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NSA spying on us through Verizon and others

"Terrorist" is a hopelessly generic term, that's true. Specifics then.

The 9/11 attacks are what has completely changed how our country acts, and reacts, to perceived threats and potential threats against us. Those attacks were carried out by Islamic extremists in general and al Qaeda in particular, but al Qaeda isn't the only threat to our country nor are they even the greatest.

The greatest threat to our country lies within; in the growing lack of confidence we Americans have in our leaders and our system of government. That lack of confidence is partially due to our governments seeming inability to prevent wanton acts of violence against us, but is mostly caused by our governments willingness to sacrifice our ideals for the sake of expediency.

Instead of using unconstitutional methods of intelligence gathering, it would be more true to ourselves as a people if we simply, when faced with a threat, sought to prevent that threat using means that don't compromise our integrity as a country. Then if they fail and we are attacked we should give no quarter to our attackers, regardless of international or domestic opinion, and exact punishment tenfold. Our enemies do not fear us. They see us dithering about, uncertain of how to react to threats against us, and think us weak. They don't respect us either since we are so quick to cast aside our ideals when the going starts to get tough.

We would be much better served if we changed our entire approach to: "This is who we are, and who we will remain. You may be able to attack us if you don't like who we are, but you will regret having done so". And then back it up.

Maybe, just maybe, we'd then stand proud again as we once did, instead of apologizing to everybody all the time for being the weaklings we've become.
 
Here's reason 4769 that the our government drives me crazy. They will track and monitor all of us endlessly and lose track of 1,000,000 million visitors that they have shown coming here legally to visit but have know idea if they ever left. Maybe if they followed the Constitution and didn't spend so much effort illegally monitoring law abiding citizens they would be able to track the flow of visitors and control illegal immigration...uggh.

The Homeland Security Department has lost track of more than 1 million people who it knows arrived in the U.S. but who it cannot prove left the country, according to an audit Tuesday that also found the department probably won’t meet its own goals for deploying an entry-exit system.

The findings were revealed as Congress debates an immigration bill, and the Government Accountability Office’s report could throw up another hurdle because lawmakers in the House and Senate have said that any final deal must include a workable system to track entries and exits and cut down on so-called visa overstays.

The government does track arrivals, but is years overdue in setting up a system to track departures — a goal set in a 1996 immigration law and reaffirmed in 2004, but which has eluded Republican and Democratic administrations.

“DHS has not yet fulfilled the 2004 statutory requirement to implement a biometric exit capability, but has planning efforts under way to report to Congress in time for the fiscal year 2016 budget cycle on the costs and benefits of such a capability at airports and seaports,” GAO investigators wrote.
 
carbinemike said:
Here's reason 4769 that the our government drives me crazy. The will track and monitor all of us endlessly and lose track of 1,000,000 million visitors that they have shown coming here legally to visit but have know idea if they ever left. Maybe if they followed the Constitution and didn't spend so much effort illegally monitoring law abiding citizens they would be able to track the flow of visitors and control illegal immigration...uggh.

The Homeland Security Department has lost track of more than 1 million people who it knows arrived in the U.S. but who it cannot prove left the country, according to an audit Tuesday that also found the department probably won’t meet its own goals for deploying an entry-exit system.

The findings were revealed as Congress debates an immigration bill, and the Government Accountability Office’s report could throw up another hurdle because lawmakers in the House and Senate have said that any final deal must include a workable system to track entries and exits and cut down on so-called visa overstays.

The government does track arrivals, but is years overdue in setting up a system to track departures — a goal set in a 1996 immigration law and reaffirmed in 2004, but which has eluded Republican and Democratic administrations.

“DHS has not yet fulfilled the 2004 statutory requirement to implement a biometric exit capability, but has planning efforts under way to report to Congress in time for the fiscal year 2016 budget cycle on the costs and benefits of such a capability at airports and seaports,” GAO investigators wrote.

That Congressional 'debate' to curtail this invasion lasted precisely 24 minutes. That should tell us something about who's side our 'leaders' are on.

Obama, who did not want a national debate on all this before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on it, has backed off of his earlier claims that the feds are not reading emails or listening to phone calls.

He has done this, no doubt, in light of unrefuted statements by Snowden and other NSA whistleblowers to the effect that federal spies can, with the press of a computer key, read emails and hear phone calls.

Only after the Snowden revelations did Obama welcome the "debate" in the House. That debate, in which more than half of his own party rejected his spying, lasted precisely 24 minutes.

How can a deliberative body of 434 current members debate an issue as monumental as whether the government is bound by the Constitution when it seeks out terrorists in just 24 minutes?

Apparently, the House Republican leadership that established the absurd 24-minute rule feared a serious and meaningful public discussion in which its authoritarian impulses would need to confront the Constitution its members swore to uphold. In that 24-minute time span, millions -- millions -- of Americans’ phone calls and emails were swept into the NSA’s supercomputers in defiance of the Constitution.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/08/ ... z2ajJeKR17
 
GunnyGene said:
That Congressional 'debate' to curtail this invasion lasted precisely 24 minutes. That should tell us something about who's side our 'leaders' are on.

Yep, pretty much sums up things in DC right now. If anything should have enraged both conservatives and liberals I thought this would. Instead we get another example of how they are really more alike than different.
 
If you think the NSA isn't watching YOU, think again.

Pressure cookers, backpacks and quinoa, oh my!
It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history.

Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now. And in these times, when things like the Boston bombing happen, you spend a lot of time on the internet reading about it and, if you are my exceedingly curious news junkie of a twenty-year-old son, you click a lot of links when you read the myriad of stories. You might just read a CNN piece about how bomb making instructions are readily available on the internet and you will in all probability, if you are that kid, click the link provided.

Which might not raise any red flags. Because who wasn’t reading those stories? Who wasn’t clicking those links? But my son’s reading habits combined with my search for a pressure cooker and my husband’s search for a backpack set off an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters.

That’s how I imagine it played out, anyhow. Lots of bells and whistles and a crowd of task force workers huddled around a computer screen looking at our Google history.

This was weeks ago. I don’t know what took them so long to get here. Maybe they were waiting for some other devious Google search to show up but “what the hell do I do with quinoa” and “Is A-Rod suspended yet” didn’t fit into the equation so they just moved in based on those older searches.

I was at work when it happened. My husband called me as soon as it was over, almost laughing about it but I wasn’t joining in the laughter. His call left me shaken and anxious.

What happened was this: At about 9:00 am, my husband, who happened to be home yesterday, was sitting in the living room with our two dogs when he heard a couple of cars pull up outside. He looked out the window and saw three black SUVs in front of our house; two at the curb in front and one pulled up behind my husband’s Jeep in the driveway, as if to block him from leaving.

Six gentleman in casual clothes emerged from the vehicles and spread out as they walked toward the house, two toward the backyard on one side, two on the other side, two toward the front door.

A million things went through my husband’s head. None of which were right. He walked outside and the men greeted him by flashing badges. He could see they all had guns holstered in their waistbands.

“Are you [name redacted]?” one asked while glancing at a clipboard. He affirmed that was indeed him, and was asked if they could come in. Sure, he said.

They asked if they could search the house, though it turned out to be just a cursory search. They walked around the living room, studied the books on the shelf (nope, no bomb making books, no Anarchist Cookbook), looked at all our pictures, glanced into our bedroom, pet our dogs. They asked if they could go in my son’s bedroom but when my husband said my son was sleeping in there, they let it be.

Meanwhile, they were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked.

They searched the backyard. They walked around the garage, as much as one could walk around a garage strewn with yardworking equipment and various junk. They went back in the house and asked more questions.

Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.

By this point they had realized they were not dealing with terrorists. They asked my husband about his work, his visits to South Korea and China. The tone was conversational.

They never asked to see the computers on which the searches were done. They never opened a drawer or a cabinet. They left two rooms unsearched. I guess we didn’t fit the exact profile they were looking for so they were just going through the motions.

They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other 1% of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to.

45 minutes later, they shook my husband’s hand and left. That’s when he called me and relayed the story. That’s when I felt a sense of creeping dread take over. What else had I looked up? What kind of searches did I do that alone seemed innocent enough but put together could make someone suspicious? Were they judging me because my house was a mess (Oh my god, the joint terrorism task force was in my house and there were dirty dishes in my sink!). Mostly I felt a great sense of anxiety. This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.

All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online.

I’m scared. And not of the right things.

https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724
 
I ran across this the the other day. It's very scary the amount of info they can get without probable cause, warrant, etc.


The Guardian said:
A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

"I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email".

US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA's "widest reaching" system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet", including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.

Analysts can also use XKeyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing "real-time" interception of an individual's internet activity.

Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a 'US person', though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

Click here for more

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data
 
MikeD said:
I ran across this the the other day. It's very scary the amount of info they can get without probable cause, warrant, etc.

I'm surprised that Greenwald isn't occupying "the darkest hole in all of Great Britain", to quote a movie line. He's sure been giving the NSA some (deserved) headaches.

Rhetorical question: How did we ever allow ourselves to get to this point, anyway? Are we really that stupid? Apparently so.

So now we are all looking over our shoulders 24/7, and feeling like hunted animals even tho we are pure as the driven snow (relatively speaking). Infectious paranoia is afflicting everyone from the President to the guy shoveling shit in Louisiana. :evil: :x

Know why? Because we cannot bring ourselves to declare who the enemy is. It would be rude. And not politically correct. So it ends up that everyone is the enemy until proven otherwise. The world is upside down.
 
Getting deeper.

Germany is pissed that their UN communications were also bugged.

http://news.yahoo.com/u-spy-agency-bugg ... 54281.html

One worthy quote from the article:

According to the documents, the NSA runs a bugging program in more than 80 embassies and consulates worldwide called "Special Collection Service". "The surveillance is intensive and well organized and has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists," wrote Der Spiegel.
 
John A. said:
Getting deeper.

Germany is pissed that their UN communications were also bugged.

http://news.yahoo.com/u-spy-agency-bugg ... 54281.html

One worthy quote from the article:

According to the documents, the NSA runs a bugging program in more than 80 embassies and consulates worldwide called "Special Collection Service". "The surveillance is intensive and well organized and has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists," wrote Der Spiegel.

The only thing that has changed since Sun Tzu is the technology. Where we (the NSA and related) have gone wrong is in turning this weapon of war on our friends and ourselves. In today's political environment everyone is the enemy. This comes about because of un-enlightened rulers and poor generals who are fearful that their power may be taken from them. Many examples throughout history.

Excerpt from Chpt 13, The Art of War:

What enables the enlightened rulers and good generals to conquer the enemy at every move and achieve extraordinary success is foreknowledge.

Foreknowledge cannot be elicited from ghosts and spirits;

it cannot be inferred from comparison of previous events, or from the calculations of the heavens, but must be obtained from people who have knowledge of the enemy's situation.

Therefore there are five kinds of spies used:

Local spies, internal spies, double spies, dead spies, and living spies.

When all five are used, and no one knows their Way, it is called the divine organization, and is the ruler's treasure.

For local spies, we use the enemy's people.

For internal spies we use the enemy's officials.

For double spies we use the enemy's spies.

For dead spies we use agents to spread misinformation to the enemy. For living spies, we use agents to return with reports.

Therefore, of those close to the army, none is closer than spies, no reward more generously given, and no matter in greater secrecy.

Only the wisest ruler can use spies;

only the most benevolent and upright general can use spies, and only the most alert and observant person can get the truth using spies.

It is subtle, subtle!

There is nowhere that spies cannot be used.

If a spy's activities are leaked before they are to begin, the spy and those who know should be put to death.
 
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