"KROFT: (Voiceover) But even members of Congress have trouble getting information about Echelon. Last year, the NSA refused to provide internal memoranda on the program to Porter Goss, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee""
Meanwhile, my mother, who died last month, knew of the prospective backlash for stating certain taboo words of the sort that Danny's relative, who was discussed above, had used. She, also, knew of outcomes for being outspoken or involved in social activism. So she repeatedly asked me, during her last several years, about whether I was making sure that I was being sufficiently self-protective when passing along information on the internet or phone.
As a former friend of left-leaning individuals like Howard Fast, Andy Goodman and other remarkable martyrs, she knew well about the tragic consequences stemming from one's bucking the status quo. In addition, she, over the years, became increasingly worried for others' well-being when they did so because it was her opinion that the U.S.A. was likely turning into a fascist police state.
She had further reasons to be apprehensive since she well remembered the U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and had refused to sign loyalty papers while serving as a junior high school teacher during the Second Red Scare. Similarly, she realized that huge amounts of funds were currently being transferred by the federal government to internet service providers and telecommunications companies in exchange for records of their customers, as is discussed in The Secret State's Surveillance Machine. Further, she was aware that such collected information is stored in perpetuity to build profiles, as can be deduced from the report at FISA Salon.com:
"This summer, on a remote stretch of desert in central Utah, the National Security Agency will begin work on a massive, 1 million-square-foot data warehouse. Costing more than $1.5 billion, the highly secret facility is designed to house upward of trillions of intercepted phone calls, e-mail messages, Internet searches and other communications intercepted by the agency as part of its expansive eavesdropping operations. The NSA is also completing work on another data warehouse, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome."
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