Pinwhale: The U.S. Government Database That Reads Your Email

U.S. intelligence agencies are being accused of deliberately spying on the emails of American citizens, including those of former president Bill Clinton.  Details are now emerging about a colossal "big brother" database system that scans millions of American email messages.  The truth is that if we all knew the level to which our privacy is being violated by the government most of us would be absolutely horrified.  The database system is know by the code name Pinwale, and it is utilized by the National Security Agency to intercept and examine massive amounts of email that pass through U.S. telecommunications networks.

The NSA has officially confirmed that Pinwale exists, although they are refusing to talk about the latest allegations or about how the database works.

Supporting these latest allegations is the whistleblower testimony of a former N.S.A. analyst who claims to have been trained in 2005 for a program in which the NSA routinely intercepted and examined millions of domestic emails without court warrants.

According to the Guardian, two other intelligence officials have confirmed that the program is still in operation.

Representative Rush Holt, Democrat from New Jersey and the chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel had this to say about the NSA's actions:

“Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental.”

Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was even more bluntin his assessment of the NSA's snooping: "Ordinary Americans' most private emails have been and still are being intercepted in bulk and then stored in secret NSA databases, without probable cause."

But the reality is that the NSA is not just satisfied with snooping on your emails.

Now the NSA is creating an artificial intelligence system called "Aquaint" that will literally intercept information from thousands of websites and databases to figure out not only who you are and what you are doing, but also what you are thinking.

Aquaint ("Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence") is being designed to collect information from cell phones, credit card receipts, social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, GPS devices, Google searches, Amazon book purchases and even E-Z Pass toll records to give government agents information on where you are, what you are doing and what you are thinking.

Oh, you didn't think that the U.S. government could do that?

Oh, you didn't think that the U.S. government was ALLOWED to do that?

Think again.

Welcome to the 21st century - the century of "Big Brother".  It is a century in which ideas such as "personal privacy" and "personal security" are considered to be outdated concepts by the governing authorities.

The truth is that Acquaint is being designed to be so incredibly intrusive that at least one researcher has left the project because of concerns about what it is evolving into.

Imagine what a technology like this could mean if it fell into the wrong hands.

It is time to face the fact that we are nearing the end of the "open society".

Each day America sinks deeper towards becoming a scientific technocracy where "Big Brother" will rule all, but most Americans still do not seem to care.

Most Americans still do not seem to realize that their personal security and the security of their families is directly tied into their privacy.

How can Americans ever feel free if every single thing that they do is watched, tracked and traced?

The reality is that if we continue down this road as a society, then we will truly cease to be "the land of the free".