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On Monday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies' Global Security Forum, John Brennan, Director of the US' Central Intelligence Agency, spoke about the recent bombings in Paris. In what many commentators took as a reference to Edward Snowden, but could instead refer to the Church Committee, Brennan predicted that finding the attackers will be more difficult than it would have been, had intelligence services been left unchecked:
In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.
I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call particularly in areas of Europe where I think there has been a misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing by some quarters that are designed to undercut those capabilities.
[...]
There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to have insight that they need to uncover it.
Brennan's complete remarks are available in video via C-SPAN.
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(Score: 2) by Ezber Bozmak on Thursday November 19 2015, @04:37AM
irrelevant
too bad
never said it was easy
Surely your opinions are informed by some of that work, right?
Yes.
Am I to take that reply as meaning that you are not interested in educating me, or anyone else reading along, as to why you are right, only that everybody you disagree with is wrong? That would be unfortunate.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday November 19 2015, @04:52AM
Am I to take that reply as meaning that you are not interested in educating me
I am not interested in spending long periods of time 'educating' you about trivial things, no. But it seems odd to draw that conclusion from some of those random quotes.
only that everybody you disagree with is wrong?
I don't know what that means. Are you someone who promotes religion?
(Score: 2) by Ezber Bozmak on Thursday November 19 2015, @05:26AM
I am not interested in spending long periods of time 'educating' you about trivial things, no
I'm sorry. I guess I thought that since you were so adamant and confident about it that it wasn't trivial to you.
. Are you someone who promotes religion?
I've always been and will always be an atheist. But as someone who minored in sociology and philosophy in college I learned that 'religion' is a complex cultural topic that can't adequately be boiled down to "all powerful magical beings." But you don't seem willing to make any sort of examination of those ideas so I won't bother you any longer. I will leave you to your utopia of a science of ethics that transcends utilitarianism.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday November 19 2015, @04:18PM
I'm sorry. I guess I thought that since you were so adamant and confident about it that it wasn't trivial to you.
Trivial in the sense that it was obvious what I meant from the start, and easy to understand if you bother to think about it. If you wanted someone to explain such a thing to you in-depth, I am definitely not the person for that, because I have little patience for such things.
But as someone who minored in sociology and philosophy in college
Truly amazing.
I learned that 'religion' is a complex cultural topic that can't adequately be boiled down to "all powerful magical beings."
Religions make many claims. Many of them are downright crazy (though those must merely be metaphorical, even when there is zero evidence of that), but they are certainly not limited to magical sky daddies. I know this. Yet still, most of the believers of these types of religions believe in magical sky daddies along with a host of other nonsense, which I consider a problem.
And no matter how "complex" religions are, what I ultimately care about is truth. I don't care about how happy religion makes some people, or any other such nonsense.