Senate report concludes: no proof of contact between

[kandrathe]

And I again state, how do you or I know if what was happening in the former Yugoslavia wasn't US security based? For all we know, since we don't have the information, the fighting in the former Yugoslavia could have inflame hatreds amongst the various ethnic groups in the vicinity that has been simmering for the better part of 50+ years.

And... If that is the case, why couldn't Germany, Italy, Spain, Britain, France, Russia, etc. etc. act to protect themselves against little Yugoslavia, and their civil war?

Not as much as you may think. Have you ever tried getting information as to why a representative, be it HoR or Senate, voted a certain way? Getting a straight answer is a exercise in political double speak. It's very rare now to find a politician at the national level that truly cares about their constintuents, the vast majority care about one thing and one thing only, how much power they have.

I believe there are good citizens who would serve us better, yes. I believe that as long as we are still able to caucus, choose Presidents, Representatives and Senators, and vote, that WE the PEOPLE still decide how the government works. I am unwilling to abdicate power to special interests, who are actually just over funded minority interests. Democracy, if exercised, will prevail over them.

Again, and I continue to state this, why does John Q. Citizen need military grade hardware? No one has yet answered this, including the pro gun lobby. Having access to handguns and hunting rifles I see no issue with, but having access to military grade hardware is just too much. You can defend yourself just as easily with a handgun or a hunting rifle as you can with military grade hardware. There is no good reason to have military grade hardware in the hands of the public.

Let's turn that around, shall we? Why should the government, who I might need to protect myself from, get to choose which tools I get to use to defend myself? Yes, you can push the argument into the ridiculous extremes of wet noodles vs thermonuclear weapons, but if the principle of the 2nd amendment is to allow the citizens the right to defend themselves, then that right should be defended as passionately as we defend the freedom to speak our minds. This is why Ruby Ridge, and Wako are somewhat disturbing cases of the government enforcing arms limitations on citizens to the point of lethality. I don't agree with the actions of the citizens in those cases. In both cases I feel the citizens should have surrendered, then used the courts to fight their battles. Yet, I also believe MY government acted wrongly as well. Should we allow people to own military styled weapons? First, why not? What is wrong with military styled weapons in the hands of decent law abiding citizens anyway? What about banning Star Wars styled weapons? Does it make any more sense, since the lethality of a AR-15 is the same regardless of style?

I have plenty of understanding on what kind of systems they're running. They have several of the most powerful super computers in the world, but, like all supercomputers they have to share CPU time with many, many projects. The CPUs of the system are going to be working on a great deal of items analyzing a large amount of things. Likewise, you make it sound like the encryption we have is easy to break, it's not. It takes a concerted effort of months to break 128 bit encyrption using several hundred desktops working in concert and spending 100% of the resources on breaking that encryption. Now we're moving in to the arena of 256 bit and 512 bit encryption for home users. Even if the supercomputer at NSA are several million times more powerful than a home machine, it's still going to take them time to break 256 and 512 bit encryptions. Considering all his prior and future emails from that account were near instant, I find it interesting that a single email with such subject taking 12 hours would be a fluke. If you know how email travels on the internet, there is one central server that all email goes through and it was setup this way by the original architects of the internet (the Stanford DARPA group). People that know about this system simply just do a quick scan of an email and can go from there on them (someone I know went to a conference by one of these guys and during the speech, the guy did a search of the server with a laptop he had on had and annonced to the session how there were 15 emails that day mentioning him, the guy giving the speech).

Rather than argue the capabilities of the NSA, which you nor I can prove or disprove, let's focus on my premise that Clinton supported the NSA's attempts to limit and regulate privacy by encryption.

The investigation is the latest round in a growing battle in recent years between the National Security Agency and a variety of groups in this country, including high-technology companies, computer researchers and civil libertarians, over the role of coding software in protecting computer data. The N.S.A., whose role is to monitor electronic communications around the world, has consistently acted to block the adoption of new technologies that would make its mission more difficult. NYT, September 21, 1993

The above excerpt was from a news article about PGP back in 1993.

And as I have stated several times now, the US Government constantly abuses its powers. It's not just the Executive branch either. You can even go back to Washington to see preceived abuse of power (look up the Whiskey Rebellion some time). Brutus wasn't far off the mark when he uttered the line, "absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Liberty is in constant danger, thus the need for an ever vigilant citizen. I don't disagree with you on this.

As to your list of EOs from Bush, looking through them, about half there we have little to no idea what they were about because they list as extention to this or that EO and give the EO's number, but none of the EOs have their number listed. Those EOs that actually have some information written next to them I can see 75%+ that could be seen as abuse of power.

When you get some time, maybe point out a couple that appear abusive and we can discuss.

Edit: Also, look into the life and work of Adi Shamir. Of note, "Together with Eli Biham, he discovered differential cryptanalysis, a general method for attacking block ciphers. (It later emerged that differential cryptanalysis was already known — and kept a secret — by both IBM and the NSA.)" Does the NSA have something like TWIRL? I'd bet on it.