"Now we know for sure: The Obama administration has presided over the most thorough expansion of the domestic surveillance state of any U.S. presidency. Even as the nation was still absorbing the news, broken by Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian on Wednesday night, that the National Security Agency has been routinely collecting phone call records for millions of Americans, the Washington Post and The Guardian published articles revealing even broader government snooping powers: Since 2007, the NSA and the FBI have had the power to watch nearly every aspect of our online life as well. The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. The nine companies are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. (PalTalk, according to the Post, “hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.”) The program is code-named PRISM, and while it was created during the administration of George W. Bush, the Post reports that it is has experienced “exponential growth” under Obama. A blistering, brutal editorial published by The New York Times before the Washington Post article broke noted the contradiction between Obama’s words and deeds, recalling “when he said in 2007 that the Bush administration’s surveillance policy ‘puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.’” The Washington Post story, in conjuction with The Guardian give the lie to such rhetoric. The Obama administration has trampled over the liberties we cherish."
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 23:18:43 +0000
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