This is not so much a conspiracy theory, but I thought to post it here. " I went to the House Intelligence Committee where I stayed for 17 years. In the last 5 of those years, I had the NSA account, which means that I supervised [...] to make sure the NSA was doing things legally, was doing things effectively, in a financially good manner [ ...] and I would make recommendations to changes in their budget every year. [... ] What happened was that only a couple of months before I retired in 2002, I found out about this secret program that I was not supposed to know about [ ...] And let me tell you, no matter what they say today [ ...] it was not just metadata, it was content; it was dragnet content domestically. Furthermore, they had just then started, by [... ] July 2002, they had started collecting other information, non-communications information on Americans, and database-ing it. So I'm just going to go down a very quick list of some of the things [ ...] they are collecting: land phones, your cell phones, your emails, your texts, your skype, your chats, your webcams, your social media postings—the FBI loves them, postal mail—a huge program on the postal mails, business records other than communications; the Patriot Act is so broadly worded, they can go to any business, and get any record, and put a gag order on the order, so he can't tell you that your records have been sceded. Government records have been amassed, which was forbidden under the Privacy Act, but apparently there is a national security exception to that now; so all local, and state, and federal government records, can be amalgamated in a federal database. That alone gives them an enormous amount of information about you, including gun licenses of course. " While she has been described as a "whistleblower", nothing she is talking about here is really that shocking or much of a revelation.
For those who understand fully that power DOES corrupt, then no, it's not shocking. It's pretty much what the cynical view expects. Yes, we know the government breaks the law and spits on the constitutional governance, and this is just more proof of that reality.
The PRIVATE SECTOR is collecting far more data on every email and smart phone user than the government is collecting.
