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NSA Chief James Clapper: We Should Have Been Transparent About Metadata Collection

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lawhawk2/18/2014 5:34:15 am PST

re: #13 Charles Johnson

Most people are completely oblivious to the details of how their magical gadgets do what they do. So when the NSA stories started coming out it was easy for the Snowdenistas to portray it all as menacing and evil.

I hope in the long run the increased knowledge of privacy issues will be worth the truly horrible damage this is doing to US intelligence.

Nope. It will be blissfully ignored as people continue to flock to social media sites that take every byte of data you input and massage it into something that will make someone else money. These companies are doing far more with far more private data than anything even contemplated by the government. And they’ve got willing partners all over the place - whether its journalists like Greenwald and Poitras who play down or outright ignore those actual threats to play up the threat the NSA poses to US citizens, businesses and industries that seek to profit from data aggregation, to the stock markets that reward creative uses of all that data to make others money.