"We All Laughed When He Sat Down" - Shia LaBeouf, Government Surveillance Whistleblower?

We suspected there was overly intrusive surveillance of suspected terrorists and some criminals, but not everyone. It was just kind of a humorous anecdote a few years ago, but the reality is now exposed. m/r

Shia LaBeouf, Government Surveillance Whistleblower? | Threat Level | Wired.com

• BY KIM ZETTER
• 06.12.13

• Who needs NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden when we had Shia LaBeouf telling us what’s up five years ago?
  If you believe the actor’s tale to Jay Leno during an interview to promote his surveillance film Eagle Eye in 2008, the FBI records one in five of all our calls.
  Let me repeat that – one in five of all of our calls.
  In the interview, the actor told the Tonight Show host that the FBI consultant on the film leaked the intelligence to him in a casual conversation.
  “He told me that one in five phone calls that you make are recorded and logged, and I laughed at him and then he played back a phone conversation I’d had two years prior,” LaBeouf told Leno.
  The story has been picked up by news outlets, including the Huffington Post and others as if true.
  But former counter-terrorism FBI agent Thomas Knowles says the revelation is just a tall tale told by an actor trying to promote his movie.
  “I like Shia, he’s a good kid,” Knowles told Wired. “I don’t want to speak for him, but he was just trying to promote his movie. He was what, 21, 22 [years old] back then?”
  Knowles, a former supervisor of the Joint Terrorism Taskforce in Fresno, says on the face of it the claim doesn’t even make sense.
  “Put it this way… you couldn’t take that many conversations. You don’t want that many conversations. You want numbers. So the whole thing about conversations in Shia’s comment just doesn’t make sense if somebody looks at it closely.”
  BUT -go to the link-