Sen. Paul To Snowden: Don’t ‘Cozy Up’ To Russian Government

[ljm2002]

27. You made a claim about the threats we face now...

...that supposedly make it necessary to do all this surveillance.

I pointed out that all this surveillance did not stop a rather awful terrorist attack, even with specific warnings about one of the individuals involved, long before the attack took place..

My remarks are not an attempt to blame this administration. I blame the security state, the apparatus as a whole: it has its own inertia, its own internal logic, its own self preservation. It spans administrations, and it continues to grow.

These people love their technology. They love the fact that they can do data analysis, etc. They love the fact that they can have well paid careers, and can be the high priests of complex systems and in charge of super-duper-secret information. And while they are busy pursuing this technological solution, they try to make the information conform to the systems they have created -- and they often overlook real information that comes to them but is not part of a digitized data stream.