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Donald Trump will get the keys to the surveillance state

President-elect Donald Trump is only months away from wielding the power of American intelligence agencies, including the NSA's mass surveillance operation.

Colin Daileda

on November 10, 2016

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

President-elect Donald Trump is only months away from wielding the power of American intelligence agencies, including the NSA's mass surveillance operation.

Many people on Twitter have already begun to voice their concern.

This, they've said, is what happens when a complacent nation allows the construction of a legally dubious mass-surveillance system under a president not generally viewed as irresponsible. Then, when the reigns of the country are handed to a man whose campaign staffers wouldn't even allow him the use of his own Twitter account in the lead-up to the election, it's too late to do much.

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If it's terrifying to imagine Trump in charge of history's most expansive & penetrating surveillance apparatus, perhaps it should not exist.
— Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) November 8, 2016

President Obama signed into law new surveillance restrictions in 2015 that limited government access to phone records, but the American surveillance apparatus extends far beyond access to phone records.

The NSA can request data from massive companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook, and the companies are forced by law to comply.

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The agency has a program called XKeyscore that allows it to track an internet user's every move.

The NSA gathers text messages and has a team of hackers to break into data the agency can't readily access.

These are just a few examples from one agency, and we only know about them because former NSA contractor Edward Snowden fed this information to publications such as The Guardian back in 2013.

Snowden, it turns out, also warned us that we were just an election away from surveillance-based tyranny.

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"A new leader will be elected, they'll flip the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world -- some new and unpredicted threat -- we need more authority, we need more power," Snowden said in 2013. "And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it."

Topics Privacy X/Twitter Donald Trump

Colin Daileda

Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.