A simply blockbuster new piece of information was just released tonight from the Washington Post, that reveals another gigantic piece of the puzzle, this time the financial one. While we already knew telecom companies were taking money for surveillance, the amounts seemed modest. That’s because that was only the part they revealed to the public. This newly released information shows a massive budget, hundreds of millions of dollars, which are being used to “grease the surveillance wheels.” The NSA seems to pay very well.
This shouldn’t come as a total surprise, atter all, Snowden wasn’t living in a teepee in the middle of Death Valley. No, he seemed to have a very comfortable life in Hawaii, and that’s how they get you. That’s why so few people talk. Who would want to shake the trees and bring down the system that is rewarding you so handsomely. Most people wouldn’t, and they don’t.
That’s precisely what makes Edward Snowden’s act so courageous. We only needed one. He knew that and realized that if not him, then who? Could he afford to wait around and assume someone else will do the job? He decided he couldn’t and for that we are forever indebted. Now from the Washington Post:
The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.
The bulk of the spending, detailed in a multi-volume intelligence budget obtained by The Washington Post, goes to participants in a Corporate Partner Access Project for major U.S. telecommunications providers. The documents open an important window into surveillance operations on U.S. territory that have been the subject of debate since they were revealed by The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in June.
New details of the corporate-partner project, which falls under the NSA’s Special Source Operations, confirm that the agency taps into “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,” according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013. The program was expected to cost $278 million in the current fiscal year, down nearly one-third from its peak of $394 million in 2011.
Although the companies are required to comply with lawful surveillance orders, privacy advocates say the multimillion-dollar payments could create a profit motive to offer more than the required assistance.
“It turns surveillance into a revenue stream, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “The fact that the government is paying money to telephone companies to turn over information that they are compelled to turn over is very troubling.”
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