Has the NSA really stopped part of it's PRISM mass phone surveillance program? Not bloody likely it seems, given their past history of lying about it.
Last week I posted about the "Mass Phone Surveillance Program Exposed by Snowden Allegedly Shutdown by NSA". The New York Times reported that the NSA program for spying on American phone calls hasn't been active for 6 months.
House minority leader national security adviser Luke Murry, speaking on The Lawfare Podcast, said the NSA "hasn't actually been using it for the past six months," adding "“I’m actually not certain that the administration will want to start that back up."
Snowden seemed to buy it though, agreeing with Glen Greenwald on Twitter:
I used to take a victory lap every time one of these stories came out. It felt good to see history vindicate my decision to expose the government's wrongdoing. Nowadays I just wish it hadn't taken me so long to speak up. If only I hadn't been so afraid.
Subsequently, NSA chief General Paul Nakasone was asked about this NYT report, but refused to confirm or deny the story.
This all appears to be a ruse, a smokescreen, to give false hope and set up a fake version of reality that is an unreality from how things actually are. Former NSA official turned whistleblower Russ Tice has rejected the claims of a drop in mass surveillance of Americans. If the program has stopped being used, the says it's because it's been superseded by superior technology.
If you want to understand a bit of how that works, watch the fictional Borne trilogy to see an example of how the bait and switch game of killing an older project and replacing it with a new one works, while nothing changes despite claims to the contrary.
Rice told INSURGE:
"Why would anyone believe a bloody word of what NSA says about their mass domestic surveillance programs? They have lied repeatedly in the past and they are likely lying now. They have been collecting metadata and content, word-for-word, both voice and text, for some time now."
"Of course NSA is still conducting phone and computer comms surveillance and yes, ‘wider programs’ go on and a new massive program that is more efficient is likely to have already been implemented."
"If anything, they no longer need this particular program to parse the card catalog — meta data — and can mine the content data directly with enhanced algorithms and processing and strapping. And when there is no pushback capability, congress is at the mercy of NSA to inform them on NSA’s abuses."
The effectiveness of such spying programs touted as necessary by the security paranoid or the controller-dominator, is not very effective. After it's inception by President Bush, defending by Obama, and alleged but false termination by Trump, there was one case of terrorism uncovered. Susan Landau, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, explains:
"While initial statements by the intelligence community brought up 54 incidents in which the bulk collection played a role in thwarting terrorist attacks, a careful examination by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) in 2014 concluded that only a single case was uncovered by the bulk metadata program: that of Basaaly Moalin, who, with three others, arranged support of al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization in Somalia."
The mass surveillance programs don't make anything safer, since the potential for threats are blown out of proportion to the reality out there. What they do though, is allow the government to have greater control over the populace through totalitarian technology, as I wrote about yesterday.
This is the future that has been created for us, as we welcome it through our fear. The new generations prefer the image (illusion) of security, rather than the burden of autonomy and privacy which is a risk to their perception of security.
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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