Here are the views of a former high ranking NSA official. They remind me of Richard Clarke.
Just because authority at this point only intrudes to a small degree does not mean it cannot go much further. The information will be there to work with. And there are thousands of laws.
I am always concerned I may seem alarmist about a trend but, really I'm just reporting the data, the emerging information. President Obama's comment today that this network of agencies is made up of our neighbors is patently disingenuous.
Click through to see the actual powerpoint slides that document this piece.
Former Top NSA Official: ‘We Are Now In A Police State”
WashingtonBlog
Phi Beta Iota: We avoid publishing any classified information, including classified information released to the public by Edward Snowden or others. To see the two classified slides, click through above them. The term “Parallel Construction” is not itself classified and it did not start with NSA — this is a term that has been used for a very long time in relation to the long-standing illegal practices of the FBI as well as state and local law enforcement, where warrantless wiretaps and other measures are used to obtain pointers, and then a case is built without reference to the illegal sources and methods — but the entire case is rooted in illegal sources and methods at its foundation, which, if known, would mandate the dismissal of the entire case. What NSA has done is scale this illegal practice to make it universal — not just within the USA, but around the world. Binney's point is nuanced — collecting everything on everyone and storing it is not the same as processing it and then prosecuting every possible violator of every possible law. What Binney is saying is that once in storage, the data enables the retrospective undressing of any given person on any given day such that everyone is easily subject to “parallel construction” and hence illegal prosecution. The integrity of the US “justice” system is now ZERO.
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