I'd be very surprised if the US Gov aren't guilty of even more cyber-attacks - ask the Iranians about Stuxnet

Lasercow, I'm fairly confident that everybody is engaged in cyber attacks of one kind or another, with the probable exception of Britain (because it's just not the done thing and is likely to be counter-productive anyway). However, what is perhaps instructive is that President Obama's recent meeting with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping produced no agreement on the matter.

I suspect this was less to do with spying and more to do with copyright theft. However, it is also interesting that Mr. Snowden has since bailed out of his Hong Kong Hotel for parts unknown. Maybe he discovered that the Chinese were about to hand him back to the US.

Yes, these powers will never be misused....

We do not know if these powers were misused. What we do know is that Miranda is a close associate of Glenn Greenwald who released the information held by Snowden and is now threatening the entire English (sic) security establishment presumably in a fit of pique. It would appear that neither the US or Britain are allowed any national security. Although one notes he has nothing to say about Russian and Chinese national security. In the case of Russia because Snowden defected there (albeit for just one year).

We also know that Mr. Anderson QC, the independent assessor on the Terrorism legislation, has not made any pronouncement on the matter unlike a whole lot of journalists who have even less knowledge of the matter than him.

However, the fact is that the information seized on Miranda's various electronic gadgets will take time to extract and assess and they better be Persil white.

I think your definition of Terrorism must differ from mine Gordon

Glenn Greenwald is a journalist. Would it be OK if I was held for 8 hours under terrorism legislation and questioned on where The InsidER gets some of his/her info? Miranda was not questioned about Terrorism once.

Presumably Mr Snowdon doesn't have first hand information on the surveillance of the Russian and Chinese governments, but from what he is saying (and he's not told everything he knows yet), the US government's programme seems a lot more advanced.

Mr Snowdon revealed what he knew because he was fed up of US officials flatly denying that they were running an illegal comprehensive electronic surveillance program against every US citizen (and everyone else who uses US based IT services such as Hotmail, Google etc).

Whatever your views on this, it's not terrorism.

Gordon McCaskill wrote:


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