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"
Wednesday morning ping! Have a great day, y’all! And God bless.
Establish a private sector consortium to work with natsec on behalf of the citizens.
Congress has failed miserably in its responsibilities.
The National Security Agency's Utah Data Center, according to a whistleblower, when completed, will have a capacity of five Zettabytes.
As far as violations of privacy: I'll see your zettabyte (ZB) and raise you a yottabyte (YB). You, Mr President are a national disgrace!
The Wheels Of Tyranny Are Turning
They already did...it's called Booz Allen Hamilton.
Good Morning Utah! The fact that King Bozo Overlord can now blackmail everyone (or almost) in America is quite a feat...shows what a socialist dictator is really made of...
Your sentence is an insult to innocent failures.
The US Congress has gone out of its way to help al Qaeda
and to savage the American people.
They are traitors to the US Constitution.
That's just what this country needs! Giving the Obama Administration expanded authority to conduct background checks on people, to include their medical records.
I thought these companies said these links didnt exist???
Can I offer additional suggestions (privately) that may take these gems you write, and polish them to even more stellar levels?
Several politicians are currently saying this is all legal but citizens couldn’t get a court hearing on it because they couldn’t prove they were spied on due to the secrecy and thus didn’t have standing.
Whoops, caught in an outright lie.
and when the testimony is over ... all the tech companies will have lied. It (the lies) will pay well though.
Most transparent PRISM ever?
|
|
|
| Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. | …we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government - or any other government - direct access to our servers. |
| We hadn’t even heard of PRISM before yesterday. | We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday. |
| When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law. We will continue fighting aggressively to keep your information safe and secure. | …we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. |
| We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. | Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received - an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false. |
| We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe. | this episode confirms what we have long believed - there needs to be a more transparent approach. |
| It’s the only way to protect everyone’s civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term. | And, of course, we understand that the U.S. and other governments need to take action to protect their citizens’ safety - including sometimes by using surveillance. But the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish. |
Later
5.56mm
Thank you so much for this outstanding essay, dear JohnHuang2!
“...I thought these companies said these links didnt exist???...”
They outright lied to their clientele. And now that the SHTF and they’re caught red-handed, it’s starting to hit their income, that almighty dollar they all worship. So now, they’re begging the government to let them try to smooth it over with their customers.
I’d say it’s a little late girls & boys. The horse is already outta the barn. Each of em had their chance to do the right thing and stand up to this tyranny. Instead, they all caved in to the communists. I hope they all go belly-up, bankrupt, dead in the ditch, broke. Couldn’t happen to a better bunch.
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.