New database taps LinkedIn to watch the NSA watchers
Everyday people are transforming the way police officers behave thanks to the power of camera-enabled smartphones. Now, the advocacy group Transparency Toolkit wants to transform the way the national security state behaves using other common tech tools: Google and LinkedIn.
The spooks who store our calling metadata and online activity in a vast warehouse in Utah may seem, well, spooky. But at the end of the day those carrying out state-sponsored surveillance are just people, and people need jobs. We tend to think of intelligence professionals as lifetime government employees, but there are many people who are employed by private defense contractors. Edward Snowden, for example, worked for Booz Allen Hamilton when he obtained all the files he eventually shared with journalists.
