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

Ron Paul: Fear Snowden Could Be Target of Drone Assassination

Tuesday, 11 Jun 2013 10:45 PM
By Paul Scicchitano



Former GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul insisted on Tuesday that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is not a traitor, but he fears the U.S. government may send drones or a cruise missile to kill the 29-year-old, who has fled the United States.

“I don’t think for a minute that he’s a traitor,” Paul told Fox Business’ Melissa Francis.

“Everybody’s worried about him and what they’re going to do, and how they’re going to convict him of treason, and how they’re going to kill him, but what about the people who destroy our Constitution?” the former Texas Republican congressman asserted. “What kind of penalty for those individuals who just take the Fourth Amendment and destroy it? What do we think about people who assassinate American citizens without trials and assume that that’s the law of the land? That’s where our problem is.”

Paul said that “our problem isn’t with people who are trying to tell us the truth about what’s happening” as in the case of Snowden, and he fears that the U.S. government may try to kill the former contractor.

“I’m worried about somebody in our government might kill him with a Cruise missile or a drone missile,” Paul said. “I mean we live in a bad time where American citizens don’t even have rights and that they can be killed, but the gentleman is trying to tell the truth about what’s going on.”

Paul added that there are no signs Snowden is trying to sell U.S. government secrets to Russia or another foreign government, otherwise he wouldn’t have made himself so vulnerable.

“He’s not defecting, there are no signs of that happening,” Paul said. “It’s a shame that we are in an age where people who tell the truth about what the government is doing get into trouble.”

He pointed to the case of a CIA agent who was imprisoned for acknowledging that torture takes place at Guantanamo.

“This is not good that the American people are spied on and the secrets are kept in government,” he said. “That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be the other way around.”


Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/snowden-ron-paul-drones/2013/06/11...

ACLU Sues Obama Administration Over Dragnet Phone Record Collections

Posted by Andrea Ryan on Tuesday, June 11, 2013, 4:38 PM
Today, the ACLU did what the ACLU does best…file lawsuits. This time it’s against the Obama Administration for illegally collecting phone records of millions of Americans.
The New York Times reports,

The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program — whose existence was exposed by a former National Security Agency contractor last week — is illegal and asking a judge to both stop it and order the records purged.
The lawsuit, filed in New York, could set up an eventual Supreme Court test. It could also focus attention on this disclosure amid the larger heap of top secret surveillance matters that were disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor who came forward on Sunday to say he was the source of a series of disclosures by The Guardian and The Washington Post.
The program “gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious and intimate associations,” the complaint says, adding that it “is likely to have a chilling effect on whistle-blowers and others who would otherwise contact” the A.C.L.U. for legal assistance.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Glenn Greenwald: There Are “Dozens of Stories” to Be Released on NS...

Posted by Jim Hoft on Tuesday, June 11, 2013, 1:53 PM
On Sunday, The Guardian reported that Edward Snowden was the 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history. Snowden spoke out from his hiding place in Hong Kong on his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadow.
Today Guardian contributor Glenn Greenwald told reporters there’s more to come,

“We’re going to have a lot more significant revelations that have not yet been heard over the next several weeks and months. How fast we get the next one out is something we’re deciding now. But there are dozens of more stories generated by the documents he provided.”

Justice Department Prepares Charges Against NSA Leaker Snowden
Tuesday, 11 Jun 2013 09:34 AM
The Justice Department is preparing charges against Edward Snowden, the former federal government contract worker who revealed the National Security Agency's vast secret surveillance program, ABC News reported.


Booz Allen Hamilton, the government contract company Snowden worked for, confirmed Tuesday that Snowden, whose salary was $122,000, was fired Monday for violating the firm's code of ethics.The FBI's Washington field office will oversee the investigation of Snowden, who said he leaked the classified information to Britain's Guardian newspaper because he wanted the American public to know the extent of the government's clandestine surveillance activities.

Meanwhile, an internal review has been launched to solely assess damage to national security, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Reuters. This review is separate from an initial criminal-leak investigation opened by the Justice Department.


The administration's review will examine the extent of damage to national security programs from the unauthorized disclosures of details of NSA's collection of phone call and email data, the official told Reuters.It will be coordinated by the National Counterintelligence Executive, a branch of the Director of National Intelligence's office, the official said.

It is unclear whether Snowden is still in Chinese territory or has left for another country such as Iceland, where he has said he may seek asylum, reports The New York Times. The Mira Hotel in Hong Kong, where he had been staying, said he checked out on Monday.


Kerri Jo Heim, a real estate agent in Hawaii, told the Times that police on June 5 visited the Oahu house Snowden shared with his girlfriend. By then, Snowden already was in Hong Kong.The paper said that pressing charges against the 29-year-old information-technology contractor would help the government in any extradition moves, as governments are generally reluctant to hand over suspects unless they have been formally charged.

Legal experts in Hong Kong said the government there likely would extradite Snowden to the United States if it found him and Washington requested that it do so.


"He won't find Hong Kong a safe harbor," said Regina Ip, a former secretary of security who is a member of the legislature.Meanwhile, Russia said it would weigh an asylum request from Snowden."We will take action based on what actually happens. If we receive such a request, it will be considered," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry told the Russian newspaper Kommersant on Tuesday, according to the Wall Street Journal.


The head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia's State Duma, its lower house of parliament, acknowledged that there would be "hysteria" in the U.S. if his country were to grant Snowden asylum.Writing on Twitter, Alexei Pushkov said, "Having promised Snowden refuge, Moscow is taking up the defense of those persecuted for political reasons. There would be hysteria in the U.S. In listening to phone calls and tracking Internet activity, U.S. intelligence agencies have violated the laws of their own country."


Referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Pushkov said, "In this sense, Snowden -- like Assange -- is a human-rights activist."Despite Snowden's youth and lack of university education, he was able to get a job with Booz Allen which allowed him almost unfettered access to private information on just about anyone in the country.

"I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email," he told Britain's Guardian newspaper.


He said he handed highly sensitive documents to journalists because the extent of the official snooping appeared to him to be part of an "architecture of oppression."

Snowden's leaks showed that the government had obtained a record of every phone call made from Verizon cellphones. They also showed that Internet giants such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and Apple had cooperated with the government in giving up billions of pieces of information about the web use of individuals.


Lawmakers in Washington are preparing for full briefings on the Snowden affair. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said her panel would hold a closed briefing for all senators on Thursday to hear from the NSA, FBI, and Department of Justice officials. A similar hearing is to be held in the House on Tuesday.


Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/snowden-justice-leaks-charges/2013...

Rand Paul: Big Brother is Watching

Tuesday, 11 Jun 2013 11:21 AM
By Dan Weil

The National Security Agency's surveillance program is a manifestation of a virtual police state, libertarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul says.

"If this is the new normal in America, then Big Brother certainly is watching and it's not hyperbolic or extreme to say so," the Kentucky senator writes in The Wall Street Journal.

"Nor is it unreasonable to fear which parts of the Constitution this government will next consider negotiable or negligible."

Paul is upset with President Barack Obama's response to the public outcry over the program. Obama said, "In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother . . . but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance."

Paul heartily disagrees. The NSA program violates the Fourth Amendment, he says.

"How many records did the NSA seize from Verizon? Hundreds of millions. We are now learning about more potential mass data collections by the government from other communications and online companies," he says.

"These are the 'details,' and few Americans consider this approach 'balanced,' though many rightly consider it Orwellian."

Paul says he doesn't trust the government to safeguard the privacy of the records it collects. "The president assures us that the government is simply monitoring the origin and length of phone calls, not eavesdropping on their contents," the senator writes.

"Is this administration seriously asking us to trust the same government that admittedly targets political dissidents through the Internal Revenue Service and journalists through the Justice Department?"

Paul says the White House understates the magnitude of the NSA program. "Monitoring the records of as many as a billion phone calls, as some news reports have suggested, is no modest invasion of privacy," he states.

"It is an extraordinary invasion of privacy. We fought a revolution over issues like generalized warrants, where soldiers would go from house to house, searching anything they liked." This is the modern equivalent, Paul says.

"I also believe that trolling through millions of phone records hampers the legitimate protection of our security," he writes. Despite all the government's data mining, it didn't act on the information that one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects traveled to Chechnya, Paul notes.

"Perhaps instead of treating every American as a potential terror suspect the government should concentrate on more targeted analysis."

The administration simply claims blanket access to all Americans' private information, Paul says. "This response is a clear indication that the president views our Constitutional 'right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects' as null and void."


Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/rand-paul-big-brother/2013/06/11/i...

Senators Confront Alexander Over NSA Prism Scandal UPDATE: PUNT

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by Breitbart News 12 Jun 2013, 10:55 AM PDT post a comment
UPDATE: At the start of Wednesday's hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Chair Sen. Barbara Mikulski announced she has agreed to Vice-Chair Sen. Richard Shelby's request to have a full hearing on revelations about NSA surveillance and its PRISM data-mining program. The previously scheduled hearing, as a result, will focus on cyber-security issues generally and will not address the recent scandal. Gen. Alexander will face Senators' questions about the programs another day. More updates below.

What was once scheduled as an ordinary hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee has become a closely-watched spectacle Wednesday, as National Security Agency (NSA) Director Keith Alexander testifies on the NSA and Prism scandals. New revelations are still emerging about the vast extent to which the agency has been monitoring telephone calls and Internet traffic--not just among foreign nationals but U.S. citizens.
Senators were expected to ask Alexander to explain, in public, the extent and detail of the NSA's surveillance programs. In particular, the Senate has shown interest in whether Alexander, like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, had appeared to mislead Congress in 2012 when asked directly about such spying.
Other legislators, both in the House of Representatives and the Senate, have shown concern about how a low-level contractor, Edward Snowden, was able to obtain top secret information--and how he was able to leak it to the media. Snowden is thought to be in Hong Kong, where he intends to fight likely extradition.
UPDATE: National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander, in his opening remarks before the Committee, said technological advances present an "incredible opportunity" for the nation in fields like education and medical care. He said these opportunities are complicated, though, by cyber espionage.
He said "disruptive attacks against infrastructure" can potentially become "destructive attacks" if they are not prevented.
Alexander said government cannot prevent these attacks without the support from industry because they "own and operate the nation's infrastructure" and said the government had to be transparent in its dealings with industry. He also said those at the National Security Agency take civil liberty concerns to heart.
UPDATE: Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said he was not going to get into a discussion today about whether Director of National Intelligence James Clapper misled Congress during his testimony on March 12.
"I'm not going into questions on whether he contradicted himself in a couple of answers," Leahy said.
UPDATE: Alexander said he is pushing to declassify some records about attacks the National Security Agency thwarted by using the various data surveillance programs "within a week."
"I want the American people to know we are being transparent," he told Leahy.
Alexander said he would give selected Members of Congress more classified information as well.
UPDATE: Alexander told Leahy Section 702 of FISA was critical in helping the agency stop Najibullah Zazi from bombing the NYC subway system in 2009. He said Section 702 "was the one that allowed us to know what was happening."
When asked if Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the agency may be using as the legal basis for the PRISM program, was critical to Zazi, he said, "Not to Zazi, because the first part in Zazi went to 702." He did say Section 215 helped stop "dozens" of attacks.
He then said these authorities ultimately "compliment each other" and "work together" in helping the National Security Agency identify threats.
UPDATE: Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked Alexander if he was concerned that someone like NSA leaker Edward Snowden could get such access to the nation's secrets.
Alexander responded that he had "great concerns" and it was something he had to fix and will look at.

"In the IT arena, some of these people have tremendous skills to operate networks, and that was his job," Alexander said. "He had great skills in the area." Alexander said Durbin's concerns were not unfounded, and the NSA needed to "go back and look" at "where we went wrong."
UPDATE: Alexander said the agency had some records of one of the 9/11 hijackers and suggested they could have gone "backwards in time" if they were able to get various phone numbers.
When Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) asked Alexander if the agency can see what Americans are "googling or emailing," Alexander said he needed a court order to search the contents of the records of any American.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) then clarified and said, "It's my understanding that you have the meta data, you have the records, if you want to go to the content, you need a court order ... to collect the content of the calls [just like you would in a criminal case]. Alexander then emphasized the agency needed to get a court order to look at the contents of phone and email records of any American.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) asked Alexander to describe the process the agency goes through to collect data on Americans. Alexander said the NSA does not get to "swim through" the data.
"What authorization gave you the grounds for acquiring my cell phone data?" Merkley asked while holding up his Verizon cell phone.
Alexander said it is a "complex area" and he needed to get the Department of Justice involved in the response so he gets it exactly right. Alexander suggested they discuss the matter at the classified hearing tomorrow. Feinstein suggested Alexander give Merkley the answer in writing so that he gets it exactly right.
UPDATE:
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) asked Alexander a "true or false" question about whether someone like Snowden could have the authority to tap into the phone and email records of nearly any American, as Snowden claimed in an interview with Glenn Greenwald.
"False, I know of no way to do that," Alexander said.
UPDATE: Alexander tells Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) that the agency is protecting America's civil liberties and privacy but could not explain it to Americans because the details were classified. Alexander said the NSA surveillance programs were not something the agency was doing "under the covers." He insisted the agency is doing nothing wrong.
Udall points out, though, that it is difficult to have "a transparent debate about secret programs approved by a secret court issuing secret court orders based on secret interpretations of the law."
UPDATE: Mikulski reads a tweet from a BuzzFeed reporter alleging she was "muzzling" senators so they do not ask questions about the NSA's phone and Internet surveillance programs. She insisted she was not "muzzling" or "stifling" any senator from asking such questions. She then said "hi" to the reporter and said it was an "open hearing."
UPDATE: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) says we are not in a scrimmage but a war and said at a briefing yesterday, one of the briefers told her about the cyber threat challenges the agency faces and explained to her that the Department of Defense is a "Coke bottle cap" and the federal civilian government (.gov) is the coke bottle itself. She said the "companies and citizens" (.com) are the "entire room the bottle is in." She said all the questions are being peppered to the top of the coke bottle but the "room that we are in" is the battleground that we are "fighting in." She said it takes "huge resources" and an unbelievable compromise between the government and private sector. The Coke bottle analogy Landrieu relayed seems to have left many perplexed.
UPDATE: Alexander that Feinstein's understanding that the NSA deletes phone records after five years was accurate.
UPDATE: Feinstein said it is important to show the cases at the classified briefing where the surveillance programs thwarted potential terrorist attacks. Alexander said he would attempt to do so.
UPDATE: Sen. Feinstein said many companies feel like they should only share information if they get liability protection. Alexander said liability insurance should be provided if the companies are sharing information with the government but not when they are sharing with other companies.
UPDATE: Mikulski said it is time for a "fresh, new national debate" about the balance beween privacy and security. She they will now move to a "closed hearing."
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/12/Senators-Confron...

FLASHBACK: Joe Biden Says Don’t Trust a Spying President (Video)

Posted by Jim Hoft on Wednesday, June 12, 2013, 5:33 PM
Then Senator Joe Biden in 2006 said you can’t trust a spying president.

“If I know every single phone call you made I’m able to determine every single person you talk to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. The real question here is what do they do with this information they collect that does not have anything to do with Al-Qaeda? And we’re going to trust the president and the vice president of the United States that they’re doing the right thing. Don’t count me in on that.“

Via TPNN and Special Report:
Under the Obama Administration… FBI requests for records under Patriot Act have increased 1,000% in....

NSA Leaker: US Has Engaged in 61,000 Worldwide Hacking Operations

Posted by Jim Hoft on Wednesday, June 12, 2013, 3:06 PM

Via Drudge:
‘I’M NEITHER TRAITOR NOR HERO. I’M AN AMERICAN’…
SNOWDEN TALKS WITH SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST NEWSPAPER…
More explosive details on US surveillance targets…
Steps he claims US took since he broke cover…
His plans for the immediate future…
His fears for his family…
Will fight extradition…
LET HONG KONG DECIDE…
Not hiding…
NSA leaker Edward Snowden told the South China Morning Post that the US government has engaged in 61,000 worldwide hacking operations.
The Washington Post reported:

Edward Snowden, the self-confessed leaker of secret surveillance documents, claimed Wednesday that the United States has mounted massive hacking operations against hundreds of Chinese targets since 2009.
The former contractor, whose work at the National Security Agency gave him access to highly classified U.S. intelligence, made the assertions in an interview with the South China Morning Post. The newspaper said he showed it “unverified documents” describing an extensive U.S. campaign to obtain information from computers in Hong Kong and mainland China.
“We hack network backbones — like huge Internet routers, basically — that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he told the newspaper.
According to Snowden, the NSA has engaged in more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide, including hundreds aimed at Chinese targets. Among the targets were universities, businesses and public officials.

George Orwell back in fashion as Prism stokes paranoia about Big Brother

Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a society in which liberty was impossible – so how should we respond to this new threat?

More relevant than ever … George Orwell, who saw the writer as a free individual striving for objective truth. Photograph: Rex Features

The NSA Prism surveillance scandal has been good news for George Orwell, and in particular for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was originally published in 1949. Sales of the centennial edition have risen by more than 7,000% on A... . Having been languishing at 13,074 in the list, it is now up to 193 and rising.

It may not rival Caroline Barnett's Willing to Walk on Water: Step Out in Faith and Let God Work Miracl..., which has miraculously surged from 144th to first in the past 24 hours with a 267,000% rise, but clearly many people are finding parallels between the US government's willingness to snoop on Joe Public's emails and phone calls and Orwell's vision of a future in which Big Brother is everywhere.
"Orwellian" is the word on everyone's lips. "The question is, what do freedom and liberty mean in the United States of America?" Senator Bernie Sanders asked in a TV interview this week. "What does our constitution mean? What kind of country do we want to be? Kids will grow up knowing that every damn thing that they do is going to be recorded somewhere in a file, and I think that will have a very Orwellian and inhibiting impact on our lives."
Not, it must be said, that Orwell really needs the publicity. Like Big Brother, he is always with us. DJ Taylor, who in 2003 wrote a biography of Orwell and for the past five years has been chairman of the Orwell Trust, makes a startling claim for the writer: "If you had to write down the names of the three writers in English who had had the greatest effect in communicating to the general public what books and literature were about," he says, "they would be Shakespeare, Dickens and Orwell."
The US has always been keen on Orwell: liberals warmed to him because of his warnings against the power of the state, conservatives because his books gave them a stick with which to beat communism. His influence has also been felt outside the English-speaking world. Editions of Ninety Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, published in 1945, circulated in the Soviet Union; he was – and indeed still is – revered in Poland, where his satires were widely read under communist rule; and Taylor believes he is being read in China today. Orwell has something to say to everyone who is suffering under autocracy.
However, readers who pick up Nineteen Eighty-Four because of the current worries over the Prism programme would be wrong just to see it as a novel about the dangers of overweening technology. The all-seeing telescreen in the corner of the room is an important device for allowing the state to exercise control, but Orwell's real concern is about far more insidious threats to liberty. The Big Brother state aims at nothing less than the control of language and thought. According to the slogans repeated by the Ministry of Truth, "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength." Deprive people of the words with which to resist, and you will crush resistance.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith's defining act of rebellion is to keep a diary, to attempt to record his thoughts and feelings accurately – not easy when the expressions you need have been obliterated or perverted. The greatest inhibition, to use Senator Sanders's word, is mental rather than physical.
The idea that governments could control people's minds terrified Orwell. Taylor argues that Nineteen Eighty-Four was born of paranoia – a paranoia that was apparent from the beginning of Orwell's writing career in the early 1930s. He lionised the writer as a free individual striving for objective truth, beholden to no special interests, yet everywhere he saw that freedom being circumscribed.
Orwell encapsulated those fears in his 1946 essay "The Prevention of Literature". "In our age," he wrote, "the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy … Everything conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above and never telling what seems to him the whole truth."
It is Orwell's paranoia that gives his writing its power and urgency, and which has kept it alive. . What we might learn from a broader understanding of that much-used (and sometimes abused) term "Orwellian" is that he would fear not only the technology of surveillance but our response to it. Are we willing to question its use? Will we demand greater oversight of the work of the security agencies? Will we hold our government to account? As long as there is a Winston Smith struggling to keep his diary, Big Brother has not won.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jun/11/george-orwell...

Rand Paul: “I’m Leaving My Phone at Home” When I Go to GOP Meetings...

Posted by Jim Hoft on Wednesday, June 12, 2013, 9:37 AM
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul joked with “CBS This Morning” that he’s not taking his phone with him anymore, after it came to light that the National Security Agency’s was secretly collecting phone records.

“I’ve been jokingly saying I’m leaving my phone at home when I go to Republican leadership meetings because the President does not need to know where I am all day long.”

Paul also blasted Barack Obama over his surveillance hypocrisy.
For the record… FBI requests for records under Patriot Act have increased 1,000% in....