NSA act like they are at war with ordinary US citizens

It’s almost like an arms race right now in the US between the spies and the ordinary people, who just want to be private and pay their taxes and do their jobs, Chris Kitze, founder of Unseen encrypted secure server, told RT.

RT: Reports have emerged claiming the NSA and GCHQ actually work to hack the codes protecting data like e-mail and bank records. Given the assistance of major service providers, how much data can the spies access?

Chris Kitze: Probably all of it. I think your listeners and viewers should assume that everything that goes through the NSA has been broken in real time. I think they want the ability to look back in time to see somebody and find a pattern. And so, they’re looking at who this person was in contact with, what they said to that person, those kinds of things. The problem here in the United States is that it’s actually against the law, it’s called wiretapping. And you can do it when you want, but you can’t do it on a huge scale. Like, apparently, they’ve been doing.

RT: Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on this, so what kind of information can the NSA or GCHQ get its hands on? Is it all just to listen-in on militants’ phone calls? Industrial Espionage?

CK: Absolutely. It’s not only industrial espionage, think about the value of how many people have access to this huge treasury of data. There are 1.4 million people in the US who have top-secret clearance. Are all those people angels? I don’t think so.

So, you have the issue of who has access to this data. And Mr. Snowden was able to get quite a bit of it, so obviously, he is not alone there. There are at least thousands or probably tens of thousands of other people who do it. What is it valuable for? For political blackmail, it’s hugely valuable. If you have all these private conversations from a political opponent, think what you could do in every election.

Think about what happens with businesses. Let’s say, I’m working for Goldman Sachs as a banker, and there’s a company that’s going to be sold to the public – and the prices are going to get up to $20 a share tomorrow, based on the news. If I had that news privately through this kind of spy system, before anybody else does, how valuable is that! That’s tens of millions, hundreds of millions dollars every day that can be made on stuff like that.

RT: Where does this leave both the American public and Internet users around the globe - do ways exist to protect data?


Con't @ [link to rt.com]