The fact that the Pentagon leaked data is duly noted over on DataBreaches.net. But over here on PogoWasRight.org, I want to highlight what kinds of data the Pentagon was leaking. Dan O’Sullivan of Upguard reports:
The repositories appear to contain billions of public internet posts and news commentary scraped from the writings of many individuals from a broad array of countries, including the United States, by CENTCOM and PACOM, two Pentagon unified combatant commands charged with US military operations across the Middle East, Asia, and the South Pacific.
The data exposed in one of the three buckets is estimated to contain at least 1.8 billion posts of scraped internet content over the past 8 years, including content captured from news sites, comment sections, web forums, and social media sites like Facebook, featuring multiple languages and originating from countries around the world. Among those are many apparently benign public internet and social media posts by Americans, collected in an apparent Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation, raising serious questions of privacy and civil liberties.
Now do you wish you had been paying more attention to all of the discussions on this site and elsewhere about what kinds of surveillance our government could conduct against US persons?
I can picture Joe sitting over there nodding his head, muttering to himself, “I told you so. I told you so!”
Go read the entire Upguard article right now. It is as bad as you might fear.