Fugitive Snowden's Hopes of Leaving Moscow Airport Dashed

[JDPriestly]

30. And if they think your call record is interesting, let's say you are a senator and you call your

secretary or one of your fabulously rich donors late at night a very often, then they can subpoena the contents of your messages.

If you are a political activist, and they identify you and follow what you say on the internet in forums like DU, they can subpoena the content of your phone calls too.

Once they have your metadata, they know exactly who you are, what your interests are, what you buy, where you shop, who your friends are, who your doctor is, who your psychiatrist is (if you have one), and if they can view your internet records without a subpoena (which they probably can), they may be able to learn how high your blood pressure is, what your allergies are and all kinds of other useful details about you -- your blood test reports, everything.

And they are recording every phone call. They just don't access all of them. We have no idea how many of the phone calls they record they do access. All that is top secret.

So they keep secret from you what they know about your personal life. That is not democracy. In fact we cannot have meaningful citizen participation in government, not even meaningful elections at the most basic level, when we have an NSA collecting our metadata.

The collection of metadata has to stop. It is the greatest threat to our nation since the invention and dissemination of nuclear weapons. I think we should be asking whether General Alexander and his team in the NSA are on a par with some of the traitors that sold the secrets on how to make an atomic bomb to the Russians. I really see the collection of metadata and the secrecy as threats as great to democracy as any other potential totalitarian attack.

I'm not meaning to harm anyone, not General Alexander or anyone else, but if there ever was an imminent danger to our Constitution and our system of government, it is this ubiquitous surveillance.

When you fly and you have your x-ray or picture taken in that machine, what they get is the image of your iris. With that, they can identify you. It is more certain, as I understand it, than DNA. To have them keeping the records of our metadata on top of that is sheer treason. It is a coup, a silent coup.