I have been very interested in the media play around the NSA snooping revelations. There seems to be two relatively shallow discussions describing the threat or lack of a threat this snooping poses for the American public.  Our trusted government officials assure us that they absolutely have not, and never will listen to our phone calls. I wish that made me feel better, but it doesn’t really.

A trained analyst can take a stack of records, a collection of information describing events, and by establishing relationships between the information, tell you what has happened.  By studying the information that describes those events such as common phone numbers, times, frequency of calls, locations where calls originate and terminate, they can paint a truly interesting picture of activities without listening to the actual calls. The head of NSA said they were not tracking any American citizens, and they would not listen to our actual calls.

The accuracy of the final analysis depends on the amount of time the analyst is given to reach a conclusion.  The shorter the time given for analysis is, the more likely the analysis is to be flawed.  Simple flaws can lead to a variety of potentially horrible outcomes.  I don’t say this from the perspective of a person that is just brainstorming about the NSA activities but from the perspective of a telephone company records custodian.  That custodian title was one that, as a business office manager, only showed up when I received a subpoena for records from some law enforcement authority.  The subpoena usually had a signature that I could recognize and was held in the hand of someone with a badge.  

The receipt of a subpoena was a serious event that normally made a mess of an otherwise normal day.  Our legal department would verify the paper work, and I would locate the records, which would be provided to the proper authorities.  One of those transfers of records led to the location of a criminal that had killed a Kentucky State Police Officer named Eddie Harris.  That criminal was shot to death when the Kentucky State police attempted to apprehend him.

I often wondered what would have happened if had accidentally provided the wrong records. Could it have led to the death of an innocent person?  Thinking about the NSA and the incredible mass of records they have, my first question if who is responsible for the accuracy of the records and the analysis of those records?   Every data system in the country has been hacked at one time or another.  Has the NSA phone record file been hacked?  Is it possible for a hacker to corrupt some of the       records that could purposely lead the analysts to an incorrect solution?  I am not talking about changing a large amount of data, just a few phone numbers.  It could be hacked by one of our government employees.  What happens if you dial an incorrect number, and it is a monitored number?

The same government that has lied or refused to answer every important question posed to them about subjects such as, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, illegal searches of new media locations, snooping on emails and using the tax law as a political weapon, now tells us to trust them.  They won’t use these records for anything other than the most clearly defined legal purposes.  It must be done just to keep us safe. This is the same government that has lied about the contents of the Obama Healthcare law, now telling us that they need to do this to keep us safe.

Safe from whom? Safe from what?  I am far more worried about what the Obama administration is doing than what some terrorist is up to.  Why haven’t you heard?  The war on terror has been won.  Do we just trust the federal government?