[ihsw]

> Is all of congress tapped? All the governors? Snowden hinted at this. What the fuck is going on in my country?

I'm going to assume the worst, which would be that the NSA is used as a tool of blackmail by nefarious parties whom the NSA relies on. Key House and Senate members put in a good word for the NSA and then they get some "free" information on their opponents, at which point they convince their opponents to "trade" wins with the opposing party's leadership.

Those in on the game get to continue their political career because the party leaderships are coordinating wins between each-other through bipartisan-orchestrated gerrymandering, and "suicide" elections where elected officials intentionally lose their elections in order to boost the profile of their friendly opponents.

Those whom are bucking the chain of command are ostracised and relegated to the fringes (eg: the Pauls).

[droopyEyelids]

You're adding an extra step, unnecessarily complicating your idea.

The blackmail information doesn't need to be passed to a third party. It can be brought directly to bear on problematic government officials by the NSA.

All they would need to do is make the senator understand that a record of all correspondence and browsing history exists.

Considering about 5% of the population has some pedophilic tendency, and estimates are around 10% of people have an incest fetish, 10% of people are estimated to be gay yet only Tammy Baldwin is out in the senate, lots of successful people do drugs, and everyone else has tons of relatives who may or may not have those problems, you can not underestimate the power wielded by someone with access to all our communications.

It's too great a power to comprehend. And someone wouldn't even have to be consciously doing ill to exploit it. I imagine that anyone in the position would believe they're protecting the USA from terrorism, and righteously punishing the deviants by leveraging their 'sins' while unconsciously building the infrastructure for future tyranny.

Furthermore, I've only listed the problems I think could be discovered through software. We aren't getting into conspiracy theory stuff like what would happen if you put a secret team of 10 analysts and 20 lawyers to work for a year looking to find laws broken by the members of the legislative branch. I mean, Hoover has been dead for a while, right?

[ihsw]

That's assuming the NSA is interested in playing politics. General Alexander may be well-versed in public speaking but I'd be hard-pressed to think managing political allegiances is of interest to him.

Also, the various federal executive agencies (Justice Department, State Department, et al) may very well be tapping into NSA data as much as possible for exactly what you're describing, especially since the recent DEA (Justice) and IRS (Treasury) revelations have shed some light on this.

The NSA's dam for controlling information dissemination has cracks in it, and I'm betting it'll be wedged wide open for the federal executive agencies to use at their convenience.

[amirmc]

"... but I'd be hard-pressed to think managing political allegiances is of interest to him."

Everyone operating at that kind of level has an interest in political allegiances (lowercase p). It's just part of the job. To not have such an interest means you'll simply be out-gamed and replaced by someone who does.

[gasull]

They are blackmailing and targeting anyone that is in the way to their goal of total surveillance.

This hasn't gotten enough attention:

US targets lie-detector coaches following Edward Snowden affair

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1297622/us-targets-li...

[ihsw]

That's hilariously bad. Polygraph examinations are awful, they're little else than measurements of how people deal with stress and there's no difference between "passing" the examination and "beating" it.

Personally I think it's appalling that they're still regarded as "lie detectors."

[amirmc]

Choice quote:

"Nothing like this has been done before," John Schwartz, a US Customs and Border Protection official, said of the legal approach. "Most certainly our nation's security will be enhanced. There are a lot of bad people out there. This will help us remove some of those pests from society."

Regardless of how anyone may feel about 'lie-detector' tests, this is chilling.