Secret court rebukes NSA for 5-year illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens

Miami Herald
May 27, 2017

WASHINGTON 

U.S. intelligence agencies conducted illegal surveillance on American citizens over a five-year period, a practice that earned them a sharp rebuke from a secret court that called the matter a “very serious” constitutional issue.

The criticism is in a lengthy secret ruling that lays bare some of the frictions between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and U.S. intelligence agencies obligated to obtain the court’s approval for surveillance activities.

The ruling, dated April 26 and bearing the label “top secret,” was obtained and published Thursday by the news site Circa.

It is rare that such rulings see the light of day, and the lengthy unraveling of issues in the 99-page document opens a window on how the secret federal court oversees surveillance activities and seeks to curtail those that it deems overstep legal authority.

The document, signed by Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, said the court had learned in a notice filed Oct. 26, 2016, that National Security Agency analysts had been conducting prohibited queries of databases “with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the court.”

It said a judge chastised the NSA’s inspector general and Office of Compliance for Operations for an “institutional ‘lack of candor’ ” for failing to inform the court. It described the matter as “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, and is a constitutional bedrock protection against intrusion.

Read the entire article

The Best Explanation Yet Of How The NSA's PRISM Surveillance Program Works

Business Insider
May 8, 2015

The Associated Press has published a detailed report about how the NSA's PRISM program — established to acquire data from tech giants including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook — is a small part of a massive domestic dragnet run by the nation's premier covert intelligence gathering organization.

The report reaffirms what we already know, specifically that "the NSA copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis," and it also shores up a few things about how PRISM works.

First, it clears up the controversy around the assertion that PRISM involves nine tech companies providing "direct access" to their servers.

From AP (emphasis ours):

Technology experts and a former government official say that ["direct access"] phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate Prism's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.

In slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from both Prism and from the fiber-optic cables.

Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream.

So PRISM leverages the direct access the NSA has to the Internet's major pipelines and then uses court orders authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to collect specific data from tech companies.

[UPDATE 7/11] Here's the corresponding PRISM slide, published by The Washington Post:

NSA

Here's how the AP explains the court order part (emphasis ours):

Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.

By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.

A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.

With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.

While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.

All adamantly denied turning over the kind of broad swaths of data that many people believed when the Prism documents were first released.

Here's where it's still murky — the government has a authority to take troves of data, and wants as much data as possible, but tech companies say they aren't providing broad swaths of data.

When PRISM leaked, The Washington Post reported that the 702 orders given to tech companies "serve as one-time blanket approvals for data acquisition and surveillance on selected foreign targets for periods of as long as a year."

Tech companies say it doesn't play out that way.

Microsoft said in a statement: "We only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers."

Google chief architect Yonatan Zunger wrote that Google only responds to "lawful, specific orders about individuals.”

And Facebook revealed it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for user data in the second half of last year, and said "we respond only as required by law."

So it remains to be seen how just much data the NSA can acquire from tech companies.

It should be noted that in July the court that was established to "hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance," called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), found that government 7o2 orders at the heart of PRISM had violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion."

Congress Moves to Grant Even More Power to the NSA

Activist Post
April 24, 2015

By Carey Wedler

Privacy advocates are urging the House of Representatives and Senate to vote against bills that further increase the government’s widespread surveillance of citizens. The bills, called the “Protecting Cyber Networks Act” (H.R. 1560) and the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act” (S. 754) are the latest move by lawmakers to bolster the strength of the domestic spying apparatus.

One of the main objectives of the new laws is to eliminate consequences for companies that share their users’ private information with the government. The bills refer to this as “liability protection.”

Letters written to members of the House and Senate from a coalition of privacy advocates caution lawmakers that the bills

…would significantly increase the National Security Agency’s (NSA) access to personal information, and authorize the federal government to use that information for a myriad of purposes unrelated to cyber security.

This is because a provision of the bill is to “require federal entities to automatically disseminate tothe NSA all cyber threat indicators they receive [from corporations], including personal information about individuals.”

One of the biggest problems with the bill, aside from exempting corporations from accountability and increasing NSA power, is the broad definition of a declared “cybersecurity threat.” As defined by the House version of the bill:

The term ‘cybersecurity threat’ means an action, not protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, on or through an information system that may result in an unauthorized effort to adversely impact the security, confidentiality, integrity, or availability of an information system or information that is stored on, processed by or transiting an information system.

Read the entire article 

Your Phone Is Gathering Intelligence For The NSA

Infowars News
July 22, 2014

A new app, Humin, lets you and your smart phone act as Humint (human intelligence) for the surveillance state. Don't worry, it'll be called a "digital butler". But you don't have to wait, you can sign up with Verizon right now and be rewarded for being tracked and sold.

NSA TARGETS AS “EXTREMISTS” AMERICANS WHO SIMPLY WISH TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM OPPRESSION

Washington's Blog
July 6, 2014

In the wake of revelations about the extent of mass surveillance by the NSA and other agencies, people are trying to protect themselves by adopting encryption and other privacy tools.

The Guardian reported in January:

The gathering crisis of trust around consumer web services and the fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations is fuelling a significant uptake in anonymity tools, new research shows, as internet users battle censorship and assert their right to privacy online.

Globally, 56% of those surveyed by GlobalWebIndex reported that they felt the internet is eroding their personal privacy, with an estimated 415 million people or 28% of the online population using tools to disguise their identity or location.

Aggregating market research data from 170,000 internet users worldwide, GWI found that11% of all users claim to use Tor, the most high profile for anonymising internet access.

Tor was created – largely with funding from the U.S. government – in order to allow people who live in repressive authoritarian regimes to communicate anonymously on the Internet.

So it is ironic that the NSA targets as “extremists” (the word the U.S. government uses for “probable terrorists”) anyone who uses Tor or any other privacy tool … or even searches for information on privacy tools on the Internet.

Jacob Appelbaum and other privacy experts explain at Das Erste:

- Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA.

Read the entire article

FACEBOOK EMOTIONAL EXPERIMENT LINKED TO PENTAGON RESEARCH ON CIVIL UNREST

Infowars News
July 1, 2014

Facebook’s controversial “emotional study”, which subjected over half a million unwitting users of the social network to a psychological conditioning experiment, has direct ties to research funded by the Department of Defense concerning the likelihood of civil unrest.

The Facebook scandal hit the headlines this week, as it was revealed that the company participated with a federally funded UCSF study into how emotions can be swayed on social media by controlling the content of personal feeds and deciding whether to show negative or positive material.

While that fact in itself is disturbing, it seems that the rabbit hole goes even deeper.

Bloggers and online sleuths have since highlighted that the research appears to be at least in part connected to a Pentagon-led project called the Minerva Initiative.

Researcher and London Guardian writer Nafeez Ahmed has noted that the project provides “funding to universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.”

In other words, the DoD wants to master how to predict, prevent, manipulate, control, and even instigate mass civil unrest. It wishes to do this by developing “operational tools” related to “social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces.”

The initiative seeks to provide authoritative knowledge on “social movement mobilisation and contagions”. Social networks including Facebook and Twitter are highlighted as key indicators in the research.

It has been noted that within the official credits for the controversial study recently conducted by Facebook, Cornell University’s Jeffrey T. Hancock is listed as an author. Hancock is also listed on the Pentagon’s Minerva initiative website, where it is noted that he received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called “Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”.

The section of the website devoted to that study includes a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease.

This is not the only connection Cornell University has to the Pentagon civil unrest study. There is a second project listed on the funding page of the Minerva website entitled “Cornell: Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions”.

The US government in conjunction with the military has long been concerned with studying the potential for civil unrest and how it can control, facilitate and combat it. The U.S. Army War College, in conjunction with numerous think tanks have somewhat obsessively studied the subject for years.

In recent years, the rise of social media, and its potential use for growing and organising protest movements, has spurred a new urgency within government and the military to adapt to and co-opt such tools.

The so-called “spring” revolutions of recent years have been heavily centered around the use of social media, with many even suggesting that Western government and military forces have, at least in part, controlled and even initiated unrest in other parts of the world for strategic purposes by employing social media.

Reports have recently emerged of the Military setting up fake Twitter-like social networks in countries such as Cuba, in order to manipulate and sway popular opinion there. The Military also developed so called ‘sock puppet’ software to create fake online identities and spread propaganda at home and abroad.

The government has also heavily invested in companies that monitor social media and track how opinions and information spreads on such networks.

Facebook was and is deeply connected to the NSA’s PRISM program. Via leaked information, and by the NSA’s own admission, it has been noted that Facebook not only knew about, but also cooperated with the mass spying program. The NSA even masqueraded as Facebook via fake servers, using them as a launching pad to grab information from hard drives, in order to infect millions of computers around the world with malware as part of the mass surveillance program.

The trend is clear – the government and the military have set about fully co-opting social media and turning it into a tool for social control and manipulation, and Facebook has cooperated in the process.

Hat tip: SCG News

—————————————————————-

Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

Privacy Versus Security Is a FALSE Choice

Washington's Blog

May 17, 2014

NSA Dumped Automatic Privacy-Protecting System … Instead Adopting Program of Mass Surveillance On All Americans

The entire “privacy versus security” argument for spying by the NSA is hogwash.

Top security experts – including the highest-level government officials and the top university experts – say that mass surveillance increases terrorism and hurts security.

They say that our government failed to stop the Boston bombing because they were too busy spying onmillions of innocent Americans instead of focusing on actual bad guys.

We have also thoroughly documented – including interviewing the top NSA expert – that last December that it would be easy for the NSA to catch bad guys without spying on innocent Americans … all while strengthening America against security breaches.

The following must-watch 5-minute clip from PBS’ show United States of Secrets shows how the “Thinthread” program would solve these problems, and why the “privacy versus security” debate is bogus (watch starting at the 25:12 mark and ending at 30:32):

Or clicking here will take you right to the start of the important part.

Postscript: In case you are unable to watch any videos, you can read the  transcript here (search for “he stumbles into sort of a skunkworks“, and read until you see “Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis all quietly retired.”)

Final Goal of the Surveillance State

Activist Post
March 11, 2014
Jon Rappoport

Surveillance is coming at us from all angles. Chips, drones, TSA checkpoints, smart meters, back-doored electronic products, video cameras, spying home appliances; our phone calls and emails and keystrokes and product purchases are recorded. 

The government and its allied corporations will know whatever they want to know about us. 

What then? 

What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance? 

Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population. 

Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model. 

National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking. 

Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.” 

As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?” 

Read the entire article

Real Unemployment? - Try 37%!!!

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!!!News
Mark Matheny
January 22, 2014

Mark Matheny discusses the REAL unemployment rate in America, and the lawlessness of the President that claims to follow the Rule of Law. He follows a "rule of law", but which one? That and more breaking news.......

Check Out Politics Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Mark Matheny on BlogTalkRadio

Americans Indifferent About Destruction of Fourth Amendment

Surveillance state is a done deal

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 21, 2014

Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said over the weekend NSA surveillance is not going anywhere despite Obama’s less than lukewarm assurance last week there will be reforms.

“The president has very clearly said that he wants to keep the capability” to surveil Americans without court-issued warrants, Feinstein said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “So I think we would agree with him. I know a dominant majority of the — everybody, virtually, except two or three, on the Senate Intelligence Committee would agree with that.”

“A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don’t understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan,” she continued. “New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness. We need to be prepared. I think we need to do it in a way that respects people’s privacy rights.”

Feinstein, Rep. Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, and others in Congress continue to spread the debunked claim that giving the NSA a blank check has stopped terrorist attacks. ABC News, CNN and the New York Times have repeated the falsehood.

If we can believe corporate polls, the American people have tuned out the debate over the destruction of the Fourth Amendment and the Bill of Rights.

“The latest evidence comes from a new Pew Research Center poll showing that half the public said they had heard nothing at all about President Obama’s speech Friday outlining new restrictions on the National Security Agency. Only 8% of those surveyed said they had ‘heard a lot’ about Obama’s plans,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

Polls also indicate a majority of Americans believe the whistleblower Edward Snowden is a criminal who should be prosecuted.

“Overall, the public is divided about whether Edward Snowden’s leak of classified information, which brought the program to light, has served or harmed the public interest: 45% say it has served the public interest while 43% say it harmed it,” Pew Research reported on Monday. “Nonetheless, a 56% majority wants to see the government pursue a criminal case against Snowden, while 32% oppose this.”

Defenders of the Fourth Amendment place hope in a positive ruling by the Supreme Court. Following rulings by lower courts, however, this appears unlikely.

Last month, U.S. district Judge William Pauley of New York ruled in response to an ACLU lawsuit that the NSA surveillance is reasonable, a “vital tool” in the battle against terrorism and less intrusive than the data people “voluntarily surrender” to “trans-national corporations.”

“Given the Justices’ preference for percolation in the lower courts,” writes Orin Kerr, a prominent Fourth Amendment scholar at George Washington University, “they may want to wait until the lower courts work through them.”

“I think a lot of commentators overestimate the chances that the Supreme Court would step in,” he added. “It’s certainly possible, but it’s not at all a sure thing.”

NSA makes final push to retain most mass surveillance powers

London Guardian
January 11, 2014

The National Security Agency and its allies are making a final public push to retain as much of their controversial mass surveillance powers as they can, before President Barack Obama’s forthcoming announcement about the future scope of US surveillance.

Security officials concede a need for greater transparency and for adjustments to broad domestic intelligence collection, but argue that limiting the scope of such collection would put the country at greater risk of terrorist attacks.

In a lengthy interview that aired on Friday on National Public Radio (NPR), the NSA’s top civilian official, the outgoing deputy director John C Inglis, said that the agency would cautiously welcome a public advocate to argue for privacy interests before the secret court which oversees surveillance. Such a measure is being promoted by some of the agency’s strongest legislative critics.

Inglis also suggested that the so-called Fisa court have “somebody who would assist them with matters of interpreting technology”, which also has the potential to recast the court’s relationship with the NSA.

Read the entire article

Exposed: Hillary Clinton's Sex Scandals

Center for Western Journalism
January 11, 2014



Video produced by http://www.westernjournalism.com Produced, written, and edited by Kris Zane. Narrated by Tom Hinchey

U.S. court allows more phone snooping

Reuters
January 4, 2013

The secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Friday renewed the authority of U.S. intelligence agencies to collect data on millions of Americans’ telephone calls in a program that has set off a legal battle over privacy rights.

The court allowed the intelligence community to collect metadata from phone companies, the Office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a news release.

The release offered almost no details about the ruling, but a U.S. official said the authority was renewed for three months, and that it applied to the entire metadata collection program.

In the past, these orders were sometimes issued to individual telephone companies. But the official said the latest order covered all companies from which metadata had been collected under recent previous court authorizations.

Read the entire article

REPORT: THE NSA CAN SECRETLY ACTIVATE AN IPHONE’S MICROPHONE, CAMERA… AND THAT’S NOT ALL

The Blaze
December 30, 2013

The National Security Agency can remotely activate an iPhone’s camera and microphone without the user knowing, according to a leaked document obtained by German news magazine Der Spiegel.

According to a leaked document, the NSA can secretly activate an iPhone’s microphone or camera. (Image source: Shutterstock)

The spy agency can also interrupt text messages, access contact lists and use cell towers to identify the location of the phone, according to The Daily Dot:

According to leaked documents, the NSA claims a 100 percent success rate when it comes to implanting iOS devices with spyware. The documents suggest that the NSA needs physical access to a device to install the spyware—something the agency has achieved by rerouting shipments of devices purchased online—but a remote version of the exploit is also in the works.

Here is the leaked doc:

(Image source: Der Spiegel / The Daily Dot)

The security researcher that initially obtained the documents noted that this presents one of two possibilities.

“Either [the NSA] have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products, meaning they are hoarding information about critical systems that American companies produce, and sabotaging them, or Apple sabotaged it themselves,” Jacob Appelbaum said at a conference.

“Do you think Apple helped them with that?” he asked. “I hope Apple will clarify that.”

–

Follow Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) on Twitter

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

Washington Post
September 7, 2013

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinionby U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Read the entire article

Obama On NSA Spying: “I Would Be Concerned Too, If I Weren’t Inside The Government”

Zero Hedge
August 11, 2013

In what is as close to saying ‘trust us, we’re from the government,’ as it gets; President Obama’s traitor-identifying, blame-pointing, cover-your-assing speech on Friday has done nothing to end the supposedly “critical NSA counter-terrorism tool,” from being used on American citizens.

People of America should be relieved, as the President stated unequivocally that he is “comfortable that the program is not being abused.”

If only American citizens were able to see all the moving pieces, Obama implied, they would say “you know what? These [government] folks are following the law,” but because the program remains classified, it remains impossible to know what is really going on.

Reassuring rhetoric aside, as the AP notes, Obama offered these inspiring words regarding the ongoing concerns that law-abiding citizens may still have beyond his assurances: “I would be worried too, if I weren’t inside the government.”

Another teleprompter-less glimpse of what he really thinks? Perhaps; but for now, the NSA will continue to sweep phone records of all Americans with the possibility of creating similar databases of credit card transactions, hotel records, and Internet searches.

Read the entire article

NSA Spying On – and Blackmailing – Top Government Officials and Military Officers

Washington’s Blog
June 21, 2013

NSA whistleblower Russel Tice – a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping – told Peter B. Collins on Boiling Frogs Post (the website of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds):

Tice: Okay. They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial. But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Courtthat I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials. They went after people in theexecutive service that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups. They went after U.S. international–U.S. companies that that do international business, you know, business around the world. They went after U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business. They went after NGOs that–like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups. So, you know, don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it. And in some cases, I literally was involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. And you know, when I said to [former MSNBC show host Keith] Olbermann, I said, my particular thing is high tech and you know, what’s going on is the other thing, which is the dragnet. The dragnet is what Mark Klein is talking about, the terrestrial dragnet. Well my specialty is outer space. I deal with satellites, and everything that goes in and out of space. I did my spying via space. So that’s how I found out about this.

Collins: Now Russ, the targeting of the people that you just mentioned, top military leaders, members of Congress, intelligence community leaders and the–oh, I’m sorry, it was intelligence committees, let me correct that–not intelligence community, and then executive branch appointees. This creates the basis, and the potential for massive blackmail.

Tice: Absolutely! And remember we talked about that before, that I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on. Now here’s the big one. I haven’t given you any names. This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It’s a big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And that’s the president of the United States now.

Other whistleblowers say the same thing.  When the former head of the NSA’s digital spying program – William Binney – disclosed the fact that the U.S. was spying on everyone in the U.S. and storing the data forever, and that the U.S. was quickly becoming a totalitarian state, the Feds tried to scare him into shutting up:

[Numerous] FBI officers held a gun to Binney’s head as he stepped naked from the shower. He watched with his wife and youngest son as the FBI ransacked their home. Later Binney was separated from the rest of his family, and FBI officials pressured him to implicate one of the other complainants in criminal activity. During the raid, Binney attempted to report to FBI officials the crimes he had witnessed at NSA, in particular the NSA’s violation of the constitutional rights of all Americans. However, the FBI wasn’t interested in these disclosures. Instead, FBI officials seized Binney’s private computer, which to this day has not been returned despite the fact that he has not been charged with a crime.

Other NSA whistleblowers have also been subjected to armed raids and criminal prosecution.

After high-level CIA officer John Kiriakou blew the whistle on illegal CIA torture, the governmentprosecuted him for espionage.

Read the entire article

22 Nauseating Quotes From Hypocritical Establishment Politicians About The NSA Spying Scandal

Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
June 13, 2013

Establishment politicians from both major political parties are rushing to defend the NSA and condemn whistleblower Edward Snowden.  They are attempting to portray Edward Snowden as a “traitor” and the spooks over at the NSA that are snooping on all of us as “heroes”.  In fact, many of the exact same politicians that once railed against government spying during the Bush years are now staunchly defending it now that Obama is in the White House.  But it isn’t just Democrats that are acting shamefully.  Large numbers of Republican politicians that love to give speeches about “freedom” and “liberty” are attempting to eviscerate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The government is not supposed to invade our privacy and investigate us unless there is probable cause to do so.  Apparently many of our politicians misunderstood when they read the novel 1984by George Orwell.  It wasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual.  We should be thanking Edward Snowden for exposing the deep corruption that is eating away at our own government like cancer.

Now the American people need to pick up the ball and start demanding answers, because without a doubt we are going to see establishment politicians from both major political parties try to shut this scandal down.  Establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans both love the Big Brother surveillance grid that the U.S. government has constructed, and they are both making it abundantly clear that they will defend the NSA to the very end.  The following are 22 nauseating quotes from hypocritical establishment politicians that show exactly how they feel about the NSA spying scandal…

#1 Barack Obama: “I think it’s important to understand that you can’t have 100 percent security and then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

#2 Barack Obama in 2007: “This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand… That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists… We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.”

#3 Speaker Of The House John Boehner on what he thinks about NSA leaker Edward Snowden: “He’s a traitor.”

#4 U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham: “I hope we follow Mr. Snowden to the ends of the Earth to bring him to justice.”

#5 U.S. Senator Al Franken: “I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people.”

#6 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: “For senators to complain that they didn’t know this was happening, we had many, many meetings that have been both classified and unclassified that members have been invited to.”

#7 U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell: “Given the scope of these programs, it’s understandable that many would be concerned about issues related to privacy. But what’s difficult to understand is the motivation of somebody who intentionally would seek to warn the nation’s enemies of lawful programs created to protect the American people. And I hope that he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

#8 U.S. Representative Peter King on why
he believes that reporters should be prosecuted for revealing NSA secrets: “There is an obligation both moral, but also legal, I believe, against a reporter disclosing something which would so severely compromise national security.”

#9 Director of National Intelligence James Clapper making a joke during an awards ceremony last Friday night: “Some of you expressed surprise that I showed up—so many emails to read!”

#10 Director Of National Intelligence James Clapper about why he lied about NSA spying in front of Congress: “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner.”

#11 National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden: “The president has full faith in director Clapper and his leadership of the intelligence community”

#12 White House press secretary Jay Carney: “…Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers that he’s given, and has actively engaged in an effort to provide more information about the programs that have been revealed through the leak of classified information”

#13 Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee: “There is no more direct or honest person than Jim Clapper.”

#14 Gus Hunt, the chief technology officer at the CIA: “We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever.”

#15 Barack Obama: “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

#16 Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency: “We do not see a tradeoff between security and liberty.”

#17 An exchange between NSA director Keith Alexander and U.S. Representative Hank Johnson in March 2012…

JOHNSON: Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens’ emails?

ALEXANDER: No.

JOHNSON: Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?

ALEXANDER: No.

JOHNSON: Google searches?

ALEXANDER: No.

JOHNSON: Text messages?

ALEXANDER: No.

JOHNSON: Amazon.com orders?

ALEXANDER: No.

JOHNSON: Bank records?

ALEXANDER: No.

#18 Deputy White House press secretary Dana Perino: “The intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks”

#19 U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss: ”This is nothing new.  It has proved meritorious because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”

#20 Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton on NSA leaker Edward Snowden: “Let me ask, who died and made him king? Who gave him the authority to endanger 300 million Americans? That’s not the way it works, and if he thinks he can get away with that, he’s got another think coming.”

#21 Senior spokesman for the NSA Don Weber: “Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide”

#22 The White House website: “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.”

Right now, the NSA is building a data collection center out in Utah that is so massive that it is hard to describe with words.  It is going to cost 40 million dollars a year just to provide the energy needed to run it.  According to a 2012 Wired article entitled “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)“, this data center will contain “the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches” in addition to “parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases” and anything else that the NSA decides to collect…

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

The goal is to know as much about everyone on the planet as possible.

And the NSA does not keep this information to itself.  As an article in USA Today recently reported, the NSA shares the data that it collects with other government agencies “as a matter of practice”…

As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as “product” in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups.

So when the NSA collects information about you, there is a very good chance that the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS will have access to it as well.

But the U.S. government is not the only one collecting data on American citizens.

Guess who else has been collecting massive amounts of data on the American people?

Barack Obama.

According to those that have seen it, the “Obama database” is unlike anything that any politician has ever put together before.  According to  CNSNews.com, U.S. Representative Maxine Waters says that this database “will have information about everything on every individual”…

“The president has put in place an organization that contains a kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” she added. “That’s going to be very, very powerful.”
Martin asked if Waters if she was referring to “Organizing for America.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Waters said. “And that database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before.”

Waters said the database would also serve future Democratic candidates seeking the presidency.

Perhaps this helps to explain why so many big donors got slapped with IRS audits immediately after they wrote big checks to the Romney campaign.

We are being told to “trust” Barack Obama and the massive government surveillance grid that is being constructed all around us, but there has been example after example of government power being grossly abused in recent years.

A lot of Americans say that they do not care if the government is watching them because they do not have anything to hide, but is there anyone out there that would really not mind the government watching them and listening to them 24 hours a day?

For example, it has been documented that NSA workers eavesdropped on conversations between U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and their loved ones back home.  Some of these conversations involved very intimate talk between husbands and wives.  The following is from a 2008 ABC News story…

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.

“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.

Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall’s “smoke pit,” but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

Is this really what we want the future of America to look like?

Do we really want the government to watch us and listen to us during our most intimate moments?

Feel free to express what you think about this NSA spying scandal by posting a comment below…