Phone Call Garbage Collection
A great deal of the American scene seems to be aghast at the sudden revelation that for years the government has been using various communications carriers to listen in on phone conversations and the like of an entity called "millions of Americans."
Well, if all you mainstream people don't have anything else to worry about -- and there are plenty of much more important things to worry about, beginning first and foremost with climate change -- then have at it.
I think that what we see here, in all this outrage about the government collecting data on all our phone calls, emails, internet posts, and the like is nothing more than a mass display of gross self-importance, based on the highly mistaken but apparently universal notion that anything in one's phone calls is worth being collected by the NSA or anybody else, when what you have going over the phone lines everywhere and all the time are merely whole mountain ranges consisting of absolutely nothing but total inanities. And so on those grounds, if such information is being collected in such volume (the "millions of Americans" nonsense). then the outrage should instead be directed at the idea that the government would expend as much as one minute and one dollar delving into all those teratons of verbal offal.
--If that were possible, that is. But I doubt that the computer wizards have yet to devise machines with enough power and, if I may say so, enough stomach to sift through all the billions of phone conversations that are carried on daily to make any sense of it at all, and I suspect all this is just a dodge instead, to make us think that the powers that be are on the job, in the so-called "War on Terror," that, because of the clumsy way that his enemies and victims keep conducting it, Osama Bin Laden continues to win, even from his current perch at the bottom of the sea.
How much better it would be if a way could be found to eliminate ringing and ringtoning, to which we are expected and trained to respond instantly, like chimpanzees in a lab hoping for another goodie to come tumbling down the chute. Having a ringing device suddenly and periodically destroying one's peace and quiet -- now there you have a real invasion of privacy.
Well, if all you mainstream people don't have anything else to worry about -- and there are plenty of much more important things to worry about, beginning first and foremost with climate change -- then have at it.
I think that what we see here, in all this outrage about the government collecting data on all our phone calls, emails, internet posts, and the like is nothing more than a mass display of gross self-importance, based on the highly mistaken but apparently universal notion that anything in one's phone calls is worth being collected by the NSA or anybody else, when what you have going over the phone lines everywhere and all the time are merely whole mountain ranges consisting of absolutely nothing but total inanities. And so on those grounds, if such information is being collected in such volume (the "millions of Americans" nonsense). then the outrage should instead be directed at the idea that the government would expend as much as one minute and one dollar delving into all those teratons of verbal offal.
--If that were possible, that is. But I doubt that the computer wizards have yet to devise machines with enough power and, if I may say so, enough stomach to sift through all the billions of phone conversations that are carried on daily to make any sense of it at all, and I suspect all this is just a dodge instead, to make us think that the powers that be are on the job, in the so-called "War on Terror," that, because of the clumsy way that his enemies and victims keep conducting it, Osama Bin Laden continues to win, even from his current perch at the bottom of the sea.
How much better it would be if a way could be found to eliminate ringing and ringtoning, to which we are expected and trained to respond instantly, like chimpanzees in a lab hoping for another goodie to come tumbling down the chute. Having a ringing device suddenly and periodically destroying one's peace and quiet -- now there you have a real invasion of privacy.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 12:45 AM
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