The NSA: All Up in Your Business With a New Domesday Book

Let's put it this way: If the NSA is using all the data it is collecting, it is probably building a Myspace-like social networking picture of everyone in the United States - and as much as possible- the entire world (because they are only limited by domestic intelligence laws, oh, and the Constitution of the United States) but one that can be searched for any purpose, as well as finding terrorists.

This mild commentary from Newsweek, social networking analysis, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's summary (who are suing AT&T), and the ACLU's Safe and Free page on surveillance, should chill you to your bones. Just the contact, time and subject information alone on the phone calls, email, and internet footprints of most of the American population would make a database that builds on social network analysis to monitor, indirectly, most of the important substance of your life.

With the following information:

The name, location, and time and date of all your phone calls.
The date, address and subject line of all your emails. (This was litigated.)
A collection of even the ordinary Google results on you.
A collection of all your public records; I think we can assume that vital statistics, IRS, Social Security, and other federal records have been included in this database, although privacy laws prohibit much of this information exchange.

What it means is that the government is building a database that can give a complete profile of you, everyone you know, and when you knew them; with this is should be able to build a fairly accurate picture of the following:

Who your friends are, and the bulk of their connections.
Who your family is, and the bulk of their connections.
Your religious associations, and probable beliefs.
All your work activities with an electronic footprint.
Your political contributions and activities.
Your medical history.
Your financial status, and what you buy.
What kind of books, articles, and communist websites you read.
Everything you've searched for.

And not incidently:

Who you sleep with. My raw suspicion is that, assuming the resources were put into a search and analyzed by a kind of statistical soup analysis (call length, target, frequency, plus email subject lines, plus internet footprints, plus credit card use) this database would reveal many or even most American sexual encounters.

I am going ahead and making suppositions about the spying program, simply because every time I thought I went too far in the past, I was wrong. I'm sure there are plenty of technical reasons this isn't being done to it's full degree - believe me, these problems are being solved as fast as money can solve them.

I don't doubt that the NSA is not generally in the habit of actually performing these kinds of searchs on Americans daily lives. But with total contempt for the law already obvious, the incredible power offered by this ability will not go unused long.

All you have to do is imagine J. Edgar Hoover's uses for this technical ability. What it does is make an absolutist police state easy, if it desired to be used for that purpose. Take that queasy feeling you get from not knowing what's in your credit report and multiply it by an order of magnitude.

It is noted that when the Domesday book was created, William the Conqueror was busy killing about 10% of the population of England. Information is invariably gathered by governments to extend their power.