cas wrote:"One account" to help connect all the dots. To help make all the information they're been collecting easier to collate. Google does it for marketing purposes.... of course Google freely cooperates with the NSA. I've long wondered if the NSA was where Google got/gets a lot of its funding early on.
Bingo.
All search engine companies and all major telecommunications companies bend over for the NSA to enter as they please under threat of legislative penalty and license forfeiture, (aka coersion, blackmail, strong-arming, terroristic threats
from government).
The primary lever is that communications and wiretap laws have been deliberately left to gather dust in the march of technology, and the only laws that change are those aimed at preventing persons and private enities from invading privacy, but not those barring government from the same activities. As an example, it's illegal for a private person to 'stalk' another person, but a police department or government agancy can do it without warrant and without penalty. The only government employees punished are those who pizz off the good old boys by crossing the thin blue line. Whistleblowers.
It's probable that more warrants are required to open a single mailbox and steam open an envelope than are required to collect metadata from the email of every American household connected to the internet, because there are clear laws written to that end.
The federal government knows this. Specifically the congress and executive know it, and they cooperate to ensure that there are no effective laws to protect civilian communications privacy from government snoops.
Government office attracts the power-mad, yet it's people who just want to be left alone to live life on their own terms who are considered dangerous.
History teaches that it's a small window in which people can fight back before it is too dangerous to fight back.
