The NSA is capturing and accumulating phone, email, text, and internet communications of American citizens, allegedly to track and prevent “terrorism.”  What is “terrorism”?  Who is the enemy?  Who are “we” fighting?

Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, has made the point that the failure to name the enemy has resulted in a defensive posture, since we can’t effectively vanquish an enemy we won’t define. So, instead, our government polices those it _can_ identify as an ‘enemy,’ which would be the current intellectual and political opposition. That has resulted in a freedom and rights hating Administration declaring Conservatives, Libertarians, Tea Partiers, and any others who espouse those hated values, to be The Enemy, and pointing their guns inward at our own population. They posture that they are fighting “terror,” but it’s a conveniently vague term that, with a firm Administration committment to sanitizing Islam & Jihad and exonerating it from all responsibility, is now being applied to those trying to rein in the Federal government.

That is where the NSA PRISM blanket surveillance program goes completely off the rails, rather it has been rerouted along rails leading to an American Treblinka. It is “merely” a technology, sure. One that can identify any pattern the government chooses to monitor. It can be used to monitor jihad, but we are being told that Islam is not The Enemy. The Tea Party is The Enemy. How long before those are the filters being applied to the monitoring?

Speaking from the vantage point of 30 years in data architecture, data analysis, etc., I find the rationalization “It’s just the metadata” to be a pitiable display of ignorance. Those in the business of political punditry owe their audience at least the minimal effort to inform themselves.  The NSA didn’t outgrow its capacious confines and take over miles of square footage to build a massive new data center in Utah because they’re “just storing metadata.” That metadata leads to specific conversations, texts, emails, audio, video, etc., which require only the authorization of a secret court created by the NSA & Homeland Security for the purpose of generating warrants whenever required for cover. How soon before the Administration’s enemies become the NSA’s enemies? Rhetorical question, since the NSA serves the Administration. Monitoring requires only a set of parameters from dimensions which are made up of that metadata. That identifies the target communications. I would bet there’s a button to retrieve the audio conversations, email, or whatever, which may require an authorization code to access. How soon before — in the interests of efficiency — a blanket authorization code is provided for all inquiries of a specific class, ongoing generic case, or the like? Again, almost rhetorical.

Of COURSE they won’t be listening into all of our phone calls; they won’t have to. Just say Obama wants a list of all people discussing or promising sizeable donations to a campaign or a demonstration, or a targeted group. Set the query, hit the button, and voila. Maybe they’ll check one or two phone calls to verify that they’ve hit pay-dirt. The rest is minutes of button-pushing and analysis.

And, BTW, they don’t need to actually “listen” to phone calls. Consider that MagicJack, Dragon, Android, and Siri have taken us 90+% of the way to speech-to-text in any language. They can run that sort of conversion overnight, every day, and then just apply keyword “Big Data” analytics to the resulting texts and catch anything they’re looking for.

In a rational world, where all of this was subject to checks and balances by an open Constitution-respecting judicial system, this could be a great crime-fighting technology. In today’s anti-American political environment, it is a weapon for the abolition of freedom and the institution of a totalitarian state.

Metadata:

Just to explain “metadata” to those who don’t have prior exposure to the term, “metadata” is data about data; that is, information that defines the context of the data, so that it is meaningful. For instance, when, where, how, and by whom the data was created. In the case of a phone call, that would be who made the call, who received the call, when the call was made, on what phone sent and received, & how long the call was. Additional automated algorithmic processing could provide affinity analysis — any other related calls, maybe a bank transaction via the web, to the limits of the imagination of the analysts.

You must understand that this is a sea change from the traditional surveillance one sees in classical crime-fighting. In your classic detective scenario, you have limited people, limited resources, so you only watch those things, people, and locations that you have established are frequented by a suspect, where a crime has been or may be committed, or a targeted location, etc. All of this is presented to a judge and you must make a compelling argument and the department heads will also want to know what they will be spending resources on.

In the PRISM scenario, the infrastructure is built and the data is already there. They can essentially just set an alert for a specific kind of activity, the way a modern bank does now for suspicious activity. Say Obama wants to wipe out a Tea Party candidate in a tight race. He can set an alert for voter registrations, offers of candidate support, donations, upcoming meetings, contacts with the press, any potentially embarrassing things said in a private conversation or email, the “buzzer” goes off, and his operatives pounce. He leaks to the press, pressure denial of permit, or rents all available meeting spaces, or uses conversations to embarrass or to indict.

I am not a conspiracy nut. I’m not a fan of wild speculation. But I don’t know how to impress on those who don’t understand what has already been developed by the NSA just how easy our freedoms could disappear in the plugged-in world we’re now in. You’re not paranoid if someone’s actually following you.

Just sayin’.