Control!

Of interest on this subject.

Edward Snowden interview in Germany. Watch it before its removed.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f93_13908...

yes, or apply what you see to steer the population toward where you want them to go. Nudging social behavior by creating landmines of conduct people would shy away from. There are so many implications in this type of unrestricted data storage its frightening.

The gather and store every move everyone makes because you can and keep it until you find a reason to use it?

Frighteningly what he says is the foundation of society I envisioned in Shadows Live Under Seashells.

Excellent. Thanks AJ. I'm stealin' it!

This article makes me dream of the MSM covering this, talking about it, and asking experts. I don't care if many of the experts say the US gov't needs more money b/c we have our finger in the dike against drugs, poverty, and evil-doers around the world. Let's at least have that debate.

I agree the information just sitting there is absolutely wrong.

I understand your point and thank you for replying. You bring up an important point which is the definition of the enemy. If you declare war on a particular terrorist organization, then I get that this is the 21st century and warfare is not quite as straightforward as it used to be. The system you speak of seems to be a much more directed attack from an outside threat. Filtering through data is one thing, but collecting and then storing data that did not meet the filter requirements seems dangerous to me. I was listening to an argument the other day where the government was having a hard time finding a vendor to store the massive amounts of data the NSA has collected on Americans and foreigners. That means that all the information is just sitting there and can be mined at any point in time for any purpose.

First, I am not validating or condoning what the NSA has done. Second, I have no problem whatsoever with the NSA spying on those outside our country and those in communication with those "parties" within our borders.

A while back, maybe a decade or so, I read of the program called Carnivore which was designed to syphon all manner of web traffic, automatically evaluate it by assign points to every word, and then flag anything that met a certain threshold based on those number values (I called it Omnivore in my book). The entire process, which has probably been in place for quite some time, is entirely automated and humans are not looking at the massive amount of data unless it meets that high threshold of probability.

Should this type of information and be gathered by the NSA? I think yes, but only if their "machine" is looking beyond our borders for the wellspring of their data to evaluate. I swore to protect this country against all enemies foreign and domestic. I would think, outside the US government itself, the large majority of the threat to American comes from outside our borders.