Edward Snowden and this fine mess we are in.

( I apologize for the disorganization, I'm not very good at this.)

I was amazed and felt a little thrilled when Edward Snowden outed himself as the source of the communication spying leaks. In my view he is a hero and I can't remember the last hero this country had. Few and far between. I thought, 'who's not gonna like this guy'? The left is going to love him, the right is going to love him, everyone is going to love him except for all the elected officials. And what are they going to do when the populous loves him and they hate him? What a story to come!

But I live in a vacuum. The vacuum of my own mind. My own private Idaho. I don't have cable TV so for all know all the pundits and talking heads are calling him a traitor and want his head on a platter. I wonder. It's almost enough to get me to watch usatvnow.com and see. But not quite. So I don't know what is going on on TV.

I read little snippets about politicians calling him a traitor. It strikes me as funny because I am hoping that the people that voted for that particular politician are taking note what they are saying now and will remember that the next time it comes to cast vote. It would be a clean sweep of the bozos if everyone took notice and voted on this issue alone.

I mean, who's going to vote for a guy that sez, "I think we should spy on our own people and we should do in in secret because we know what's good for you and you shouldn't have knowledge of what we are doing for you". Nobody, right? I'm living in my own private Idaho.

The only people I can imagine taking that approach would be someone who thinks, "I don't really understand what is going on and these people have been elected so they must be smart and I'm going to trust them to do what's right for me because they have been elected by the people". Ok. I understand that position. When I'm faced with difficult material that is above my level of intelligence, I look to people I respect and what to know their opinion on the subject because I trust and respect them and I've decided I can't figure it out for myself. I think that's a reasonable thing to do at times.

But consider this: Is it the actual data collection or is it the secrecy about the data collection? There's the data collection itself, that's one thing, and then there's the secrecy about the data collection. That's a whole other thing. So there's more than one issue here. I personally don't like either but it's the secrecy that I really have a problem with.

When the leaks came out there were politicians that were quick to point out: "It's all legal! It's all legal! It's all been approved by congress. Nothing illegal here.". Well, just because it's legal doesn't make it right. I don't care if it's legal or not. They are making decisions for me and not telling me about the laws they are creating to legalize spying. This all started under Chaney's gang and probably wasn't all legal at the time but now apparently Obama has 1: continued it, 2: expanded it and 3: made it legal. So I don't like any of them. They are all filthy garbage in my eyes.

I've always had an aversion to being kept in the dark. I want to know what is going on and why. My government believes I don't have the right to know what is going on. My government believes it knows better than I what is good for me. What is government?

Government is made up of two things: inertia and people. Inertia is what the founding fathers intended and everything that's happened since then. The inertia for the spying has deep roots in our government but most recently in the Patriot Act brought forth by Bush's regime right after 9/11. Recently there has been some folks in the news saying something like, "I wish I hadn't been so unquestioning about the Patriot Act when I supported it". Yep. This is what happens when you give the government permission to do things in secret. One secret leads to another. And another. And eventually there are so many secrets that congress ( if they have been let in on this particular secret ) must constantly ask themselves, "remind me again what the people know what they don't know". Is that anyway to run a government?

Oh yeah. Want to make me mad? Do something related to me and then tell me, "it's not in your best interest for you to know about this, so we are not going to tell you."

Let's talk about data and metadata for a moment. For telephone calls the explanations are simple: data is the content of the call, the voices, and the metadata is the information about the call, not the conversation itself. For a single phone call, the metadata is very simple and very small. It contains 4 numbers: the calling phone number, the called phone number, the date/time of the call, and the duration of the call. That's it. 4 numbers per call. That's not a lot of data. The data of the call, the actual content, now that's a lot of data. I'll get to that in a moment. ( metadata size appendix?)

Companies like amazon, google and microsoft have huge warehouses stuffed to the gills with computers and hard drives. They are called server farms, and disk farms. This is the data of the web. This is content. This is a huge amount of data. The NSA is building a couple of huge data farms for themselves. These are projects that alarm Edward Snowden. And they should alarm you too. The NSA doesn't need these disk farms to hold metadata. The metadata just isn't that large. So what does the NSA need these server and disk farms for? Content.

The content of a phone call depends on the length of the call. And these files are quite big. Think about your MP3 audio files. They take up a lot of space. It's an audio recording, it takes a lot of numbers to represent sound. In fact, if you wanted to keep digital files of a lot of phone calls you would need way more than your computer. You would need a disk farm. Coincidence?

Edward Snowden told us about the phone calls being monitored. He also told us about Prism. This is actually the bigger of the two nuggets of information. Prism is government monitoring of the internet. At some level. At what level is not known. What is known is that the NSA has in place some method of getting the information flowing between known individuals on the internet. There's a of conjecture about what Prism is and isn't. One ominous chart has the names of all the big internet companies and the date they signed onto Prism. Whatever that means. Names like google, yahoo, microsoft and apple. All these companies adamantly denied allowing the NSA internal access to their data. All those denials were carefully worded. The government is spying on the internet. In what way remains to be seen. Edward Snowden has given us the tip of the iceberg. We should thank him.

Not yet revealed but hinted at a few times over the past 8 years is NSA's direct access to the main fiber optic wires of the internet.  The end points of the optic wires are controlled by the companies named above, the wires themselves are under control of the telecommunication companies. Companies like ATT, Verizon and Sprint. It is with these companies that the NSA has secret agreements and physical tie in points. There have been reports of rooms inside the fiber optics connection points where only NSA cleared personell are allowed. Now, why would that be? And wouldn't Prism be a fine name for a project that diverts light from fiber optic cable to the NSA? That's what a Prism does it; redirects light. Light is what the fiber optic cables use to carry their data.


Well, I need to wrap this up and ship it off. Couple of things first: 1. The way to stop terrorism is by changing our behavior overseas, not spying on everyone and trying to predict future events. 2. There needs to be way more transparency and way less secrecy in our government. 3.Edward Snowden gave two members of the press a 41 slide NSA power point presentation. Less than a half dozen of those slides have been made public. 

In the coming weeks and months, as you watch our government prosecute Edward and destroy his life, ask yourself if that's the kind of government you want representing you.

Whew. Enough. Don't get me started.

And when the NSA google for "Edward Snowden hero" I'll be on their list. No secret sauce
needed for that. And that's the way it should be.