Why the NSA needs your e-mail contact list (and everyone else's too)

NSA boss General Keith Alexander spells it out; "you need the haystack to find the needle."

Well carry on then General. I've been in a bit of a unwarranted flap about the illegality and immorality of the entire spectrum of spy-on-everybody-all-the-time initiatives, to say nothing of their sheer Orwellian overkill, but the impeccable logic of your rationale has won me over.

God bless America!

Technology and "treason"

Not that many years ago, if you wanted to spirit a million pages of top secret stuff out of a government facility you would have needed a forklift and a truck.

And helpers.

And a window of opportunity.

Thanks to the advances in information technology, now you can do it with a memory stick that you can hide anywhere anytime.

With over 1.4 million Americans enjoying "top secret" security clearance, it's open season on state secrets. Snowden and Manning will soon enough be followed by many others.

No state secret is safe.

Ironically, the biggest "secret" spilled by Snowden has been the complicity of big telecom and big IT in betraying their customers to the government via the "PRISM" snooping initiative. Those are the very corporations who have unceasingly trumpeted the democratizing influence of their technology!

Even though the revelations about Prism expose the bankruptcy of the tech giants' commitment to democracy, their technology may inadvertently make their fraudulent claims come true. A state that can't keep secrets is a state that can't lie to its people.

That can only be a good thing, at least for anyone who believes in democracy.