We now find ourselves operating in a strange paradigm where the government not only views the citizenry as suspects but treats them as suspects, as well. Thus, the news that the National Security Agency (NSA) is routinely operating outside of the law and overstepping its legal authority by carrying out surveillance on American citizens is not really much of a surprise. This is what happens when you give the government broad powers and allow government agencies to routinely sidestep the Constitution.
Indeed, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, these newly revealed privacy violations by the NSA are just the tip of the iceberg. Consider that the government's Utah Data Center (UDC), the central hub of the NSA's vast spying infrastructure, will be a clearinghouse and depository for every imaginable kind of information - whether innocent or not, private or public - including communications, transactions, and the like. In fact, anything and everything you've ever said or done, from the trivial to the damning - phone calls, Facebook posts, Tweets, Google searches, e-mails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc. - will be tracked, collected, catalogued, and analyzed by the UDC's supercomputers and teams of government agents.
By sifting through the detritus of your once-private life, the government will come to its own conclusions about who you are, where you fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise. Indeed, we are all becoming data-collected in government files. Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for "innocent" reasons, surveillance of all citizens gradually poisons the soul of a nation. Surveillance limits personal options - denies freedom of choice - and increases the powers of those who are in a position to enjoy the fruits of this activity.
