J.R.McHale

NSA = J. Edgar Hoover On Steroids – The Big Picture:

“With a few hundred cable probes and computerized decryption, the NSA can now capture the kind of gritty details of private life that J. Edgar Hoover so treasured and provide the sort of comprehensive coverage of populations once epitomized by secret police like East Germany’s Stasi. And yet, such comparisons only go so far. After all . . . . J. Edgar Hoover still only knew about the inner-workings of the elite in one city: Washington, D.C. To gain the same intimate detail for an entire country, the Stasi had to employ one police informer for every six East Germans — an unsustainable allocation of human resources. By contrast, the marriage of the NSA’s technology to the Internet’s data hubs now allows the agency’s 37,000 employees a similarly close coverage of the entire globe with just one operative for every 200,000 people on the planet. In the Obama years, the first signs have appeared that NSA surveillance will use the information gathered to traffic in scandal, much as Hoover’s FBI once did.”

Read the whole thing. Domestic bulk data collected by the NSA conveys immense power on those with access to this information and will be prone to political (and financial) abuse. History demonstrates that the lure of such data for improper purposes likely will be irresistible. Hoover stayed in office for decades, aided in large part by the information the the FBI had collected on politicians of the day. Imagine what could be done with the data collected by the NSA.