comrade1

Ha ha! I know who you are.

Tomorrow, after your meds, read what you wrote and you will see that you are arguing against yourself. I'm only responding to you so that others here can see how insane you are.

Tomorrow if you wish to continue this debate we can do so in person with Roberts rules of debate, the loser with their head between their knees.

This was an interesting and early revelation, but it wasn't until the Snowden documents that we understood what this closet really meant. We had no idea the government was recording every phone conversation in the u.s., every email, etc... We still had some hope that the rule of law as being followed and that this closet was just a way to make targeted surveillance easier.

First, I'm American. I've worked on NSA and DoD projects, and I've worked for PGP. I now live in Switzerland.

You only have to look at the consequences of the Snowden revelations. Nothing has really changed - some meaningless legislation was passed that moves the phone metadata recording to the phone companies from the NSA, but even then it's not clear that its stopped - the NSA data center in Utah where those conversations were recorded doesn't seem to be shutting down. I would bet the phone conversation, skype conversation, etc recording is still going on since it was never explicitly addressed anywhere in legislation.

And my comment about Americans being Authoritarian is nothing new - they've long considered to be Authoritarian.

No, not really with ECHELON. That would have required all phone calls in the u.s. to be routed outside of the u.s., and really the only cooperating country was the UK, even though Canada was part of the group. It wasn't practical to route all communications from the u.s. through the UK, and it probably would have been noticed.

Spying on the u.n. based on terrorism legislation is a revelation. Recording of all telephone conversations in the u.s. is a revelation. Recording of all emails, skype, sms, etc is a revelation.

Before discovery of that room everyone knew that there was close cooperation between the telecoms and the government, but we had no idea it was this close and we were shocked at especially the recording of all phone conversations in the u.s.

Hopefully companies and organizations like the UN start moving away from AT&T. AT&T is a publicly traded company and so the only thing they understand is profit and loss.

The snowden releases cost u.s. tech companies $100B+, including a 10% drop in Cisco quarterly revenues. Hopefully this continues as multinationals continue to move their business outside the u.s.

Let the u.s. government spy on Americans all they want since Americans seem to like being spied on, while the rest of us move on. I know that mindset doesn't match many of the people here on HN, but Americans are mostly Authoritarian and seem to like the comfort they feel from programs like this.