the Dystopian Orwellian Nightmare is even worse than what Stallman is saying here. First of all, one of the most critical top secrets (ab)used by NSA against us in the Snowden cache has been kept secret from us.

in the Wiretap Act of 1968 (Title III), it explicitly defined what is a wiretap and who is authorized to perform them and what the legal procedure is. if you read the Wiretap act in the most literal fashion, you will conclude that Title III applies to any communication device which is connected to a network via a physical wire, such as a landline telephone.

https://it.ojp.gov/PrivacyLiberty/authorities/statutes/1284

would you like to know what NSA's interpretation is of the Title III? well, you can't, because it's Secret Law. but I'll give you a hint: cell phones don't connect via wires, therefore, Title III does not apply, therefore NSA can just "read the air" any damn way it pleases, and it doesn't have to tell you, nor tell a Judge, nor tell anybody. NSA just does it. NSA records the entire radio spectrum going over the air. technically, it's not a "wire" tap, since there is no wire. the closest i recall this little legal loophole fib almost coming out during the peak of the Snowden leaks was when (traitor neocon) Sentator Wyden was challenging the NSA in open hearings by giving hints that the NSA was spying on the GPS locations of all cell phones in the US. but nothing ever came of it, Wyden never followed through with leaking any documents nor holding a public hearing.

if you have any doubts, just read the NSA AURORAGOLD slide deck:

https://search.edwardsnowden.com/docs/AURORAGOLDWorkingGroup...

i don't even know what "IR.21" is, some kind of telco protocol thingy like SS7, but NSA targets it and surveils it on every "Mobile Network Operator" (MNO) on the planet. Slide 10: "We Monitor the Industry." NSA spies on the GSM Association in Switzerland. NSA spies on the entire technical staffs of every "MNO" on Earth.

scroll towards the end of the slides where there is a map "network coverage." the whole fucking world of cell phones is "covered" by NSA surveillance. notice anything funny about the map? the US and most FVEYs countries are orange, meaning 1%-20% wireless "coverage." but Africa, inner Asia, and desolate countries are green, which means over 80%.

gee, that's funny. why would NSA's "wireless collection" be so much higher in countries who are marginal American allies and all of whom are rapidly developing economies which went from pre-industrial agrarian, to skipping over industrial, which means they never built a national phone network of wires, and skipped straight to national wireless networks.

it means NSA basically data rapes wireless. it is infinitely easier for NSA to spy on wireless than wired.

but wait! it gets worse. you may ask yourself "okay, fine, NSA steals the air, but i'm a hacker and by flying spaghetti monster i can come up with a technical counter measure. i will develop my own decentralized system to defeat NSA as the global passive adversary."

a few days or weeks later, after you study Mixnets and Meshnets and Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) and RFC 5050 and after you start prototyping your own off-grid Internet, you come across this slide from the Snowden leaks:

Moving Data Through Disconnected Networks

https://search.edwardsnowden.com/docs/MovingDataThroughDisco...

you slap yourself in the forehead.

shit. NSA has already covered new forms of sneakernets too. of course they have. undetecable decentralized sneakernets are the perfect method of exfiltrating all of the data which NSA is stealing from everyone else in the world, and doing it using their own private off-grid network is ideal because nobody will notice exabytes of your data being siphoned through your fleet of "smart" e-lighbulbs used as a hop point back to Bluffdale.

those NSA slides about DTNs are from around 2011, and it clearly shows NSA had several DTNs operational. they even had a partner program with NRO to develop "CubeSat" nanosatellites to act as nodes in their global exfiltration DTN. and if we know one thing about NSA it's when they're 10 years ahead of everyone else in inventing new defensive tactics, they also invent the offensive tactics to attack that defense, in order to cripple anyone else who might use the same weapons. so of course NSA already has ways to destroy DTNs, in order to prevent anyone else from gaining an advantage over NSA. remember "NOBUS"? Nobody But Us.