• Mossberg Owners is in the process of upgrading the software. Please bear with us while we transition to the new look and new upgraded software.

NSA spying on us through Verizon and others

More and more keeps pouring out and yet everyone's main concern is catching the Whistle Blowers and prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law. FOX is usually pretty on track with things but even they have fallen to the way side on the actual story and is trying to get this kid in their News Room....
 
Itsricmo said:
More and more keeps pouring out and yet everyone's main concern is catching the Whistle Blowers and prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law. FOX is usually pretty on track with things but even they have fallen to the way side on the actual story and is trying to get this kid in their News Room....

Much of this expansion of intel is the result of refusing to name our enemy - due to political correctness. We do know who the enemy is, we just can't bring ourselves to name them. So we call them "radical extremists" and other wishy-washy labels that mean nothing, and restrict us from targeting who we ought to be targeting and out comes the giant dragnet. When we adopt that attitude, we must treat everyone as an enemy in order to be "fair", and not be accused of "profiling" or "bias" or "Islamophopia". That means knowing what everyone is up to 24/7/365 and that results in the kind of thing we see being built in Utah and other places. It means treating the problem as a legal/criminal issue instead of a war (which are not mutually exclusive tactics, btw. We could do both.).
 
The FBI director today:
Mueller defended the government's collection of millions of U.S. phone records, emails and other information as vital to the nation's national security.
Early in the hearing, Mueller tried to make the case for the National Security Agency surveillance programs and said that law enforcement “must stay a step ahead of criminals and terrorists” while still heeding the civil liberties of Americans.


If they spy to keep ahead of the bad guys why didn't they know about the Boston Bombers? They monitor calls, mail, social media and even things like M.O. They know all that I do but couldn't keep up with two radicalize muslims that the Russians even warned us about. Gunny called it right, here's why:

Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won't snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are.

That's right, the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized.

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.

Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret.

We do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel's formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.

Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland.

If only they were allowed to continue, perhaps the many victims of the Boston Marathon bombings would not have lost their lives and limbs. The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15 attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the Muslim bombers worshipped.

The bureau didn't even contact mosque leaders for help in identifying their images after those images were captured on closed-circuit TV cameras and cellphones.

One of the Muslim bombers made extremist outbursts during worship, yet because the mosque wasn't monitored, red flags didn't go off inside the FBI about his increasing radicalization before the attacks.

This is particularly disturbing in light of recent independent surveys of American mosques, which reveal some 80% of them preach violent jihad or distribute violent literature to worshippers.

What other five-alarm jihadists are counterterrorism officials missing right now, thanks to restrictions on monitoring the one area they should be monitoring?


They spy on regular citizens but not on mosques...says it all about who the view as the enemy.
 
I didn't really expect the Senate do anything about the illegal data collection on US civilians and below confirms they won't. Just over half decided to go home early rather then be debriefed on it and, you know, actually do what they are paid for. Obama can actually smile and honestly say "at least I'm more popular than Congress".

A recent briefing by senior intelligence officials on surveillance programs failed to attract even half of the Senate, showing the lack of enthusiasm in Congress for learning about classified security programs.
Many senators elected to leave Washington early Thursday afternoon instead of attending a briefing with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), and other officials.
 
Someone is lying and I think it's our president.

From the President:
In an interview that’s been heavily promoted by the White House and Obama aides, the president acknowledged that a program which collects massive amounts of data on telephone calls made in or through the U.S. could theoretically be used to invade individuals’ privacy, even potentially yielding conclusions about callers’ health conditions.

“All of that is true. Except for the fact that for the government, under the program right now, to do that, it would be illegal. We would not be allowed to do that,” the president said, according to a transcript. “The number of requests are surprisingly small. ....Folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.”



The National Security Agency disclosed in a classified Capitol Hill briefing that it can listen in on domestic phone calls without a warrant, according to tech site CNET.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) told FBI Director Robert Mueller during an open House Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday that he was told “specific information” from the telephone could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.


Basically what I got reading interviews and quotes from BHO today, they aren't really spying on us. They just collect information about everything we do, with no name etc attached. If they ever need to delve into say Carbinemike, they will get the warrant on me and then access the information and connect the dots to fry my ass. The American people aren't the enemy or so they say. This is all for our own good. They aren't violating the Constitution. They need to do this to stay one step ahead of the terrorists and bad guys. I have two questions they will never answer. If that's true, why is crime so bad and why didn't they stop the Boston Bombers even with a tip from Russia that they had become radicalized? My answer: because they aren't the enemy. The regular American citizen is.

NSA: "In God we trust. All others we monitor"
 
^ There's a great deal of word parsing and shady interpretation of the law when it comes to the NSA and other intel organizations as is discussed in this CNET article. The NSA, CIA and others rely quite a bit on the Humpty Dumpty rule.

Clapper's statement refers to "legal authorization" -- not a traditional court order backed by the privacy-protective standard of probable cause. That suggests that some in the Obama administration may be interpreting the law to grant legal authorization to an analyst to review domestic phone calls and e-mail messages, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated domestic surveillance cases. (U.S. intelligence officials have argued in the past that the president had the constitutional authority, no matter what the law says, to authorize domestic spying without warrants in some cases.)

"The DNI has a history of playing games with wording, using terms with carefully obscured meanings to leave an impression different from the truth," Opsahl said today. "The word choice here raises more questions than it answers."

An extensive legal brief (PDF) that EFF filed last fall in its ongoing lawsuit against the NSA concludes: "The evidence shows that the NSA seeks a warrant only after the communication is initially acquired and analyzed by computers according to algorithms designed by humans, placed in a government database, and reviewed by an analyst."

More: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589 ... -warrants/
 
^ Yup, we called it... so much for protecting whistleblowers (I guess that policy doesn't count when it's the NSA)
 
Here's a look at the FISA court, which is a major player in all this. The entire mess is all about balance and trust. I understand the necessity for secrecy, but secrecy requires a great deal of trust in the govt apparatus and individuals, and that has been evaporating due to their own actions in many areas, including gun ownership. The govt obviously doesn't trust the people and we don't trust the govt.


By Peter Wallsten, Carol D. Leonnig and Alice Crites, Published: June 22 E-mail the writers

Wedged into a secure, windowless basement room deep below the Capitol Visitors Center, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates appeared before dozens of senators earlier this month for a highly unusual, top-secret briefing.

The lawmakers pressed Bates, according to people familiar with the session, to discuss the inner workings of the United States’ clandestine terrorism surveillance tribunal, which Bates oversaw from 2006 until earlier this year.

Bates had rarely spoken of his sensitive work. He reluctantly agreed to appear at the behest of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who arranged the session after new disclosures that the court had granted the government broad access to millions of Americans’ telephone and Internet communications.

The two-hour meeting on June 13 featuring Bates and two top spy agency officials — prompted by reports days earlier by The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper about the vast reach of the programs — reflects a new and uncomfortable reality for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and its previously obscure members. Within the past month, lawmakers have begun to ask who the court’s judges are, what they do, why they have almost never declined a government surveillance request and why their work is so secretive.

The public is getting a peek into the little-known workings of a powerful and mostly invisible government entity. And it is seeing a court whose secret rulings have in effect created a body of law separate from the one on the books — one that gives U.S. spy agencies the authority to collect bulk information about Americans’ medical care, firearms purchases, credit card usage and other interactions with business and commerce, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

“The government can get virtually anything,” said Wyden, who as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee is allowed to read many of the court’s classified rulings. “Health, guns, credit cards — my reading is not what has been done, it’s what can be done.”

Members of Congress from both parties are pursuing legislation to force the court’s orders into the open and have stepped up demands that the Obama administration release at least summaries of the court’s opinions.

Critics, including some with knowledge of the court’s internal operations, say the court has undergone a disturbing shift. It was created in 1978 to handle routine surveillance warrants, but these critics say it is now issuing complex, classified, Supreme Court-style rulings that are quietly expanding the government’s reach into the private lives of unwitting Americans.

Surveillance court judges are selected from the pool of sitting federal judges by the chief justice of the United States, as is required by the law that established the panel. There is no additional confirmation process. Members serve staggered terms of up to seven years.

3 more pages here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... story.html
 
Here's one I didn't realize went on and it not the fed's this time. In Kalifornia, they are recording license plates to track movements. As with everything else it's ok because they caught some car thieves.

Apparently the government not only is monitoring telephone activity, maintaining back-door access to computers and networks and photographing mail, it is recording where your vehicle’s license plate is seen – and storing the details.

The report comes from the Center for Investigative Reporting, which explained in an online posting that police officers can gain insight into who are your friends, where you shop, where you work, where you go to church and whether you go to political meetings based on the tracking of your car.

The report, from website contributor Ali Winston, cited the situation for computer security consultant Michael Katz-Lacabe of San Leandro, Calif. He found out that police there had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including once in 2009 when he and his daughters were exiting the car in their own driveway.

That, he told CIR, made him “frightened and concerned about the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection.”

The report said police agencies, at least throughout California, are collecting records on drivers by the millions and feeding them to intelligence “fusion centers.”

According to the report, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center recently signed an agreement with a company called Palantir to built a database of license plate records across 14 counties.

Contract documents uncovered by the center revealed the database can handle 100 million records – and be readily accessible to law enforcement.

The report said law enforcement agencies all across the region are working on similar projects.
 
If you have a recent drivers license, it's likely your mugshot is already archived, but it's nice to see the initiative to get around it.

I would wear led's if for nothing more than the thought of some small bit of freedom.
 
Do they think anyone would believe that the NSA can't track their own emails????? Antiquated and archaic my ass.


The NSA is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic," she added.
 
carbinemike said:
Do they think anyone would believe that the NSA can't track their own emails????? Antiquated and archaic my ass.


The NSA is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic," she added.

stock-illustration-22357338-lmao-face.jpg
 
carbinemike said:
Do they think anyone would believe that the NSA can't track their own emails????? Antiquated and archaic my ass.


The NSA is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic," she added.


It's probably by design. It's OK for them to spy on us but they don't want to people spying on them. ;)
 
lol WOW imagine that... They can watch us but when the question is asked "Who is watching them..." they have no answer... and it can't be tracked
 
kwizzer said:
It gets worse...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-5...eb-firms-to-turn-over-user-account-passwords/

I don't look at kiddie porn and I don't carry a bomb in my shoe but I still don't like the idea of the government having access to the passwords for my various, and abundant, online accounts. We've lost a great deal of our privacy since 9/11 and I don't like it one little bit. Sometimes it's hard not to think the terrorists have already won.

I have a problem with the term "terrorist", or "terrorism". Neither are legally, or otherwise defined. Use of either term means we haven't defined the enemy. They are just emotionally charged words that are liberally applied to anyone who instills a sense of fear in somebody else. So-and-so 'terrifies' me, therefore so-and-so is a terrorist. Bull.

Until we define who the enemy is we will never defeat them. It's not that hard to define the enemy, find the enemy, and kill the enemy. Except for politicians and bleeding heart liberals, who find it politically expedient to hold that booger man up for as long as possible in order maintain their position as savior and expand their control over any nation you care to mention.

So you tell me: Who is the real enemy? Some raghead with an AK in a Yemeni cave? Or somebody who holds the reins of real power?
 
Back
Top