Congratulate them and lock them up
Joe got around to watching a video I linked a bit back. He’s right. As a non technical person, I didn’t understand a lot of the technical stuff but I got the main point. Joe concludes with: The NSA people should congratulated (sic) on the awesome technology they have developed and deployed and then they should be sent to the gulags.
January 27th, 2014 at 11:38 pm
I watched it too. It’s amazing, and frightening. This stuff is WAY sophisticated. It’s also WAY dangerous.
January 27th, 2014 at 11:38 pm
When I say way dangerous, I mean I wouldn’t trust Mother Theresa with the kind of power the NSA has.
January 28th, 2014 at 4:22 am
I wonder if some folks at NSA have had the thought of NSA becoming a “shadow government.” There’s a chance Obama & Co. may be using NSA data now (see: SCOTUS, Roberts, ACA) but what happens when the brain trust at NSA figures out they don’t need the politicians except as a false front. I think Sebastian (above) substantially understates the threat.
Side thought – it’s well known in data maven circles that Obama’s 2012 campaign was extremely data-savvy, using some bleeding edge stuff; I wonder if there’s a campaign-NSA link in there somewhere. By that I mean not that the campaign used NSA data but that data mining/management techniques may have been enhanced with knowledge from outside the campaign.
January 28th, 2014 at 1:39 pm
When J. Edgar Hoover was well-established, it’s questionable whether he or the President had more power in some areas.
January 29th, 2014 at 1:31 pm
That’s a frightening thought. With everything they must have collected about key political figures, the NSA is just a small group of blackmailers away from controlling the entire .gov from behind the scenes.
Even more frightening is the possibility that it might have already happened.
January 30th, 2014 at 11:50 am
The NSA’s power is mostly in blackmail, same as the FBI under Hoover. This is dangerous, to be sure, but for it to work, they need to maintain the false front. If the false front comes down, they no longer can exercise power, because then they’d have to rule directly, which they can’t. Without the backing of the military, the NSA government would likely be easily deposed.