To the people in control of the executive branch, violating our civil liberties is an essential government service. So -- to ensure total fulfillment of Big Brother's vast responsibilities -- the National Security Agency is insulated from any fiscal disruption.
The NSA's surveillance programs are exempt from a government shutdown. With typical understatement, an unnamed official told The Hill that "a shutdown would be unlikely to affect core NSA operations."
At the top of the federal government, even a brief shutdown of "core NSA operations" is unthinkable. But at the grassroots, a permanent shutdown of the NSA should be more than thinkable; we should strive to make it achievable.
The NSA's vacuum-cleaner collection of metadata is highly intrusive, providing government snoops with vast information about people's lives. That's bad enough. But the NSA, using the latest digital technology, is able to squirrel away the content of telephone, e-mail and text communications -- in effect, "TiVo-ing" it all, available for later retrieval.
"Metadata, if you were doing it and putting it into the systems we built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world," Binney explained. "That's all the space you need. You don't need 100,000 square feet of space that they have in Bluffdale to do that. You need that kind of storage for content."
Posted by: Ed | Monday, September 30, 2013 at 02:44 PM