I’m not even sure what to say at this point..
I would say I’m shocked but nothing this Administration does shocks me.
Remember when Clinton was selling secrets to China?
I was just trying to watch a video, and it started with an ad for The Verizon Share Everything Plan. What are they thinking?
I,m sure Obama would be happy to share the dat with Hamas and al Qaeda.
The NSA frequently came to our campus to recruit in the 1980’s. It was the general consensus that they had access to everybody’s phone calls, and could pretty much eavesdrop on us at-will.
The usual story was that we let the Brits spy on our people domestically, while we did the same to Her Majesty’s Subjects. Then we’d just exchange the intel.
Lovely.
Sharing universal phonetaps with a country that really has no freedom of speech whatsoever and is poular with muslims doing libel lawfare.
At least one...
Where’s the ACLU in all this?
Sounds like the NSA must have goat pics on Pansy Graham and Saxby Chambliss. Shame on them for going along with this.
And still... Obama is untouched by any of these scandals...
I’ve become so disgusted with this country, it’s beyond words.
Those people were right. Those libertarian types were right..
People are forgetting that this government has identified Tea Partiers, gun control advocates and other conservatives as “terrorists”. When we read that the phone spying efforts were aimed at rooting out terrorists and their networks, I do not think that the government thinks that “terrorist” means what we think it means. I think that they wanted to monitor US calling patterns to identify conservatives and their allies.
We have been sharing elint, electronic data, with the UK since WWII and with Echelon starting in 1947:
A short history of Echelon, the grandparent of Prism:
http://echelononline.free.fr/documents/dc/inside_echelon.htm
The world’s most secret electronic surveillance system has its main origin in the conflicts of the Second World War. In a deeper sense, it results from the invention of radio and the fundamental nature of telecommunications. The creation of radio permitted governments and other communicators to pass messages to receivers over transcontinental distances. But there was a penalty - anyone else could listen in. Previously, written messages were physically secure (unless the courier carrying them was ambushed, or a spy compromised communications). The invention of radio thus created a new importance for cryptography, the art and science of making secret codes. It also led to the business of signals intelligence, now an industrial scale activity.
Although the largest surveillance network is run by the US NSA, it is far from alone. Russia, China, France and other nations operate worldwide networks. Dozens of advanced nations use sigint as a key source of intelligence. Even smaller European nations such as Denmark, the Netherlands or Switzerland have recently constructed small, Echelon-like stations to obtain and process intelligence by eavesdropping on civil satellite communications.
During the 20th century, governments realised the importance of effective secret codes. But they were often far from successful. During the Second World War, huge allied codebreaking establishments in Britain and America analysed and read hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese signals. What they did and how they did it remained a cloely-guarded secret for decades afterwards. In the intervening period, the US and British sigint agencies, NSA and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) constructed their worldwide listening network.
The system was established under a secret 1947 “UKUSA Agreement,” which brought together the British and American systems, personnel and stations. To this was soon joined the networks of three British commonwealth countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Later, other countries including Norway, Denmark, Germany and Turkey signed secret sigint agreements with the United States and became “third parties” participants in the UKUSA network.
Besides integrating their stations, each country appoints senior officials to work as liaison staff at the others’ headquarters. The United States operates a Special US Liaison Office (SUSLO) in London and Cheltenham, while a SUKLO official from GCHQ has his own suite of offices inside NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, between Washington and Baltimore.
Under the UKUSA agreement, the five main English-speaking countries took responsibility for overseeing surveillance in different parts of the globe . Britain’s zone included Africa and Europe, east to the Ural Mountains of the former USSR; Canada covered northern latitudes and polar regions; Australia covered Oceania. The agreement prescribed common procedures, targets, equipment and methods that the sigint agencies would use.
Among them were international regulations for sigint security , which required that before anyone was admitted to knowledge of the arrangements for obtaining and handling sigint, they must first undertake a lifelong commitment to secrecy.
Every individual joining a UKUSA sigint organisation must be “indoctrinated” and, often “re-indoctrinated” each time they are admitted to knowledge of a specific project. They are told only what they “need to know”, and that the need for total secrecy about their work “never ceases”.