Thread: Privacy Alert! Big Brother is watching and listening, UPDATED

Europe Fed Up With Obama Dick Morris TV: Lunch ALERT!



http://www.fiscalconservatives.com/v...4gTos.html?a=1

3 Hours Ago by Tim Brown

Senators Demand Answers About Illegal Gun Registry From NSA

9 Comments

On June 27, 2013 26 United States Senators signed a letter that was sent to Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper demanding information about exactly what types of information and records the National Security Agency (NSA) is keeping on American citizens. Particularly in one part of the letter, the senators ask specifically about the collection of firearms sales records from gun dealers.

While Federal Firearms Licensed (FFL) dealers are to maintain records of all gun sales and are to do background checks (which are not to be stored long term). This also includes ATF form 4473. They are to simply hold onto those forms at their location. However, in the event the store closes they go into the hands of, you guessed it, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). There have been reports of ATF officials going into gun stores and demanding to see the forms and making photocopies of them on site rather than taking them from the store.

With that in mind the senators began their letter:

“Earlier this month, the executive branch acknowledged for the first time that the “business records” provision of the USA PATRIOT Act has been secretly reinterpreted to allow the government to collect the private records of large numbers of ordinary Americans. We agree that it is regrettable that this fact was first revealed through an unauthorized disclosure rather than an official acknowledgment by the administration, but we appreciate the comments that the President has made welcoming debate on this topic.”

We know that Barack Obama doesn’t welcome debate. He hates being questioned about such matters, but he says the words and people believe him, in a manner similar to those he said about not taking guns and that he “supports the Second Amendment.” It’s all Obama-ese.

While the senators did deal with the issue of privacy with regards to phone records, citing Smith v. Maryland, they also had concerns for other records.

“Furthermore, we are troubled by the possibility of this bulk collection authority being applied to other categories of records,” the senators wrote. “The PATRIOT Act’s business records authority is very broad in its scope. It can be used to collect information on credit card purchases, pharmacy records, library records, firearm sales records, financial information, and a range of other sensitive subjects. And the bulk collection authority could potentially be used to supersede bans on maintaining gun owner databases, or laws protecting the privacy of medical records, financial records, and records of book and movie purchases. These other types of bulk collection could clearly have a significant impact on Americans’ privacy and liberties as well.”

Notice among those other “categories of records” is firearm sales records is mentioned and that bulk collection authority could be used to superced bans on maintaining gun owner databases.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) spearheaded the letter with some of his fellow colleagues in the Senate.

“In this country, the government can’t just monitor your constitutionally protected activities—like gun ownership—just because it wants to,” said Brian Phillips, a spokesman for Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who signed onto the letter. “The justification that, ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong, you don’t have to worry about it,’ turns us into a police state very quickly. That’s why Congress is right to seek broad oversight of the NSA’s data collection programs.”

Well we can rest assured if the Federal government has overstepped its bounds in one area, they’ve done it in others. We know they’ve overstepped them in several areas now, including the category of wiretapping phones, looking at phone records and various other Fourth Amendment violations. Obviously I’m referring to when they do this without a warrant. However, since this administration has had no problem targeting conservatives with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and violating the Fourth Amendment all over the place, I don’t put it past them to not be accessing gun purchase information for the purpose of a national gun registry. After all, this is what they want.

So what can be done about it? According to Dr. Gary North:

“There is nothing Congress can do to stop this, other than to cut the budgets of the NSA, the CIA, and other surveillance organizations. But these budgets are hidden from Congress.

Congress in fact does not even know how large these budgets are. So, Congress is utterly impotent. Yes, 26 members can send an inquiry to the temporary head of intelligence, who is a political appointee. But how much authority does he have to pry information out of these secret organizations? He has no meaningful authority. He cannot fire anybody. He cannot cut their budgets. He is simply a temporary appointment, and his term appointment will end in a few years. The agencies can stonewall him, the same way they have stonewalled every other temporary political appointee. As long as their budgets are intact, they cannot be touched, and their budgets are not even known.”

North indicates that they will have information on elected officials and refers to it as “bulk blackmail data.” He also hopes they won’t have the manpower to be able to follow through on all the data.

One thing is for sure, we can forget about these agencies erasing the data they have collected.


http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/07/se...stry-from-nsa/

http://www.alipac.us/f9/us-governmen...2/#post1353783

Watch The Flightpath Of Bolivia Air Force One As It Gets Trapped Over Austria

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/02/2013 20:50 -0400

• Dassault Falcon
• Falcon
• France
• Italy
• Portugal

As already reported, the Dassault Falcon 900EX that is the Bolivian Air Force 1 was prohibited from flying over Italy, Portugal, Spain and France, due to suspicions it was harboring the "democratic world's enemy #1" Edward Snowden, trapping FAB1 above Austria, and forcing to land in Vienna. Watch the animation of the flight path below how effective the "democratic world" is in making a mockery of due process, diplomatic immunity and all those other highly valued qualities that make living in the "democratic world" such a joy. As for Europe: what can we say - the continent that over the weekend was furious at the NSA for spying on it, expressed its anger by blocking Snowden's airpace.




Source: Flightradar


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...d-over-austria

Allies Turn On US Over Snowden

JULY 2, 2013 BY BREAKING NEWS 21 COMMENTS

U.S. allies are turning on the Obama administration over the latest revelations from National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

French politicians from the right and the left and a leader of Germany’s Green Party called for their countries to grant amnesty to Snowden on Monday amid continental outrage over reports America bugged offices of the European Union.

French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira described the allegations as “an act of unqualified hostility,” while President François Hollande warned that talks on a U.S.-EU trade pact that were set to start next week would be jeopardized unless the spying stopped immediately.

Luxemburg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, called the latest accusations “disgusting.”

The spying fight has put German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the defensive over her government’s relations with the U.S. less than three months before national elections. She said through a spokesman on Monday that “the monitoring of friends cannot be tolerated.”

Read More at The Hill . By Julian Pecquet.

http://www.westernjournalism.com/all...-over-snowden/

Obama Tells EU: We’re Spying On You, But Everyone Does It

Posted on 3 July, 2013 by Amy

Video at the Page Link:



via New York Post

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — President Barack Obama tried on Monday to reassure European allies affronted by reports of U.S. spying by suggesting all the world’s intelligence services were involved in finding out the thinking of opponents and allies alike.

The European Union has demanded the United States explain a report in a German magazine that Washington was spying on the bloc, calling such surveillance shocking if true.

French President Francois Hollande said the alleged action was intolerable and could hinder U.S. relations with Paris and the EU. “We want this to stop fast,” he said.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


http://gopthedailydose.com/2013/07/0...ryone-does-it/

The Feds Are Spying On Your Snail Mail Too

July 3, 2013 by Sam Rolley

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” – The 4^th Amendment to the United States Constitution

Amid reports of the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance efforts centered on collecting electronic communications data, many Americans have expressed concern about their privacy on the technological front.

But a report out Wednesday from The New York Times offers a reminder: The NSA is not the only government agency spying on Americans.

Leslie James Pickering, a former member of a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Earth Liberation Front, told the Times that he found a misplaced card in his mailbox last September that indicated that the United States Postal Service was monitoring his mail.


Via the Times:

Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else.

As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.

http://personalliberty.com/2013/07/0...nail-mail-too/

http://www.alipac.us/f9/has-washingt...empire-282678/

Snail Mail Snooping: The US Government Stooping to an all new low!

Posted by Darla Dawald, National Director on July 3, 2013 at 8:50pm in Patriot Action Alerts

Where does this end? At what point does this government stop the surveillance of American citizens? Will the Obama regime stop at nothing? This latest story is just another example of a gross overreach of the current Marxist government. This story has ignited my anger toward the government to an all new high. It matters not to me what side of the aisle you are on... if the government is watching our every move, obtaining our contacts via snail mail, watching our credit card purchases, and listening in our our conversations, GPS locations, and email/internet activity, what is left for them to monitor? Perhaps the number of times we flush our toilets, bathe, feed our children, or what television programs we watch? We know they have the capability of watching us through our web cams and televisions....

WASHINGTON — Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.
“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.
“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else.
As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.
Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.
Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.
The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Actually opening the mail requires a warrant.) The information is sent to whatever law enforcement agency asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.
The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.
“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit in the criminal division’s fraud section of the Justice Department and worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”
Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.
“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.
But law enforcement officials said mail covers and the automatic mail tracking program are invaluable, even in an era of smartphones and e-mail.
In a criminal complaint filed June 7 in Federal District Court in Eastern Texas, the F.B.I. said a postal investigator tracing the ricin letters was able to narrow the search to Shannon Guess Richardson, an actress in New Boston, Tex., by examining information from the front and back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her home. Ms. Richardson had originally accused her husband of mailing the letters, but investigators determined that he was at work during the time they were mailed.
In 2007, the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and the local police in Charlotte, N.C., used information gleaned from the mail cover program to arrest Sallie Wamsley-Saxon and her husband, Donald, charging both with running a prostitution ring that took in $3 million over six years. Prosecutors said it was one of the largest and most successful such operations in the country. Investigators also used mail covers to help track banking activity and other businesses the couple operated under different names.
Other agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, have used mail covers to track drug smugglers and Medicare fraud.

Later in the article:

Postal officials refused to discuss either mail covers or the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program.
Mr. Pickering says he suspects that the F.B.I. requested the mail cover to monitor his mail because a former associate said the bureau had called with questions about him. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the Postal Service, the F.B.I. and other agencies, saying they were improperly withholding information.
A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Buffalo declined to comment.
Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out. He said he became tired of focusing only on environmental activism and moved back to Buffalo to finish college, open his bookstore, Burning Books, and start a family.
“I’m no terrorist,” he said. “I’m an activist.”
Mr. Pickering has written books sympathetic to the liberation front, but he said his political views and past association should not make him the target of a federal investigation. “I’m just a guy who runs a bookstore and has a wife and a kid,” he said.
Complete Article New York Times
More on this story Here

On the eve of Independence Day this story has to make you feel warm and fuzzy! NOT! The founding Fathers would turn over in their graves if they knew what has happened to the Liberty and Freedom they signed on to through the Constitution, fought and died, for all Americans.
Happy Independence Day Patriots!



Tags: covers, enforcement, law, mail, nsa, obama, pickering, snail, snooping, surveillance

http://patriotaction.net/forum/topic...sg_share_topic

July 3, 2013 | By Jennifer Lynch


Customs & Border Protection Logged Eight-Fold Increase in Drone Surveillance for Other Agencies

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/0...eillance-other



Recently released daily flight logs from Customs & Border Protection (CPB) show the agency has sharply increased the number of missions its 10 Predator drones have flown on behalf of state, local and non-CPB federal agencies. Yet, despite this increase—eight-fold between 2010 and 2012—CBP has failed to explain how it’s protecting our privacy from unwarranted drone surveillance.
EFF received the three years of flight logs, a 2010 “Concept of Operations” report about the Predator program, and other records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the agency. In that lawsuit we asked for specific information on the agency’s program to loan out its drones to local, state and federal agencies.
According to the documents, CBP already appears to be flying drones well within the Southern and Northern US borders, and for a wide variety of non-border patrol reasons. What’s more — the agency is planning to increase its Predator drone fleet to 24 and its drone surveillance to 24 hours per day / 7 days per week by 2016.
As the Concept of Operations report notes, CBP’s goal is that its drone data will be “persistently available” (p. 21) and interoperable (p. 29) — not just within CBP, but to other agencies, and also possibly to other countries. CBP plans that its “UAS will provide assured monitoring of entities along land borders, inland seas, littorals and high seas with sufficient frequency, continuity, accuracy, spectral diversity, and data content to produce actionable information.” (p. 29)
Daily Predator Flight Logs Detail Scope of CBP Drone Flights for Other Agencies
CBP’s three years of daily flight logs detail when, where and how the agency flew its Predator drones on behalf of other agencies. These logs show a marked increase in drone flights over the years. In 2010, CBP appears to have flown its Predators about 30 times on behalf of other agencies, but this number increased to more than 160 times in 2011 and more than 250 times in 2012.
While CBP blacked out important information about dates, geographic location of flights, and, in most cases, agency names, these logs do provide some insights into the agency’s drone program. For example, we’ve learned that CBP conducted drone surveillance for law enforcement agencies ranging from the FBI, ICE, the US Marshals, and the Coast Guard to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the North Dakota Army National Guard, and the Texas Department of Public Safety. These missions ranged from specific drug-related investigations, searches for missing persons, border crossings and fishing violations to general “surveillance imagery” and “aerial reconnaissance” of a given location.
CBP also flew its drones for non-law enforcement agencies and missions. The logs show that CBP conducted extensive “electro-optical, thermal infrared imagery and Synthetic Aperture Radar” surveillance of levees along the Mississippi River and river valleys across several states, along with surveillance of the massive Deep Water Horizon oil spill and other natural resources for the US Geological Survey, FEMA, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the Department of Natural Resources, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Yet even these missions raise red flags. While the goal of each may be to gather useful environmental information, the drones necessarily also collect information on the people living within those areas—and we’ve seen no policies describing limitations on how the information is used or whether it’s shared with law enforcement agencies like the FBI or ICE.
Report Details CBP’s Plans to Increase Surveillance Capabilities, Expand Operations, and Possibly Add Weapons to Drones
CBP also released to EFF a 2010 “Concept of Operations” report for its drone program. This document provides significant detail about CBP’s program, including the three major operational locations in which the agency flies its drones, the Predators’ on-board surveillance technologies, and CBP’s "far-term" goals for the program.
The report notes that CBP’s Predators have highly sophisticated, high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), color video, and electron optical (EO) and infrared (IR) cameras, and are capable of performing Reconnaissance, Surveillance, Targeting and Acquisition (“RSTA”) on and tracking of multiple moving and stationary targets of interest in both clear and adverse weather. CBP hopes to improve its surveillance capabilities in the future so that its sensor “point target resolution” increases to “well below one foot.”
The report also notes that CBP plans to make its drones and the data gathered through its drone surveillance even more widely available to outside agencies. For example, CBP plans to share data on a near real-time basis, possibly “via DOD’s Global Information Grid (GIG)/Defense Information Systems Network.” CBP also plans that “joint DHS and OGA [other government agency] combined operations will become the norm at successively lower organizational hierarchical levels[,]” which will, presumably, reduce the already limited oversight for CBP’s drone-loan program.
As we noted earlier in a separate blog post, one of the most surprising pieces of information revealed in this report is that CBP has considered equipping its predators with “non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize” targets of interest. Predators are designed to carry weapons for use in wars abroad, but this is the first we’ve heard of a federal agency proposing using weapons domestically.
CBP’s Formal Process for Prioritizing Missions is Detailed in a Power Point Presentation
The final document we received from the agency is an October 2012 Power Point document titled “CBP UAS Mission Prioritization Process.” This document describes for the first time CBP’s policies on loaning out its predator drones to other agencies.
The document was likely drafted in response to last year’s scathing report (pdf) from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. The OIG Report noted several serious problems with CBP’s drone program, including lack of appropriate equipment and staff to fly the drones safely, failure to account and recoup costs for expenditures, and lack of procedures to prioritize requests for drone flights. We noted when the report came out that the agency’s lack of procedures was especially troubling, given the agency has been flying drones since 2004, and that its 10 Predator drones each cost $18 million to purchase and $3,000 per hour to fly.
Considering the scope of the OIG’s criticism of CBP’s drone program, it’s surprising this is the only document the agency has drafted to explain its prioritization process (and CBP has assured us this was the only document, as of last October). The presentation fails to provide much-needed details about the process, including which types of state and local missions CBP feels are appropriate for its drone surveillance (and how the agency determines this), how CBP recoups costs for its involvement in these missions, and how it determines appropriate legal and technical protections are in place to protect privacy and civil liberties.
Conclusion
While these documents provide Americans with important information about CBP’s drone program and the agency’s plans for expanding that program, they raise more questions than they answer. CBP needs to tell Americans where—specifically—it’s flying its drones, which agencies it’s flying its drones for, what it does with the data it collects, and what policies it has in place (if any) to protect our privacy rights. Also, as we’ve detailed in a separate blog post, CBP needs to assure the public that it will not equip its Predators with any weapons—lethal or otherwise. Without first addressing these issues, the agency—and Congress—should halt the expansion of CBP’s Predator drone program.
Documents:
- 2010 “Concept of Operations” Report
- 2012 CBP UAS Mission Prioritization Process Presentation
- 2010 Daily Flight Logs
- 2011 Daily Flight Logs - Part 1
- 2011 Daily Flight Logs - Part 2
- 2012 Daily Flight Logs - Part 1
- 2012 Daily Flight Logs - Part 2
- 2012 Daily Flight Logs - Part 3