The more we learn about NSA surveillance the scarier it gets. The agency is making it a point to collect anything and everything it can get. It has all of your data, which it is convinced is relevant to “terrorism” investigations.
But as the fight picks up to limit the NSA’s position of near limitless, unchecked power, a secondary battle is picking up between the NSA and every other government agency, who all think they should have access to it too.
From the DEA to the military, everyone is willing to argue that them getting a copy of everything is in the interest of national security, and if there’s a silver lining in the NSA scandal, its that government agencies hate to share, so the NSA has been very reluctant to hand over your data to anyone else.
Ironically, officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence argue that if those other agencies that they don’t run get the data, they’ll abuse it. That’s a fair bet, because the NSA itself has had “compliance problems” from day one, and everyone else seems like they’d be just as willing to abuse their access.
What does the "I've got nothing to hide" crowd now have to say? I won't be long before they'll create some other program that searches all your communications through all of Internet history and then matches them to the thousands of federal, state, local crimes. And here we thought the US has already a large prison population.
I'd still like to know how the NSA claims to keep all our data safe- safe from corrupt employees, contractors, hackers, foreign enemies or foreign "friends."
What a dangerous, yet blatantly obvious, propaganda effort this NYT article is. It is designed to take your attention off of the fact that at the very core – the data mining policies of the NSA are ILLEGAL and violate the US Constitution – no matter what agency is carrying them out. This article is intended to shift focus from the NSA to these other government agencies who are just clamoring for our data all the while attempting to paint the picture of an NSA showing such great restraint in keeping our data (that they've already illegally collected) safe from these other bad agencies.
Not going to work, NYT. The NSA is violating the law. Period.