Tweet
Right! Exactly!! I oppose this bullshit not just on Libertarian and civil liberties' grounds, but on the grounds that all they're doing is swamping themselves with massive amounts of data that cannot be effectively "mined" for any practicable benefit, even with their massive supercomputers in the desert. I think I heard the claim that they stopped a NYC subway bombing, but it sounded like dubious bullshit to me and they could have just as easily stopped it by focusing in on the guys who were chatting with foreign jihadists rather than collecting phone numbers of who Roger and Jane have called and received calls from. What fucking good is that? You investigate people under suspicion. You don't find suspicious people by investigating everybody because then you're off on bullshit, Quixotic Easter egg hunts...
-
-
The data mining is for us, dumdum...Comment
-
Eternally Under the Authority of Satan
Originally posted by SockfuckerComment
-
Eternally Under the Authority of Satan
Originally posted by SockfuckerComment
-
Some "change" Obomba brought, eh ??Comment
-
Well, there's a reason he did not carry the Demoncratic Party of Hell's endorsement in the 2012 election.
Eternally Under the Authority of Satan
Originally posted by SockfuckerComment
-
That's scary shit...
He's just standing there telling how it's "legal" to spy on everyone and then goes on to further justify it by saying it started in 2006 under Bush...
Incredible...Comment
-
Meanwhile the Chinese are hacking the fuck out of us and eating our Moo Goo Gai Pan lunch!Comment
-
Government likely to open criminal probe into NSA leaks
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration is likely to open a criminal investigation into the leaking of highly classified documents that revealed the secret surveillance of Americans' telephone and email traffic, U.S. officials said on Friday.
The law enforcement and security officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said the agencies that normally conduct such investigations, including the FBI and Justice Department, were expecting a probe into the leaks to a British and an American newspaper.
Such investigations typically begin after an agency that believes its secrets have been leaked without authorization files a complaint with the Justice Department.
It was unclear on Friday whether a complaint had been submitted by the publicity-shy National Security Agency, which was most directly involved in the collection of trillions of telephone and email communications.
However, one U.S. official with knowledge of the situation said that given the extent and sensitivity of the recent leaks, federal law may compel officials to open an investigation.
A criminal probe would represent another turn in the Obama administration's battle against national security leaks. This effort has been under scrutiny lately because of a Justice Department investigation that has involved searches of the phone records of Associated Press journalists and a Fox News reporter.
Leaks to media outlets this week have revealed a government campaign of domestic surveillance going far beyond anything that had been acknowledged previously.
Late on Wednesday, Britain's Guardian newspaper published what U.S. officials later acknowledged was an order, approved by the secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requiring a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to give the NSA raw data showing phone calls made from numbers within the United States and from U.S. numbers to those overseas.
The data did not include the identities of people who made the calls or the contents of the calls.
On Thursday, the Guardian and the Washington Post published slides from a secret NSA powerpoint presentation that described how the agency gathered masses of email data from prominent Internet firms, including Google, Facebook and Apple under a Top-Secret program called PRISM.
Some of the companies denied that the NSA and FBI had "direct access" to their central servers, as the Post reported.
On Friday, for example, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said his company "is not and has never been part of any program to give the U.S. or any other government direct access to our servers."
"We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received," Zuckerberg said. "And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of PRISM" before Thursday, he said.
James Clapper, the director of U.S. national intelligence, condemned the leaks and asserted that the news articles about PRISM contained "numerous inaccuracies."
WIKILEAKS
Journalists involved in The Guardian and Washington Post articles have reported in depth on WikiLeaks, the website known for publishing secret U.S. government documents.
The Post report on the PRISM program was co-written by Laura Poitras, a filmmaker who has been working on a documentary on WikiLeaks, with the cooperation of its founder Julian Assange, and who last year made a short film about Bill Binney, a former NSA employee who became a whistleblowing critic of the agency.
Last year, the web magazine Salon published a lengthy article by the author of the Guardian report, Glenn Greenwald, accusing U.S. authorities of harassing Poitras when she left and re-entered the United States. Greenwald also has written frequently about Assange.
The Guardian and Post stories appeared in the same week that U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning went on trial in Maryland accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.
In an email to Reuters on Friday, Poitras rejected the notion that the trial had any impact on the timing of her story.
"I am fully aware we are living in a political climate where national security reporting is being targeted by the government, however, I don't think fear should stop us from reporting these stories," Poitras wrote.
"To suggest that the timing of the NSA PRISM story is linked in any way to other events or stories I'm following is simply wrong. Like any journalist, I have many contacts and follow multiple stories."
Kris Coratti, a Washington Post spokeswoman, said the timing of the paper's publication of Poitras' story had nothing to do with Manning's trial and that Assange had played no role in arranging or encouraging the story.
Comment
-
The leaker leaks himself...
Edward Snowden identified as source of NSA leaks
By Barton Gellman and Aaron Blake, Updated: Sunday, June 9, 4:00 PM
Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former undercover CIA employee, unmasked himself Sunday as the principal source of recent Washington Post and Guardian disclosures about top-secret National Security Agency programs.
Snowden, who has contracted for the NSA and works for the consulting firm Booze Allen Hamilton, denounced what he described as systematic surveillance of innocent citizens and said in an interview that “it’s important to send a message to government that people will not be intimidated.”
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said Saturday that the NSA had initiated a Justice Department investigation into who leaked the information — an investigation supported by intelligence officials in Congress.
Snowden, whose full name is Edward Joseph Snowden, said he understands the risks of disclosing the information, but that he felt it was important.
“I intend to ask for asylum from any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy,” Snowden told the Post from Hong Kong, where he has been staying. The Guardian was the first to publicly identify Snowden. Both media organizations made his name public with his consent.
“I’m not going to hide,” Snowden said Sunday afternoon. “Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”
Asked whether he believed his disclosures would change anything, he said: “I think they already have. Everyone, everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten— and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”
Snowden said nobody was aware of his actions, including those closest to him. He said there wasn’t a single event that spurred his decision to leak the information.
“It was more of a slow realization that presidents could openly lie to secure the office and then break public promises without consequence,” he said.
Snowden said President Obama hasn’t lived up to his pledges of transparency. He blamed a lack of accountability in the Bush administration for continued abuses. The White House could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday afternoon.
“It set an example that when powerful figures are suspected of wrongdoing, releasing them from the accountability of law is ‘for our own good,’” Snowden said. “That’s corrosive to the basic fairness of society.”
Snowden also expressed the hope that the NSA surveillance programs would now be open to legal challenge for the first time. Earlier this year, in Amnesty International v. Clapper, the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit against the mass collection of phone records because the plaintiffs could not prove exactly what the program did or that they were personally subject to surveillance.
“The government can’t reasonably assert the state secrets privilege for a program it has acknowledged. The courts can now allow challenges to be heard on that basis,” Snowden said.
Snowden’s name surfaced as top intelligence officials in the Obama administration and Congress pushed back against the journalists responsible for revealing the existence of sensitive surveillance programs and called for an investigation into the leaks.
The Guardian initially reported the existence of a program that collects data on all phone calls made on the Verizon network. Later in the week, the Guardian and The Washington Post reported the existence of a separate program, code-named PRISM, that collects the Internet data of foreigners from major Internet companies.
Clapper, in an interview with NBC, targeted the leaker but also sought to spotlight the media who first reported the programs, calling their disclosures irresponsible and full of “hyperbole.” Earlier Saturday, he had issued a statement accusing the media of a “rush to publish.”
“For me, it is literally — not figuratively — literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities,” Clapper said.
On Sunday morning, Clapper got some backup from the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who appeared jointly on ABC’s “This Week” to espouse the values of the programs.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) had harsh words for whoever is responsible for the leaks, and for the journalist who first reported the NSA’s collection of phone records, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.
“He doesn’t have a clue how this thing works; nether did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous,” Rogers said, adding, “I absolutely think [the leaker] should be prosecuted.”
Greenwald, who appeared earlier on the same show, said the secrecy is the reason the programs must be laid bare.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) agreed that whoever leaked the information should be prosecuted, and she sought to beat back media reports that suggest the Obama administration overplayed the impact of the programs.
After opponents of the programs questioned their value last week, anonymous administration officials pointed to the thwarting of a bomb plot targeting the New York City subway system in 2009. Soon after, though, reporters, including BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith, noted that public documents suggested regular police work was responsible for thwarting the attack rather than a secret government intelligence program.
Feinstein confirmed that the programs were invaluable in both the New York case and another one involving an American plotting to bomb a hotel in India in 2008.
“One of them is the case of David Headley, who went to Mumbai to the Taj [Mahal] Hotel and scoped it out for the terrorist attack,” Feinstein said. “The second is Najibullah Zazi, who lived in Colorado, who made the decision that he was going to blow up a New York subway.”
Feinstein noted that she could talk about those two cases because they have been declassified, but she suggested the surveillance programs also assisted in other terrorism-related cases.
That explanation wasn’t enough to satisfy some critics of the programs. Her Senate Intelligence Committee colleague, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), agreed that the so-called PRISM program — which taps into the Internet usage of foreigners — has “been very effective.” But he said the collection of Americans’ phone metadata has not proven so.
“It’s unclear to me that we’ve developed any intelligence through the metadata program that’s led to the disruption of plots that we couldn’t obtain through other programs,” Udall said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Udall and two Democrats from Oregon — Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley — have emerged as key voices critical of the phone record collection.
Another chief critic of the efforts, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), said he is looking at filing a lawsuit against the government and called on Americans to join in.
“I’m going to be asking all the Internet providers and all of the phone companies, ask your customers to join me in a class action lawsuit,” Paul said on “Fox News Sunday.” “If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then somebody will wake up and say things will change in Washington.
© The Washington Post CompanyComment
-
The most transparent presidency everComment
-
Committed to total transparency...Comment
-
Comment
-
Yep.....
While a Devil certainly does not endorse Obama doing anything like this, the fact is that he's done nothing that Chimpy hadn't already done before. And not a single right winger objected then, from my Most Unholy memory.
The Constitution has no skin color or political affiliation. Those who violate it deserve condemnation for doing so equally.
And eternal damnation, as well, but that's my department......
Eternally Under the Authority of Satan
Originally posted by SockfuckerComment
Comment