Spiegel online comment nails grave threat of NSA spying

Commenting on the Spiegel Online report “NSA Snoops on 500 Million German Data Connections,” a writer identifying as “rightsreserved” puts NSA’s unlawful surveillance program in proper perspective:

People don’t seem to be getting what this is all really about or the monumental implications of it. This information awareness system is the largest gold mine in human history. Politically-favored corporations/governments/private entities who have access to this can quickly and easily dominate nearly every financial market on the planet, or send it spiraling. Imagine for one second knowing the details of every Report or research paper before it is published, every discovery or disaster before any news report can even be broadcast, every lawsuit or Patent before it is filed, every merger/sale/acquisition/bankruptcy/scandal/hiring/firing/contract/marriage/divorce/retirement etc etc etc before it is announced, and so on and so on. In today’s world of high volume micro-trading with sophisticated algorithms running on supercomputers, anyone with even partial access to this could position themselves to extract as much wealth and value out of the markets as they desired. It’s the ultimate system of insider information and corporate espionage. It is an economic Doomsday Device, and it is already fully operational…and no one appears to realize or be talking about THAT. It is conspicuously absent from all the debates, even though the Patriot Act and the NDAA are positively littered with cryptic references to financial systems and economies. This thing has been purpose-built for it. None of the so-called “safeguards” address it, there is no Public oversight in that aspect at all, much less any accountability. Obviously, there are many tin-foil-hat-wearing Legitimacy Theorists that still foolishly Trust the federal U.S. government and the multinational corporations & banking interests that run it will never, ever allow anything like that to go on…