Snowden - 14 Hours of Interviews

[WhiskeyGirl]

During more than 14 hours of interviews fueled by burgers and ice cream, he reflects on the roots and repercussions of his choice to spill the NSA’s secrets.

 

Internal briefing documents reveled in the “Golden Age of Electronic Surveillance.” Brawny cover names such as MUSCULAR, TUMULT and TURMOIL boasted of the agency’s prowess.

With assistance from private communications firms, the NSA had learned to capture enormous flows of data at the speed of light from fiber-optic cables that carried Internet and telephone traffic over continents and under seas. According to one document in Snowden’s cache, the agency’s Special Source Operations group, which as early as 2006 was said to be ingesting “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds,” had an official seal that might have been parody: an eagle with all the world’s cables in its grasp.

Each year, NSA systems collected hundreds of millions of email address books, hundreds of billions of cellphone location records and trillions of domestic call logs.

Most of that data, by definition and intent, belonged to ordinary people suspected of nothing. But vast new storage capacity and processing tools enabled the NSA to use the information to map human relationships on a planetary scale. Only this way, its leadership believed, could the NSA reach beyond its universe of known intelligence targets.

In the view of the NSA, signals intelligence, or electronic eavesdropping, was a matter of life and death, “without which America would cease to exist as we know it,” according to an internal presentation in the first week of October 2001 as the agency ramped up its response to the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington.

With stakes such as those, there was no capability the NSA believed it should leave on the table. The agency followed orders from President George W. Bush to begin domestic collection without authority from Congress and the courts. When the NSA won those authorities later, some of them under secret interpretations of laws passed by Congress between 2007 and 2012, the Obama administration went further still.

read much more here - http://www.pressherald.com/news/NSA_leaker_Snowden___Mission_s_already_accomplished__I_already_won_.html?pagenum=4

I wonder how much money was spent on all these fiber optic cables.  I believe rural America still has lousy internet, how many billions did Obama spend?  Where did the money really go?  Same with the Obamacare website...where did the hundreds of millions really go?  I recall hearing private sector say it should have costed just 5 million.    Geeks create one over a weekend in their basement.  Millions on firewood in Iraq or Afghanistan?  Millions for cookstoves for refugees?  Really?

How many are being blackmailed by the ruling class with information from this data?