Thursday, June 06, 2013
If some snooping is good, then...
The White House response to the revelation that the NSA is collecting massive amounts of phone "metadata" from Verizon is that this is a vital "anti-terrorism" tool. But if collecting data from Verizon is a key anti-terrorism tool, then surely collecting it from AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and everyone else would be an even better anti-terrorism tool. And if collecting metadata is providing essential anti-terrorism information, think how much more anti-terrorism information could be gleaned by recording the actual "data" (that is, the conversations that are taking place)? Not to mention all the anti-terrorism information that could be found by intercepting, recording, and analyzing every single email message, every single Skype conversation, and every single text message being transmitted.
And, without getting too paranoid, there's little reason to believe this isn't already happening, despite the revelation of what appears to be an outrageous (quoting Al Gore) but still much smaller invasion of privacy.
