Spy Nation

 New documents released by Edward Snowden reveal our National Security Agency's vast spy network. The Washington Post Reports "The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable."
 
 Maybe it's unimaginable to some but in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 it was mandated that all telecommunications have backdoor capabilities for government use by 2002. Over the past couple of months it has leaked that the United States collects millions of emails and has admitted to spying on our own allies.

   The article goes on to say:

"One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year."

Question: How do you spy on billions of people?
Answer:  Get billions of people to do it for you.

 We've made it so easy to become tracked there is no footwork that needs to be done from the receiving end. They make the laws so products and companies are forced to allow access. Give the people phones they can hardly put down while risking car accidents just to use them. Along with social media (which is an app on the phone) the user puts their full name, address, phone number and uses check in features. How many of you have heard the stories of houses getting robbed because of a status update? If anyone with basic info can know your whereabouts imagine how easy it is for any government. Technology is a double edge sword; used to empower and inform or if we take it for granted; a means of enslavement.

                                                                                                                             - Sodaghar 12/5/13