student the student's own beliefs about how things are in the NSA. The student goes on to be more adamant about the program's lying (though we all by now have seen that the program in all of its shady ways was on display before Edward Snowden ever said anything about it). The female NSA analyst then goes onto say essentially that you can read something that's presented as fact, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily fact. The student then insists that despite being invited to leave the recruitment (if she's not interested in joining the NSA) that she doesn't have the option of opting out of surveillance, which multiple NSA analysts try to voice an objection about.