Free Republic

It’s amazing how many here seem to have forgotten what the deal was with Ukraine after the cold war.
Ukraine would abolish the nuclear weapons it inherited from the breakup of the Sowjet Union and therefor Russia AND the US would both guarantee for their safety and their borders.

What happened then was: Putin grabbed the Crimea and Zero did nothing. Now Putin is gonna grab the next part because he knows Biden won’t do anything beside peeing his pants.

If Trump would still be in office, Putin would never even have thought about grabbing another part of Ukraine, nor would Xi Jinping think about invading Taiwan.

The Iranians don’t perform carrier operations so the landing gear on theirs dont get as much stress as the navy cats. I’d guess the iranians are capable of building engine mounts if they can build entire F-5 clones on their own. But i guess they will have problems with electron beam titanium welding process needed to produce a F-14 wingbox.

“Passive phased array radar?”

Phased array is nothing but a bunch of antennas assembling a wide angle via electronics instead of mechanically rotating/sweeping antenna. While passive means it can use almost any other source of radio signal for tracking it’s target without sending out a beam it self.

“F14’s — Their two big Pratt and Whitney’s make great heat signatures for total passive IR missles like whatever version of the sidewinder (or subsequent model like the AIM 120).

Keeping a Jet flying is one thing, keeping them operationally fit is quite another.

They must have something like a 1 functional F14 to 3 Hanger Queens.”

I wonder if they turned the Tomcat into a Crumcat by replacing the P&Ws with russian Mig-29 Fullcrum RD-33s engines to keep it flying. It would be much more gas guzzling but easier to maintain, more reliable and provide more power then the ill fated TF30.

I think the only part they really have to worry about is wear on the wingbox. All the other stuff can be more or less easily substituted by russian designs or domestic reengineered parts. But after so many years of service, including 10 years of heavy dogfight in the Iraq-Iran war fatigue on the structural elements is guaranteed. And that is what turns a fighter airplane finally into a useless piece of junk. So don’t worry. One day these aircraft will get rendered useless no matter what they try to do. Building entire new F-14s on theyre own would be too costly and nonense if they can buy the superior new Suchoi T-50 PAK FA.

Of course it’s warmer in Europe this winter because it’s colder in the US. Has this something to do with global warming ?
We don’t know.
Has this something to do with CO² ?
We don’t know.

What do we know ?
We know that about every 20 years or so the continental US get’s catched inbetween a quite steady high pressure system over the pacific ocean and a steady low pressure system over the atlantic ocean. In the northern hemisphere high pressure systems rotate clockwise and low pressure systems rotate counter clockwise pumping giant loads of cold polar air down south. The rocky mountains in the west and the appachian mountains in the east keep these two systems appart so they can’t balance out the difference in pressure easily. There is also no north south barrier, but the great plains in the middle that work out like a climate highway. Therefor cold polar air get’s easily pushed deep down to the south in the US.

On the other side of the pond the counter clock wise rotating low pressure system pumps a lot of warm water into the gulf stream and warm air directly to europe. Therefore it’s a very warm winter this year in western europe.

That’s all folks: Simple physics.

Why doesn't the Obozo government issue a alert to all americans in the US that they're getting wire trapped all the time by the NSA too ? Doublestandards ?!?

Another fail of Zeros foreign relationship czars. Could anyone please wash out her mouth with soap ?

@mperkel #ASKSNOWDEN They say it’s a balance of privacy and safety. I think spying makes us less safe. do you agree?

Intelligence agencies do have a role to play, and the people at the working level at the NSA, CIA, or any other member of the IC are not out to get you. They’re good people trying to do the right thing, and I can tell you from personal experience that they were worried about the same things I was.

The people you need to watch out for are the unaccountable senior officials authorizing these unconstitutional programs, and unreliable mechanisms like the secret FISA court, a rubber-stamp authority that approves 99.97% of government requests (which denied only 11 requests out of 33,900 in 33 years http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request. They’re the ones that get us into trouble with the Constitution by letting us go too far.

And even the President now agrees our surveillance programs are going too far, gathering massive amounts of private records on ordinary Americans who have never been suspected of any crime. This violates our constitutional protection against unlawful searches and seizure. Collecting phone and email records for every American is a waste of money, time and human resources that could be better spent pursuing those the government has reason to suspect are a serious threat.

I’m going to stop here. My deepest thanks to everyone who sent questions, and whether or not we agree on where the lines should be drawn, I encourage you to contact your members of congress and tell them how you feel about mass surveillance. This is a global problem, and the first step to tackling it is by working together to fix it at home.

If you’d like to more ideas on how to push back against unconstitutional surveillance, consider taking a look at the organizations working together to organize https://thedaywefightback.org/ .

@jaketapper #AskSnowden Under what conditions would you agree to return to the U.S.?

Returning to the US, I think, is the best resolution for the government, the public, and myself, but it’s unfortunately not possible in the face of current whistleblower protection laws, which through a failure in law did not cover national security contractors like myself.

The hundred-year old law under which I’ve been charged, which was never intended to be used against people working in the public interest, and forbids a public interest defense. This is especially frustrating, because it means there’s no chance to have a fair trial, and no way I can come home and make my case to a jury.

Maybe when Congress comes together to end the programs the PCLOB just announced was illegal, they’ll reform the Whistleblower Protection Act, and we’ll see a mechanism for all Americans, no matter who they work for, to get a fair trial.

@Valio_ch #asksnowden Do you think that the Watchdog Report by Privacy & Civil Liberties Oversight Board will have any impact at all?

I don’t see how Congress could ignore it, as it makes it clear there is no reason at all to maintain the 215 program. Let me quote from the official report:

“Cessation of the program would eliminate the privacy and civil liberties concerns associated with bulk collection without unduly hampering the government’s efforts, while ensuring that any governmental requests for telephone calling records are tailored to the needs of specific investigations.”

@RagBagUSA #AskSnowden what (in your opinion) is the appropriate extent of US national security apparatus? Surely some spying is needed?

Not all spying is bad. The biggest problem we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance, where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents’ communication every single day. This is done not because it’s necessary — after all, these programs are unprecedented in US history, and were begun in response to a threat that kills fewer Americans every year than bathtub falls and police officers — but because new technologies make it easy and cheap.

I think a person should be able to dial a number, make a purchase, send an SMS, write an email, or visit a website without having to think about what it’s going to look like on their permanent record. Particularly when we now have courts, reports from the federal government, and even statements from Congress making it clear these programs haven’t made us any more safe, we need to push back.

This is a global problem, and America needs to take the lead in fixing it. If our government decides our Constitution’s 4th Amendment prohibition against unreasonable seizures no longer applies simply because that’s a more efficient means of snooping, we’re setting a precedent that immunizes the government of every two-bit dictator to perform the same kind of indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance of entire populations that the NSA is doing.

It’s not good for our country, it’s not good for the world, and I wasn’t going to stand by and watch it happen, no matter how much it cost me. The NSA and the rest of the US Intelligence Community is exceptionally well positioned to meet our intelligence requirements through targeted surveillance — the same way we’ve always done it — without resorting to the mass surveillance of entire populations.

When we’re sophisticated enough to be able to break into any device in the world we want to (up to and including Angela Merkel’s phone, if reports are to be believed), there’s no excuse to wasting our time collecting the call records of grandmothers in Missouri.

@auerfeld #AskSnowden do you think it’s a shame that #Obama gave his #NSA speech before his Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board reported?

The timing of his speech seems particularly interesting, given that it was accompanied by so many claims that “these programs have not been abused.”

Even if we accept the NSA’s incredibly narrow definition of abuse, which is “someone actually broke the rules so badly we had to investigate them for it,” we’ve seen more instances of identified, intentional abuse than we have seen instances where this unconstitutional mass phone surveillance stopped any kind of terrorist plot at all — even something less than an attack.

To back that up with the government’s own numbers, according to the NSA Inspector General, we’ve seen at least 12 specific, intentional cases of “abuse” by the NSA.

In contrast, the federal government’s independent PCLOB report on the NSA’s mass phone surveillance today (which stated the NSA has spied on at least 120,000,000 American phones under this program) said this:

“We are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”

At the press conference, Judge Wald stated this program, which has been operated in secret for years, has no basis in law. The panel determined this kind of mass surveillance is illegal and should be ended.

When even the federal government says the NSA violated the constitution at least 120 million times under a single program, but failed to discover even a single “plot,” it’s time to end “bulk collection,” which is a euphemism for mass surveillance. There is simply no justification for continuing an unconstitutional policy with a 0% success rate.

In light of another independent confirmation of this fact, I think Americans should look to the White House and Congress to close the book entirely on the 215 BR provision.

“Cheney, Bolton and Michelle Bachmann have condemned him as well.”

I always wonder how it was possible to start a impeachment process against Bill Clinton for not keeping his wiener under control, when the house misserably fails to start a impeachment process on Obama for spying millions of US citizens ?

That’s quite a presumption to call the European Union “the free world”.

You’re right. There is no place that’s worth to be called “free world” in the world of today.

The german attorney general go stopped by Merkel to investigate in this issue. So there’s no hope some one will show Barry the limits. Merkel still lets the US spy on the german people as long as she get’s all the data she isnt allowed to gather on her own. It’s the same way the NSA is passing data of US citizens to the UK and let them do the things the NSA isn’t allowed to do either. It’s a huge moral and legal loop hole.

The real problem ist that all EU countries and the US do the same. They’re all limited to spy on their own population by their constitutions, thus their solution is: “You’ll spy on mine and report to me, i’ll spy on yours and will report to you.”

It should be a no go to spy on people in the free world on each side of the pond. Therefore it should be a no go to help other countries to spy on their own population like the US and all EU countries do.

Zero turned the constitution into a piece of scratchy vintage toilet paper.

“Santa” aka “Saint Nicholas” former bishop of myra (ancient greece) ...
He should look like any other turk or greek person. Not white, not black, just having a nice sunny tan :-)

“What happened to his right to free speech?”
Nothing. Even in the USSR people had the rigt to free speech, but they had to fear the consequences if they do so. Welcome to the USSA.

“I would like to know if 0 has the NSA spy on the middle eastern countries that hate us. He loves them, and doesn’t want them mad at him.

He hates European countries, and doesn’t care if he gets them mad.”

He also hates americans. The 4th ammendment is dead. No doubt they’ll keep on spying every one on this planet. In other words: “The Terrorists have won”. They hated our liberty and freedom. We gave up all our liberties and freedom on this “war on terror”. That’s like committing suicide to prevent murder. The entire western (formerly known as the free) world turned into something like the USSR and it’s satellite states. Now i know what the misterious “change” meant. The outrage in europe makes me remeber the prague spring and the polish crisis. Welcome to the USSA.