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NSA: We Mulled Ending Phone Program Before Edward Snowden Leaks
Mark Wilson writes Edward Snowden is heralded as both a hero and villain. A privacy vigilante and a traitor. It just depends who you ask. The revelations he made about the NSA's surveillance programs have completely changed the face of online security, and changed the way everyone looks at the internet and privacy. But just before the whistle was blown, it seems that the NSA was considering bringing its telephone data collection program to an end. Intelligence officials were, behind the scenes, questioning whether the benefits of gathering counter-terrorism information justified the colossal costs involved. Then Snowden went public and essentially forced the agency's hand.
Yes, that's why they built their vast data center in the middle-of-nowhere Utah. Because they were shutting down the program.
Why is Snark Required?
How old are you? Because I learned about ECHELON 15 years ago (in computer magazines at the bookstore), and there were already talks about intercepting and accessing pretty much everything, large data stores, keyword analysis, etc. And I was just a slightly-geeky teen discovering the Internet 'underground' back then. From France. Even the EU was publicly investigating ECHELON around this time.
Wikipedia tells me there has been some amount of public discussion about it for the past 20 years, and the program dates back to 50 years ago, so it's very easy to imagine much progress has been made since then.
Even back then, I wouldn't have called them 'suspicions'... No need to be paranoid to understand how obvious it was, in a large part at least, and not just from the USA of course...
One of the main issues with all our problems, is that people often 'forget' for how long they knew about them (even when nothing was ever really done to try and solve them), media always repaint them as 'news' for business purpose (and, it is easy to think, for more global manipulation), and new generations think they are new problems they just discovered themselves... It's easier to consider accepting to do nothing about recent problems, than understanding how everything and everyone has been so thoroughly covered in shit for so long and try to do anything about it.
Who gives a crap about the phone shit. What it revealed was that US government executives routinely lie to the public and attack members of the public with slander and false arrest when members of the public try to expose the criminal activities of above the law government departments.
The US department of State, the CIA, the NSA, the Secret Service and even the FBI at the highest levels all routinely consider themselves above the law. This horrifically extends to the corporations that controls which politicians get elected and who will be selected to take the highest administrative positions in government not as agents of the public but as agents of the corporations who arranged for their appointment.
The US government has become an empty teleprompter reading mouthpiece for those corporations who pay to get their colluding and conspiring pet politicians elected. The Snowden leaks exposed the underlying reality of how far the Public Relations show of the US government differs from corporate controlled reality of government agencies.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen