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Press TV has conducted an interview with Scott Rickard, former American intelligence linguist, Orlando about the news that US President Obama is to announce the future scope of the NSA’s global and domestic spying operations.

- The NSA’s espionage program has been described as an insurance policy. Just how effective has this program been countering terrorism considering that it started way before 9/11?

- The program has been around obviously for decades, way beyond what Snowden has described as only what he knows.

The actual plots that have been thwarted over the past 20 to 30 years are probably very few. At the same time the amount of technology that’s been developed over the last 30 or 40 years has just been incredibly immense, it’s disproportionate the amount of information that’s being collected today comparatively of the amount of information that was being collected 30 years ago.

It’s just an incredibly strong amount of activity going on and they’re violating our Bill of Rights and our Fourth Amendment.

And there is no probable cause, there is no reason for these things. It’s just because they have the technology that it is deployed and it is being used.

These particular announcements that Obama might make in a week are going to be insignificant because you really don’t have a lot of people that even understand this technology. Even the judges that are on the FISA Board, they will admit we don’t even understand what we’re ruling on.

And at the same time the NSA is not going to do a very good job at describing the facts to these individuals because they want their anonymity and they also want their ability to continue their processes.

These are not necessary applications and they are by far incredibly illegal and they’re taking it to the extreme because there is a lot of money to be made in these systems and there’s a lot of pride these individuals take in their ability to be perhaps in a position of authority.

These are just people who have jobs and you know how it works sometimes, people take their jobs a little too seriously.

- How much have the NSA revelations changed the peoples’ behavior and attitude towards privacy?

- Well, the people, most of them unfortunately don’t care. They’re too busy with their entertainment lives, but at the end of the day the people that do care, the individuals that are trying to operate privately, they are the ones that are becoming more vocal now.

And that being said as they’re becoming more vocal the NSA is basically learning more about the people that were more interested in their privacy.

So this is yet another mechanism by which they can actually collect even better data because as people speak out about this information they’re going to find out the more the people are concerned about their privacy.

You could use a simple example – they’re legalizing marijuana across the United States and legalizing hemp. Now they understand more and more of the people in the United States that are not opposed to legalizing this particular plant that’s been made illegal for so long and the fact is that this is something else that they’re able to collect on.

They can collect all your Face Book traffic all your email traffic and any groups that you belong to that are proposing these things so they have a much large data base of individuals who once again don’t oppose these illegal laws that have been imposed on Americans for almost 100 years now.

And so the same thing goes with the intelligence community as they ‘reveal’ these things. Not much has really been revealed in my opinion. People that speak out against it, they build a data base against these people.

Over and over again I don’t think it’s going to change much – I say this all the time – even a lot of the NSA folks, they’re fighting tooth and nail to try to keep everything they’ve got.

So I don’t see many revelations coming out of next week’s announcement out of Obama.