Last week, I blogged about The Intercept's exposé of the extent of the surveillance state. One of the surveillance programs exposed in the story is a CIA program to “…secretly access databases maintained by foreign countries and extract data to add to the watch lists.”
The name of this program? Hydra. If that name sounds familiar, it is because Hyrda is the name of the villainous organization featured in Captain America: Winter Soldier. In the movie Captain America foils Hydra’s plant to impose a universal surveillance system so it can "preemptively" take out any possible threats to “national security” or Hydra’s power.
I am not sure if whoever named the CIA program is a Marvel movies/comics fan, but I would not be surprised if the bureaucrats at the CIA/NSA/TSA did not understand that Hydra are the bad guys. Still it is nice to see a government program accurately named, unlike the USA PATRIOT Act, or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
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PDFTags: NSA, CIA, Survelience State