Lawrence O'Donnell: Edward Snowden's Christmas Message Was 'Wildly Overblown,' 'Provably Untrue'

[JDPriestly]

97. Who is NSA? I know that one of them lied to Congress.

Other than that, I don't think I can trust them at all. Why should I? I do not trust anyone who wants to see my phone bills. Normally the only people who want your phone bills are the police or opponents in law suits to which you are a party. I try to avoid attracting the attention of either the police or law suits.

So the NSA needs my phone and e-mail and Google search records for what reason? To find a terrorist? I don't think that I am a candidate for a terrorist search. It's unlikely that NSA thinks I am. So why are they collecting my phone bills, my internet records, etc.?

I do not believe that the metadata collection is really about preventing terrorism. Finding, that is predicting, who is a terrorist and more important stopping a terrorist by reviewing phone bills would be impossible. It would be a matter of luck. You might find who talked to a terrorist before an act of terror, but there is a good possibility that you would not.

Finding who belongs to what organization, who attends what meetings, who believes in what religion, who is friends with whom, which family members get along best, who hangs out at a bar and who hangs out in a church, that information you can glean from the metadata. And why does the NSA want it? No good reason is what I think.

My question to all who think that collecting metadata is OK: Have you ever reviewed, let's say a year's worth of someone else's, some stranger's telephone bills? Think about it. Think about what you might find if you connected the calls on one bill with the calls on other bills that exchanged calls with the first bill you looked at. Think about what that might tell you if the first bill was the bill of a politician, let's say a senator. Just think about it.

You would probably find out the names of the senator's donors, friends, stock broker, pastor, campaign manager, people he was looking to hire, friends who fixed things for him beginning with his hearing to his feet to everything in between. You'd have a real profile of the individual without needing to follow him around or listen to his calls.

And once you had that information, you would have a lot of power. You would know when he lied, to whom he lied, when he missed meetings, why, how often he talked with his wife, his best friend, his mother, everything about him. And that knowledge means political power, political leverage in many cases.

People are crazy if they don't understand why Snowden is upset with what he saw at the NSA.