So I've always been skeptical of conspiracy theories. I have thought that while there may be some truth to some of them, most of them are just people attempting to connect the dots into a larger picture that may not necessarily be there.
But the recent uncovering of secret NSA programs has truly shaken my skepticism. Edward Snowden himself was not even a high level government employee. He was just a private citizen, that worked for a private company contracted by the NSA. And the more I think about it the more it troubles me. It is unlikely that Snowden was the only person at Booz Allen Hamilton that was working on this program, and also unlikely that Booz Allen Hamilton was the only private company working on the program. Before this leak while I may have ceded that the U.S. was probably doing some kind of spying on it's citizens. But I would have completely shot down that the U.S. government was involved in the extensive level of surveillance that we now know it is engaged in. And my reasoning behind it would have been that it would be extremely improbable that there would be (possibly) hundreds of citizens whose job it is to spy on the American public, without it becoming leaked. Now it did eventually get leaked, but not until recently and this program has been around since the previous presidency. And even still it has only been leaked by one person, meaning that there are still American citizens complicit in the surveillance program spying on their fellow Americans, and they are still very quiet about it.
Essentially what I'm trying to get across, is that I was very skeptical of people being able to keep a secret. Especially a big, juicy one like the NSA surveillance. But it was done. Which leads me to ask, what else are they hiding from us? What other secrets have they hid from the American public?
Have your views on conspiracy theories changed? What are your thoughts?
But the recent uncovering of secret NSA programs has truly shaken my skepticism. Edward Snowden himself was not even a high level government employee. He was just a private citizen, that worked for a private company contracted by the NSA. And the more I think about it the more it troubles me. It is unlikely that Snowden was the only person at Booz Allen Hamilton that was working on this program, and also unlikely that Booz Allen Hamilton was the only private company working on the program. Before this leak while I may have ceded that the U.S. was probably doing some kind of spying on it's citizens. But I would have completely shot down that the U.S. government was involved in the extensive level of surveillance that we now know it is engaged in. And my reasoning behind it would have been that it would be extremely improbable that there would be (possibly) hundreds of citizens whose job it is to spy on the American public, without it becoming leaked. Now it did eventually get leaked, but not until recently and this program has been around since the previous presidency. And even still it has only been leaked by one person, meaning that there are still American citizens complicit in the surveillance program spying on their fellow Americans, and they are still very quiet about it.
Essentially what I'm trying to get across, is that I was very skeptical of people being able to keep a secret. Especially a big, juicy one like the NSA surveillance. But it was done. Which leads me to ask, what else are they hiding from us? What other secrets have they hid from the American public?
Have your views on conspiracy theories changed? What are your thoughts?
