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News reports in December 2005 first revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications. Those news reports, combined with a USA Today story in May 2006 and the statements of several members of Congress, revealed that the NSA is also receiving wholesale copies of American's telephone and other communications records. All of these surveillance activities are in violation of the privacy safeguards established by Congress and the US Constitution.

The evidence also shows that the government did not act alone. EFF has obtained whistleblower evidence [PDF] from former AT&T technician Mark Klein showing that AT&T is cooperating with the illegal surveillance. The undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails web browsing and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers and provides those copies to the NSA. This copying includes both domestic and international Internet activities of AT&T customers. As one expert observed “this isn’t a wiretap, it’s a country-tap.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Verizon just did what the Government asked them to do. I hear rumors of lawsuits being planned, but just try proving damages.

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According to a briefing slide published by the Guardian, PRISM began with data from Microsoft in 2007. The program began collecting data from Yahoo in 2008 and from Google, Facebook and the message system PalTalk in 2009. YouTube became a source in 2010, Skype and AOL in 2011 and Apple in late 2012, the slide recounts.

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Originally posted by NewOldBrownCoat:
Righties, libertarians, and individual rights people have talked about it forever. ALL of a sudden somebody decided to believe it was true? And, of course, it's all OBAMA'S FAULT. Nobody ever did it before him? Haven't they been listening to each other all this time?

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
More importantly, what are you going to do about it now?

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
GEEZER- It seems to me that every right-wing post begins with BUT OBAMA!

Aaaaaannnnddd.... I come back to my point several threads ago. What did you do about it then? Protest the Patriot Act? Donate to EFF and to whistleblower organizations? Write to the FCC? Vote for someone who might actually protect your Constitutional rights? (And, no, I don't mean Obama)

More importantly, what are you going to do about it now? Bitch and moan about Obama, and vote Republican next time? Or are you going to... yanno... address the issue?

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:
Erm, I'm not gonna make any friends admitting this one, but...
What am I going to do about it ?

Try my level damn best to very purposefully and deliberately incite a full on witch-hunt/pogrom/purge, with malice aforethought and a full understanding of what the potential consequences of that might well be, because I think no course less awful is left to us.

And I have a very large collective of slightly immoral bastards willing to help do it, too - just waiting to get enough traction for a good, solid push.

-Frem

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
But Bush was evil for targeting int'l calls of SUSPECTED terrorists. This? Heck, Obama's cool, so it's all good. And anyone who criticizes O for this is racist. Straight up.

* Basically, it started 7 years ago, & has been continued. ( Much like Gitmo. )
Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen

Resident USA Freedom Fundie

" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall

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The Sedition Act was also used to control media reports of the Influenza epidemic of 1918, as such reporting was considered bad for morale. And you thought the Patriot Act was bad. (2007)

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Originally posted by m52nickerson:
So you are going to post on sites like this one and hope something happens.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
GEEZER- Well, I wondered what people have thought of this over time, so OOC I googled this site for the Patriot Act. Nearly all of your postings about our lost Constitutional rights occurred in 2012 and 2013. But further back, you thought the Patriot Act wasn't so bad

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The Sedition Act was also used to control media reports of the Influenza epidemic of 1918, as such reporting was considered bad for morale. And you thought the Patriot Act was bad. (2007)

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http://beta.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=35207
The only people who consistently spoke against is were Rue, Frem, myself, maybe a few other that I missed (I didn't look too hard).

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:
Piss off Dreamtrove, I'm a little too busy catherding to give a fuck about your asinine opinions.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
"And by D.C., I mean the entire damn town, and its culture."

Teabaggers, too.

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But your hatred for honest, hard working Americans comes through, loud and clear.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The order does not apply to the content of the communications.

Verizon Business Network Services is one of the nation’s largest telecommunications and Internet providers for corporations. It is not clear whether similar orders have gone to other parts of Verizon, like its residential or cellphone services, or to other telecommunications carriers. The order prohibits its recipient from discussing its existence, and representatives of both Verizon and AT&T declined to comment Wednesday evening.

The four-page order was disclosed Wednesday evening by the newspaper The Guardian. Obama administration officials at the F.B.I. and the White House also declined to comment on it Wednesday evening, but did not deny the report, and a person familiar with the order confirmed its authenticity. “We will respond as soon as we can,” said Marci Green Miller, a National Security Agency spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

The order was sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that regulates domestic surveillance for national security purposes, that allows the government to secretly obtain “tangible things” like a business’s customer records. The provision was expanded by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which Congress enacted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The order was marked “TOP SECRET//SI//NOFORN,” referring to communications-related intelligence information that may not be released to noncitizens. That would make it among the most closely held secrets in the federal government, and its disclosure comes amid a furor over the Obama administration’s aggressive tactics in its investigations of leaks.

The collection of call logs is set to expire in July unless the court extends it.

The collection of communications logs — or calling “metadata” — is believed to be a major component of the Bush administration’s program of surveillance that took place without court orders. The newly disclosed order raised the question of whether the government continued that type of information collection by bringing it under the Patriot Act.

The disclosure late Wednesday seemed likely to inspire further controversy over the scope of government surveillance. Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy group, said that “absent some explanation I haven’t thought of, this looks like the largest assault on privacy since the N.S.A. wiretapped Americans in clear violation of the law” under the Bush administration. “On what possible basis has the government refused to tell us that it believes that the law authorizes this kind of request?” she said.

For several years, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, have been cryptically warning that the government was interpreting its surveillance powers under that section of the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming to the public if it knew about it.

“We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

They added: “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

A spokesman for Senator Wyden did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment on the Verizon order.

The senators were angry because the Obama administration described Section 215 orders as being similar to a grand jury subpoena for obtaining business records, like a suspect’s hotel or credit card records, in the course of an ordinary criminal investigation. The senators said the secret interpretation of the law was nothing like that.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act made it easier to get an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain business records so long as they were merely deemed “relevant” to a national-security investigation.

The Justice Department has denied being misleading about the Patriot Act. Department officials have acknowledged since 2009 that a secret, sensitive intelligence program is based on the law and have insisted that their statements about the matter have been accurate.

The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2011 for a report describing the government’s interpretation of its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act. But the Obama administration withheld the report, and a judge dismissed the case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/us/us-secretly-collecting-logs-of-bu
siness-calls.html?_r=1&;

Obama's newest scandal. Forget monitoring terrorists, he's got his Boris and Natasha spy network collecting data on business communications and 120 million Verizon customers.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

Given that the REASON for all this data mining was to protect us from terrorism, and given the fact that the Russians flat out TOLD us of the Tsarnaev threat , what good did it do anyone ?

We knew, well in advance, of the likelihood that Major Malfunction Nidal would go Crazy Muhammad and start shooting folks in Allah's name, but since that was only 'work place violence', and not really terrorism per se, we'll just ignore that as an 'oopsie', and move on.

On the face , the " it's for your own good " seems to be suspect, at best.

But with THIS administration, which has lied to the American public about everything from healthcare, Benghazi and add in breach of confidence by the IRS scandal, how can we believe anything that comes out of D.C.

And by D.C., I mean the entire damn town, and its culture.

Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen

Resident USA Freedom Fundie

" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall

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It's all too neat and tidy for this latest round of scandal - I say this because it has existed for some 7 years (at least this version). It's interesting how suddenly this tidbit of info comes out now, amidst the firestorm of "scandal." Just too damn convenient. Why now?

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And where was the outrage when the IRS targeted the NAACP back during the Bush Administration?

SGG

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Originally posted by m52nickerson:
So how is that going?

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whole sections of the net conveniently losing connectivity

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It's all too neat and tidy for this latest round of scandal - I say this because it has existed for some 7 years (at least this version). It's interesting how suddenly this tidbit of info comes out now, amidst the firestorm of "scandal." Just too damn convenient. Why now?

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NSA Spying: Whistleblowers Claim Vindication On Surveillance State Warnings

... after The Guardian newspaper reported that Verizon was turning over customer phone records to the intelligence agency as part of a secret court order, Kirk Wiebe had a “feeling of great gratification.”

... In response, Binney and Wiebe were accused of leaking classified information to the press. The FBI raided their homes. Still, they continued to speak publicly about their concerns about the NSA invading Americans' privacy. On Thursday, they had a moment of vindication as they gave interviews criticizing the NSA over a domestic surveillance program they had been warning about.

“This would appear to be the hardcore evidence that I think a lot of people needed to start to believe it,” Binney, who was at the NSA for nearly 40 years, told The Huffington Post. “It’s domestic spying, that’s what it is, on a very large scale.”

A fourth NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, criticized the court that authorized the surveillance.

“There is no need to call this the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” Drake said in an interview with Democracy Now on Thursday. “Let’s just call it the surveillance court. It’s no longer about foreign intelligence. It’s simply about harvesting millions and millions and millions of phone call records and beyond.”

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NSA Plans $1.6 Billion Utah Data Center
The first phase of the project will feature an $800 million investment in a 35-megawatt data center, with a second $800 million, 35-megawatt phase to follow. The initial phase is currently in the design stage, with construction scheduled to begin in June 2010 and be completed by March 2013, according to documents.

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