'The main objective of US cellphone surveillance is intimidation'

Iran's Press TV, 6/9/12:

A Congressional report on the relationship between cellphone carriers and law enforcement agencies shows that the companies are responding to thousands of requests per day from criminal investigators asking for text messages, call records, location data, and other information on customers.

Linh Dinh is a political analyst in Philadelphia and in a phone interview with Press TV's U.S. Desk on Monday said that the main objective of this type of cellphone surveillance is intimidation. He said "these news items have been broadcast fairly frequently and this is not a new issue. In 2008, Bush was caught wiretapping on Americans with the cooperation of private companies such as Horizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, these are cellphone companies. So that was illegal in 2008, so when Washington was caught doing that, they simply made a new law to allow that to happen and to prevent those private companies from being sued."

He continued, "There has been a series of news leaks of the government snooping into every aspect of private citizens' communications. And it's interesting these days because in a sense they are getting cooperation from private citizens too because people are using Facebook and twitter and all kinds of social media. In a sense they are keeping track of themselves."

He pointed out that interestingly, the U.S. protest movement, the Occupy Movement, had applauded the social media as an empowerment tool since it allowed the movement to communicate and organize and they saw it as a tool in their favor. However, it was actually a tool for the government to keep track of them because in the past, for the state to keep an eye on its citizens involved a lot of manpower and money.

"But these days it is becoming very easy because people are keeping track of themselves so they know exactly where you are with your cellphone because everybody carries a cellphone around. So people are doing the job of the CIA and the FBI for the government. So anyway although the citizens think that these tools are empowering them, it is actually empowering the government. And the government is keeping track of everything because I think it is obvious, it fears an imminent rebellion, a growing rebellion within the population," Linh Dinh continued.

He added that as the U.S. economy collapses, "there is going to be social unrest and the government is preempting whatever rebellion that will happen down the line by basically broadcasting to everyone that we know what you are doing."

Linh Dinh also referred to the Obama government as a "lawless government" that will continue to do what it wants to do and this wiretapping is part of the program of intimidation "so people become fearful so that they cannot communicate with each other so that they cannot organize."



SM/KA



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