The NSA has access to more than 80 percent of international telephone calls, for which it pays the U.S. telecom monopolies hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And it has broken into Internet data abroad.84 By these means it has spied even on the heads of state of its allies.
The government and the corporate media sought to brand Snowden as a traitor. Two leading figures seeking to discredit Snowden in the media circuit are Clark, who invariably fails to disclose his own role in surveillance capitalism (having left Acxiom he is now on the advisory board of the cyber-intelligence corporation Tiversa), and McConnell (who downplays the continuous revolving door that has allowed him to move back and forth between the U.S. intelligence establishment and Booz Allen). Both have claimed that Snowden has compromised the security of the United States, by letting the population of the country and the world know the extent to which their every move is under surveillance.85
The Snowden revelations bewildered a U.S. population already struggling with numerous intrusions into their private lives, and ubiquitous surveillance. Dissident hackers associated with Anonymous and Wikileaks, and courageous whistle-blowers, like Snowden and Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning—the twenty-five-year-old soldier who released hundreds of thousands of classified documents—have been fighting the secret government-corporate security state.86 Numerous organizations have been struggling for free speech and privacy rights in the new surveillance capitalism.87 The population as a whole, however, has yet to perceive the dangers to democracy in an environment already dominated by a political system best characterized as a “dollarocracy,” and now facing a military-financial-digital complex of unbelievable dimensions, data mining every aspect of life—and already using these new technological tools for repression of dissident groups.88
So far the Snowden revelations have mainly disturbed the elites, making it clear that monopolistic corporations, and particularly the intelligence community, are able to penetrate into the deepest secrets at every level of society. Employees in some private corporations working for the NSA have the ability to hack into most corporate data. The most likely result of all of this is a coming together of giant firms with the security apparatus of government, at the expense of the larger population.