To those people who are now citing the US government as the guardian against the data-thief, Elon Musk
May 25, 2025
∙ Paid
I discussed the charge made against Musk—that he stole or is in the process of stealing enormous chunks of private data on US residents—stealing it in his DOGE work.
Whether or not that’s true, claiming the federal government is the holy guardian of citizen-data poised AGAINST MUSK is absurd. Yes, there are actually people who believe this.
Remember Ed Snowden?
Oops.
He took (estimates vary) from 200,000 to over a million documents from the National Security Agency in 2013—most of them detailing NSA spying operations. Spying on Americans and people all over the world.
Snowden: “The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system, and it filters them, and it analyzes them, and it measures them, and it stores them for periods of time... Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere.”
Snowden: “The biggest problem we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance, where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents’ communication every single day.”
Snowden: “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email.”
Remember the NSA program called PRISM? It gave the government direct access to the servers of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube.
How about NSA’s Boundless Informant? It involved a SECRET court order commanding Verizon to surrender the phone records of millions of US citizens every day.
Then there was XKeyscore. It was a tool that could be used to collect virtually EVERYTHING happening on the Internet.
But don’t worry, the US government is keeping your personal data safe and secure, and has NEVER EVER spied on you. It doesn’t care what you say or do.
And it would NEVER cross-reference its databases to gain more information about you. (This is what Musk is accused of engineering and stealing for the benefit of him and his close tech pals.)
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