I worked at the NSA a couple years and saw Vint Cerf talk at a meeting at the NSA in 2009. Cerf was being asked for his opinion on using hadoop at the NSA. One thing he did say was that he was there as a salesman, to sell google products to the NSA. Also the google tech talk "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" is illuminating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

I worked at the NSA a couple years and saw Vint Cerf talk at a meeting at the NSA in 2009. Cerf was being asked for his opinion on using hadoop at the NSA. One thing he did say was that he was there as a salesman, to sell google products to the NSA. Also the google tech talk "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" is illuminating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

A recent foia request by propublica for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a time period that the TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA resulted in the following response from the NSA (the supercomputing powerhouse) "There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately.... [the system is] a little antiquated and archaic." A former employee of the department of labor statistics said that the department's entire data set fits on a single hard drive. Note that in the 90’s the IRS was still using vacuum tube technology. The National Security Agency in the last couple of years just started building modern data centers in Utah. There is abundant evidence provided by the Thomas Drake prosecution and the 9-11 commission report that information management is a problem in the intelligence community. Does google have better information management technology than the NSA? If corporations do have better data on the U.S. economy and population than the U.S. government doesn't it make sense to be governed by these corporations, ie government sachs? Is it not true that he who has the information has the power? And of course doesn't that create a clear “moral hazard”and “regulatory capture” situation as the corporations are regulated by the gov? Regulatory capture is basically when the cops and judges are owned, the book "13 bankers" goes over the issue for wall street. Isn’t corporate control of government part of what occupy wall street activists protested?

A recent foia request by propublica for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a time period that the TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA resulted in the following response from the NSA (the supercomputing powerhouse) "There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately.... [the system is] a little antiquated and archaic." A former employee of the department of labor statistics said that the department's entire data set fits on a single hard drive. Note that in the 90’s the IRS was still using vacuum tube technology. The National Security Agency in the last couple of years just started building modern data centers in Utah. There is abundant evidence provided by the Thomas Drake prosecution and the 9-11 commission report that information management is a problem in the intelligence community. Does google have better information management technology than the NSA? If corporations do have better data on the U.S. economy and population than the U.S. government doesn't it make sense to be governed by these corporations, ie government sachs? Is it not true that he who has the information has the power? And of course doesn't that create a clear “moral hazard”and “regulatory capture” situation as the corporations are regulated by the gov? Regulatory capture is basically when the cops and judges are owned, the book "13 bankers" goes over the issue for wall street. Isn’t corporate control of government part of what occupy wall street activists protested?

If the the major U.S. news organizations promoted journalists for writing insightful, well researched articles on U.S.-middle east relations there would be plenty journalists writing about it whether or not they were surveilled by the NSA. The mainstream media (propaganda) organizations are more to blame for censorship in the U.S. than the NSA. Take a look at the problems faced by Harvard and University of Chicago professors publishing their work on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N294FMDok98

A recent foia request by propublica for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a time period that the TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA resulted in the following response from the NSA (the supercomputing powerhouse) "There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately.... [the system is] a little antiquated and archaic." A former employee of the department of labor statistics said that the department's entire data set fits on a single hard drive. Note that in the 90’s the IRS was still using vacuum tube technology. The National Security Agency in the last couple of years just started building modern data centers in Utah. There is abundant evidence provided by the Thomas Drake prosecution and the 9-11 commission report that information management is a problem in the intelligence community. Does google have better information management technology than the NSA? If corporations do have better data on the U.S. economy and population than the U.S. government doesn't it make sense to be governed by these corporations, ie government sachs? Is it not true that he who has the information has the power? And of course doesn't that create a clear “moral hazard”and “regulatory capture” situation as the corporations are regulated by the gov? Regulatory capture is basically when the cops and judges are owned, the book "13 bankers" goes over the issue for wall street. Isn’t corporate control of government part of what occupy wall street activists protested?

Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, was executed by the U.S. government in 2010 without being tried in a U.S. court. You don't have to be convicted of anything to be executed by the USG. I believe Anwar was primarily a propagandist for al-Qaida, al-Qaida is primarily a U.S. defined organization. Because al-Qaida is a U.S. defined organization it gives the U.S. a lot of power in deciding who is considered a member. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/22/white-house-drone-strikes-us-citizens