Confiscating the Phone Records of US Citizens

[Townsend]

Does anyone think he could have won re-election if all this had been swirling around in June of last year? 

I'll refer you back to the "a group of power hungry individuals who wish to remain in power."

[Ibanez]

It's hard to believe this is a huge surprise to anyone.

People are grabbing it and feigning OUTRAGE.

Shock me, shock me, shock me.

[Gaspar]

Check out the new 1.5 million square foot $2,000,000,000 NSA data mining facility in Utah. Expected to be finished in September of 2013, the facility is designed to hold yottabytes of your personal information, and provide processing power to mine all of that information in seconds.

http://galleries.realclearpolitics.com/gallery/Secret_NSA_Data_Center_in_Utah/slideshow/A_military_no_trespassing_sign_is_seen_in_front_of_Utah%27s_NSA_Data_Center_in_Bluffdale%2C_Utah%2C/0cK46u71Pta6x

[Gaspar]

Binney is talking:
http://libertasutah.org/interview/nsa-whistleblower-speaks-out-on-verizon-prism-and-the-utah-data-center/

[Conan71]

Looking at the cooling towers, I could have retired on the sale of the HVAC system alone.

[Gaspar]

Looking at the cooling towers, I could have retired on the sale of the HVAC system alone.

You need those when you play a lot of Call of Duty 4 at high resolutions.

[Gaspar]

I guess they have finally had enough of being lied to. . .
MSNBC is starting to report the news again.
Contrary to the president's comments today, most of congress has not been briefed that the NSA is gathering data on citizens.

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/06/07/internet-spying-kept-secret-from-most-of-congress-sen-merkley-says/

[Vashta Nerada]

"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," President Barack Obama said Friday as he tried to reassure Americans who have had to digest a dizzying array of revelations in the past few days.

Thats a half-truth.
Machines have been doing that job for the better part of a decade, first with international calls, now with domestic calls.

From 2005:

    In 1995, back when the Pentium Pro was hot stuff, the FBI requested the legal authorization to do very high-volume monitoring of digital calls.
    There's no way for the judicial system to approve warrants for the number of calls that the FBI wanted to monitor.
    The agency could never hire enough humans to be able to monitor that many calls simultaneously, which means that they'd have to use voice recognition technology to look for "hits" that they could then follow up on with human wiretaps.

It is entirely possible that the NSA technology at issue here is some kind of high-volume, automated voice recognition and pattern matching system. Now, I don't at all believe that all international calls are or could be monitored with such a system, or anything like that. Rather, the NSA could very easily narrow down the amount of phone traffic that they'd have to a relatively small fraction of international calls with some smart filtering. First, they'd only monitor calls where one end of the connection is in a country of interest. Then, they'd only need the ability to do a roving random sample of a few seconds from each call in that already greatly narrowed pool of calls. As Zimmermann describes above, you monitor a few seconds of some fraction of the calls looking for "hits," and then you move on to another fraction. If a particular call generates a hit, then you zero in on it for further real-time analysis and possible human interception. All the calls can be recorded, cached, and further examined later for items that may have been overlooked in the real-time analysis.

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/12/5808-2/

[guido911]

That is why I am supporting Hillary in 2016.

Oh, THAT'S the reason why....

[patric]

Apparently the NSA complained to the Justice Department that it's privacy was violated, and is asking the Obama administration to investigate the recent leaks.
 

[guido911]

Well, the leaker has been identified. Not looking good for this guy.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2531439

[patric]

Well, the leaker has been identified. Not looking good for this guy.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2531439

The kicker is that he, an American citizen, had to seek sanctuary from the U.S. in China.
Have we really sunk that far in the free world?

I wonder if this will cause people to re-evaluate the case of former Tulsan Bradley Manning.  
They both exposed high-level abuses that embarrassed the government, but in Mannings case, the State Department spun it into treason, even after they conceded that his whistleblowing did not actually place any American troops in danger.

[Ed W]

The guy who leaked the information is named Snowden. 

Yossarian was a collector of good questions and had used them to disrupt the educational sessions Clevinger had once conducted two nights a week in Captain Black's intelligence tent with the corporal in eyeglasses who everybody knew was probably a subversive. Captain Black knew he was a subversive because he wore eyeglasses and used words like panacea and utopia, and because he disapproved of Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating unAmerican activities in Germany.

Yossarian attended the education sessions because he wanted to find out why so many people were working so hard to kill him. A handful of other men were also interested, and the questions were many and good when Clevinger and the subversive corporal finished and made the mistake of asking if there were any.

"Who is Spain?"

"Why is Hitler?"

"When is right?"

"Where was that stooped and mealy-colored old man I used to call poppa when the merry-go-round broke down?"

"How was Trump at Munich?"

"Hi-ho beriberi!"

and "Balls!" all rang out in rapid succession, and then there was Yossarian with the question that had no answer:

"Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?"

[heironymouspasparagus]

And yet...there are people who think the Patriot Act was a good idea.....

[patric]

And yet...there are people who think the Patriot Act was a good idea.....

Because they had no idea what it actually was.
Some of those people are in Congress.


As for Snowden, someone who can make $200,000 a year with only a GED must have been doing something right.


We managed to survive greater threats in our history ... than a few disorganized terrorist groups and rogue states without resorting to these sorts of programs.  It is not that I do not value intelligence, but that I oppose ... omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance .... That seems to me a greater threat to the institutions of free society than missed intelligence reports, and unworthy of the costs."