In A World of Constant Surveillance We Still Lost Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

This missing Malaysia Airlines flight has me glued to the TV, news sites, and the #MH370 hashtag on Twitter — it’s a real mystery and it’s crazy to me how we can just lose a massive plane.  It disappeared into thin air, literally.  I feel terrible for the families of the people who were onboard, the whole not knowing aspect must be impossibly hard to deal with, I really cannot imagine what they are going through.  I’m hoping for a safe return of their family members.

But back to the disappearing plane, I’m not going to propose any theories or speculation as to what happened to it, but I want to discuss something that we have been following here at BestTechie (along with the rest of the media and people around the world) that I feel needs to be talked about in the same conversation as this missing plane: NSA surveillance.

The revelations from Snowden over the past several months that outlined the [perhaps too] far reaching surveillance conducted by the NSA post 9/11 to help ensure Americans stay safe from terrorist attacks.  The spying takes place all over the world, I’m sure insane amounts of data have been collected and analyzed by the NSA over the years, some of which they claim has led to thwarted terrorist attacks, but if in fact MH370 was hijacked (which it appears it was) and our surveillance is so advanced and extensive, why wasn’t anything related to it picked up by NSA?

Then again, maybe they did have the intel, but didn’t realize it, though you would think by now (10 days in) if they did have something that it would have become more clear to them.

I’m not a terrorist, but I would imagine there had to be some communication chatter somewhere for an operation of this magnitude to take place. There had to be.

To me, this missing plane brings up three important questions about NSA surveillance: The first is whether or not the extensive surveillance really works?  The second is just how extensive is our surveillance (based on Snowden leaks, it seems very vast)?  The third is whether or not the surveillance is as sophisticated and/or good as Snowden’s leaks make it seem?

Obviously I cannot answer those questions, as I just don’t know any of the answers, but it is worth thinking about.

Right now, everyone has more questions than answers and as we are slowly piecing together this plane’s course, with new reports that the plane was on the ground when the last signal was sent, hopefully it will not be too much longer until the plane resurfaces and everyone (especially the families) can get some closure.