Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and with the NSA it’s hard to think of anything that hasn’t. Now England’s Daily Telegraph is reporting that some of the NSA’s army of four million staffers and contractors use the agency’s PRISM and other high-tech spy programs to gather intelligence on their husbands, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends.
Check out my column on this topic, exclusive to ANewDomain.net, which yes, pays me for them so you should support them:
I probably wouldn’t do it now; I turn 50 today. But back in my 20s, I was wilder. I loved pranks, I was curious, I was testing limits. And I was a computer programmer. And a hacker. I can’t imagine 29-year-old me not using the limitless access to Americans’ private communications and personal information that NSA analysts have — these guys even tapped Obama — to check out my girlfriend’s bank balance and text messages and phone records.
1 Comment.
Just a hypothetical to consider.
At this point, the political apparatus has lost all believability. Every statement turns out to be either an obvious lie or a painfully crafted exact truth completely isolated from context. (e.g., “we only ‘touch’ 1.6% of Internet traffic” rather than “we copy every single e-mail”)
What happens when the next Edward Snowden releases his (or her) trove of data, which has several carefully counterfeited, but completely believable, stunners mixed in to it? What are they gonna do? “Oh, no. That’s a lie. We can’t show you the information, but, trust it, it’s a lie. Seriou… hey, where did all these pitchforks come from?”