The Guardian just exposed details of yet another shocking NSA surveillance program. This one “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”1 In other words, the NSA built a Google for your entire online private life. Tell Congress: Stop the Surveillance Now These revelations follow a major shift in opinion about the NSA’s right to spy on us. Last week, nearly half of the House of Representatives — Democrats and Republicans alike — voted to defund the worst of the NSA’s programs. And polls show that more and more people are uncomfortable with the government’s blanket surveillance.2 The Guardian’s latest report is a doozy. It reveals a previously top-secret program called “XKeyscore” that enables NSA analysts to dig up your emails, Facebook chats, Web searches — even the cookies on your computer — by entering simple search terms into their custom-built system. The NSA can search by email address, name, telephone number, IP address, keywords and other simple terms. With those queries, your entire life could be exposed: the people you talk to, your most embarrassing Web searches and the content of your private emails and chats. And all of this is happening without a warrant. Enough is enough. We need to step up the pressure on Congress and stop this sweeping surveillance. Imagine you’re an NSA analyst with this tool at your disposal and virtually no limits on how you use it. You could single out innocent people who are talking to the “wrong” people. You could take out a grudge on people you know — or go after entire groups you’re biased against. You could turn people’s lives upside down with the click of a mouse. This is too much power for anyone, or any institution, to have. When Congress passed the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act, it assured us that this type of surveillance would not occur. Then why did the NSA build a program that could monitor every aspect of our online lives? Now that we know what’s going on in our names we can’t stay silent. Tell Congress to put an end to the surveillance state.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 10:02:51 +0000
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