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

Report: Legal loophole allows NSA to spy on Americans

3:05 PM 08/09/2013

A legal loophole approved in October 2011 allows for National Security Agency analysts to access the emails and phone call records of U.S. citizens.


An NSA analyst can use “certain United States persons names,” phone numbers, email addresses or other identifying bits of metadata to check for matches contained in various NSA databases, the Guardian reports.

According to the NSA, a U.S. person, as defined by federal law and executive order is: “a citizen of the United States; an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence;an unincorporated association with a substantial number of members who are citizens of the U.S. or are aliens lawfully admitted for permanent residence; or a corporation that is incorporated in the U.S.”


According to the new document published by the Guardian, an NSA analyst was not allowed to query the information of a United States person “until an effective oversight process” had been developed by the agency and and agreed to by the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The latest revelations provided to the Guardian by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden come despite repeated denials by the Obama administration and U.S. intelligence officials that the agency is spying on Americans.


Since Snowden’s disclosures began in June, intelligence officials have attempted to assure members of Congress and the public that the programs are under strict oversight and access to the information is limited to a select number of individuals.


By accessing the metadata embedded in the document, the Guardian was able to determine that the reported document was last updated in June 2012.
President Obama told late night talk show host Jay Leno on Wednesday that the controversial spy programs were not a “domestic surveillance program,” a sentiment NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander repeated during a panel on Thursday.


“This isn’t a domestic spying program. It’s a tool to find terrorists. I think the country is well serviced by courts and congress,” said Alexander.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/09/re...-on-americans/

Amash: Intelligence Committee withheld surveillance document from House

By Brendan Sasso - 08/12/13 05:00 PM ET
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) has accused House Intelligence Committee leaders of failing to share a document describing a National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program with other lawmakers in 2011.
The document, which the administration declassified last month, describes the NSA's controversial program under the Patriot Act to collect records on virtually all U.S. phone calls.
In a Facebook post on Sunday night, Amash revealed a Justice Department memo recommending that the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee make the document available to "all members of Congress" ahead of a vote on whether to reauthorize the Patriot Act.
But according to Amash, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) never provided the document to all House lawmakers.
"Less than two weeks ago, the Obama administration released previously classified documents regarding ‪#‎NSA‬'s bulk collection programs and indicated that two of these documents had been made available to all Members of Congress prior to the vote on reauthorization of the Patriot Act," Amash wrote in the Facebook post.
"I can now confirm that the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence did NOT, in fact, make the 2011 document available to Representatives in Congress, meaning that the large class of Representatives elected in 2010 did not receive either of the now declassified documents detailing these programs."Since the program became publicized, many lawmakers, including Patriot Act author Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), have expressed shock at the scope of the phone data collection program.
Susan Phalen, an Intelligence Committee spokeswoman, said Rogers hosted classified briefings on the NSA programs for all members prior to votes to reauthorize the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“The House Intelligence Committee makes it a top priority to inform Members about the intelligence issues on which Members must vote," she said. "This process is always conducted consistent with the Committee's legal obligation to carefully protect the sensitive intelligence sources and methods our intelligence agencies use to do their important work."
She said that in the past two months, Rogers has hosted four classified briefings with NSA officials for all Republican members.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/316707-amash-in...

Google: Don't Expect Privacy



Tuesday, 13 Aug 2013 11:41 PM
By Matthew Auerbach



Users of Google’s Gmail service should not expect the emails they send or receive to stay private, Business Insider reports.

According to a motion filed in July by Google in hopes of having a class action complaint dismissed, lawyers representing the Internet company said anyone who turns over any information to a third party has no right to expect that information to stay private.

The motion was based on Smith vs. Maryland, the 1979 Supreme Court case in which the majority decision stated that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.”

The brief, obtained by the Consumer Watchdog web site, claims that Google employs automated processes to sift through email for the purposes of providing spam filters, advertising relevant to its users and other features of the Gmail service.

According to the Huffington Post, the class action complaint accuses Google of infringing on the privacy of its users by searching their personal messages for information that will aid in the placement of targeted ads it displays.

The suit calls for Google to make full disclosure of precisely what information it's taking from emails, and to pay damages for these alleged privacy violations.

“Google has finally admitted they don’t respect privacy,” said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director.

“People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents’ privacy don’t use Gmail.”

The company’s viewpoint is consistent with a statement made in 2009 by Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, in which he made clear Google is simply following the terms laid out by the Patriot Act.

“If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt said.

“But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time.

And ... we're all subject, in the United States, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/goo...8/13/id/520242

EFF: Multiple New Polls Show Americans Reject Wholesale NSA Domestic Spying

August 14, 2013 by Electronic Frontier Foundation

This article, published Tuesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), demonstrates Americans’ growing mistrust of the Federal government’s Orwellian and secretive programs that enable law enforcement agencies to spy on U.S. citizens without warrants, probable cause or informing us we’re being targeted. Follow the link at the end to add your voice to the growing number of people who demand the government come clean about its domestic surveillance operations, and to urge Congress to reform our Nation’s broad, permissive laws that have nurtured the expansion of Federal spy programs.

By Mark M. Jaycox and Trevor Timm

Polls further confirm that Americans are deeply concerned with the unconstitutional NSA spying programs. In a July 10 poll by Quinnipiac University, voters were asked whether the government’s efforts “go too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties” or “not far enough to adequately protect the country.” The poll revealed that Americans largely believe that the government has gone too far by a margin of 45% to 40%. This is a clear reversal from a January 2010 survey in which the same question found that 63% of voters believed the government didn’t “go far enough to adequately protect the country.”

Polls further reveal Americans as highly skeptical of the programs. In an Economist/YouGov poll, 56% of Americans do not think the NSA is telling the truth about the unconstitutional spying. The same poll found that 59% of people disapprove of the spying, while only 35% approve of it. These numbers are not outliers and are supported by a recent Fox News poll (.pdf) finding 62% of Americans think the collection of phone records is “an unacceptable and alarming invasion of privacy rights.”

The latest poll, performed by Pew, affirms every one of these conclusions. Not only are Americans skeptical about the program, but they also believe the government has gone too far—the same exact conclusion found in the Quinnipiac poll. In a series of questions, Pew asked Americans whether they supported or opposed the program with different phrasings. As Pew reports: “Under every condition in this experiment more respondents oppose than favor the program.” The Pew poll is full of evidence supporting the fact that Americans oppose the unconstitutional spying, are skeptical of government claims about the unconstitutional NSA spying, and are increasingly concerned about their privacy rights.

In the 1950s and 60s, the NSA spied on all telegrams entering and exiting the country. The egregious actions were only uncovered after Congress set up an independent investigation called the Church Committee in the 1970s after Watergate. When the American public learned about NSA’s actions, they demanded change. And the Church Committee delivered it by providing more information about the programs and by curtailing the spying.

Just like the American public in the 1970s, Americans in the 2010s know that when the government amasses dossiers on citizens, it’s neither good for security nor for privacy. And a wide range of polls this week show widespread concern among the American people over the new revelations about NSA domestic spying.

Yesterday, the Guardianreleased a comprehensive poll showing widespread concern about NSA spying. Two-thirds of Americans think the NSA’s role should be reviewed. The poll also showed Americans demanding accountability and more information from public officials—two key points of our recently launched stopwatching.us campaign.

But there’s more. So far, Gallup has one of the better-worded questions, finding that 53% of Americans disapprove of the NSA spying. A CBS poll also showed that a majority—at 58%—of Americans disapprove of the government “collecting phone records of ordinary Americans.” And Rasmussen—though sometimes known for push polling—also recently conducted a poll showing that 59% of Americans are opposed to the current NSA spying.

The only poll showing less than a majority on the side of government overreach was Pew Research Center, which asked Americans whether it was acceptable that the NSA obtained “secret court orders to track the calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism.” Pew reported that 56% of Americans said it was “acceptable.” But the question is poorly worded. It doesn’t mention the widespread, dragnet nature of the spying. It also neglects to describe the “information” being given—metadata, which is far more sensitive and can provide far more information than just the ability to “track the calls” of Americans. And it was conducted early on in the scandal, before it was revealed that the NSA doesn’t even have to obtain court orders to search already collected information.

Despite the aggregate numbers, many of the polls took place at the same time Americans were finding out new facts about the program. More questions must be asked. And if history is any indication, the American people will be finding out much more. Indeed, just today the Guardian reported that its working on a whole new series with even more NSA revelations about spying.

One thing is definitely clear: the American public is demanding answers and needs more information. That’s why Congress must create a special investigatory committee to reveal the full extent of the programs. Democracy demands it.

Head over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to take action by signing the organization’s letter to Congress demanding a full accounting of the NSA’s U.S. citizen surveillance activities.

Filed Under: Liberty News, Staff Reports

http://personalliberty.com/2013/08/1...mestic-spying/

NSA DOMESTIC SPYING "BUILT ON LIES"

By Chuck Baldwin
August 15, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

Kit Daniels recently wrote a brief but very enlightening news story on InfoWars.com:“On the August 6 edition of the Alex Jones Show, Dr. Ron Paul responded to this very straightforward statement which appeared in a recent New York Times article:

“‘Some analysts and Congressional officials suggested Friday that emphasizing a terrorist threat now was a good way to divert attention from the uproar over the N.S.A.’s data-collection programs, and that if it showed the intercepts had uncovered a possible plot, even better.’
“‘Well, it’s not amazing that this is the truth,’ Paul said in response. ‘It’s amazing, I think, that the New York Times would admit it.’

“Paul went on to say that the NSA’s claim of saving Americans from dozens of terrorist attacks is simply rhetoric to prove that the agency’s massive spying on Americans is a good thing.

“‘Their (the NSA officials) claimed successes are all built on lies,’ Paul said.

Paul referred to NSA Deputy Director John Inglis’ admission that the agency’s warrantless wiretapping only prevented maybe one terrorist plot and even that one is questionable, which contradicts the NSA’s earlier claim of 54 thwarted plots.

“‘It’s all based on lies and I think this is probably a benefit to us because most Americans now are being very, very leery of what our government tells us,’ Paul continued. ‘This is a terrible thing to have to go through… who wants to have to give up on their country?’“‘We don’t want to give up on our country but I think it’s high time we gave up on a lot of our politicians and the way our government is being run.’”

See the report: Ron Paul Calls NSA’s Alexander and Clapper Liars
What is even more amazing than the New York Times reporting such a story is the fact that some of Barack Obama’s biggest Hollywood supporters are beginning to recognize the evil machinations of Obama’s domestic spying.

Breitbart.com covered the following story:

“Actor Matt Damon told Black Entertainment Television (BET) that President Barack Obama ‘has some explaining to do:’

“‘There are a lot of things that I really question--the legality of the drone strikes, these NSA revelations. Jimmy Carter came out and said we don’t live in a democracy. That’s a little intense when an ex-president says that. So you know, he’s got some explaining to do, particularly for a constitutional law professor.’

“When asked his opinion of the President's second term, Damon chuckled and said, ‘He broke up with me.’

See the report: Damon: Obama Broke Up With Me

Damon is not the only one in Hollywood angry over the NSA’s domestic spying. Included in the list are Alec Baldwin, Judd Apatow, Steve Martin, Rob Schneider, Patton Oswalt, John Cusack, Janine Turner, and even (Egad!) Michael Moore.

Read the actors comments: More Celebs Slam NSA

Here is my problem: how is it that liberal actors in Hollywood can see, and are willing to speak out against, the unconstitutional citizen spying apparatus that Barack Obama is implementing against the American people and our country’s pastors and Christian leaders neither see it nor have spoken out against it? What the heck is going on? You mean to tell me that actors in Hollywood care more about freedom than the men standing behind America’s pulpits? Creepers, Batman!

Plus, neither let us forget that it was George W. Bush who put all of the infrastructure, policies, and laws in place which created the machinery for everything that Obama’s NSA is currently using against the American citizenry. This is NOT a political issue. Both Republican and Democrat administrations and congresses have collaborated to eviscerate the Bill of Rights and turn America into a giant surveillance society.

What is it about people (including Christians and Republicans) that cause them to be infatuated with a police state? All one has to do is say that some law, no matter how egregiously oppressive it might be, is in the interest of “national security,” and, presto, everyone blindly supports it.

Yes, yes, I realize that not everyone supports it. Ron Paul and a few others oppose this slippery slope; but the vast majority of Republicans and Democrats, pastors and Christians, liberals and conservatives, the media elite and journalists, do support it.

With all of this love and infatuation that so many people have with the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the NDAA, the NSA, etc., why don’t these same people love Nazi Socialism? After all, the surveillance society created by G.W. Bush and Barack Obama makes Hitler’s spy apparatus look amateurish by comparison.

Does anyone really not know that the NSA is lying to us? Does anyone really believe that the surveillance society is about protecting the American people from a few thousand Sand People?

The last report I read on the topic said that the TSA now has almost ONE MILLION people on the no-fly watch list. Almost one million! Al Qaeda has never numbered more than a few thousand people (not to mention that Al Qaeda is a contrivance of our own CIA). And at the rate we keep killing their “number two” guys, it is questionable just how many of them are truly left. Let’s put it this way: there are far more people on the TSA watch list than there are Al Qaeda members worldwide. But it really doesn’t matter how many or few of them there are; they justify America’s politicians turning the United States into a giant police state--for our own protection, or course. BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!

Researcher Joel Skousen quotes a Reuters news report saying, “Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigation trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

“A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manuel instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

"Reuters broke another report about the way the government lies to us entitled, “U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans.” From the report: “‘I have never heard of anything like this at all,’ said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

“‘It is one thing to create special rules for national security,’ Gertner said. ‘Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.’”

See the report: U.S. Directs Agents To Cover Up Program Used To Investigate Americans

Ron Paul knows the NSA is lying to us; Alex Jones knows they are lying to us; Stewart Rhodes knows they are lying to us; Joel Skousen knows they are lying to us; Matt Damon knows they are lying to us; Alec Baldwin knows they are lying to us; the New York Times knows they are lying to us; Reuters news knows they are lying to us; even Michael Moore knows they are lying to us. So, why don’t America’s pastors and Christian leaders know they are lying to us?

Click here to visit NewsWithViews.com home page.

© 2013 Chuck Baldwin - All Rights Reserved

Chuck Baldwin is a syndicated columnist, radio broadcaster, author, and pastor dedicated to preserving the historic principles upon which America was founded. He was the 2008 Presidential candidate for the Constitution Party. He and his wife, Connie, have 3 children and 8 grandchildren. Chuck and his family reside in the Flathead Valley of Montana. See Chuck's complete bio here.

E-mail: chuck@chuckbaldwinlive.com


Website: ChuckBaldwinLive.com

http://www.newswithviews.com/baldwin/baldwin766.htm

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August 16, 2013 | By Trevor Timm


Key Takeaways From the Washington Post Report Detailing Thousands of Privacy Violations by the NSA

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/0...violations-nsa



The Washington Post has published two important stories, based on perhaps the most signficant documents yet leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Separately, the stories tell of an agency in charge of policing itself, leading to thousands of violations of Americans’ privacy per year, and a secret court with no power to stop them.
These new revelations, and the many before it, lead to one conclusion: we need a full, independent investigation of the NSA’s powers. Here are the most significant new facts we learned yesterday:
An internal NSA privacy audit showed thousands of violations of the law per year, despite administration statements insisting NSA hasn’t abused its powers:

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance.

The NSA, on at least one occasion, decided not to report a violation of Americans’ privacy to the FISA court, in violation of court rules:

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

In an important statement to the Post, the chief judge of the FISA court essentially says the court does not have enough power to adequately oversee the NSA:

“The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” its chief, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, said in a written statement to The Washington Post. “The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”

In just a year’s time, from April 1, 2011 through March 31, 2012, there were 2,776 “incidents” of privacy violations. The number of Americans affected is unknown, but much higher than 2,776.

The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended… The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.

The audit only takes into account violations at NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade in Maryland, and omits other NSA locations.

Three government officials, speak*ing on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to oversee the NSA, did not have a copy of the privacy audit until asked by the Post:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit until The Post asked her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”

The NSA continues to use secret definitions of ordinary words (see more here) in order to mislead Congress:

One of the documents sheds new light on a statement by NSA Director Keith B. Alexander last year that “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens.” Some Obama administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have defended Alexander with assertions that the agency’s internal definition of “data” does not cover “metadata” such as the trillions of American call records that the NSA is now known to have collected and stored since 2006.

We also learned that violations of Americans' privacy have increased in recent years:

Despite the quadrupling of the NSA’s oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009, the rate of infractions increased throughout 2011 and early 2012. An NSA spokesman declined to disclose whether the trend has continued since last year.

Despite claims to the contrary by the administration, the documents provide further confirmation Americans’ data are stored in the NSA’s database on a massive scale:

The large number of database query incidents, which involve previously collected communications, confirms long-standing suspicions that the NSA’s vast data banks — with code names such as MARINA, PINWALE and XKEYSCORE — house a considerable volume of information about Americans. Ordinarily the identities of people in the United States are masked, but intelligence “customers” may request unmasking, either one case at a time or in standing orders.

Go here to demand Congress authorize a full, independent investigation into the NSA's domestic surveillance powers.

Class Action Lawsuits Filed Against Obama/NSA For Violations of Constitution

Dear Patriot:

Thank you for your continued support of WND.com.

Please take a few moments to consider this message from a friend of WND, whom we believe is engaged in a worthy cause.

Thank you again, from the team at WND.com!


We the People have recently learned that the President Barack Obama is using his National Security Agency to spy on us, by intercepting our private and confidential telephone messages, emails and internet postings to use against us. In this way it can obviously coerce and blackmail the American people to remain silent to his power grab, which is intended to transform our beloved nation into his dream of a socialist state.

I'm looking for millions of Americans to stand together and join with us in the class action lawsuits we have already filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. against the Obama adminisration, its corporate enablers and the judge who went along with their power grab, in order to take back our constitutionally protected rights of privacy, freedom of association and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures of our most private personal communications and due process. Without millions of American citizens fighting for freedom, we fear that our great country will be totally destroyed if President Obama is allowed to continue spying on all of our telephone calls, email and internet postings. PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY AS OUR CLASS ACTION CASES HAVE ALREADY BEEN FILED AND ARE IN PROGRESS AND WE NEED YOU TO JOIN IN THE FIGHT TO PRESERVE OUR FREEDOMS BEFORE ALL IS LOST!

Please help us win this class action suit by donating here.

These class action lawsuits were filed because Barack Hussein Obama's National Security Agency (NSA) is looking through billions of our emails, phone records, and other personal and confidential information to coerce and blackmail the American people to remain silent to his tyranny and attempted dismantling of the foundations of our Republic.

This outrage is more than simply the latest scandal in Washington. It marks a critical turning point in our nation, and I am counting on you to support us in our efforts to regain our rights as American citizens; rights which our Founding Fathers and the American colonies fought and died for.

This is an absolutely critical and defining moment. Already filed class action lawsuits against President Obama, his Attorney General Eric Holder, the NSA, Verizon, and other cell phone and internet provider companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and AOL, will serve to unify all political and social persuasions in our great nation to wage a second American revolution, one that is peaceful and legal - but pursued with force. The time has come for We the People to rise up and reclaim control of our nation. The American people can use these class actions to 'man the barricades of freedom' against President Obama and his establishment government despots and their corporate enablers who seek to imprison them through coercive abuses o f their privacy and other constitutional rights. We must say 'no' to the Orwellian power grab. We must demand that our liberties be respected, before we are all made the prisoners of Obama and his comrades.

Without your strong financial support, however, this could be the moment that Americans give up their God given rights to freedom, ran away from a fight and gave up our last bit of approval for a government-takeover of our lives. To keep us down and to prevent us from fighting back, Obama and his comrades are spying on all of us. They are obviously prepared to use confidential personal information to coerce and blackmail we, the American people, into submission in order that he can pursue his agenda to transform the nation into a socialist state. This simply cannot be permitted and we must not stand for this, but rather stand and fight together to prevent this. As our Founding Father Benjamin Franklin declared in the days leading up to the Declaration of Independence, either we must all hang together or separately we will be hanged.

The class action cases which we have filed are a way for us all to hang together to defeat Obama and his socialist comrades.

To view the class action complaints, join our just cause and make generous gift to our legal defense fund, go here. We the People are up against powerful forces and we must have the financial means to legally wage this battle; a second American revolution to reclaim and preserve our liberties. Let us all band together to wage a second American revolution, legally and in the courts, to preserve our God given freedoms and liberties. Time is short before all is lost.

If you can, please agree to your most generous contribution of $500, $250, $100, $50 or $35 today. Every dollar counts. With your support, we will immediately begin mobilizing millions of freedom loving Americans from all over the country to join our already filed lawsuits stop Obama’s spying on us and to preserve our freedoms! While others just talk, we have taken action to put an end to this illegal attempt by President Obama to take away our constitutional rights and to take total control over the lives of me, you and our loved ones.

Thanks so much for your support. Time is short to save the nation from President Obama’s totalitarian takeover! Help us NOW to wage this legal revolution to save the nation before all is lost!

Please consider donating. Anything will help.

Sincerely,

Larry Klayman

Mr. Klayman was the legal counsel who successfully
defeated the legal recall of Sheriff Joe Arpaio

WND E-mail

Saturday, 17 August 2013 16:00 Verizon Rewarded for Records Release With $10 Billion Government Contract

Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.







Verizon’s willingness to give the federal government unfettered access to its customers’ phone records is paying off handsomely for the telecommunications giant.
Verizon announced on August 16:

The U.S. Department of the Interior has selected Verizon to participate in a $10 billion, 10-year contract to provide cloud and hosting services. This is potentially one of Verizon's largest federal cloud contracts to date.
Verizon is one of 10 companies that will compete to offer cloud-based storage, secure file transfer, virtual machine, and database, Web, and development and test environment hosting services. The company is also one of four selected to offer SAP application hosting services.Each of the 10 agreements awarded under the Foundation Cloud Hosting Services contract has a potential maximum value of $1 billion.

Put simply, not only has Verizon not suffered a loss of customers since revelations of its collusion with the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans’ phone records, but now the company is being paid billions for its cooperation.The press release issued by Verizon boasts of its buddy-buddy relationship with departments of the federal government.

"Verizon has a history of successfully providing advanced networking and security solutions to the Department of the Interior," said Susan Zeleniak, senior vice president, public sector markets, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. "The Foundation Cloud Hosting Services contract represents an expansion of Verizon's engagement with the department and will enable it to leverage Verizon's significant cloud investments and expertise to help the department achieve its long-term objectives."

Verizon's participation in the construction of the Panopticon is well known.
According to a court order labeled "TOP SECRET," federal judge Roger Vinson ordered Verizon to turn over the phone records of millions of its U.S. customers to the National Security Agency (NSA).The order, issued in April by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and leaked on the Internet by the Guardian (U.K.), compels Verizon to provide these records on an “ongoing daily basis” to hand over to the domestic spy agency “an electronic copy” of “all call detail records created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”
This information includes the phone numbers involved, the electronic identity of the device, the calling card numbers (if any) used in making the calls, and the time and duration of the call.

In other words, if you are a Verizon customer, your detailed phone records secretly have been handed over — and will continue to be handed over — to NSA agents.This wholesale dragnet of personal electronic communication data proves beyond dispute that the Obama administration is keeping millions of Americans under constant surveillance regardless of whether the targets are suspected of committing crimes.
In other words, millions of innocent Americans have had their call records shared with a federal spy agency in open and hostile defiance of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” 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.”

What is reasonable? Legally speaking, “the term reasonable is a generic and relative one and applies to that which is appropriate for a particular situation.”Even if the reasonableness threshold is crossed, though, there must be a warrant and suspicion of commission or intent to commit a crime. Neither the NSA nor Verizon has asserted that even one of the millions whose phone records were seized fits that description.

Again, the government has made no attempt to demonstrate that any of those whose phone records have been seized are suspected of committing some crime. It is a plain and simple violation of the Fourth Amendment in the hope of finding something that one day might be found to qualify as suspicious. That is putting the cart of culpability before the horse of the Constitution, and it should not be abided by the American people.

How far are the citizens of this Republic willing to let the federal surveillance apparatus go toward constructing a Panopticon? At this accelerated rate of construction, how long until every call, every text, every e-mail, every online message, and every movement fall under the all-seeing eye of federal overlords?
When contacted by The New American, a spokesman for Verizon declined to comment on his company’s compliance with the order.

Such a demur is expected in light of the provision of the order which prohibits Verizon, the FBI, or the NSA from revealing to the public — including the Verizon customers whose phone records now belong to the Obama administration — that the data is being given to the government.

Glen Greenwald of the Guardian (U.K.) details the data being seized by the NSA:
The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data — the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to — was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.
Greenwald’s accurate analysis raises a couple of very important questions.
First, why would agents of the federal government willingly violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution by seizing phone logs of millions of innocent Americans?

As quoted by Greenwald, the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez remarked, “We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence [sic] of constraint or particularized suspicion.”
Can anyone doubt that?

Readers should recall that as required by provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008 (FISA) and the Patriot Act (as amended in 2005), the Department of Justice revealed to Congress in April the number of applications for eavesdropping received and rejected by the FISA court.
To no one’s surprise (least of all to the architects and builders of the already sprawling surveillance state), the letter addressed to Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reports that in 2012, of the 1,789 requests made by the government to monitor the electronic communications of citizens, not a single one was rejected.
That’s right. The court, established specifically to judge the merits of applications by the government to spy on citizens, gave a green light to every government request for surveillance.

Not content to be a mere formality for electronic surveillance, the FISA court (officially called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) also held the coats of the FBI while that agency carried out the searches and seizures set out in 212 applications.Perhaps the most disturbing take-away from the leak of this secret court document ordering Verizon to hand over customer call logs and other data to a federal surveillance agency is the fact that the government considers the protections of the Fourth Amendment to be nothing more than a "parchment barrier" that is easily torn through. The Obama administration regards the Constitution — as did the Bush administration before it — as advisory at best.

Far from running scared from repercussions from its betrayal of customers’ privacy and constitutional protections of the right of people to be free from unwarranted searches and seizures, Verizon's August 16 statement demonstrates the sort of brazen boasts that are the prerogative of those under the protections of government.

http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/ite...nment-contract

Gowdy doubts lawmakers were briefed on years of NSA privacy breaches


By Jordy Yager - 08/17/13 10:18 AM ET

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said late Friday that he doubts that members of Congress were briefed on the on the several thousands of privacy violations carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) that were revealed earlier this week.



An internal NSA audit and other documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the agency had broken its own privacy rules and violated privacy rights of citizens thousands of times since 2008, according to The Washington Post. “I wonder how many of my colleagues in Congress were briefed that there were thousands of errors made with respect to this program, because I have a sneaking suspicion the number is zero,” said Gowdy on Fox News.

“That's how many of my colleagues were told ahead of time before we had to learn from a leaker to a newspaper that there were thousands of violations.” Many members of Congress, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is charged with overseeing the NSA, have said they were not made aware of the audit until recently. And Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has called for a hearing on the matter when Congress returns next month.
Gowdy said he’s been hearing a great roar of dissatisfaction and distrust from voters in his South Carolina district, and that Congress needs to take serious steps to fix its oversight capabilities of highly secretive intelligence operations, like those carried out by the NSA.

“If we don't get that figured out, I'm not worried about winning elections, I'm worried about the republic,” said Gowdy. “People who are governed have consented to be governed [and] have to have trust in the people we have put in positions of responsibility.” The NSA audit found that the spy agency had procured private communications thousands of times without proper authorization. Most of the incidents were unintended and involved unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign targets in the United States, according to the Post report.

Gowdy pointed to the need to balance privacy with security, saying that in order to try and prevent attacks like those on Sept. 11, 2001, the government has made great strides towards being more secure. But, in doing so, he said he worries that civil liberties may have been sacrificed.
“I think there's a growing mood in Congress on both sides of the aisle that we have over-skewed it towards public safety and away from privacy. And that is very difficult for a former prosecutor to say, but I believe it,” he said.

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...ivacy-breaches

Power Play: NSA Scandal Worsens, EPA Boss Uses Personal E-Mails For Lobbyists, And Egypt Uprising



http://www.fiscalconservatives.com/v...5C7w0K_X4.html