deathtokoalas
you can't stop them. if the court stops them, they won't stop. if you vote them out, they won't stop. if we have a revolution, the new government will continue. so long as we have governments and we have technology, government will use that technology to spy on you.

that doesn't mean you should be complacent, or feel safe in the understanding that you're not carrying out crimes. what it means is that you should be vigilant in ensuring your privacy by taking personal action to protect it.

this idea that you can trust the government is pure idiocy. the laws have never been respected, they're just meaningless abstractions. so, stop being naive in thinking that the laws of the country mean anything at all and start taking greater control over your data.

the legal literature refers to this ridiculous idea that the government cares about it's own laws as "the rule of law" and claims our society is rooted in it.

an empirical analysis of western/european history since at least the industrial revolution suggests the exact opposite. our governments seem to have no respect for the "rule of law" at all, and essentially do whatever they want.

the idea that we have or can gain oversight over the state - and especially the deep state - is a lie. you can continue to believe these lies that keep the state in place, or you can reject them and adjust your existence to the reality - which is that the intelligence agencies in our culture are not subject to meaningful regulation or oversight.

(deleted response) 

deathtokoalas 
what you can do is force them to be more secretive about how they do things.

running through these comments, i'm led to believe that people are a little bit confused. a common response seems to be:

"well, he made a few moves on her, and she said no. what's wrong with that? she can't just say she was harassed."

it's the making the moves part that is the harassment.

most of you don't seem to even understand that.

you need to ask somebody before you go grabbing their body parts or grabbing their hands at all, let alone move them to a part on your own body. if you don't ask, that's called harassment.

now, when you know somebody a really long time, those formalities might be a little less entrenched. that's when trust and intent become more important than formal requests.

but the idea that you can just grab somebody that you've known for a mere couple of hours without asking is entirely preposterous. this is the underlying patriarchal entitlement that feminists speak of, and it's all going directly over your heads without so much as a phantasmic smidgeon of evidence that it's remotely grasped.

it's a cropped, generated background - this could have been filmed anywhere. but, given that the guy has a british accent, it's reasonable to guess that it was filmed in london.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38YJq1v9fZg

that's obviously a syrian government outpost. the building looks at least 100 years old - it was clearly not recently erected by isis fighters, but was taken over by them. so, this is merely evidence that the united states is, in fact, targeting syrian military targets.