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

Sir Tim Berners-Lee – Inventor of Internet – Finds Obama’s Data Gat...

Posted by Jim Hoft on Friday, June 7, 2013, 7:09 PM

Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, found Obama’s government surveillance strategy “deeply concerning.”
The Guardian reported:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has released a statement about Prism on behalf of the World Wide Web Foundation.
Calling Prism “deeply concerning,” Berners-Lee asks Web users to “demand better legal protection.” Here is the statement in full:

“Today’s revelations are deeply concerning. Unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society.
“I call on all Web users to demand better legal protection and due process safeguards for the privacy of their online communications, including their right to be informed when someone requests or stores their data. Over the last two decades, the Web has become an integral part of our lives. A trace of our use of it can reveal very intimate personal things. A store of this information about each person is a huge liability: Whom would you trust to decide when to access it, or even to keep it secure?”

Paper: UK Government Getting US Spy Agency's Data
Friday, 07 Jun 2013 11:42 AM


Britain's Guardian newspaper says that the U.K. government has been secretly gathering communications data from American Internet giants through the medium of the U.S. National Security Agency.


The paper says that it has seen documents showing how the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ has had access to America's "Prism" system since at least June 2010.It says the program has generated 197 intelligence reports in the past year.GCHQ declined to comment on the story Friday, saying only that it takes its legal obligations "very seriously."


The Guardian has recently published a series of stories on America's secret surveillance dragnet, revealing the stunning details of an undisclosed intelligence operation targeting millions of Americans' phone, email, and Internet records.

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/Britain-NSA-Spying/2013/06/07/id/...

Lawmakers aim to rein in administration on data-collection 'dragnet,' change law
Published June 07, 2013
FoxNews.com

Republican and Democratic lawmakers already are plotting ways to rein in the Obama administration's mass collection of phone and Internet data, after a rapid-fire series of disclosures about the program set off privacy alarms.
"This is a dragnet," Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., told Fox News on Friday.


The latest development, as reported by The Guardian newspaper, is that the British government has also been secretly gathering intelligence from U.S. Internet companies via the U.S. National Security Agency data-mining project. That project, along with reports about a secret court order allowing the government to collect phone records for millions of Verizon customers, triggered a renewed debate this week over whether Americans are trading too much privacy for a sense of security.


President Obama, speaking publicly for the first time on the controversy, said Friday that the programs have made a difference in tracking terrorists and are not tantamount to "Big Brother."Obama acknowledged that the U.S. government is collecting reams of phone records, including phone numbers and the duration of calls, but said this does not include listening to calls or gathering the names of callers.


"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society," Obama said.Obama, though, welcomed a "debate" over that issue.

He'll get one.


While some security-focused lawmakers defended the program, others warned that they plan to start reassessing the Patriot Act as early as this month, with the goal of potentially curbing the data collection.Sensenbrenner, who wrote the 2001 law that provides the legal authority for such efforts, told Fox News on Friday that he and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., are prepared if necessary to change the relevant portion of the law. The Patriot Act provisions are scheduled to expire in 2015 without reauthorization. Sensenbrenner said if lawmakers need to change the law before then, "we will have hearings and we'll do that."


He said the scrutiny will begin next week, when the committee holds a hearing with FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Sensenbrenner is specifically concerned about the section of the law that allows the government to obtain business records. It requires investigators to show that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation, but the congressman questioned how the mass collection of phone records could possibly fit under those guidelines.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., an Obama ally, echoed Sensenbrenner's concerns -- and noted he's been raising them for years. Durbin introduced a bill in 2003 to place limits on some of these powers, and in 2005 called for the section in question to require "individualized suspicion" before collecting records. It was removed from the bill.


"This provision would require that the government could only issue a Section 215 order for an American's records if there is some connection to a suspected terrorist or spy," Durbin said in a statement, calling for a renewed debate over these possible changes.Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., who has long raised concerns about data-collection efforts which he was unable to describe publicly until now, joined Durbin in calling for changes to the Patriot Act.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., meanwhile, is introducing a separate bill that aims to shore up Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches.


"The revelation that the NSA has secretly seized the call records of millions of Americans, without probable cause, represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution," he said in a statement.His bill would order that the Fourth Amendment not be "construed" to allow any federal agency to search phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/07/lawmakers-aim-to-rein-in...

Dem. Senator disputes Obama’s claim that Congress was briefed

By Jonathan Easley - 06/07/13 01:36 PM ET

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on Friday disputed a claim President Obama made at a press conference only moments earlier, when the president said that every member of Congress had been briefed on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) domestic phone surveillance program.

Merkley said only select members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the program, and that he was only aware of it because he obtained “special permission” to review the pertinent documents after hearing about it second-hand.

“I knew about the program because I specifically sought it out,” Merkley said on MSNBC. “It’s not something that’s briefed outside the Intelligence Committee. I had to get special permission to find out about the program. It raised concerns for me. … When I saw what was being done, I felt it was so out of sync with the plain language of the law and that it merited full public examination, and that’s why I called for the declassification.”

Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/304189-dem-senator-disputes-obam...

Obama defends NSA surveillance programs as 'right balance'

By Justin Sink - 06/07/13 02:07 PM ET
President Obama on Friday defended a pair of recently disclosed surveillance programs as striking the “right balance” between national security and civil liberties following a speech Friday in California.
“You can't have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a government,” Obama said.“You can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance.”

The administration acknowledged Thursday that the National Security Agency (NSA) had monitored domestic telephone data and international Internet traffic from tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook.Obama stressed that every member of Congress had been briefed on the phone monitoring program and that the relevant Intelligence committees were aware of PRISM — the code name of the NSA's secret program to monitor Internet traffic. He also noted that federal judges had to sign off on data-gathering requests.

“If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure we're abiding by the Constitution, then we're going to have some problems here,” Obama said.

Read more: http://thehill.com/video/administration/304165-obama-defends-nsa-

Worse Than We Thought? Gov’t Tracked Credit Card Transactions, Shared Phones Records With UK

Jun. 7, 2013 12:42pm Becket Adams
You may want to sit down for this.
It appears that along with online information, the U.S. government has tracked credit card purchases and, in some cases, shared phone data with the U.K., according to The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Beast.
It was revealed earlier this week that the feds have been monitoring Verizon, Sprint Nextel, and AT&T customers and that the National Security Administration had established a massive program, code-named PRISM, that indicates the monitoring of Americans.Now the Wall Street Journal’s sources claim NSA operations also encompass purchase information from credit-card providers.


“It couldn’t be determined if any of the Internet or credit-card arrangements are ongoing, as are the phone company efforts, or one-shot collection efforts,” the WSJ notes.What is known at this time, however, is that the NSA has established with credit-card companies the same type of relationship it has established with tech companies. That is, the NSA asks for the data and they get it.


Also, according to The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake, at least “one foreign government has gained access to sensitive data collected by the National Security Agency from U.S. telecommunications companies in dragnet court warrants demanding the secret transfer of U.S. customers’ calling records.”


The collected information, referred to as “metadata,” does not include conversation content or the names of people associated with accounts. It does, however, record when and where calls are made and for how long.
And in a few “discreet cases,” as Lake puts it, “the NSA has shared unedited analysis of these records with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters.”


Furthermore, in 2010, GCHQ actually gained access to the NSA’s PRISM program, The Guardian reports.
“The documents showed the British generated 197 intelligence reports from access to the system in 2012,” Lake notes.
“With advances in computer science, intelligence services can now mine vast amounts of data collected by telecom companies, Internet service providers, and social-media sites for patterns that can illuminate terrorist networks and help solve crimes,” he adds, citing intelligence officers.


“These metadata … reside in vast hard drives that belong to the NSA. Analysts there can then take a phone number or email address and uncover suspected terrorists’ associates, find their locations, and even learn clues about their possible targets.”A former senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast, “My understanding is if the British had a phone number, we might run the number through the database for them and provide them with the results.”

“I do not know of cases where the U.S. government has shared this kind of metadata with the United Kingdom, but I would be surprised if this never happened,” Peter Wood, the CEO of First Base Technologies, said in the same report. “Both countries cooperate very closely on counterterrorism.”
Click here to read The Daily Beast’s full report

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Breaking: Obama Administration Was Aggressively “Bullying & Thr...

Posted by Jim Hoft on Friday, June 7, 2013, 8:13 AM
Glenn Greenwald, a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian, spoke with Piers Morgan last night on the top secret PRISM program that has direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple.
Greenwald told Piers Morgan the Obama administration “has been very aggressive about bullying and threatening anybody” who thinks about exposing the program.
Business Insider reported:

“There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal,” Greenwald said on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Live” on Thursday.
“And that is to destroy privacy and anonymity not just in the United States but around the world.”
Greenwald’s subsequent comments came just hours after The Guardian and The Washington Post both broke another bombshell report detailing a program dubbed as “PRISM.” According to the reports, the program involves the National Security Agency and FBI tapping into the servers of nine leading Internet companies to extract information.
Greenwald jump-started Thursday’s discussion over civil liberties and government surveillance with a report late Wednesday night that detailed the NSA’s collection of data from millions of Americans’ phone records.
“It’s well past time that we have a debate about whether that’s the kind of country and world in which we want to live,” Greenwald said on CNN. “We haven’t had that debate because it’s all done in secrecy and the Obama administration has been very aggressive about bullying and threatening anybody who thinks about exposing it or writing about it or even doing journalism about it. It’s well past time that that come to an end.”

A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more. (The Guardian)

Report: 9 Internet Firms Giving Data to Government

By Greg Richter

It's not just your cell phone calls. Nine Internet companies have been giving your emails, videos, photos and more to the NSA and FBI, The Washington Post reports.

The classified program PRISM began in 2007 and has signed on Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Cloud storage website Dropbox is set to join soon.

PRISM has become the biggest contributor to President Barack Obama's Daily Brief, the Post reports, with a total of 1,447 articles in 2012. One in seven intelligence reports are based on PRISM data.

The program descends from a program in the 1970s in which 100 American companies worked with the government, though PRISM is more like the controversial warrantless surveillance efforts undertaken after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

PRISM attempts to use formulas to avoid gathering data from Americans, but the system isn't perfect. And while compliance by the companies is voluntary, the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court can force compliance.

Apple resisted participation for five years, and Twitter has never joined.

The Post said it obtained information on the program from a career intelligence officer who believes the program is a serious invasion of privacy.

"They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type," the officer told the Post.

Reuters reports that both Apple and Facebook deny knowing anything about the PRISM program and say they do not allow any government agency "direct access" to their servers.


Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/internet-firms-

Flashback 2007: Barack Obama Deplores “Illegal Wiretapping of American Citizens” (Video)



Today’s Huffington Post’s cover photo:

Via Instapundit:
Back in 2007 Barack Obama deplored “illegal wiretapping of American citizens.”

But that was before he became president and lost all credibility and started mining U.S. citizen data from nine U.S. internet companies.

More from Drudge:
NSA, FBI secretly mining data from Internet firms…
‘THEY QUITE LITERALLY CAN WATCH YOUR IDEAS AS YOU TYPE’…
Top secret PRISM program…
MICROSOFTYAHOOGOOGLEYOUTUBEFACEBOOKSKYPEAPPLE…
Obama administration collecting phone records of millions daily…
Secret court order requires VERIZON to hand over ALL CALL DATA…
White House: Critical tool against ‘terrorist threats’…
Specifically targeted Americans, not foreigners…
‘Homeland Security’: Laptops, phones can be searched based on hunches…
NSA SEES ALL: Phone Sex, Banks, Emails…
CIA: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher…
’1984′ Published 64 Years Ago Today…

Flashback 2007: Barack Obama Deplores “Illegal Wiretapping of Ameri...