I was in the Air Force from 1981 to 1985. For the last 2 years of my enlistment, I flew in an RC135W off the coast of Russia listing to telephone conversations. I was a back end tech making sure the receivers and recording equipment worked well. Others in the plane spoke Russian. This was a long time ago and it was called passive reconnaissance. It was spying by listening to electronic communication, recording it, translating it and using it. My assumption is that China and Russia and God knows who else has been listening to us the same way.
When I was in the Air Force, I learned of a project called Echelon. It was a program by the NSA that put huge listening or receiving antenna up in Alaska and on both coasts and they were sensitive enough to hear phone conversations all over the world. This is because electrons don’t die. When messaging moves along a wire, the message radiates out all across the world and gets mixed up with all sorts of other messages. Good programs on good computers with good antenna can break all this apart and listen to it.
All this stuff I did in the Air Force was Top Secret back then, but we do not use any of that stuff anymore. Edward Snowden told us about Prism to capture and copy all internet traffic going through Google, Amazon, Yahoo and others. Sidewinder can capture all cell phone data and conversations and store them for later use.
All this data is stored in data warehouses, huge buildings full of hard drives. The result is referred to as Big Data because the amount of data is so huge anything can be found in it. This data is searched regularly for keywords and trends and from this terrorist attacks may be detected, although we have rarely stopped one.
America listens to all electronic communication in the world. Communication from the US to elsewhere and from elsewhere to the US and from the US to the US. This is because all these electrons go everywhere and it is impossible for the NSA to know if a packet of information is American or unAmerican. They just grab it. That is how the old system of Echelon was designed and how the new systems are designed. So the NSA and the DNI tell us that they do not “target” Americans. Which means they do not go looking for Americans, which I suppose it true, but it does not matter. All electronic traffic from everywhere to anywhere is captured and stores. That is life and has been that way since the early 1980s.
If it is captured and stored, people will look at it. We know of many who have looked up old girlfriends or old bosses because that is what people do. People unmask the Trump campaign because the temptation of all that data, everything that has been communicated, is just to strong. There are no righteous people, so people look and people leak and data gets away from them.
When I was in the Air Force, I learned of a project called Echelon. It was a program by the NSA that put huge listening or receiving antenna up in Alaska and on both coasts and they were sensitive enough to hear phone conversations all over the world. This is because electrons don’t die. When messaging moves along a wire, the message radiates out all across the world and gets mixed up with all sorts of other messages. Good programs on good computers with good antenna can break all this apart and listen to it.All this stuff I did in the Air Force was Top Secret back then, but we do not use any of that stuff anymore. Edward Snowden told us about Prism to capture and copy all internet traffic going through Google, Amazon, Yahoo and others. Sidewinder can capture all cell phone data and conversations and store them for later use.
All this data is stored in data warehouses, huge buildings full of hard drives. The result is referred to as Big Data because the amount of data is so huge anything can be found in it. This data is searched regularly for keywords and trends and from this terrorist attacks may be detected, although we have rarely stopped one.
America listens to all electronic communication in the world. Communication from the US to elsewhere and from elsewhere to the US and from the US to the US. This is because all these electrons go everywhere and it is impossible for the NSA to know if a packet of information is American or unAmerican. They just grab it. That is how the old system of Echelon was designed and how the new systems are designed. So the NSA and the DNI tell us that they do not “target” Americans. Which means they do not go looking for Americans, which I suppose it true, but it does not matter. All electronic traffic from everywhere to anywhere is captured and stores. That is life and has been that way since the early 1980s.
If it is captured and stored, people will look at it. We know of many who have looked up old girlfriends or old bosses because that is what people do. People unmask the Trump campaign because the temptation of all that data, everything that has been communicated, is just to strong. There are no righteous people, so people look and people leak and data gets away from them.
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