(New York Times) Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
NY Times Continued: A senior administration official quoted in The Times online Thursday afternoon about the Verizon order offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”
NY Times Continued: On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.
“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”
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Senator Dianne Feinstein |
(Fox News) The classified program is code-named PRISM, the Washington Post reported, and has not been disclosed publicly before. Members of Congress who are aware of the program were reportedly bound by oaths of office to keep it confidential.
According to slides from an internal presentation intended for NSA senior analysts and obtained by the Washington Post, the program accounts for nearly one in seven intelligence reports.
The companies that participate knowingly in the program are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, the Washington Post reports.
Bush vs Obama (a reminder)
(Malkin) To refresh your memories: If an NSA surveillance program tracks all international communications (or all international communications to al Qaeda hotspots such as Afghanistan), it does not target specific individuals as required by 1801(f)(1). If the communications are intercepted outside the U.S., the NSA program falls outside the definitions in 1801(f)(2) and 1801(f)(4). If the program excludes intentional capture of purely domestic communications, it falls outside the scope of 1801(f)(3).
Bottom line: a massive surveillance system that intercepts millions or billions of international calls and e-mails may not constitute electronic survellance as defined by FISA, provided that the interception occurs outside the United States and neither specific individuals nor purely domestic calls are targeted
Under Bush, collection of purely domestic calls by the special collections program was rare or inadvertent — by the New York Times’ own admission.
And the data mining program exposed in May 2006 (which I linked/referred to at the very top of this blog post) was expressly established “to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.”
Under President “War on Terror is over” Obama, massive, blanket collection of data involving purely domestic calls placed by Americans to other Americans is the intended objective, not an accident.
Now I know what Verizon meant when they wanted to sign me up for the "share everything plan"…
Terrorist in the White House.
But…but…but…President Obama says that the war on terror is over.
And with all of the recent disclosures, it would appear as though the war against his political enemies at home is swinging into full gear.
The title could also read, "Business as Usual With the Obama Administration."
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"It's not even news when another scandal breaks with the Obama administration."
Scandal.
Could you please explain the use of the word in this context?
Scandal.
Why are the NSA activities a President Obama scandal and not a USA government scandal?
Ema Nymton
~@:o?
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Another day in the ObamaNation.
Ema, President Obama has her personal handprints all over this, and the other "incidents" cited here. If you're offended by the word, "scandal" in the first paragraph, replace it with "Watergate-like incidents". Some of them are criminal, some of them are plain wrong, but in each case they are Obama-instigated.
It's never some low-level government functionary whose wheel's have slipped off the tracks. They are designed for political purposes that inevitably work against elements contained in the Bill of Rights. That is why it's an Obama Scandal, not merely a USGOV scandal.
You're right. There are times when it's a government hubris situation and the boss doesn't know. In this case, the architect is the guy at the top. And the fish rots from the head down.
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