Wow Did I Screw up
Today I did 30 minutes on the NSA Spying program and while much if not all of the actual info I put out was accurate the site referenced is NOT THE OFFICIAL NSA website.
You can see that here, http://nsa.gov1.info/about/about.html
Now when I screw up I admit it and do so fast. I am going to overwrite the show with a disclaimer. Man this sucks!
The reason I believed this was simple, it is in fact what they are doing. But I don’t have the smoking gun I thought I did.
Some would say it is easy to believe things you want to believe. The reality is I don’t want to believe any of these things, it is sadly easy to believe things when they are true even when the source isn’t what you think it is.
I apologize for this error and will do what I can to come out with more official information backing up much of what was said today. If you can assist me with that and supporting information I would appreciate it.
Again I apologize for the error and hope that the immediate correction and the fact that I am being open and honest about it is well received.
Jack
damn jack that scared the shit out of me. i was 15 mins in the episode and everything just stops!? lol. first thought: “damn they got jack!” starting over on the episode. keep up the good, honest, and transparent work brother!
Please see this link, Looks like I got sucked into a very well done parody site, my apologies to all. http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/wow-did-i-screw-up
LOL My first thought on your comment louisiana survivor was going all the way back to South Park. “They killed Jack! You b*stards!”
Hey it happens to us all. LOL
I used to work for the “Never Say Anything.”
When I worked there during the Reagan years, it was a crime to target an American citizen punishable by time spent in federal prison. Even if an American citizen walked on to a scene where I was running ops and was obviously a spy for the targeted country, I was to pull the plug on the ops and vacate the site.
Some people are not bothered by a government knowing everything about them and I have this to share.
When a government agency is collecting the kind of data that they are collecting on you, they can make you do anything. We used to do it to foreign nationals. We would destroy their lives with that data and the only option that we left for them was for them to betray their own country for our benefit. If we could do it to them, we can do it to our own people.
I’ve heard people say this past week that they aren’t worried because they don’t do anything wrong or break any laws. Really? There are so many laws and regulations that anyone of us could be tripped up without knowing it. We all report every cent of income, right?
We still love you brother!
Jack,
I have been using this web search engine for a while. I am sure this won’t solve every problem, but at least your search won’t be recorded blatantly.
https://startpage.com/eng/prism-program-exposed.html
Start page is located in Netherlands.
How dare you take responsibility for yourself, why can’t you just blame someone else. It’s their fault you know…It must be Bush’s fault , like everything else in this country right? Keep it up Jack we all love ya and continue to support you.
this honestly is why i love listening to the podcast. you do your best and are man enough to step up and admit when you mess up.
keep up the great work.
I think I’m going to burn my grocery store club card all the same. Thanks for the correction. You’re a good man.
Happens to everyone. You did what needed to be done on your end and all is well in the TSP again.
Reminds me of stories that get ran by media and their source is the Onion. There was one recently I think it was in China or in Taiwan where they sourced the Onion. Hilarious.
I guess its one damn good parody website hahaha. Happens to the best of us.
I got sucked into that website too. Jack, if you did this podcast due to an article link I sent several days ago I owe you and my fellow TSPers a thousand apologies.
You were not the only one, I got that link from about 15 listeners and it is why I just took it at face value. It was MY MISTAKE not yours.
Hey, it’s okay! Thank you for being a man, standing up, and openly admitting your error. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for clearing things up, Jack.
Next thing you know someone will be saying that the administration is using the IRS to target political enemies!
Thanks for the correction! Actually came here to get the link and then saw the note. Don’t feel bad, I just got duped by CNET into loading some spamware in my browser and I’ve been working with computers since before the PC. Even monkeys fall out of trees…..
Jack,
Last week I had viewed the same site with a similar reaction. Then I read on a libertarian blog I follow that it was indeed a parody.
10 minutes in the episode I started to cringe, thinking (“oh no, Jack’s in a deep hole now”).
Because of your integrity for calling out your own goof up, and because I sympathize for what must have been rather embarassing – I have renewed my MSB membership today.
We’re all in this together, and you’ve lost no credibility as far as I am concerned.
Thanks
-Sean
You’re such a screw-up…
🙂
Dude, This is the one time I’m glad it was a screw up. That freaked the shit out of me.
I was listening to Jack, and I couldn’t believe the NSA would be so bold, but to go ahead and spill the beans on their own website. That just sounded completely illogical. An organization that works completely in the black; what would they have to gain shining a light on themselves?!?
So I went to the site, first thought, this is just too rich, and then I just looked at the eagle symbol, and that raised my eyebrow. That eagle looks goofy, not to mention the url was not technically a .gov address but with so many ways to shortcut urls I was going to let that one slide, but that little eagle, no way. Started reading the whole page, and I knew this had to be bogus. Getting to the bottom of the page brought a grin to my face. Somebody spent a lot of time making a good looking fake. But it is too good to be real for the type of agency you are dealing with.
Not knocking Jack, it just smelled wrong the moment he said he had a page from the NSA giving up all the cookies.
Out best hope of something like that surfacing would come from a Wikileaks or Anonymous.
LoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooL
It’s not like Jack was far off from the truth. Some contributing articles below, from big news sites. Sorry for not knowing how to shorten links.
NSA Monitoring Includes Three Major Phone Companies, as Well as Online Activity
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324299104578529112289298922.html#articleTabs%3Da
Government Says Secret Court Opinion on Law Underlying PRISM Program Needs to Stay Secret
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret-court-opinion-law-underlying-prism-program-needs-stay
Government likely to open criminal probe into NSA leaks
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/08/us-usa-security-leaks-idUSBRE95700C20130608
More than the fact that you made an error — and properly and prominently corrected it — is that it was perfectly plausible that this was completely possible. It isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the government can and would do this. That’s what’s scary.
Cheers,
Rich
What, you are human? Shocking! 😉
I have been thinking; the Patriot Act provides for penalties of $10,000 for violation of civil rights. What would happen if I mailed a bill to the Justice Dept for $10,000 each since I use yahoo, Verizon and Google? I could use $30,000. Would the evildoers prosecute me for mail fraud or would they send me checks?
What if a million Americans did that? Should we enclose a tea bag?
Props on the show and the quick clarification of an oops. We all have have them sometimes. Glad that some of us still can stand up and say I messed up! Again props on the show and on the integrity of the show. Glad you didn’t just delete the show and make us miss one. I have to have something to listen to while I check out the days growth in the garden and rabbitry when i get off work. Time to give it a listen. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK BRO.
Autofab
I too went to the web sites. They are of amazing quality. It boggles my mind on how much work someone did. (Graphic Artist/Web Developer) Very high quality work.
I guess I’m not the sharpest knife in the rack because I’m pretty sure it would have fooled me as well. Despite that, an excellent ‘cast!
Jack:
After listening to hundreds of TSP episodes you slipped. I appreciate you manning up and admitting it. The world would be such a better place if everyone simply admitted when they screwed the dog. Time to pick and move on.
I’ve your back here in Michigan brother. Please keep up the great work.
Listened to the show while working in our garden. Variety of cover crop, weeding, mulching with oak leaves, and thinking. Why can’t every night be like that? I found my old email I sent well over a year ago asking for the service discount code. Then tried the new code for June… decided to bite the bullet and go for the one that was more. Wasn’t a big difference but at least it is recurring. I know it may not mean much to some but money has been super tight around here. I’ve been wanting to join for a long while and after seeing your response to a serious fubar I knew I had to fit it in the budget. Honesty is amazing and sadly in short supply now days. Keep it real and you will have listeners for a very long time.
The site did not pan out to be a smoking gun, but I would not be at all surprised, if they were gathering all that info on us. If they get called on it, the way it looks like that are going to be now, they are just going to lie lie lie, deny, deny, deny, then if a smoking gun pops up, you will see all the main players from the top down swearing they didn’t know anything about it. Then congressional hearings, bla, bla, bla, the smoke eventually clears, and nothing happens. back to business as usual.
Have you learned nothing from government?
YOU did not make a mistake. In fact for the next two – three months, you must deny that such a podcast ever took place.
When approached with indisputable evidence from multiple sources, each with a conflicting political agenda, which prevents you from writing it off as a slanderous political campaign to undermine you, you must then (and only then) admit that “someone” made a mistake.
That someone is not you. You cannot be expected to read everything that crosses your desk, that is the job of the adjunct to the junior vice-editor’s secretary. That nameless person has since been investigated, was found to have an extremist political agenda you neither endorse or condemn, but fortunately had already been let go for unrelated reasons several days ago.
This admission will be brief, discussed only in the news ticker on the bottom of the screen on C-SPAN2 coincidentally on the same night as the Superbowl, when viewership is effectively 0. Later it will appear on page 23 of Delaware’s least read newspaper, Tuesday edition.
Any further discussion of the topic on blogs, web forums and the like will be discredited as a desperate attempt by your conspiracy nut opponents to make themselves feel important. Others in the media will mock them for you.
During this time, you should retain the services of an image consultant. Someone to help you look more… “leaderly”. The next 20 podcasts will be filled with optimism about the economy, foreign policy, and one show dedicated to sharing your great-grandma Ethel’s famous blueberry pie recipe. That makes you relatable to us simple folk. We have a hard time even spelling Ee-Kon-O-Me, but we do love pie.
Meanwhile your lackeys can write stories demonizing you for appearing in a YouTube video with your flag-pin worn on the wrong side. Many of those schmucks who would otherwise be discussing this misstep will jump on that bandwagon instead, discrediting themselves in the process.
Then just ride it out until another pod-caster is found tapping his foot in a bathroom stall. Then the heat is off you, and there’s nothing to worry about.
Isn’t that easier? And you went with honesty, lol. You’re playing the game all wrong. Don’t run for office dude, you won’t last 5 minutes.
In all seriousness though, considering every bit of my smart-assed advice is “based on a true story”, can anyone fault you for believing this hoax? Nevermind the fact that it’s mostly true, I could see a scenario where people in government would put up such a page if it served their own perverse agendas.
* I intended to lighten the mood a bit with this response, but after re-reading it, it’s just not funny, is it?
The tracking of government school children is outlined and explained in this article by Home Schooling Legal Defense Association here:
http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/2013/201304090.asp
Basically it says that some states already track children extensively in order to get money from Race to the Top funding and states might start putting this data together. Of course, if Common Core is passed then the tracking will go straight to the federal government.
So, the question is. Why does anyone put their children n government schools anymore – or ever?
Government schooling is socialism. People talk about how bad socialized medicine is but then have no problem with socialized schooling. It is because we get used to the programs over the generations, just like people will get used to socialized medicine and won’t even realize how much better it would have been if it was left in the hands of the parents.
Well said, jon. Incrementalism is a killer. Each generation gets raised on a little less freedom — the new normal. We generally have a society of damaged people due to public schooling and the whole Prussian education model the technocrats and bureaucracy based our system on. I say that as a person who attended public school of course.
Here’s Glenn Greenwald’s article on phone calls being recorded from the admission of an FBI agent. Written May 4, 2013:
Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?:
A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case
US Supreme Court Justice Douglas was eloquent on this subject.
Scroll down to his dissent here
http://progressivehistorians.wordpress.com/2007/10/06/justice-douglas-condemnation-of-government-surveillance/
“…..Those who already walk submissively will say there is no cause for alarm. But submissiveness is not our heritage……”
It must be the Chemtrails clouding your judgement….
Jack that is amazing. It is so rare for some one to truly admit making a mistake. If you watch the media on TV or radio they begin an apology and then usually worm their way out as they give an apology.
Someone was definitely in the army and took to heart the values we were taught. I wish I could say it was everyone of us that took those values to heart.
Jack this is one of the reasons I definitely enjoy your show and person.
Dear Jack,
The problem is.. no one is saying anything about the dumbing down of America through Fluoridated water (fact) and the constant injection of mercury contaminated vaccines. Regardless of your source your premise is correct. This is the end game of what freedoms we have left. Keep up the good work. You handled your fop-ah like a man.
Be well.
Jack if more people were like you we would be better off and if our own government would only screw up 1,000 times the amount you do, well…..we really would be be much better off!
You are not part of the government. I’m sorry, but you aren’t and government or the state isn’t actually its own entity that cares or tries to do anything good, but accidentally screws up. The state is only made of other people. The state is an apparatus of force that is used by people who know how to use it for their benefit.
To me the first step to improving things is admit that it’s not “your” government. It is not owned or controlled by you or your neighbors. It is controlled by a small percentage of people that have learned how to use it against others, to prevent competition, to increase profits for certain companies, to exempt lawmakers from morality, really whatever aims suit their fancy. And in any case government is force, coercion and violence institutionalized. I wouldn’t give it my blessing by claiming it as my own. I think there was plenty of thought and good intention put into its creation, but remember what that road to hell is paved with.
Thank for the absolute honesty Jack!
You are a good man Jack – a real man.