CitizenFour - a documentary covering Edward Snowden's leaks of NSA material showing how the US government has been systematically spying, wholesale, on the communications of the modern world.
As one of the characters featured says, the US has a well-established criterion for bugging citizens' phone calls, emails, google search history etc, known as 'probable cause' - ie, it believes there is good reason to suspect the subject to be up to no good. This has now been abandoned. To all intents and purposes, the new criterion is 'no particular cause required'. Ie, it now employs the capability of modern data-gathering and analysis technology to routinely hoover up and sift everything. Which it can then leverage for its own purposes, whether in suppressing political protest or helping US Corporations gain an edge over foreign competitors. True, it does still need some kind of judicial sanction to spy thus on communications between US citizens which take place entirely within the US; but any communications that cross the national border lose all such protection. And any communications involving non-US citizens are subject to no oversight or legal review whatsoever.
And what is our government doing to protect us from such super-snooping? Well, to say 'nothing' doesn't come close. Indeed, according to Snowden, GCHQ exceeds even the zeal of America's NSA in its snooping, operating 'probably the most intrusive and systematic spying in the world'.
News International eat your heart out.
Chilling stuff, brilliantly presented.
