The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.

“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.

Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited.

There is a basic truism of such voyeuristic surveillance: it is indicative of inefficiency in government.

Efficiency in a government determines whether it will survive or fail. It is based on the simple ratio of what a government promises to do, to what promises it actually keeps. Oddly enough, it depends far less on what is being promised. So if a government only promises to do 10 unimportant things, and it does each one well, it is more likely to survive than a government that promises all things to all people, and delivers little.

In real terms, when a government is impotent about the big things that government is supposed to do, it instead focuses on surveillance of the minutiae of people’s lives, gathering vast amounts of useless data.

Governments of this kind are also addicted to shortage, real or imagined. Because they believe they have control if they ration everything of value. This invariably fails, because if anything is in abundance, it becomes an alternative currency, restoring choice to the public.

Right now, the US government has 17 major intelligence agencies, 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations in the United States that are working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, and that the intelligence community as a whole includes 854,000 people holding top-secret clearances.

The government also has over 100 federal police agencies, and even that was not enough, so has now authorized military weapons and SWAT teams to any non-police, non-military, and non-intelligence agency that wants them. This includes agencies like the Department of Education.

The real value of what all of this multibillion dollar boondoggle accomplishes is remarkably little, compared to the relatively small and efficient agencies that existed before. And the inefficiency rears its ugly head because the real threats are lost in the mountain of useless data.

To put it bluntly, they are missing what the terrorists are doing, because they are so intensely focused on how much toilet paper is being consumed by older middle aged single women with cats. And they do not want to be accused of profiling.

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