News flash for everybody.
Guess how Amazon got so rich so quickly--
Not by delivering sh!t to your door. The US government made them rich. Along with Facebook and Google.
Here's how--
The NSA has a program where they use agencies like the NRO (national reconnaissance organization) among others, to record every email, text message, phone call-- Google search and on and on, that you ever do. All this data is jammed into a file that has your name on it. These little data points collected about you is called "metadata".
Welp, when you save all these billions of emails and text messages and what not that happen daily, you better have some serious memory space to do it with. Sooooo-- these big tech firms build these MONSTER Ser ver farms out in New Mexico, Utah, Arizona etc-- that are a million square feet full of nothing but computer memory banks. Think of it as warehouses for data. There's one being built outside of Santa fe right now that is massive. I have a buddy that owns a contracting company that does electrical work for it. It's huge. I mean freaking huge. And the government pays them BILLIONS in our tax dollars to build and maintain these huge digital filing cabinets that warehouse your online history, your GPS location via cell phone or your car GPS, emails, text messages, phone calls etc. Anything with a digital fingerprint on it is grabbed up and shoved into your file and a profile is built that's all about you.
Using complicated mathematical algorithms, massive computers crunch your data (of which takes a REALLY long time because they are collecting data faster than it can be processed) and they start looking for patterns or communications that raise red flags. Are you sending messages to people with burner phones in Yemen? Are you hanging out in chat rooms what have known bad guys in Qatar using them and talking in ubiquitous code words? Has your cell phone ever pinged its GPS location near a cell phone of a known baddy? If so, how long were you and known baddy next to each other? Did you simply pass by him in a public market place or were you pinging for an hour in a cafe in Djibouti while a known baddy was three feet away, which would suggest you were meeting with Mr baddy.
I don't think
@GuaranteedFresh! Can tell this story even if he knows about it, but in the early days of the Iraq war, our intelligence community did a pretty cool Op where they basically were monitoring every freaking phone in the country. And using said method to track the bad guys. And that was 15 years ago.
Now I know what you're going to say--
"Clob, the government might collect all this data about us, but they can't actually look at it or use it unless they have a warrant."
Riiiiiiiiiight. Keep telling yourself that. You jokers that take selfies on Instagram or whatever else have just handed your face to them and your mug gets analyzed by a computer so that if there's ever a serious terror attack, they can use facial recognition software to eliminate you or identify you as a baddy.
And I know what you're thinking now--
"But clob, if I'm not doing anything wrong, why would I have to worry about anyone coming for me?"
Simple answer, because you never know what the motive is. You may have seen something happen that you shouldn't have seen. You may have simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time and not even know it. There's a myriad of reasons why you could get swept up into something that is beyond your control. And 99.999999999% of the time you've got nothing to worry about. But what if you end up being part of that .000000001% that didn't do anything wrong, but end up with the sh!t end of the stick because of simple bad luck?
I bet your ass would care then.
