The NSA is in the process of profiling every one of us

as horrifying as this sounds, it's no surprise... since the government is collecting information on not only every electronic transaction - from phone calls to atm withdrawals to airline tickets to supermarket affinity card swipes - as well as assembling facial recognition information and feeds from the millions of surveillance cameras located virtually everywhere, the next reasonable step is to do something with it... kevin at cryptogon has been all over this for years (here and here, among others) and i've been posting on it since at least 2006 (here)... the objective clearly is to build not only profiles of individuals but also of their communities, their networks, their behavior patterns, their interests, their allegiances, their movements, their beliefs, and their vulnerabilities... why...? control... the more information the government has about ordinary citizens and their proclivities, the more control can be exercised, and the more control that can be exercised, the greater the opportunity to instill fear which, in turn, increases the control...


from raw story...

NSA whistleblower William Binney was interviewed by internet journalist Geoff Shively at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York on Friday.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its domestic surveillance program, had just delivered a keynote speech in which he revealed what Shively called “evidence which we have not seen until this point.”

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country … and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.” He estimated that something like 1.6 billion logs have been processed since 2001.

a video clip of binney's summary of his talk...


 

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More on the American Surveillance State

in the previous post, i highlighted yesterday's democracy now interview with nsa whistleblower william binney... glenn greenwald, naturally, is all over it...

We love to tell ourselves that there is a robust freedom and a thriving free political press in the U.S. because you’re allowed to have an MSNBC show or blog in order to proclaim every day how awesome and magnanimous the President of the United States is and how terrible his GOP political adversaries are — cutting and edgy! — or to go on Fox News and do the opposite. But people who are engaged in actual dissent, outside the tiny and narrow permissible boundaries of pom-pom waving for one of the two political parties — those who are focused on the truly significant acts which the government and its owners are doing in secret — are subjected to this type of intimidation, threats, surveillance, and climate of fear, all without a whiff of illegal conduct (as even The New York Times‘ most celebrated investigative reporter, James Risen, will tell you).

Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does. The stories of the three Democracy Now guests — and so many others — provide that answer loudly and clearly.

[...]

Two Democratic Senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado — have spent two full years warning that the Obama administration is “interpreting” its spying powers under the Patriot Act in ways so “twisted” and broad that it would shock the American public if it learned of what was being done, and have even been accusing the DOJ and Attorney General Holder of actively misleading the public in material ways about its spying powers.

chilling, isn't it...?

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"We Do Not Live in a Free Country"

more on our rapidly expanding national security state...

democracy now via information clearing house...

National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance

In his first television interview since he resigned from the National Security Agency over its domestic surveillance program, William Binney discusses the NSA’s massive power to spy on Americans and why the FBI raided his home after he became a whistleblower.

Binney was a key source for investigative journalist James Bamford’s recent exposé in Wired Magazine about how the NSA is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah. The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency, including private emails, cell phone calls, Google searches and other personal data.

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