Recently it has come to light that Uncle Sam is creating an audit trail of all communications in and outside of the United States.
Surprisingly, everyone acts as though this is the first time that Uncle has monitored the population's electronic communications en masse. The fact is, back in the 1990s, we learned of a SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) program called Echelon that essentially did the same thing, only using another nation's intelligence officers to do the spying.
US CIA leaker Edward Snowden, an infrastructure analyst for CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), offers some thoughts as to why a young man with so much to lose still chooses to disclose what NSA (National Security Agency) is doing by way of massive monitoring of domestic communications.
Snowden says that his worst fear is that even after disclosure, the American public will do nothing to change things--that everything will continue on as if he hadn't made this huge sacrifice. Honestly, his career is over, perhaps his very life. And yet most of us in this nation have no idea as to what the implications is of the information that Snowden has given us. Worst yet, most of us don't even know this young man's name and most of us don't even care about what he has told us.
In time, more Snowden's are going to surface, especially as NSA becomes even more power hungry and intrusive in their intelligence gathering practices.
If you are one of those people who could give a rat's rear as to what Snowden has chosen to share with the world, despite the life-changing nature of the information he's leaked, then you need to look in the mirror. You need to give some serious thought to who you are, what you are, and what you have become.
Copyright©2013/Allan B. Colombo
www.alcolombo.us / al_colombo@hotmail.com
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