In the ballyhooed lead up to dear leader’s Friday speech in which he will outline NSA “reforms” in an effort to begin to put a coat of fresh whitewash on the rampant unconstitutionality of surveillance programs run amok the latest revelation of snooping broke today. Not that anyone should be the least bit surprised given what has already been exposed in terms of the American Stasi’s frenzied spree of collecting the metadata, emails, browsing habits, purchasing histories, political views and everything outside of what Orwell referred to as those “few cubic centimetres inside your skull" it has come out that millions of text messages are also being swept up.
In a Guardian story (the state-corporate media here is too busy spinning the abuse of power by Krispy Kreme Christie) the program which is touted in presentation slides as “A Goldmine to Exploit” the capture of the texts of otherwise law abiding Americans are being harvested. According to the story, by James Ball the following are scooped up by the out of control NSA and their Norsefire buddies running GCHQ across the pond are grabbing on average:
-More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)
-Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts
More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.
-Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users
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The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”. Other travel information was obtained from itinerary texts sent by travel companies, even including cancellations and delays to travel plans.
Not that this will mean anything to Obama. The man is a narcissist, a veteran liar only concerned with playing Chicago style politics (not that New Jersey style politics are much different), selling out to big banking and corporate interests and of course his legacy. Barry will trot out there tomorrow in front of the easily duped schmucks and Kool Aid drinking apologists who once demanded Bush’s head on a pike for lesser intrusions and deliver his teleprompter boilerplate bullshit. Then according to reports he will just punt the ball to Congress which mind you is in it’s current incarnation the greatest enemy to American liberty and the Constitution that have ever existed. They are doing their damned level best to ensure that a war with Iran will be started in the coming months, one that could lead to WW III and an extinction level event if itchy trigger fingers prevail. They of course can’t be bothered, there are politics to be played and elections forthcoming, screw the American people and let them eat dirt while every aspect of their increasingly desperate lives is collected and stored by a money gobbling cancer on the Constitution that is the NSA.
In a normal country Obama’s big speech would be looked upon with the same type of skeptical eye as a former United States President from Illinois once had when he famously said: "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time".
Like I have said before, Orwell was an optimist.
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