I Don’t Give a Damn if Jesus, MLK and Gandhi are Cloned and Made President,

[TheMadMonk]

75. We have the admission that encrypted traffic is stored for analysis.

This means every Skype conversation, all VPN traffic, all of your online banking and shopping, and a whole lot more. And as more and more telephony providers switch to voice over IP, those conversations too are recorded. Furthermore, good data compression and encryption are indistinguishable to cursory analysis, both ideally present as a random sequence of bytes. The sole difference lies in the algorithms used expand or decrypt.

Furthermore, because they have made themselves the quintessential "man in the middle" key security is a joke.

Bluntly, unless you are making a direct physical copper connection between the last two decadic exchanges on the planet, the rules of the game "permit" the NSA to record your conversation.

Whether or not, anyone is listening right now, nearly all barriers, but the good will of the listeners are down. The potential for massive abuse is there, and who the hell knows what the future might bring.

Odds are that future is here right now: We know the NSA et al use computers to perform keyword monitoring in order to glean the titbits that might interest them, which means that there is at least a small chance that your viperous criticism of the president of the local football club, will be listened to for at least long enough to determine it's not Obama you're talking about.

No one is reading or listening to every word coming from you and I, but you can lay London to a house brick that every last possible trick of analysis is being applied to your words in order to determine whether or not someone "should" listen in.

And finally, who is to say what constitutes an "ENEMY OF THE STATE" 6 months, a year, or a decade from now.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.