The more we learn about the antics of our national intelligence apparatus the more we are left with the image of a bunch of smart guys operating with no sense of boundaries or propriety. Rather than being servants to and guardians of the the people they have striven to become our masters.
When Edward Snowden alleged that he, as a low level IT technician, could access communications by virtually anyone simply by asking there was a howling from the general direction of Fort Meade, MD that this was not true. Because FISA Courts. Because The Constitution. Subsequent reporting by Glenn Greenwald (or one of his sock puppets. it is really hard to tell… ) indicates that Snowden was more right than wrong.
When the NSA’s deputy director, Chris Inglis, testified on July 17, he revealed that the NSA surveillance program not only extends to potential terrorists but extends to three degrees of separation. This means that as many of 2.5 million persons, Americans and foreign, become subject to surveillance based on any suspect conversation.
For a sense of scale, researchers at the University of Milan found in 2011 that everyone on the Internet was, on average, 4.74 steps away from anyone else. The NSA explores relationships up to three of those steps. (See our conversation with the ACLU’s Alex Abdo on this.)
Now the information develop from this system seems to have bled into regular law enforcement activities.
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