If you look at "Interview #07 (Washington, DC) by FF4Films on Youtube, Richard Clarke makes this allegation. It's pretty clear the situation is quite different than just saying the warnings were too non-specific to notice.
-/edit- here: https://cpj.org/2007/12/french-journalist-investigated-over-... -edit/-
Then again 9/11 is not a valid excuse as the US has been orders of magnitude worse for decades, had been preparing for such an event but did nothing and even the contrary when it actually happened and then used it to go to war to unrelated countries for unrelated reason (access to oil). So please just stop brandishing 9/11 as a justification for doing more of what the US have been doing all along.
I agree with you. That isn't what I was arguing at all.
Seems like mass suveillance by western agencies is jut a way to cover for their own incompetence. How many terrorist attacks in how many countries over the last few years have we heard that 'the suspect was known to intelligence agencies' and yet they still couldn't stop jack shit.
The whole intelligence apparatus in NATO countries needs reforming.
>They didn't. To suggest they did is to allege a massive conspiracy.
Please be smarter than that, claims of conspiracy to discredit something is just making you look like an uneducated fool.
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Ladin_Determined_To_Strike... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_intelligence_befo...
> It's pretty absurd to suggest we would kill people just because we caught a spy agency snooping on us.
The US kidnaps, imprison, tortures and kills innocent people. I will not say all the time, but it happens often enough to not be a rogue agent or an isolated case, more like orders and policy.
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_by_the...
I'd be terrible shocked if this is not just Hollywood-level paranoia, the kind most people around the world merely laugh at. This idea that countries are at some kind of equal footing with regard to those things, "doing the same" with the 10.000ft gorilla that spends more than 3 times for its military what the next player (China) does -- more than the next 7 players combined.
There are maybe 4-5 countries that even remotely do anything like that on a global scale. Most countries merely track their neighbours's and traditional (regional) enemies.
I'd say just the US, the UK and France (ex big colonial powers that have fucked half the world over), Israel (because it has people everywhere, who, due to the terrible persecutions Jews faced in WWII can be very loyal to the cause of the "homeland" even if its not their actual country of citizenship), and China (because of sheer size and economic/global rise) have any such capacity, intent and power. USSR back in the day too, modern Russia, not so much. France a little, as an ex-colonial power. Germany has its secret service too, but not much to write home about either.
And even of those few, even fewer have the history, military and diplomatic means to pressure and reach of using those things to mess with other countries the world over.
I sincerely doubt that a country could pull out a stuxnet with a couple $100,000 0day and a hundreds of people with computer science diplomas. There's a reason stuxnet was almost instantly pinned on the US and that reason is that apart from maybe China and Russia (who seem to have fun hacking the US and not getting caught or exposed) no other country can match the US.
No one is making that case
This is bizarre to witness.
It's amost like as an American you need to be safe in the perception that the US is #1 always, even in truly terrible things.
No, but doing anything with the data, and being able to get away with doing it, is.
https://qz.com/954265/russian-hacker-pyotr-levashov-arrested...
It's not about being extradited. It's about your country being bombed, economically pressured, embargoed, messed with diplomatically, through your neighbors given preferential treatment and arms, etc.
The kind of not getting away with it I mean involves the impact of the world's #1 military and economy fucking your country over in retribution.
It's not like the US would even feel a pinch if some middle eastern country embargoes its products. Now reverse that, or add even more extreme measures to it (doing to Iraq level measures) and you get the point.
It's pretty absurd to suggest we would kill people just because we caught a spy agency snooping on us. We've caught and rebuked foreign spy agencies all the time. The usual punishment is covert retaliation (escalating malware attacks, etc.), and the times when it isn't covert (like with the Russia revelations), responses usually involve sanctions and condemnation.
NSA would be doing the American people a disservice if they weren't competing with the rest of the spy agencies out there. It's just a fact of life. We just want them to do it without warrantless mass surveillance of US citizens.
>It was proven that the CIA had knowledge about the attack before it happened...
They didn't. To suggest they did is to allege a massive conspiracy. They received hints it might happen, but intelligence agencies receive tens of thousands to millions of pieces of new information per week, 99.99% of which turns out to be nothing. You can apply this argument to almost every war or attack in history (including Pearl Harbor). Sieving the signal out of the noise isn't easy.
I'm an American but neither a nationalist nor a patriot. I just realize they're doing their job. I also realize and acknowledge Russia wouldn't be doing its job properly if they didn't try to influence the Presidential election.