EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT…SO WHY THE BEEF…
(…just ‘cause we do it better?)

A few years ago when we first began producing and posting these e-column commentaries of mine on this site, our readership following was at or near…zero. Which was okay, because we understand that the site was a work in progress, and, that it would take some time before our Net “presence” would gain any level of following.

Then it happened…as the first screams of outraged broke out about NSA’s surveillance activities, the media poured out blazing headlines of –SPYING ON AMERICANS!-. giving everyone hissy-fits about it all. Congressional reaction, as usual, was to angrily call for investigative committees to look into the matter (no doubt drooling at the prospect of all the photo-ops and sound-bites these would generate for future election campaigns). The White House, for its part, also did its usual thing whenever  its not so clean hands in such cases are exposed to public view. That is, grumpily decrying such mischaracterization of the situation as not being in the national interest…especially when it was holding the equivalent of four aces against two deuces for a big pot of an intel poker game.

Friends and associates were thus frantically calling me to ask what my take was on all that, and why I wasn’t showing any signs of outrage or concerns about it. As I recall, in my attempt to calm that hysteria of theirs, my response didn’t go over too well with them because I said: Hot Damn! I finally have an audience…of one! Needless to say all that  just caused more outraged hysteria among them, making most to go off in a huff, and some, still not speaking to me to this today. But I didn’t mind. At least now that damned phone would quit ringing, my e-mail would be less cluttered, and, I have the peace and quiet to ponder the all the ramifications of the issue.

As I saw it at the time, if NSA was so convinced it was necessary to assign some of its worker-bees to monitor my maverick commentaries posted on this site, and thus broadcast over the Net for all the world to see…then that simply confirmed my validity as a source of Op-Ed content. Of course, I’ve since been disabused of such an ego-centric perspective by one of my hotshot IT acquaintances who, very kindly, explained the realities involved.  My content output was simply a microcosm of the meta data that NSA’s system collected every hour of the day. Because of the state-of-the-art of its technology, it really didn’t have much choice. Its system was much like a vacuum cleaner on steroids, sucking up anything and everything out there in the ether-net world, without the capacity on the intake end to differentiate between a speck of dust and a fur ball from a pet. Everything went into its bag of data…private or not.

In short, NSA’s system sucks up a hell of a load of mostly trash data, while trying to pinpoint any nasty stuff that might lurking in it. By comparison dumpster diving is a snap. So it’s not really a deliberate or conscious effort to “spy”, but rather a question of properly upgrading its methods of triage and filtering out the critical data from that load of trash. Right now, all it can do is simply pile up the trash much like a virtual landfill…for possible intel nugget mining at a later time.

As for the problem of how this lets NSA “spy” on friends and allies, and how accidental that might be is an open question. So far its response to the present furor about it seems to be…everyone else is doing it…so why the beef…just ‘cause we do it better? Bah! Humbug!

Okay, NSA…forget about it…so just look over here…and apply a bit more scrutiny my way instead…I need a boost for my traffic stats…what the hell do I pay taxes for!

CENTURION