All Your Emails Are Being Stored by the Government (and May be Used Against You)

Recently, a man named William Binney sat down for a remarkably scary interview with RT, an online magazine.

Binney worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) for many years before resigning in 2001, stating that he didn’t want to be a part of an agency that he believed was betraying the Constitution.

In his interview with RT, Binney makes the jaw-dropping claim that nearly every email sent by a U.S. citizen is being captured and stored by the FBI in huge data warehouses.

In the interview, Binney states:

The FBI has access to…the emails of virtually everybody in the country. All the congressional members are on the surveillance too, no one is excluded. So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason – they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all.

Why the Government is Collecting Your Emails

Ever since 9/11, the government has been in the business of collecting huge amounts of data on U.S. citizens and, as they say, business is booming. The FBI and NSA have leveraged the Patriot Act to collect huge amounts of private, personal data without any warrant or court oversight at all.

But here’s what’s interesting: even the FBI has no idea what they are collecting.

There’s simply too much data being collecting for them to analyze it properly. But because they have all this data, and a green light from Congress to collect it via the Patriot Act, they figure they can just hold on to it until they DO find a reason for it.

Binney explains why you should be concerned:

If you ever get on the enemies list, like [General] Petraeus did or… for whatever reason, than you can be drained into that surveillance… The original program that we put together to handle this was to be able to identify terrorists anywhere in the world and alert anyone that they were in jeopardy. We would have been able to do that by encrypting everybody’s communications except those who were targets. So, in essence you would protect their identities and the information about them until you could develop probable cause, and once you showed your probable cause, then you could do a decrypt and target them. And we could do that and isolate those people all alone. It wasn’t a problem at all. There was no difficulty in that.

However, the government chose to not protect our identities and did not put those encryption protections in place. And while this program started during the Bush administration, the Obama administration has signed off on this.

In essence, the government is saying they have the right to collect vast amounts of information about you, information that nearly all of us assumes is private, and store it until they decide they want to use it against you.

What if the government read all of your mail? Or listened to all of your personal phone calls?

And not only that, but stored this information and used it against you when the opportunity arose? The outcry and backlash would undoubtedly be huge and swift. So why aren’t people upset about the government doing the exact same thing to our online correspondence?

Do you ever worry about a future dystopia in which a vast surveillance state watches our every move? It looks like we may already live in one, except most of us don’t realize it.