The NSA is turning the internet into a total surveillance system

Last week's revelations are a disturbing harbinger of future surveillance. Two months ago, this newspaper reported that the US government has been forcing American telecommunications companies to turn over the call records of every one of their customers "on an ongoing daily basis", to allow the NSA to later search those records when it has a reason to do so. The government has since defended the program, in part on the theory that Americans' right to privacy is not implicated by the initial acquisition of their phone records, only by their later searching.
That legal theory is extraordinarily dangerous because it would allow the NSA to acquire virtually all digital information today simply because it might possibly become relevant tomorrow. The surveillance program revealed by the New York Times report goes one step further still. No longer is the government simply collecting information now so that the data is available to search, should a reasonable suspicion arise at some point in the future; the NSA is searching everything now – in real time and without suspicion – merely on the chance that it finds something of interest.
          ***Read article at The Guardian***