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So apparently NSA has been listening to our conversations, and - oy vey! - Israeli companies are involved in this too. Am I surprised? Not one bit. I understand that many, who are still dangerously ignorant and believe that governments have our best interests at heart, find this "revelation" rather shocking and outrageous, but the truth is that this is far from being new. I remember how many years ago I first read about a project called Echelon.
ECHELON, according to information in the European Parliament document, "On the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system)" was created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s[...]

Bamford describes the system as the software controlling the collection and distribution of civilian telecommunications traffic conveyed using communication satellites, with the collection being undertaken by ground stations located in the footprint of the downlink leg.[...]

The UK/USA intelligence community was assessed by the European Parliament (EP) in 2000 to include the signals intelligence agencies of each of the member states: UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands.[...]
Echelon was created long before the War [of] Terror and prior to the arrival of the Internet, meaning that back then there was no need for thorough "shaping of the public opinion", no need for media to be an overt whore for the military or intelligence agencies. NSA, CIA, Mossad, MI5, etc. just did their bloody thing and didn't worry much about whistleblowers. Of course, there were always trouble-makers, but everything was manageable (various coup d'états, COINTELPRO projects, assassinations, etc... piece of cake!), not to mention using the wonderfully silver-tongued concept of "plausible deniability", which came in handy, oh so often. In any event, in the public's eyes, intelligence agencies still had an aura of mystique about them. Hey, who wouldn't want to be a secret agent or a spy?

Well, there is mysterious about these morally rotten, devoid-of-conscience 'individuals'. They have no shame, no empathy and no regrets. Read L. Fletcher Prouty's The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World to learn more on the topic. Some of them may be patriots and care about their country, but when someone's sense of duty is being used to do pure evil, and this someone doesn't utilize his brain power to see what's really happening, then it's even worse than just being a slave of circumstances, because they could choose to direct their supposed high morals towards something that is actually beneficial for their fellow countrymen or for mankind.

But back to the issue at hand. With time, everyone forgot about Echelon or other similarly Orwellian surveillance programs. Now and then some public committees were convened to look into the spooks' activities, then posted their findings. For example,
In 2001, the Temporary Committee on the Echelon Interception System recommended to the European Parliament that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy, because economic espionage with ECHELON has been conducted by the US intelligence agencies.
Notice that this report was published on 11th of July, 2001. Once 9/11 happened, we 'entered a new world' where anything goes as far as these people are concerned. In any case, except for a small percentage of "conspiracy oriented" enthusiasts, no one really cared or paid attention to whatever was going on under the surface, or if their phone calls were recorded or not. Echelon and its keywords became legend, a piece of "secret" information that everyone with a "conspiratorial streak" knew. Other similar programs were also forgotten or explained away as being "discontinued".

But were they, really? Would the people who invested so much in covert activities and who built an extensive, deep and overreaching surveillance web simply stop? Or would they adapt to the changing times, lay low for a while and work on developing new strategies? In the age of Youtube, Twitter and Facebook, we all do the intelligence gathering work for these agencies, while real whistleblowers are quietly locked up. Sharing information, whether it's useful or useless, is the essence of the Internet era, so if there is no way to "stop the signal", they must instead manipulate the information flow to vector the herd mind in this direction, then another.

I'm no genius and no great analyst, meaning that if I sussed out the above, then the suits using Game Theory and similar psychopathic models to predict and control our actions have already discovered which psychological tactics work and don't work. They seek total control, something they can't actually achieve by watching and paying attention to everything everyone does, but which they wishfully 'predict' we will think and thus self-censor and self-police ourselves into accepting their 'total control'. They want us to feel that they are all-knowing and are thus in control of every situation, just as they would like us to believe that Earth Changes or the threat of cometary bombardment from space can be 'fixed' by flying less and painting asteroids.

With this in mind, it's very hard to not be skeptical about this NSA whisleblower affair. Did we really learn anything new here? Are we really surprised that the NSA and the corporations are working together against us?

I'm not saying that Edward Snowden isn't sincere and honest. It's quite likely that this young man did what he did because he actually has a conscience and sought to right a wrong. But we mustn't forget the Masters of Smoke and Mirrors, and that nothing is as it seems. In such situations we can only observe the results, and they haven't been that overwhelming, judging from previous attempts.

Today I read an article that mentions how "in the wake of recent revelations regarding the secret National Security Agency surveillance program known as PRISM, George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984 has seen a surge in sales on Amazon.com." I find it quite ironic, because this book's main line of force has to do with the deficiency in collective memory and the abundance of amnesia. We clearly forget who we are dealing with. But they surely haven't.
"One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived."~ Niccolo Machiavelli