The Spy Factory

Country restricted. YouTube mirror http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdPpdu8OGDQ

What a coincidence... last night, I pulled up the NOVA site on my TV-connected PC and watched this episode. I had seen it before, and I was racking my brain trying to remember the name of it, until finally discovering it on the Wikipedia page about Room 641A.

It was the bit about the Asia traffic reaching US landfall at Morro Bay and going to the San Luis Obispo data center before routing up to San Francisco that had made me remember the episode years later, just because I have a personal love with that area of the CA coast.

Note: February 03, 2009

Watch 'Inside the NSA' first, since it goes into the history:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPh5Pe1Iwk

If you watch them in sequence it is almost a continuous timeline.

One of the whistleblowers at the end says she was listening to the content of the phone calls, too (from Americans). I hope nobody actually believed Obama when he said the phone calls are not listened to.

Clearly they take video-calls fully from the web, and chats, and e-mails. What would make phone calls so different if they already do that? Plus, he's hidden most of this so far, and who knows what else they aren't telling us (such as the fact that they are actually listening to phone calls from Americans).

That "analyst" that has all the data in front of him should be able to do whatever he wants with the data. There may be rules to not do that, but who's actually verifying it?