According to an article by Sara Fischer and Scott Rosenberg on 26 Aug 2019 published in
Axios , both government and tech companies are getting all of our personal un-protected data both ways - all-the-time, using crisis-after-crises to break into troves and treasures of our 'protected' private data
Government wants access to personal data while it pushes privacy
"Over the past two years, the U.S. government has tried to rein in how major tech companies use the personal data they've gathered on their customers.
At the same time, government agencies are themselves seeking to harness those troves of data.
Why it matters: Tech platforms use personal information to target ads, whereas the government can use it to prevent and solve crimes, deliver benefits to citizens — or (illegally) target political dissent. . .
> Investigations of specific crimes are the most common situations that pit the government's law enforcement needs against tech companies' privacy rules.
> Experience demonstrates that gathering stockpiles of data holds a magnetic attraction for government.
- In the post 9/11 era, the National Security Agency began a long and controversial program, widely seen as extra-legal, to broadly monitor phone and other telecommunications messages.
Fortunately, the two reporters include this somewhat outdated time-dated link from Mother Jones.
It's from that fateful day 911.
Here's the forward link > https://www.motherjones.com/nsa-timeline-surveillance
Politics September 11, 2013
How We Got From 9/11 to Massive NSA Spying on Americans: A Timeline
Total Information Awareness, PRISM, encryption back doors, a “black budget” of billions, and everything in between
"Recent news reports exposed how the National Security Agency has been collecting millions of Americans’ phone data and online communications.
Here’s how we got from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the massive domestic spying operations of today:
Two inserts:
| 2009 | 
NSA headquarters NSA
June: A federal judge upholds immunity for telecoms that handed over private information. The same day, Facebook starts participating in the NSA’s PRISM program. |
| 2011 | January: The NSA begins construction of a massive, 1 million square foot, $2 billion data center in Utah. “Just as we defend our lands, America also needs to also defend our cyberspace,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) says at the groundbreaking ceremony. It is scheduled to be completed in September 2013. May: The Patriot Act is renewed and signed by President Barack Obama. May: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee has access to classified materials, warns: “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.” |
| 2013 | March: Wyden asks DNI chief James Clapper in a congressional hearing if the NSA collects information on millions of Americans. June: The Guardian reports that the NSA has been collecting millions of Verizon customers’ call data. A day later, the Guardian and the Washington Post reveal the existence of PRISM. Now under pressure from the revelations, Clapper admits that he lied in his congressional testimony. June: “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about,” Obama says at a speech in Silicon Valley. “But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.” He adds, “”You can’t have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” August 15: Based on more Snowden documents, the Post reports that the NSA had “broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year” since 2008. Sens. Wyden and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) say the reported violations represent “just the tip of a larger iceberg.” August 29: The Post publishes details of the United States’ $52.6 billion intelligence “black budget,” more than $18 billion of which is dedicated to the CIA and NSA data collection and analysis operations. September 5: The New York Times, Guardian, and ProPublica report that the NSA has engineered ways to foil virtually all encryption protecting the average person’s “everyday communications in the Internet age.” September 9: Der Spiegel reports that the NSA has the capability to bypass security features of iPhones, Android devices, and BlackBerrys, allowing it to access contacts, location data, photos and perhaps credit card numbers and passwords. |
FACT:
Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and the wealthy wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.
Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone.
If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2019 demands.
_________________________________________________________________________
