NSA Spies on You
I’m all for the government tracking down terrorists and keeping them from ruining my day. Hey, if they can figure out who they are just gather them all up and stick them in a dungeion somewhere. But I am not a terrorist, and you are not a terrorist, so they should leave us alone, right?
A guy named Russell Tice who is a former analyst at the National Security Agency (NSA) recently blew the whistel on exactly what has been going the last few years. The NSA has been building an enormous database that cross-references credit card transactions with wiretap data. Warrantless wiretapping has been a big debate. So how did/does the NSA get all this data.
It seems clear that credit card companies and banks handed data over to the government just as telecommunication companies did. Let me rephrase that – they handed your data over to the government. After all, the data is about you right?
Remember the secret room in the AT&T building in Missouri where we think the NSA set up a data mining operation? There was one in San Francisco too. There are probably rooms like that all over North America, not to mention data feeds that are being taken off of satellites. It is sort of chuckled about these days, but apparently when Kerry almost won the election in 2004, the guys at NSA who knew they were breaking the law, were extremely nervous that they would be tossed in jail if Bush were to leave the White House.