Sorry about chopping this up so much. I just wanted to share what went through my head as I read it.

The problem isn't in that.  The problem is in the policing, i.e. who watches the watchers?  How can we know that they can't get access without a court order.  The court order isn't an encryption key- it's a standard court order.  So they *always* have access... we just have to trust them not to use it unless due process has been followed.

...

I got nothing.  I don't trust human nature that much.  And once you do have oversight to that extent, more people have access. I just don't trust the checks and balances.

Now all of a sudden this (allegedly) non-existent content just magically appears out of thin air.

“If we didn’t collect that ahead of time, we couldn’t make these connections, so what we create is a set of data and we put it out here and then only under specific times can we query that data.”
That was National Security Agency (NSA) head Gen. Keith Alexander in testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee on June 12 admitting that phone metadata on everybody is in fact being collected in real-time.

Quote from: Stoic Joker on June 13, 2013, 11:27 PM

Sorry about chopping this up so much. I just wanted to share what went through my head as I read it.

You cut out the most telling line, however...

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I think it is only a truism, i.e. if you get absolute power, you will eventually be absolutely corrupt.  Not that you can't become absolutely corrupt without absolute power.  See: politician.

I can't help but think that this is a test bed for something much larger and more insidious.

“What I would like to see right now is for people at these internet companies to stand up and say the truth, all of it, about their dealings with the NSA.” – Michael Arrington

Arrington, along with the rest of Libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley, is right to be wary of the way the government is able to use technology to track our every move. He’s also right to criticize the double-speak of any Valley company that prevaricates on its true level of involvement in programs like PRISM.

The only odd thing is why Arrington doesn’t go even further in connecting the dots fully between Silicon Valley and government snooping.

As the Financial Times’ April Dembosky reminds us, the relationship between the Valley and Homeland Security is nothing new. The Internet started out as a government project, designed to keep communication lines open in the event of a nuclear attack. In 1999 the CIA established In-Q-Tel, a venture capital fund to invest in technology companies that might be useful to the folks in Langley or Fort Meade.

According to CrunchBase – the technology investor database founded by Arrington himself – Cloudera, iMove, 3vr, and Mocana – all share one additional investor in common: SV Angel, one of the Valley’s most prolific “micro VC” firms. And whose name do we find on the firm’s list of limited partners? One Michael Arrington. (In a neat piece of symmetry, SV Angel’s co-founder, Ron Conway, is an investor in Arrington’s CrunchFund.)

Once you start digging into the data, the connections get really entertaining: Arrington is also an LP in Benchmark, which invested alongside In-Q-Tel in data-storage company Decru. And in Andreessen Horowitz, which co-invested with In-Q-Tel in Silver Tail Systems and Platfora. CrunchFund also invested in Facebook, which boasts Palantir’s Peter Thiel as a board member, and from where former data team leader Jeff Hammerbacher left to head up technology at Cloudera.

Data mining is fun!

The only people who love big data more, and who care about our privacy less, than the NSA are the outraged Libertarians of Silicon Valley.

if you talk about the data collection of the private sector, you're not in immediate danger of becoming a non-person

Does your definition of "private sector" also include those companies that are contracted by

Accused bank robber wants NSA phone records for his defense

And so it begins...

Uncle Sam can't demand to know where you're spending your cash. And if he does you can always refuse to answer. But your credit card company and bank are very accommodating when Uncle comes calling and asking for information.

Nacchio alleged that the government stopped offering the company lucrative contracts after Qwest refused to cooperate with a National Security Agency surveillance program in February 2001.

That claim gains new relevance these days, amid leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden that allege widespread domestic surveillance by the NSA.

Back in 2006 Leslie Cauley of USA Today, citing multiple people with direct knowledge of the arrangement, reported that shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks America's three largest telecoms signed contracts to provide the NSA with detailed call records from hundreds of millions of people across the country.

Cauley noted that Qwest's refusal to participate "left the NSA with a hole in its database" since the company served local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states.

From USA Today (emphasis ours):

Quote

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard. ...

... the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government.

Nacchio's legal concerns about the NSA program at the time mirror those of civil liberty groups today.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-joseph-nacchio-and-the-nsa-2013-6

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