Yesterday Glenn Greenwald gave a talk (video) to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago. At 39:48 into the talk he says this (my transcription):
Another document that I probably shouldn’t but – since it’s not published – but I am going to anyway share with you – and this one is coming soon – but you are getting a little preview. It talks about how a brand new technology enables the National Security Agency to direct, redirect into its own repositories, one billion cellphone calls every single day, one billion cellphone calls every single day.
What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without it’s being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency. It doesn’t mean they are listening to every call, it means they are storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time. And it does mean that they are collecting millions upon millions upon millions of our phone and email records.
It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy. And what is incredibly menacing about it is that it is all talking place in the dark, with no accountability and virtually no safeguards.
That the NSA can grab and store one billion calls per day is plausible. Voice can be easily compressed into a quite small data chunks. Automated speech to text transcription allows to make all these calls searchable. Not only their metadata, but the spoken and transcribed content of the calls themselves. Then matching that content to trigger words allows to fish out “targets” for further investigation. Voice recognition and/or metadata analysis will then allow to filter out other calls such “targets” made or will later make.
The NSA, we are told, must set out to find the needle in the haystack, the one terrorist in the midst of all us good people. To find a needle in the haystack is quite easy to do. Get a huge electromagnet, switch it on and the needle will come towards it while the straw will not move. That is what the NSA is set out to do here with one billion cellphone calls per day. To find those bad, bad terrorists. But that electromagnet trick assumes that the needle is made of metal. It will not find the needle made from bone, or plastic, or ceramic or something else. There is no pattern for terrorism. It can not be found and prevented.
The story of the need to find the needle in the haystack using that giant electromagnet is therefore not plausible. Storing and analyzing all global cellphone calls is neither necessary nor sufficient to fight the conflict method of terrorism. But storing those phone calls can be a tool of control. Caught up in a demonstration or accident? Now the state can go back and find out not only to whom you talked when but also what you talked about. Soon not just yesterday’s calls but those you will then have made years ago. There is likely something in all those pasts calls (and emails and chats) that you do not want others to know.
Greenwald is right in saying: “It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy.” But destroying privacy is not the primary or ultimate purpose of the system. The only plausible purpose of this striving for total information is its use for total control. It is the foundation of a totalitarian state.