Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower and former AG Mukassey debate Snowden
Daniel Ellsberg, co-author of the famous internal Defense Department study “The Pentagon Papers,” and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey debate: When Edward Snowden exposed the existence of some of the National Security Agency’s intelligence gathering operations, did he help or harm America?
Attorney General Michael Mukasey repeats the NSA talking point that meta-data is meaningless. Even Rush Limbaugh knows that is bunk. Here’s an informative discussion Rush had with a Telecom executive shortly after the initial NSA revelations a few weeks ago.
The advent of mobile phones has created a situation where a phone number equals a person, so the phone number’s a much better index for getting everything you know about a person…
RUSH: This is Matt from Miami and it says you are an exec in the telecommunications industry, right?
CALLER: Yes, that’s right, Rush. Thank you so much. It’s been 15 years listening to you, and I’m thrilled that my expertise and your expertise may actually intersect and allow me to make you look good.
RUSH: Well, thanks very much. That is the purpose of a caller, and let’s hope you can do it.
CALLER: Well, first off, I think it’s important to think about motivations. Our president, like all the Democratic presidents, would love to be Bill Clinton after he leaves office, and to do that you need to have power. You need to be a kingmaker. A database can do that. I left a multibillion-dollar phone company to start a smaller company, and our core product is a product that looks up phone numbers instantly when people make or receive phone calls and uses that information to populate details on the screen for people to use in selling or supporting customers, like their name, their address, the value of their home, their marital status, approximate income, approximate assets, cards they have registered to the address they live at, whether they’re in foreclosure, Facebook profiles, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter profiles associated with that number. The advent of mobile phones has created a situation where a phone number equals a person, so the phone number’s a much better index for getting everything you know about a person than something that’s less easy and less public like a Social Security number. And so my company sells that information to companies so that they can know who’s calling and route that call better and offer appropriate products or not.