NSA Spokesman Accidentally Admits that the Government Is Spying On Virtually All Americans!

• NSA Spokesman Accidentally Admits that the Government Is Spying On Virtually All Americans! 
  by WashingtonsBlog 
  NSA Spying:  A Matter of Degree
  We have long noted that the government is spying on just about everything we do. The NSA has pretended that it only spies on a small number of potential terrorists.  But NSA Deputy Director John C. Inglis inadvertently admitted that the NSA could spy on just about all Americans.
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  Inglis told Congress last week that the agency conducts “three-hop” analysis. Three-hop (also known as “three degree”) analysis means:
  The government can look at the phone data of a suspected terrorist, plus the data of all of the contacts, then all of those people’s contacts, and all of those people’s contacts.
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  This means that a lot of people could be caught up in the dragnet:
  If the average person calls 40 unique people, three-hop analysis could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.
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  Given that there are now approximately 875,000 people in the government’s database of suspected terrorists – including many thousands of Americans – every single American living on U.S. soil could easily be caught up in the dragnet.
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  For example, 350 million Americans divided by 2.5 million Americans caught up in dragnet for each suspected terrorist, means that a mere 140 potential terrorists could lead to spying on all Americans.   There are tens of thousands of Americans listed as suspected terrorists … including just about anyone who protests anything that the government or big banks do.
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  As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes:
  According to an unusually blunt Senate investigation of so-called “fusion centers” released last month, the TIDE [i.e. suspected terrorist] database is also full of information of innocent people that have nothing to do with terrorism. The report gave examples of: a TIDE profile of a person whom the FBI had already cleared of any connection to terrorism, a TIDE profile of a two-year old-boy, and even a TIDE profile of Ford Motor Company.
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  read more!

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