A Profile of Big Brother in the 21st Century

http://watchingamerica.com/News/232518/a-profile-of-big-brother-in-the-21st-century/

In the area of privacy and security, the government imposes mandates on individual liberty. "We will not apologize simply because our (intelligence) services may be more effective." – Barack Obama.

A Profile of Big Brother in the 21st Century
El Tiempo, Colombia
By Gabriel Iriarte Nuñez
Translated By Miriam Rosen
5 February 2014
Edited by Lau­rence Bouvard

Exactly 64 years after George Orwell published his celebrated, and now prophetic, work "1984," on June 5, 2013, The Guardian began to divulge the largest package of leaks from the United States intelligence system ever revealed, which unleashed a political storm of enormous proportions.

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The American public discovered that its government had concealed the NSA’s illegal activities to the point of lying about their existence. In March 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in charge of coordinating the 16 security and surveillance agencies in the United States, denied before the Senate that the NSA was illegally compiling data about hundreds of millions of American citizens ... at least, "not deliberately." Three months later, in the face of Snowden’s revelations, Clapper maintained that he had not lied: He had responded in the most truthful way possible.

The NSA receives information from phone communications — the phone numbers of the people involved, time, place and duration of the calls — of hundreds of millions of individuals in the U.S. and worldwide. It has access to the systems of collaborating Internet companies, allowing the NSA to access billions of metadata daily on people and institutions, both inside and outside of the United States.

This access is made easier due to the fact that between 80 and 90 percent of the world’s telecommunication traffic, including cell phone calls, Internet and satellites, passes through servers and fiber-optic cables located in the United States, owned by American corporations.