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Oh, good gosh, PIF. Of COURSE I am complaining!

I explain why it is not the same situation (surveillance-wise) below, but do we agree that FISA is NOT supposed to be used to specifically target US Citizens (only foreigners) but that it foreigners were TARGETED in order to surveil the REAL targets, who are US Citizens? That FISA forbids targeting Americans as the primary target, but it is worth not the paper it is printed on, because they deliberately use a cut-out targeted foreigner’s connection to the real targeted US Citizen Can we agree on that before you read below where I explain why surveillance today is not the same thing it was in 1950 or even 1970?

I expect you would have to agree that the collection, storage, archival, and retrieval of electronic communications in 1970 was quite a different endeavor even as late as 1970, than it is today.

Back then, human. resources would have been dedicated to ANY surveillance of communications because they didn’t have the luxury of databases and unlimited storage of collected material.

Everything collected would have to be manually catalogued, transcribed, and physically archived.

All that required humans to collect, humans to listen, humans to archive, physical facilities to store, tapes, transcribed communications, an agreed on logical storage scheme, and records kept on access to records of those collected data.

It isn’t even the same universe of an issue in 1970 as it is today. And it is because of all those things mentioned above that the access to communications is very easy due to the digital nature of it, storage is cheap, can be done for a whole country in just a few buildings. Most importantly, talent to harness technology, capture communications, write databases, and analyze data is readily available for little money. If you don’t live in India, Russia, or China, you can buy their knowhow, hardware, and human knowledge from them from hard cash to implement surveillance.

If you live in an ostensibly free country like the United States, there are always ideological fellow travelers who will give access to information for little or no money, and if that doesn’t get what you need, you pay people who are competent in a field who will sell themselves.

The equipment to use can be purchased anywhere.

Every country with any degree of access to technology today is surveilling its citizens in every way possible from video to snail mail, using software to transcribe video and voice into electronic text based data, perfectly catalogued with metadata for retrieval.

Now, in almost every state in the Union, traffic video cameras exist, tied in giant networks, and every car that passes through has its license plate examined by video, converted to text, which is instantly sent to a database with at least three data points: the plate number, data/time, and geolocation.

And they have been doing this for decades.

That is why the point of “Two-Hops” and five years of ready data is so important in this context. Sure, we have electronic surveillance data going back some years, but in the 21st century, we entered the age of ubiquitous, constant, and organized surveillance. So, for at least the last quarter century or so, they switched on the vacuum cleaner for electronic communication and have been gathering it on us and storing it without our consent, but...we have their word. It is all anonymous. Masked. Can’t be accessed, unmasked, or used without a “valid” reason.

And that is the rub.

If someone, somewhere, has any reason they want data, they can find a “valid” reason to access it. And the FISA process is a way they can do it that is private, closed to the public or even the person being surveilled.

So.

If I spoke to the head of my company about getting his computer in his office repaired, and my CEO spoke to some White House staffer about the technical capabilities of an enemy overseas (as someone like Carter Page may have done, to solidify his knowledge on something as he angled for a job in the Trump Administration) I could easily end up having my communications and movements unmasked and analyzed. All of them. For the last year and a half, and forever into the future, and it is all there.

Do they want to monitor my movements minutely? With a FISA warrant, they can obtain the traffic camera data from EVERYWHERE for the last year and a half to look for “patterns” in my movements. They can likely see every single drive I have taken, anywhere. So, if I am a married man, and in their referencing of cell phone GPS data, cross-indexed with names and addresses of people, find a repeatable pattern that ends up at some young woman’s house, they can make a note of that. Then, in the future if they interview me for ANY reason, and they ask me what I was doing on a given date a year and a half ago, I might well say, not knowing the FBI was not my friend, that I think I was camping with buddies. In reality, I might have been having an affair with a woman. Doesn’t make a difference. If I said I was camping when I wasn’t, they record that in their 302 form, and I can be arrested at any time for lying to the FBI. (just a fictitious example, of course). Look at what they did with General Flynn. Not that far off.

Surely you would concede that 2024 is not even in the same ballpark as even 1974?

We are on the verge of becoming 1970 East Germany with all that hardware, software, technology knowledge, video, but the same ideological malice and lust for control permeates everything they do. The FBI would be The Stasi on hyper steroids, and the US government will have their thumb on every single citizen.