Posted on 06/07/2013 8:21:46 AM PDT by Perdogg
The US has admitted using a secret system to mine the systems of the biggest technology companies to spy on millions of people's online activity, overshadowing attempts by Barack Obama to force China to abandon its cyber-espionage program.
As concern mounted over the sweeping nature of US surveillance, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, confirmed revelations by the Guardian that the National Security Agency uses companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple to obtain information that includes the content of emails and online files.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Funny this comes out the day before Dear Leader meet the Chinese in CA.
One name missing from all the hoopla about the electromatic spying? Bubba. Don’t over look that Bubba began the monitoring on his watch with the Echelon Program designed to capture all communications, overseas. It was the forerunner of what we have now, Echelon was an adolescent compared to what is going on today but nonetheless, it was the beginning. Of course then it was foreign collection.
So, we are once again involved in code breaking and looking at an enemies secrets.
The irony seems to be that we learned of Chinese Cyber surveillance by secret surveillance of their secrets.
Maxine Waters: ‘Obama Has Put In Place’ Secret Database With ‘Everything On Everyone’ (Video)
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=49a_1360284775
The Guardian appears to be avoiding how England and other English Speaking countries set up Echelon, the grandparent of Prism:
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”.
And after collecting all this private information illegally, and at great expense, they weren’t able to prevent the mad piece of $h!t from murdering people during the Boston Marathon.
Or didn’t try to prevent it.
Hey,Wong, mine’s bigger than yours!
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.
Ya just knew they were spying on all of our email...
The pins on her jacket are a nice touch
They tell ya the government is reading your email and you post cute pics for humor?
not to mention Hilda’s thief of over 800 FBI files....to which she has never been held accountable
I would say that from this govt's viewpoint, they/we are terrorists. We seek to stop this govt's current actions, and peaceably remove the people in charge of this govt. and undo much of what this govt. has done.
If you don't see why this govt. considers us terrorists, I don't know what to say.
You cannot tell me that they do not control the elections and the agenda from both parties. Rove is now defending this overreach. Both parties have went too far though Obama is the master violator. Unreal that impeachment hearings are not in the works. He gets away with everything. You or I could not. Now, we know why our side will not go after him. They know that he and his party operatives have had their secrets and of course they are afraid of the Chicago way so the overtake continues. Blame Obama but the repubs are just flat out not fighting back hard enough for me. This current Speaker, a reformer. he can't even align his members to win on a issue most of the times. Amnesty will finish their party. See California. Accountability has to be given/seen for anyone to even think of seeing/knowing wrongs are being made right. It's wrong/unconstitutional to gather our personal thoughts and private messages and to be spied upon. Police state for certain; the weak have got it. Both sides have failed by allowing this to even occur.
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