K&R

Here we thought this internet thingy was so neato. And that we could call our family and friends and have a private conversation.

Now, if we want any privacy, looks like we're going to have to pile up all the electronics, including the cell phones and oh yeah, through the TV on there too, and sledge hammer them to smithereens. Will have to go out and buy a dependable old jalopy with no GPS in it OR rip it from the vehicle I drive. Cut up the credit cards after they are paid off, go back to the country and raise my own food, build a house under the ground. I could go on and on.... but I won't.

These activities were first exposed (by Private Eye and the Guardian) back in 1988 and has receive regular airings since then.

This is not LBN.

After that definition next to nothing is breaking news. Terrorist organisations have been plotting acts of terrorism all of the 20th and 21st century and will continue to do so, something that also has got and will get regular airings. Why even bother to report any discovered plot if there never was any damage as that is what terrorist organisations do? No LBN.

The NSA surveillance is portrayed as no big deal because no content is said to be collected, stored and analysed. MTI & GTE (that haven't been in place since 1963 due to lack of fibre-optic internet backbones) do exactly that. GCHQ makes all of this data available to the NSA to full extent: PRISM doesn't need to collect content for the NSA. The Brits are doing it for them after having acquired the means to do it 18 months ago.
So the whole meta-data discussion was just a sideshow or a lie.

But then of course, lying politicians and officials really shouldn't constitute LBN.

Would you still say the same? The re-hashing of old news stories is very common and British newspapers are real experts

ECHELON and subsequent programs have been in place for nearly as long as I have been alive. They have been recording American phone calls transmitted via cable and later by satellite and even later by fiber optic link. When faxes were the new technology they monitored those and when the internet came into being they monitored that. The supposedly "new" information about internet traffic monitoring was first told back in 1998 which never really shocked anyone (except the ignorant) because the internet requires the storage of vast quantities of data.

This monitoring and recording has been done with US cooperation because the US would rather have some control over what the UK as well as Japan, Australia and, probably, Spain intercept and so also control over how that data is used. This is not a bad idea as, in these past countries (including the UK) used such intercepts for military and commercial advantage.

You may be content (as the Grauniad so often is) to be the tool of right wing ideogogues but do not pretend this is in any way "Latest Breaking News"

Especially when it comes to the enormous amount of data in question.
The news in this is the applied ability to actually analyse all content.
The news is also (on a related note only) that it makes the official line of the NSA not doing anything wrong because they were only collecting metadata irrelevant; the NSA has no need to, they get the info form the Brits.

The existence of this specific program was news to me. And the news is the specific program, not the general activity.

If you'd be so kind as to leave the tools in the shed, what would you suggest? Never ever speak of this topic again outside some discussion groups far away from the news cycle because it can never be LBN? Keep the ignorant who haven't paid attention so far ignorant? Wait until you have a right wing president to make it LBN?

The Internet? "It's just a series of tubes" ... hmm ... like the nervous system of meta-human (post-human?) consciousness arising in our midst.

I wonder if all this "total information awareness" we are yearning for will cross some threshold that suddenly makes us realize our common humanity and begin to truly empathize with each other (i.e. the "Noosphere&quot , or will it instead bind us all into that rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem.

Can we really get our arms around something no single individual can possibly understand? Or are we finally becoming the tools of our tools?

I should fear our collective fate, but my own personal one looms closer. And the stars, the grave --both call.

ECHELON.