August 12, 2013

The NSA is turning the internet into a total surveillance system

Last week's revelations are a disturbing harbinger of future surveillance. Two months ago, this newspaper reported that the US government has been forcing American telecommunications companies to turn over the call records of every one of their customers "on an ongoing daily basis", to allow the NSA to later search those records when it has a reason to do so. The government has since defended the program, in part on the theory that Americans' right to privacy is not implicated by the initial acquisition of their phone records, only by their later searching.
That legal theory is extraordinarily dangerous because it would allow the NSA to acquire virtually all digital information today simply because it might possibly become relevant tomorrow. The surveillance program revealed by the New York Times report goes one step further still. No longer is the government simply collecting information now so that the data is available to search, should a reasonable suspicion arise at some point in the future; the NSA is searching everything now – in real time and without suspicion – merely on the chance that it finds something of interest.
          ***Read article at The Guardian***

2 comments:

Marc B said...

The internet was designed to be a surveillance system for citizens. Lots of evidence points to companies like Google and Facebook being NSA fronts.

Anonymous said...

I think alternative media is not doing enough to use the internet for all it is worth. They more often need to name names and give contact information, phone numbers, emails, approcimate home addresses of public elected and nonelected "officials" who are lying, cheating and stealing from the people everyday.

We need to get real info and USE IT but every legal means possible to totally expose and undermine in every way the life and activities of these filthy entities.

So far, the alternative media has just been "educating us" and "waking us up" but they never name names and get real actions going.

I think a funny example is how good privacy expert Katherine Albrecht on her radio show has been promoting everybody test and sign up for new very private StartMail email program. The problem is the only thing that will be private are emails you send out to other StartMail recipients/accounts and even those emails can be subverted and made available to the NSA. That makes the paid StartMail service a NONSTARTER Email service before it even launches.