Well Lizard, maybe you are and maybe you're not...but if you're not, you'd be incredibly naive to believe the NSA is no big deal. But this topic certainly gets my goat. The Federal Government is literally transforming into the all-seeing, all-knowing "eye of Sauron" and they are watching and recording everyone and everything in this country.
You wanna know where I'm coming from? Read this: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03...datacenter
1984 wasn't fiction...it's our current reality.
You wanna know where I'm coming from? Read this: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03...datacenter
Quote:Quote:
The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
1984 wasn't fiction...it's our current reality.