Posted on 06/11/2013 11:14:34 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Edited on 06/11/2013 11:23:39 PM PDT by Lead Moderator. [history]
Technology companies stung by the controversy over the National Security Agency’s sweeping Internet surveillance program are calling on U.S. officials to ease the secrecy surrounding national security investigations and lift long-standing gag orders covering the nature and extent of information collected about Internet users.
The requests, made by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo and echoed by a top official from Twitter, came as debate intensified over whether oversight of government spying ... Click here for full article
========================================================================
The Obama administration says it wants people to know it adores transparency. That's why it's hiding all its transparency in a safe place somewhere. The administration profoundly believes openness is a good thing so long as no information gets out."For me it is literally, not figuratively, literally, gut-wrenching to see" all this information get out, says DNI head honcho James Clapper. Meanwhile, Obama says he welcomes all this debate that's wrenching Clapper's gut. Clapper last week harshly attacked all the media leaks of classified material. Then he swiftly declassified top-secret material for the media.
Obama's lackeys keep bragging about all the terror plots they've thwarted with all their snooping and spying. They also can't site a single case. It turns out the 2009 New York subway station bomb plot hatched by Najibullah Zazi was thwarted, not by NSA chaps sifting through every piece of data in Sarah and Bristol Palin's phone records and email accounts, but through evidence bagged by FBI agents and British authorities in an earlier raid which yielded a treasure trove (or "computer") from which they gained access to an email account Zazi used. None of it involved 'metadata' (not to be confused with mega-dating under Bill Clinton).
For the record, Clapper says PRISM is narrowly tailored, targeting billions of foreigners only, not Americans. Emails of U.S. citizens are not being illegally bundled. Only foreigners' emails and online communications are being illegally bundled. (Also for the record, Clapper recently told a Senate panel NSA isn't snooping on hundreds of millions of U. S. citizens' phone records. Whadda guy.)
Clapper now heatedly denies denying under oath the existence of NSA domestic spying programs. There's just so many ways of interpreting "no sir".
Sen. Dianne Feinstein claims Americans would wholeheartedly support Obama's constant mass surveillance operation on them if only they knew all the good that constantly being watched is doing in the war on terror. Meanwhile, Obama declared the war on terror was over. Feinstein also can't site any evidence the programs actually work. It's all classified, she says. (With that, she won me over!)
In a press conference last week, Obama claimed that every member of Congress was properly told that he was spying on all Americans. Every member was fully briefed. Apparently, "every member" means a few Senators and Congress people. And "fully" means the phone records spying, but not PRISM. And "no more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war" means tracking everyone else. (And seizing all your phone records is a "modest" violation of privacy.)
In fairness, maybe Obama meant every member of China's Congress was briefed, at the rate they're hacking us.
Obama argues that his false claim that every member was briefed wasn't false since any member of Congress could have simply asked to be briefed about programs they didn't know existed and thus wouldn't know they needed to ask about them in the first place.
And, whaddaya know, nobody allegedly briefed on any of these programs is allowed to publicly discuss anything they were allegedly briefed on, so the big government surveillance groupies' argument that enough checks and balances are baked into this gag-order black-holing 'oversight regime' because this or that secret court, invoking the Super-Duper Patriot Act's Rubber Stamp clause, has to give the go-ahead after hearing one-sided pleas from government lawyers in closed sessions is truly risible blather.
And it's not like the groupies can keep their story straight. First it's the 'gotta metadata the whole domestic and PRISM population to stop something from happening' strawman. But, while the nice, upstanding NSA chaps were sifting through Tony Blair's email inbox and watching Nicolas Sarkozy's ideas form as he typed, a lot of 'somethings' -- Boston, Fort Hood, Times Square -- and the Christmas bomber's detonatable undies had already blown the strawman away.
It's at that point they reach for the lame-o 'we're only building monstrous data farms in case we have to prosecute so-and-so later' excuse. Just warehousing arsenals of zetabytes to help police work, nothing to see here, move along. (Wait a minute, hang on. This changes everything!)
If the "logic" of keeping all the snooping secret was that you don't wanna tip off terrorists as to methods, now that the terrorists know, what's the point of castrated NSA surveillance projects now?
Rather than just shutting down the "misguided Bush wars" overseas, the 'smart war' set merely turned the war-waging inward, to the homeland. That's what happens when you start thinking 121 million Verizon phone customers are potential terror suspects.
Anyway, that's ...
My Two Cents ...
"JohnHuang2"
I want her head on a pike.
Ooops, now I’ve done it. I will be visited.
Did you see the woman who was shot in Santa Monica on CNN? She said she was shocked to see what kind of weapon the shooter had. She said she thought only police could own that kind of rifle, not civilians. She was talking about an AR-15.
Then did you see the sheriff getting two weapons out of his car and run toward the crime scene? He had some firepower. And they want to make sure they’ve got more than the people.
I’m beginning to think these shooters are brainwashed by the government. It’s sad when we mistrust the government so much. Guess I need to change my name to EXTREMELY Sad American.
Zuckerberg is only the “face” of Facebook. Suppose the government came out with a “facebook” type social media site and said everyone can sign up for free, post pictures of your ugly kids, tell all your “friends” what TV show you’re about to watch.....but we will need some private information and you have to agree to our “terms”. Do you think anyone but really dumb liberals would sign up?
How many times has Zuckerberg and all the tech company honchos had dinner at the white house? How many of them worked on obama’s campaign?
I’ll glad wrap tin foil around my head because I truly believe what I’m saying.
Yep, it’s time to wean myself off the internet.
believe it or not I have seen a freeper who has no problem with spying on us, course that freeper might live in the woods and only hears talking points but it does show how pathetic some have become and how they can just sit there and have no problem with a secret program with a secret court full of secret judges, who only hears one side of the issue
“Digital Blackwater”: Meet the Contractors Who Analyze Your Personal Data
With about 70 percent of our national intelligence budgets being spent on the private sector - a discovery I made in 2007 and first reported in Salon – contractors have become essential to the spying and surveillance operations of the NSA.From Narus, the Israeli-born Boeing subsidiary that makes NSA’s high-speed interception software, to CSC, the “systems integrator” that runs NSA’s internal IT system, defense and intelligence, contractors are making millions of dollars selling technology and services that help the world’s largest surveillance system spy on you. If the 70 percent figure is applied to the NSA’s estimated budget of $8 billion a year (the largest in the intelligence community), NSA contracting could reach as high as $6 billion every year.
But it’s probably much more than that.
The term "direct access" leaves a hole big enough to fit 500 Hilderbeast tushies through.
The NSA wouldn't want "direct access", they would want data feeds that are ingestable to the Narus appliance that they use (Narus Solutions - Cyber 3.0: Rise of the Machines).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.