Are you surprised?
The NSA has Snowden’s name, photograph, cellphone number, names and emails of some of his supporters.
Not to mention the NSA is:
- Tracking all air travel and reservations.
- Monitoring all cell telephone traffic.
- Monitoring all email and Internet traffic to an from known supporters (like Julian Assange and company).
- Monitoring all other electronic traffic.
If PRISM can’t help confirm the location of one known individual, how is it going to locate people that are unknown?
Short answer: It’s not. No matter how much dirty data they collect. In fact, the more data they collect, the harder the task becomes.
Targeted data collection, the traditional electronic intercepts used by law enforcement, have been successful for decades on end.
Traditional law enforcement has enough sense to not try to boil the ocean when you want a cup of tea.
Tracking Snowden is one more demonstration that widespread data collection benefits only contractors, agencies and lobbyists.
As presently collected and processed, the NSA data haystack has no value for national security.
[…] NSA can mine all the telephone traffic if it wants. Mining the telephone traffic of security risks, a much smaller data set, is likely to […]
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