Image: Emory Allen/Flickr
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Regardless, the NSA now has legal permission to track all Verizon subscribers' phone calls for three months, which will give the NSA a comprehensive picture of millions of American's phone activities. That permission was granted in secret by a secret court tasked with foreign intelligence and surveillance law, not surveillance of domestic citizens. Verizon was expressly barred from notifying its customers of the secret ruling. Aside from being unfathomably broad and quite possibly not limited to Verizon, the ruling is strange because it's both unclear why FISC ruled on it and, more importantly, what the NSA argued it needed the data for.The US government has become so distrustful of its own citizens that the NSA has turned into a pathological information hoarder.
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We're talking about millions upon millions records here, all of which the NSA apparently wants because it will give it a vast picture of everyone Americans talk to, in the hopes that somehow all that data can be sorted and crunched to give a portrait of who's an actual threat. I really enjoyed the above tweet, because I think it sums up the insanity of all of this. Not only is a US government agency legally spying on its citizens on a scope that's so unfathomably broad that no single person can comprehend just how much data is being skimmed, but the NSA also has no clear motive.The US government has become so distrustful of its own citizens that the NSA has turned into a pathological information hoarder. The FBI loves to bitch about its "going dark" problem, saying it needs more access to internet communications because it can't fight through the clutter. But now the NSA has the opposite problem: It has detailed phone records of millions of Americans. How is such an offensive dragnet, one that's at least 99.99% inane phone calls, going to keep the United States safe?But perhaps the most shocking thing about Greenwald's incredible scoop is that it's shocking at all. We know the NSA has been testing massive information dragnet software since at least the turn of the century, when it took its incredible info-gathering abilities on a tour through New Zealand and other friendly countries. More recently, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to FISA, which gives the NSA broad spying powers and which Congress recently renewed for five years without really understanding what it does.Somewhere an exasperated #NSA agent shakes his head at another texted photo of a 20-something's boner sent to a lover w/ caption "da bomb."
— Eugene Mirman (@EugeneMirman) June 6, 2013
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