NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden's Claims Are Believable Because We've Heard Them Before

SF Gate ^ | 6/9/13 | Paul Szoldra

[mgist]

NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden's Claims Are Believable Because We've Heard Them Before Paul Szoldra, provided by Published 7:25 pm, Sunday, June 9, 2013 With a video interview released Sunday by The Guardian, we now know 29-year-old contractor Edward Snowden as the whistleblower behind leaks of secret NSA spying programs.

There's a big reason why many are quick to believe his claims of vast government surveillance — with the NSA intercepting millions of phone calls and emails, and having supposed access to tech companies — because we've actually heard it all before. Many will debate over the coming days and weeks whether he's a hero or a traitor — or if he's possibly stretching the truth — but it's worth noting another, perhaps even more credible whistleblower that worked for the NSA. His name is William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the secretive agency, and one of the best codebreakers in NSA history — who appeared in an Aug. 2012 video shot by Laura Poitras for The New York Times. Binney detailed a top-secret surveillance program called "Stellar Wind" — the scope of which had never been public — which tracked electronic activities, including phone calls, emails, banking, travel records, and social media, and then mapped them to collect "all the attributes that any individual has" in every type of activity and build a profile based on the data. "So that now I can pull your entire life together from all those ...

[Gene Eric]

>> “all the attributes that any individual has”

That’s why I pay cash for my cigars and IPA.

[Gene Eric]

And I have an unlisted phone number too...

[SubMareener]

Are you a City Planner at Cagayan de Oro City Government?

[flaglady47]

Posted elsewhere on threads; fits here also:

Anyone who doesn’t think that at some point Obama and his regime thugs won’t use the data gathered by the NSA for their own nefarious reasons against individuals or groups of individuals of the opposite political party or religious groups, or pro-Israel groups, has rocks in their heads where a brain should be. The Obama thugs could pluck out info on you or me, on our entire internet lives. They would know everything, our e-mails, our bank accounts and/or credit cards, our health records, everything. Any politically oriented operative within the NSA could do this and bypass any required search warrant needed to do so by simply doing the search on an individual and surreptiously pass it on to whomever wants it, usually a political ideologue of liberal/socialist bent.

The dangers here are tremendous. The government is asking us to trust them on this data mining, that it will not be abused. We already know that the Obama regime is very willing to abuse and use gov’t agencies for their own political purposes. Look to the IRS spying and abuse of citizens of the opposite political party, or wrong religion in their eyes, or those with a pro-Israel bent.

Audits and grant stalling past elections to harm opposition parties from being able to organize and get their word out to educate the public on the constitution, etc., was the norm of this Obama Admin. Look at EPA bullying as a weapon by this Admin, or all the regulations being shoved down our throats, in particular affecting the business community; banks and corporations forced to become crony capitalists used by this crooked regime. Look to Obamacare and its thousands of rules and regulations that were hidden from the public and we are just now finding out what all is entailed in Obamacare.

What in heaven’s name would stop them from having ideologue plants spy on citizens’ e-mails and their backgrounds contained on the internet, basically their whole lives encapsulated therein, to use for their own politically evil intentions? I suspect they have already done this.

SCOTUS John Roberts might have been one of those whose background was looked into by the Obama regime and then used against him to blackmail him into voting for Obamacare. We’ll never know. But I wouldn’t sit here too comfortably and agree that this massive data mining is necessary for our safety rather than using more narrow targeting of data gathering with greater restrictions on its use and how it is mined. I have zero faith in the integrity of the current gov’t and what they would not stoop to in order to further their political cause. We have no true safeguards. Zero.

[tbw2]

It fits in with Raytheon’s RIOT software, for data mining and data correlation across different social networks.