US Gov wants to log every phone call you make, track most of what you do online and even record every time you drive your car. Is this what America was supposed to be? Doesn’t the Constitution protect against such intrusive government behavior? On February 27, the Guardian revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had secretly captured and stored the webcam images of millions of ordinary American Internet users not suspected of any crime. They are accumulating the images for future use. Use for what? This follows last year’s revelation that the NSA collected and stored data (not the contents) from every single phone call—domestic or international—made in the United States DURING THE LAST FIVE YEARS. And that it was building a massive new operation to do the same with e-mails and even Web-browsing activity. The government enacted this enormous intrusion into citizens’ private lives quietly and without public debate. If not for a whistle-blower, it would still be secret. Who gave the federal government permission to turn the land of the free into a police state? No One Is Immune A year ago, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was called in to testify before Congress. America wanted to know: Is the NSA indiscriminately spying on people without suspicion, and without a judge’s warrant? Clapper denied it. He was asked point-blank: “[Could you] give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” “No, sir.” “It does not?” “Not wittingly.” It was a premeditated, bold-faced lie. But what does the NSA care about what Congress thinks? In January it was revealed that the NSA was spying on Congress too, and America’s elected representatives didn’t have a clue. In a December ruling that described the NSA’s action as “almost Orwellian,” Judge Richard Leon wrote: “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval .… Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.” Yet the surveillance goes on. On March 11, Sen. Dianne Feinstein accused the Central Intelligence Agency of spying on members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and hacking their computers. “I don’t know about you, but I’m worried,” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told students at the University of California–Berkeley on March 19. “If the CIA is spying on Congress, who exactly can or will stop them?” The president? When running for election, then-Sen. Barack Obama campaigned against this exact kind of government intrusion that began under President George W. Bush. The nation reflexively looked to him. In January, at the height of the phone spying scandal, the leader of what he has called “the most transparent administration in history” asked Americans once more to trust him. President Obama promised to do everything in his power to reform the NSA. His proposals “should give the American people greater confidence that their rights are being protected,” he said, “even as our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies maintain the tools they need to keep us safe.” Within that context he recommended two things: The NSA should get permission from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court before accessing phone records, and the NSA should no longer store phone records for so long. The FISA courts are not new. The NSA already goes to FISA judges to get authorization to spy on people (just not to collect phone metadata). The problem is that FISA judges almost always give permission. Not once in the past three years has a FISA judge denied an NSA request. Since first being instituted, the court has only turned down 11 requests—out of nearly 40,000. This is not a court; it is a rubber stamp. It is no advocate for the public. President Obama knows that. Nothing has changed. Secret government spies still secretly ask for permission to spy from unaccountable judges, who make their rulings in secret. The president’s second recommendation—putting a stop to storing the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of any crime—should be a slam dunk. What possible justification could there be to secretly collect and store personal information from Americans who have done nothing wrong—and for five years? Now that the world knows about this obviously unpopular and clearly unconstitutional practice, who would keep this program running? Yet, despite the months that have passed since President Obama said he would stop this domestic spying, it continues. Federal employees and their contractors continue collecting data on your phone calls. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, the White House has now asked for special court approval to allow the NSA to store phone records for even longer.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 12:46:48 +0000
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