★ Linked: ….we’re wiretapping the world.

via Le Monde.fr:

Amongst the thousands of documents extracted from the NSA by its ex-employee there is a graph which describes the extent of telephone monitoring and tapping (DNR – Dial Number Recognition) carried out in France. It can be seen that over a period of thirty days – from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, 70,3 million recordings of French citizens’ telephone data were made by the NSA. This agency has several methods of data collection. According to the elements obtained by Le Monde, when a telephone number is used in France, it activates a signal which automatically triggers the recording of the call. Apparently this surveillance system also picks up SMS messages and their content using key words. Finally, the NSA apparently stores the history of the connections of each target – or the meta-data.

It seems to me that the only USA citizens that care enough to do anything about the monitoring of our activities are the same people who were already “conspiracy theorists” toward this whole business. Basically, if you assumed the government was monitoring you, steps were taken to prevent this and the news that broke earlier this year wasn’t surprising to the half a percentage of Americans who already suspected it. The rest of our citizens care about the monitoring activities but not enough to do anything about it. It’s sort of like high-salt foods will cause heart disease but until you get heart disease, you don’t really care about the risks. 

What I think is going to end up being a bigger story is not that our government monitors what we do online, it’s that they’re monitoring citizens and government officials globally from Mexico to Russia, Japan and now France. Collecting private information on citizens around the world is a big deal. Also, this isn’t targeted monitoring. In the article linked above, we’re collecting airwave signals from cell phones in mass and not in a targeted manner. I could maybe be okay with targeted data collection if there’s a good enough reason but collecting it all, that’s a huge issue.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the global communities, the UN and G8/G20 collectives get involved and tell the US to chill the Hell out. This is a huge problem. The paranoia and insecurity exhibited by our government makes us look weak and we’re breaking global civil liberties laws at this point and I’m embarrassed for us.