Posted on 06/06/2013 4:56:00 PM PDT by Nachum
The Washington Post has published a remarkable report showing that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been monitoring the central servers of major Internet companies -- Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple -- and "extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time."
Why did a government source leak information of this program, dubbed "PRISM," to the Post? What follows is perhaps the most chilling paragraph I've read to date about U.S. government surveillance:
Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
In the wake of last night's Guardian report about the NSA's collection of Verizon phone user metadata, the New York Times editorial board argued that the Obama administration "has now lost all credibility" in defending its abuses of executive power. That was before the report about PRISM, which unlike the Verizon metadata, includes surveillance of user content.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Is it paranoia if it's really happening?
Thanks jimjohn. When it gets late at night I get lazy.
5.56mm
I believe the order in which all these violations have been revealed has been carefully thought out and is building up to make a case in the minds of the American people. If the NSA data mining had come out first, it could have been blown off or excused with the lie that ‘the government only wants to protect us’, or just ‘tin foil ‘ paranoia, even though conservatives would have known better.
But there has been a steady stream of “reveals “ that have been made public in a certain order that I think is intentional, building up to a certain goal.
-The IRS scandal showing malice toward conservatives.
- The AP scandal showing monitoring and intimidation toward journalists.
-The James Risen incident showing how far the DOJ is willing to go to keep their American Pravda in line.
-The news about the IRS collecting health data on millions of Californians came next, the first ‘outing ‘ to show potential government abuse toward a broad cross section of citizens.
These reveals are all starting to chip away at the edges, but it was still in the realm of: “they came after....but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a journalist, conservative, etc” .
Then the news that they were collecting phone records on ALL Verizon customers came out, showing that the monitoring was more broad based than thought and was affecting a huge cross section of Americans.
The reveal yesterday by Holder that Congressmen and the Supreme court have been monitored and probably compromised to a great extent. This could cast some doubt in the liberals minds that maybe even their own representatives are being controlled.
Now, with all that background revealed, the information about the NSA data mining center was seen in the truly frightening context that it should be, and hopefully this carefully timed and orchestrated set of information releases will serve to wake up some independents, some young people, some of the ‘head in the clouds’, ‘ useful idiot’ type of liberals who are not the hard core leftists.
Same here, this was about 6 years ago when I broke an old flip phone that didn’t have location awareness (GPS for E911). I had to get a new phone that was compatible with their system and it had to have the feature in order to be compatible.
Made me wonder at the time, now it becomes much more clear.
I just saw some moron from Blue Spire (http://www.bluespiremarketing.com/Home) on the local Fox affiliate say he was “OK” with all of this because it keeps us safer. Yeah right...
I'm thinking it is the government which is acting out of paranoia. The citizenry is acting (or not) out of realism.
Don’t be to sure about that Nokia being as dumb as you think, The phone companies have been making great advances in the technology even before the “smart phone”.
To say otherwise would be a FEDERAL FELONY . You think your govt. wants you to have any idea how much information the secret police wannabes are collecting ? HELL NO they want to stay in power for all the perks & fawning over they get and this is how they get to do that.
My first thought was “hollow point” but I like your touch of theatrics - not to mention your appreciation of Unix.
They will be hooking up thousands of servers according to James Bamford [author of The Shadow Factory], enough to store the equivalent of 500 quintillion pages of text. That’s 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 pages.
Oh my goodness, thanks for the link! LOL!
You might enjoy this thread when you get home. The twitter people have started trending hashtag #theNSAcalledtotellme
Some of these are hysterical. Omarxist and his regime hate internet ridicule, so LOL.
oops. I meant to ping you to the hashtag thread. It’s here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3028364/posts?q=1&;page=51
First name starts with a V, and the last name starts with Putin.
Think about it.
I like how 6 people chimed in on who the artist really was. Freepers are like info hawks!
Interesting theory. So you are saying that the Russians are destabilizing our country by informing Americans that the security apparatus of the country spies on any and all activities on the internet, telephone or banking inside the country.
With all due respect, I think this administration has been doing a fine job of destabilizing this country all on their own.
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