Thread: Meet PRISM / US-984XN - The US Government's Internet Espionage Super Operation

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How the NSA Spies on Americans (Jim Harper) Cato Institute

Added by Darla Dawald, National Director on June 7, 2013 at 4:34pm


A leaked (and secret) court order and other documents reveal that the National Security Agency has been collecting phone records on millions of Americans for months at a time, spying on e-mail communications with the knowledge of large Internet providers and collecting a vast catalog of Americans' credit card transactions. Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, discusses the revelations.

Video produced by Caleb O. Brown and Austin Bragg.

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NSA’s Verizon surveillance: how the White House tramples our constitution

by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) on June 7, 2013
In December 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama joined then-Senator Chris Dodd in threatening to filibuster the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa). Senator Obama opposed provisions granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that shared private client information with the government. His office released a statement:

“Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill …”

Senator Obama was right. Had I been in the Senate, I would’ve voted with him. I’ve even filibustered myself over civil liberties issues I believe are important.
Later, supporting an amendment that he believed repealed retroactive immunity from Fisa, Senator Obama said in February 2008:

“We can give our intelligence and law enforcement community the powers they need to track down and take out terrorists without undermining our commitment to the rule of law, or our basic rights and liberties.”

Senator Obama in 2007 was rightly concerned that telecommunications companies might get away with sharing clients’ private information without legal scrutiny. This week, we learned that the president’s National Security Agency compelled Verizon to hand over all of its client data records.
Senator Obama in 2008 wanted to track potential terrorist activity “without undermining our commitment to the rule of law, or our basic rights and liberties”. Today, President Obama undermines the rule of law, basic rights and core liberties – all in the name of tracking terrorists.
There is always a balance between security and liberty and the American tradition has long been to err on the side of liberty. America’s founders feared a government powerful enough to commit unreasonable searches and seizures and crafted a constitution designed to protect citizens’ privacy.
Under this administration, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has targeted political dissidents, the Department of Justice has seized reporters’ phone records, and now we’ve learned the NSA seized an unlimited amount of Verizon’s client data. Just when you think it can’t get any worse under this president, it does. This is an all-out assault on the constitution. These actions are unacceptable under any president, Democrat or Republican.
I can remember well a Senator Obama who joined the Democratic chorus against the warrantless wiretapping of the Bush administration. Now, that chorus has gone mute. The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald has noted what he sees as “a defining attribute of the Obama legacy: the transformation of what was until recently a symbol of rightwing radicalism – warrantless eavesdropping – into meekly accepted bipartisan consensus.”
Not every Republican or Democrat is part of that consensus. When the Senate rushed through a last-minute extension of the Fisa Amendments Act over the holidays late last year, Senator Mike Lee (Republican, Utah) and I offered an amendment requiring stronger protections on business records that would’ve prohibited precisely the kind of data-mining the Verizon case has revealed. Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat, Oregon) introduced an amendment to require estimates from intelligence agencies of how many Americans were being surveilled. Both these measures were voted down.
Just last month, I introduced the Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act, which if enacted would’ve protected Americans from exactly the kind of abuses we’ve seen recently. It was also voted down.
On Thursday, I announced my Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013, which ensures that no government agency can search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause. We shall see how many join me in supporting a part of the Bill of Rights that everyone in Congress already took an oath to uphold.
If the president and Congress would simply obey the fourth amendment, this new shocking revelation that the government is now spying on citizens’ phone data en masse would never have happened. That I have to keep reintroducing the fourth amendment – and that a majority of senators keep voting against it – is a good reflection of the arrogance that dominates Washington.
During my filibuster, I quoted Glenn Greenwald, who wrote:

“There is a theoretical framework being built that posits that the US government has unlimited power. When it comes to any kind of threats it perceives, it makes the judgment to take whatever action against them that it warrants without any constraints or limitations of any kind.”

If the seizure and surveillance of Americans’ phone records – across the board and with little to no discrimination – is now considered a legitimate security precaution, there is literally no protection of any kind guaranteed anymore to American citizens. In their actions, more outrageous and numerous by the day, this administration continues to treat the US constitution as a dead letter.
Senator Obama said of President Bush and Fisa in 2008:

“We must reaffirm that no one in this country is above the law.”

No one in America should be above the law. Including this president.
This first appeared at the Guardian UK.

Tagged as: fourth amendment, NSA takes verizon phone records, privacy, rand paul on NSA spying http://www.conservativeactionalerts....-constitution/

NSA wired into internet servers, Facebook, credit card, and phone records, but Obama says not to worry...

Posted by Darla Dawald, National Director on June 7, 2013 at 10:45pm in Patriot Action Alerts

By now I'm sure you've heard about the NSA (National Security Agency) collecting Verizon, Sprint Nextel, and AT&T phone records. Earlier today the Spy in Chief attempted to explain his reasoning for NSA record collection:
Obama defends and explains a National Security Agency program that monitors domestic and international phone records.

So according to Obama members of Congress have been involved and aware of this collection of data. This process is also monitored by FISA. This special court is responsible for making sure that no one is listening to calls without first going to a Federal Judge for permission.
Obama's response is a crock. According to the Wall Street Journal:

The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S. court for Verizon Communications Inc.'s VZ +0.54% phone records set off the latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA's operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. T -1.01% and Sprint Nextel Corp., S -1.36% records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers.

So the NSA and FBI are also plugging into internet, Facebook, and credit card provider records as well. All of this is name of protecting the American public from terrorist, perhaps as they did in the Boston Bombing with the Tsarni brothers. As a matter of fact they had questioned these men a year prior and did nothing to prevent a terrorist act on US soil.
Seriously friends, when Bush made a commitment to keep America safe, I actually felt pretty safe. Since Obama came into office no one is safe. None of your records are safe. Obama can play it off however he desires (he is a better actor than president) but it does not change the fact that the government is watching EVERYTHING we are doing.

It's not tin foil hat conspiracy, it's truth. From illegal media wire tapping to the IRS targeting Conservatives, Patriot, Christian, and Pro-Israel groups to data mining from phone, internet, credit card, and Facebook records on millions of Americans, data collection in doctors offices about if you own guns and the number of guns in your home, it's clear that the Obama admin is a rogue administration and we are paying the price for it.
Wired.com reported:

As if news of the National Security Agency collecting phone records on millions of Americans wasn’t enough, a new report reveals that the NSA and FBI are directly tapped into central servers at nine U.S. internet firms, in order to provide constant monitoring of audio, video, photos, emails and documents as well as connection logs.

The companies whose servers are being mined are reportedly Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. The classified program, dubbed PRISM, has been in operation since 2007 and has been a leading source of intelligence fed to the president in his daily intelligence briefings, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story at the same time as the Guardian today.
The Post notes that PalTalk hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and during the ongoing Syrian civil war.
Microsoft was the first to cave into the requests in 2007, though Apple resisted for five years before joining the club last year.
Dropbox is on the government’s wishlist for other servers in its sights. Presentation slides describing the program indicate that surveillance of Dropbox is “coming soon,” according to the Post, which says the companies have been given immunity from lawsuits through a directive signed by the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. Wired.com

Is America safer?
Darla Dawald, National Director



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