NSA supposed / alleged snooping on everybody in the country (heavens to betsy).

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STOP MESSING WITH THE TELEPHONE?  While I do not really know, as such things as the latest news about N.S.A. “metadata” and “PRISM” activities could just be a test of secrecy and discussing the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of this is moot.  Also, and with respect to any visceral reaction by anyone who talks over the phone, most people who have a telephone or a cellphone handset know the telephone company has the ability look at anyone’s telecommunications profile and call records at any time.  Such details are internal to telecommunications carriers and serve as a reference for things like demographics and marketing studies, system stress studies, customer service activities and the like.  For people like me, for the U.S. President even to have made this part of his agenda is not likely – he has to be too busy with other things.  Though snooping and mining into voluminous and numerous calling and other records with varying degrees of granularity and specificity is absolutely insidious in its intent and effect as far as civic, political, administrative, and other rights are concerned here in the U.S., it is undoubted that this makes any difference, even one iota of a smidgen of care, for most people as telecommunications customers.  It will be interesting if, or whether or not, our chief executive is found ever to be involved in such forms of monitoring of people’s behavior, but this is not likely:  Our president is a law professor at the nation’s best law school, big on issues like asserting and preserving individual and constitutional, and human rights, and that he is concerned with and orders and / or participates in the actual, purposeful and direct monitoring and recording of us talking over the phone is entirely doubtful to me.  That he ever gave direct permission for these sorts of things is doubtful as well, and the activities by N.S.A. under scrutiny at this point are to individuals such as myself a redundancy of ordinary corporate activities under different motivations and purposes (see above), perhaps, though centered on information – gathering and analysis that happens in any event due to things like systemic structure of our information systems, the nature and capabilities of high – level computing power, and solving the difficulties and other issues presented by communications today and the systems that host and operate them. 

 

See CBS News online coverage of this (click here.)