It has become common knowledge to anyone residing in Europe, UK or US that theirprivate communications, whether internet or cellular are being stored and most likely read through by a ginormous conglomerate of surveillance agencies. Most likely as meta-data: snippets of useful information organized by date, time and location. For example, on such a list, your phone call to your husband or wife would be registered as:
11.04.2013 3:14 PM – 006 88356453 90 to 006 8867772 90 — 97 seconds — San Diego, CA
No nude pictures or family history of heart disease as you can see? So how dangerous or threatening to you or your privacy can these list be? You won’t believe.
If someone has a “binder” or a folder of months worth of these communications, they can easily follow and create a very accurate picture of your intentions and movements. If they are interested in you beyond looking at tables of data, they can request all audio recordings of these phone calls from your provider. Then, afterlistening to your conversations, they can request to read all of your emails fromGoogle or Yahoo, then search your Facebook for photos, your house bills, your bank account etc.
But you’d have to be a terrorist for NSA to put its hands on you, don’t you? No. There needs to be a suspicion, a tiny little suspicion for someone up there to have access to all that information. It could be the wrong Google search, could be a wrong Facebook share, you could be the wrong guy at the wrong place for them to mark you as a person of interest.
So what? I’ve got nothing to hide! They shuffle through my boring data for a few hours and forget I ever existed. Hold your horses, pal. Have you forgotten how you were look at those antique guns on the internet? Or that midget porn you download ever once in a while? Or that one of your Facebook friends is in an anarchist reading club? Or that JFK conspiracy book you’ve purchased on Amazon? It all matters, it all puts you on a list you see. Just look at this through the eyes of some office working, life hating NSA clerk that goes through all of your shit. If he has all these awesome tools at his hands to sort and make sense of big data, why won’t he use it to his convenience?
Convenience. The word that has made surveillance all that bigger, all the more dangerous. The data they have, the power to store and analyze, is not going to just disappear, they don’t throw it out. Why would they? They certainly have all the resources they need to do so. So they they keep it, they organize it, and use it as soon as someone goes out of line. You keep purchasing conspiracy books and looking at Communist message boards, three strikes and all your personal information and every conceivable digital footprint you’ve left are going to be scrutinized.
Under these extraordinary, unconstitutional conditions, every one is a criminal, every one jaywalks, everyone downloads a song every once in a while. No on is innocent, everyone is guilty until proven otherwise. It’s not even the fact that the ones in power, the ones who are beyond their own surveillance know, manipulate and hold this data over your head every breathing second of their lives, because of their ingrained need to control. Its a system that this technology and a frame of mind creates that is absolutely horrifying. A great example would be the Stasi in Eastern Germany and the way this massive spy network affected the lives of ordinary people.
As CNN writes in its recent juxtaposition of NSA and Stasi:
In the fall of 1989, shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi had 91,000 staffers and some 173,000 unofficial collaborators, according to their own files. Many more contributed through official functions to the information gathering of the secret police on co-workers, fellow students, neighbors, visitors, even friends and sometimes family.Any and all technical means, including phone tapping, were used by the Stasi to gather information. Many thousands of people landed in jail for their desire to travel freely, to express their opinions openly and to vote for candidates they wanted — to exercise their human rights, in essence.
This is what state surveillance, in the name of “security and peace” leads to. There is no other way around it, power gets abused, always.
via:http://www.penurystreet.com/rise-nsa-surveillance-guilty-proven-innocent/
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