Hey Heather, this is pretty much just for you so yea.
I kind of agree that the NSA leaks aren’t really like OMG ITS THE END OF THE WORLD type news, especially when you have children in Gaza, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Burma, Sri Lanka and all the other places I’ve seen you talk about. What I’ve been thinking for a while though, on top of what’s more important between human lives and spying, is that all the NSA stuff, even if it weren’t for the leaks, is that we could still find out quite a bit of what we’ve seen in the leaks. After all, the only way to hide information is to control it, meaning you have to control everyone who’s ever seen it in order to keep it secret. As an example, the Manning video, although not NSA stuff, was kept secret, but we didn’t entirely need Manning to leak the video to know about it. Like a crime investigation, you interview all the witnesses. There were probably people in or near the area of the helicopter shooting that saw it happen first hand or at least heard it happen. Speaking to those witnesses would have lifted the veil of secrecy of the incident without having to leak anything. Similar to the shooting down of the plane over Ukraine. The U.S government is already trying to keep everything a secret and will try to classify investigative findings as top secret in the name of national security, but that doesn’t change the fact that there were likely people on the ground who witnessed it. I don’t know if I’m making much sense, but the main point I’m trying to get across is that despite all the secrets, you can’t actually hide history, you can’t make something disappear as if it didn’t happen. There are always witnesses or people who know/hear things. Not one person may have all the info like a whistleblower like Snowden did, but there is always info out there just waiting for someone to connect the dots to other bits of info to create the big picture. Plus, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if a company like Microsoft makes computers, and the government obviously needs computers to function, that there are going to be backdoors. If a company of any kind does business with government agencies, it’s safe to assume there are shady things going on that violate our rights. At least, that’s my opinion. Anyways yea, I’m not the best at putting into words the thoughts that I’m trying to say, but I hope you kind of get what I’m saying, in that no information is truly ever “secret” it’s just a matter of searching for it in the right places.
adamkendall2 