Don't get me wrong, IMNSHO what the NSA/Government is doing/has been doing is wrong. I railed against it when Old W signed the Patriot Act and all its sidecar acts into law. (May have actually used the words Stalinistic and SS in my descriptions.) The fact that any government has the power just to randomly cease any information they want because they feel there MIGHT one day be a use for it should scare the crap out of everyone. We need to get back to the 50s and 60s when they still did that shift, but it was illegal so they didn't caught! (Insert sarcastic sneer here.)
Still, after saying that we have to face a valid point of order here. Okay suppose the Feds do cease all of our phone data and all of our interwebz data. Poof, they got it all! Let's be completely honest with ourselves here. What have they actually got?
With a few exceptions, every single one of us lead quiet and relatively boring lives. Millions of people get up in the morning, take a shower, grab some coffee and go to work. While they are at work, they bullshit with their co workers and try to survive the day. They might sneak a peek at Farmville once in awhile and they might fudge a few extra minutes on lunch break. Most of them will send dozens of inane text and email messages to their friends talking about their aching bunions or who dropped who on Freeform Rock Climbing With The Stars. After 8-10 hours of drudgery, they will return home, eat dinner and maybe watch the latest episode of Flower Boy Next Door on Dramafever. (Don't laugh, it is highlarious!) Then they go to bed only to wake up the next day to start all over again.
That is what the NSA is going to get from its wiretaps, record ceasing and mind reading groups. (Don't laugh, they are real. I saw it in the International Questioner!) No secret plans to assassinate Mickey Mouse. No evil plans to take over the world. (Except for that odd little lab out in the middle of nowhere, hmm.) Just ordinary people leading ordinary lives. I mean it is not like your Facebook posts are a concern for national security. What your dog had for supper last night does not threaten the safety of the free world.
One of the reports I read said that the NSA is building a brand new Billion (Yes folks I said Billion) dollar facility just to hold all of the information. The data collected so far is in the Petabyte range (For those who don't know, including me, a Petabyte is the next byte up from Terabyte and 1 PB is a quadrillion bytes. Our Milky Way Galaxy is home to approximately 2 hundred billion stars. If each individual star was a single byte, then we would need 5,000 Milky Way Galaxies to reach 1 PB of data.) Of course keep in mind this information is unconfirmed, but I use it to illustrate my point.
Now imagine being the group of Schmucks who have to sift through every single bit of that data. I mean even with computers helping you it is a daunting task with seemingly no end. Unless someone manages to stop all of this, more and more data will just keep pouring in. Course I guess you could view it as job security.
Of course the Law of Averages says, just the majority of people in the world lead quiet unassuming nay even boring lives, then 90% of that data will be quiet, unassuming and BORING information. If I had that job, I'd probably wind up killing someone.
So yes, the Federal Government is ceasing information left and right. We cannot call it illegally ceasing, because their actions conform to the current (and previous) Regime's laws. Immoral, probably. Sneaky and underhanded, absolutely. However, I think we should be just as peeved off about the billions of dollars wasted to find out who spilled coffee on Susie Joe Johnson's coat at work. How is knowing exactly what color Fluffy's hairball was going to keep our nation save? Get mad about the Ceasing, but save a little bit of that ire for the Stupidity.
End of Rant
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