They Know Much More Than You Think

[ashling]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/nsa-they-know-much-more-you-think/

One man who was prescient enough to see what was coming was Senator Frank Church, the first outsider to peer into the dark recesses of the NSA. In 1975, when the NSA posed merely a fraction of the threat to privacy it poses today with UPSTREAM, PRISM, and thousands of other collection and data-mining programs, Church issued a stark warning:

That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

[1-Old-Man]

1. Why isn't this the most recommended post of the day? K&R

Or do sage words bounce off the ears of sheep?

[PowerToThePeople]

3. I think there is another post floating around

with the same story. I am darn sure I replied in that thread.

[westerebus]

2. DU rec.

[LadyHawkAZ]

4. I frankly think we crossed that abyss in 2000,

or possibly even earlier with the Reagan/Bush1 era. That was the time when we needed to fix the problem. Good luck getting rid of it now.

[Waiting For Everyman]

5. Sen. Wyden gave us a similar warning just this week.

If we do not seize this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we will all live to regret it... The combination of increasingly advanced technology with a breakdown in the checks and balances that limit government action could lead us to a surveillance state that cannot be reversed.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/sen-ron-wyden-nsa-spying-its-bad-snowden-says

[WillyT]

6. K & R !!!

[Quantess]

7. Food for thought.

K & R