New NSA Revelations Another Limited Hangout Whitewash

Mainstream media still refuses to acknowledge Echelon has listened in on all communications since 1990′s

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
December 4, 2013

In unveiling new Edward Snowden revelations about NSA spying, the Washington Post has once again whitewashed the fact that the content of all our communications have been stored and analyzed under the Echelon program since the 1990′s.

Image: iPhone User (Wikimedia Commons).

The new details concern how, “The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world.”

However, the report reveals itself to be little more than an exercise in soft-peddling when it claims that, “The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally.”

This notion that the NSA just accidentally happens to record the locations of Americans using data from their cellphones, and is not deliberately engaging in domestic surveillance, is yet another example of damage control by the establishment.

The new revelations once again pale in comparison to what we have known since the 90′s – that the NSA is deliberately storing the content of all our phone calls, emails and other data under the Echelon program.

In 1999, the Australian government admitted that they were part of an NSA-led global intercept and surveillance program called Echelon in alliance with the US and Britain that could listen to “every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission,” on the planet.

In addition, a 2001 European Parliament report stated that “within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted” by the NSA.

As former NSA employee turned whistleblower William Binney has emphasized on multiple occasions, the space required to store mere metadata and not actual content of conversations is minimal.

The reason the NSA is building huge data centers which cover 1.5 million square feet, like the facility in Bluffdale, Utah, is because the agency is storing actual content of phone calls, online chats and conversations.

Indeed, according to Binney, the NSA is analyzing conversations in real time and has a Google-style search capability for all our communications.

Binney’s revelations were for more hardcore than anything Edward Snowden released yet he was largely ignored by the mainstream media, whereas Snowden has attracted an infinitely greater amount of attention.

Although Snowden’s revelations are an important part of the NSA spying puzzle, their content routinely allows the mainstream media to spin, sideline and downplay the true scope of mass domestic surveillance.