NSA Operating Enemy Of the State-Style Social Media Surveillance

Published October 3, 2013 | By skrufff

Edward Snowden- click for more

US secret police force the NSA are combining GPS tracking data with Facebook profiles, phone records and ‘contact chains’ of emails to build detailed profiles of vast numbers of people, the New York Times reported this week.

The Times said the NSA are using such data to identify individuals’ ‘associates, locations at certain times, traveling companions and other personal information (such as) sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter’.

“Metadata can be very revealing,” Law professor Orin S. Kerr told the Times, “Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the person’s cellphone is going to allow them to assemble a picture of what someone is up to. It’s the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.” (New York Times: http://nyti.ms/17iamPZ )

The latest details of the extent of the NSA’s worldwide spying operations emerged just as exiled and on-the-run NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden delivered a speech to the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs in which he attacked the NSA’s ‘culture of secrecy’.

“The surveillance of whole populations, rather than individuals, threatens to be the greatest human rights challenge of our time,” he said (in a statement delivered to the European Parliament by Jesselyn Radack, National Security & Human Rights Director of the Government Accountability Project.

“The success of economies in developed nations relies increasingly on their creative output, and if that success is to continue, we must remember that creativity is the product of curiosity, which in turn is the product of privacy,” he noted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film) (Plot: “As the U.S. Congress moves to pass new legislation that dramatically expands the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies, Congressman Phil Hammersley remains firmly opposed to its passage. To ensure the bill’s passage, National Security Agency official Thomas Reynolds kills Hammersley . . .”)