Check out this appearance by Hollywood actor Shia Labeouf on the Jay Leno show back in 2008 plugging his latest movie at the time, "Eagle Eye." During Labeouf's appearance, he tells Leno that an FBI expert working as a consultant on the production of the movie shared with him the extent of the government's surveillance of private citizens at that time, which he said included recording one out of every phone calls we make. To prove his point, the FBI consultant played for him a call Labeouf had made two years prior to the making of the movie. The opening paragraph from Wikipedia of the plot for the movie reads:
Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) is a Stanford University dropout who learns that his identical twin brother Ethan, a US Air Force first lieutenant, has been killed. Following the funeral, Jerry is surprised to find $750,000 in his bank account. He later finds his apartment filled with weapons, ammonium nitrate, classified DOD documents, and forged passports. He receives a phone call from a woman who says the FBI is about to arrest him and that he needs to run.So was anyone prosecuted for leaking this information to a Hollywood actor discussing specific techniques of government surveillance? You know the answer. Just like nobody in the Obama administration was prosecuted for leaking classified information about the supposed capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden for the making of "Zero Dark Forty." Hat tip to Gawker.
Listen to Charles Strange, father of Michael Strange, one of the members of Navy Seal Team 6, which carried out the mission to capture Bin Laden, as he blames Obama administration official leaks for the death of his son and many of his fellow Seal Team members in Afghanistan.
2 comments:
Key point here -- the leaker played back a phone call.
What I've presumed is that the admission of recording 'meta data' about calls is a lie by omission.
To be sure they record the meta data as they admit. I fully expect we will learn they have been recording the CONTENT as well all along and THAT part is still being kept a secret.
This whistle blower is getting all of the attention, but there are others who have come forward in the past several years claiming exactly what Shia describes he was told by this FBI consultant--that all digital communications are captured. From what these other NSA whistle blowers have claimed, they capture the voice and text communications in their entirety. There are algorithms programmed into the Prism software that flags communications discussing certain subjects for current view, while all others are archived in an easily searchable format. If you are discussing doing certain illegal activities that are rated for high scrutiny in either e-mail communications or telephone calls, you can bet it will come to the government's attention almost immediately. This is one of the reasons I simply don't buy anything the government has told us about these two guys they tell us carried out the Boston Marathon bombings. These guys were flagged and would have been monitored in real time using the government's vast surveillance capabilities. The only way they could have gotten by with these bombings is if the persons monitoring them wanted to make sure the bombings took place, or they wanted to make it appear that they were carried out by these two individuals. This level of surveillance is not used for purposes of protecting us; it's used for far more sinister purposes. I believe that virtually every member of Congress has been or will be blackmailed at some point with information the NSA has gathered. We've reached a point where only persons who are compromised are elected to public office. People who are clean and can't be blackmailed cannot be elected to any significant office in this country any more. All of this information gathering responsibility has been moved off the books with these private contractors who work for companies controlled by the people pulling the strings of government from the shadows.
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