I am sick and tired of seeing posts defending Snowden..so here is my side

[paland99]

81. why the [feigned?] surprise?

I have worked with computers since around 1980. At that time, the Apple 2 came out and many people learned to program in BASIC. But if you were going to work in the field, you had to move beyond desktop computers. Soon after that, I started working with mainframes. Client/Servers weren't very common, maybe some Universities or such, so many connected to mainframes (And they charged a LOT for the time you were on.) Mainframes meant COBOL (JCL). FORTRAN, and if you worked in some classy game making company, C language. C++ came a few years later.

Through all of this, I always knew that data was kept. Not just by the NSA, but in obscured databases from other businesses as well, such as medical history from doctors offices, or some county gov health info on employees, or purchases made on some stores cards.

IT shops tend to keep backups often and sometimes long term data gets stored somewhere. Sometimes it is lost forever, sometimes it is found again. Sometimes the media gets so old that it cant be read, 5¼ floppies, or even punch-card ticker-tapes from way back when. Sometimes media gets too old to be recovered. But sometimes you find very old files that can be converted, and you would be surprised what you find sometimes. Careers can change sometimes with what you find.

But I have always assumed that everything I ever type online will be saved forever. I knew the CIA was farming MySpace and facebook. They don't have anything to do with either, they could just see the info everyone was spilling out online for free. People do that. They spill their guts online, then scream when they find some gov agency was saving their posts.. Really?

I do believe that he who holds the data, holds the power. IT shops now tell Human Resource what to do. It wasn't that way before 1995 or so. Data gets saved by EVERYONE! Your Safeway card is telling your habits to marketing folks. Cops are online all the time trying to trap frauds and child molesters and have been for a long time now.

So I wonder why everyone was surprised by this info?