Snowden Stuck It to the Overclass - For All of Us

[JDPriestly]

81. Several whistleblowers have testified that they could pull information on anyone's phone numbers.

One reported that he had the orders in his hand to pull the phone records on Alito and on numbers associated with our president (before he became president).

Obama has admitted that the NSA gets all our metadata. Once you could see the FISA order requiring Verizon to save all records of communications, it is very simple to go from there to realizing that the government can tap right into the system either through satellites or electronically with a "wire" or other electronic connection into the phone or internet provider's system and obtain all the records on any individual.

Snowden was in the top echelons of the system management. He was a star computer expert. He could easily have done this.

My great-aunt was "central" in a small town when I was a child. I remember very clearly how she plugged calls on party lines into the system and how she could listen to any call she wanted (and often did).

Later, I worked for a couple of years for the phone company. That was way back when. I remember how the huge rooms where the phone wires connected into the system worked and how they looked.

Everything is done electronically now, but the basic principal is the same. It is a system of connections and circuitry. The wires carry the electronic signals that are translated into sound or visual communications by your computers.

If you have ever been on a conference call, you know how easily you can talk to more than one person at a time. That's what this system can do. In addition, it collects all of our metadata -- the most valuable part of the system. That metadata is important because it gives the government the ability to reconstruct our social networks, to know our needs, our convictions, our political affiliations, our obsessions, our interests, our weaknesses and our strengths. They know what games you play or don't play. In many cases, they can know what you read. They have all the records.

Obviously, they don't use all this information or even bring it up on everyone every day. But because they collect the metadata and because the FISA court is secret and readily hands out its orders and because the communications industry is under a FISA court order to save all our actual data and not just the metadata, the government has a tight grip on every person in the country and many overseas.

Any politician from any country that makes a phone call that could be embarrassing is at the mercy of the American NSA.

And so are we all. Because some very innocent event can be twisted and used to seriously jeopardize a career or a marriage or someone's health. It is a very dangerous thing to have that much information available to the NSA, a political organization.

A person has to have a little intelligence and a bit of experience with life to figure it out, but Snowden gave us all the evidence we need if we just use a little reason and logic.

Does this help?