Member-only story
Big Brother in the Data Mines
One of the television talking heads hurt my feelings in a report on Edward Snowden, the traitorous hero or heroic traitor who leaked the existence of PRISM, wholesale collection of data from the servers of various major players on the Internet. Not once but twice, he demanded to know how a 29-year-old high school dropout could become a computer jock for the National Security Agency with a top-secret clearance?
I was once an 18-year-old high school dropout who was a computer jock for the NSA (USAF branch) with a top-secret clearance. In the three years I worked up to my elbows in top secret intelligence, I can remember two items the leaking of which would have landed the news on the front pages along with the leaker in the pokey.
We were all told regularly and often what the consequences of revealing classified information would be. Would I have done that? I like to think I would if the public interest in the information clearly outweighed my own safety, but that circumstance never came up, so I can’t know.
Spying on the retail level has been part of war on this continent at least since the Rio Grande pueblos pulled off a sneak attack in 1680 that sent the Spanish colonists all the way back to El Paso del Norte, licking their wounds.
Spying on the wholesale level awaited technology, not intent. Governments had always…
