I for one think the National Security Agency has gone
completely overboard in spying on citizens and others. Currently the big outrage is that the NSA has
tapped the phone of the German Chancellor and other foreign leaders. To be honest, I could care less about tapping
the German Chancellor’s phone. What I do care about is the unprecedented
invasion of US Citizens' privacy. In
2002, a year after the 9/11 attack, the Lovely Sharon and I had a small dinner party in Palm Desert.
On that evening I got into an argument with some of my Republican friends about
my concern over the Bush administrations warrantless invasion of email, phone
calls and other personal matters of privacy.
I understood the fear we all had over terrorism but it appeared to me
that the government was involved in a mass violation of constitutional rights. I didn’t like it. On that even in 2002, many of my friends said
they had nothing to hide and they were ok with the government intrusion. I said that I had nothing to hide but I was
not ok with this government intrusion.
Eleven years later, under a new president, it appears to me
that this government intrusion has not gone away but has gotten worse. The intrusion,
the spying is worse than ever. It is as though we have abdicated civil and constitution
rights in an effort to combat terrorism.
It is too much, the government (the NSA) has gone too far. We need to stop this. Our elected leaders need to stop this. Forget
about Chancellor Merkel. Let’s worry about us, the American Citizen.
Do you remember the Japanese internment camps during World
War II when the US Government rounded up US citizens of Japanese heritage and
moved them to what were essentially concentration camps because of the fear
that some might be working for Japan.
Our citizens sat back and allowed that to happen. Outrageous. We now seem to be in the same position of ignoring citizens rights for some other reason.
This massive NSA spy program is outrageous. It frightens me and appalls me at the same time. At what point to we say enough is
enough. Are you ok if the government
installs cameras in your house, in your bedroom?
Are your really ok if some NSA government worker reads an email you send
to your wife or husband?
I just read the following:
The NSA's data-collection activities are so
resource-intensive, the agency can't complete its new server farms fast enough.
But when it does, a significant share of what gets held on those servers could
wind up being worthless spam. We now know the NSA collects hundreds of
thousands of address books and contact lists from e-mail services and instant
messaging clients per day. Thanks to this information, the NSA is capable of
building a map of a target's online relationships.
Sometimes, however, that process goes awry — such as when
one Iranian e-mail address of interest got taken over by spammers. The Iranian
account began sending out bogus messages to its entire address book. This
included a number of Yahoo Groups addresses that in some cases represented
thousands of other e-mail users. So the NSA dutifully flagged not only the fake
messages that got sent out, but also the inboxes of all the thousands of people
who were receiving the spam. And then the NSA started downloading information
on them, and their inboxes, and their address books even if they weren't of
interest. Worse, the spam that wasn't deleted by those recipients kept getting
scooped up every time the NSA's gaze passed over them. And as some people had
marked the Iranian account as a safe account, additional spam messages
continued to stream in, and the NSA likely picked those up, too.
This caused huge amounts of unimportant information to flow through the NSA's systems, according to a chart in a top secret NSA presentation. Every day from Sept. 11, 2011 to Sept. 24, 2011, the NSA collected somewhere between 2 GB and 117 GB of data concerning this Iranian address. The exact numbers aren't clear because details of the chart have been redacted.
Here is another article:
“There is no spying on Americans,” Obama told late-night
comedian Jay Leno in an interview earlier this month.
But as more details emerged about the government’s extensive
surveillance network last week, the National Security Agency admitted that
there had, in fact, been “willful violations” of its own restrictions on spying
on Americans, but that those instances had been “very rare,” according to
Bloomberg News.
This weekend The Wall Street Journal reported additional details: Its story suggested NSA analysts broke the rules to read their love interests’ e-mails and other communications often enough that the behavior was given a nickname — LOVEINT. (The intelligence community tends to attach -INT to their intelligence monikers. Information gleaned from people, for example, is called HUMINT.)
The NSA says it punished these transgressions with
administrative sanctions, and in some cases, termination.
In the past year, the NSA has repeatedly denied that it is
collecting data on U.S. citizens. In March 2012, NSA chief Keith Alexander told
Congress that his agency doesn’t even have the ability to collect data on
Americans.
This past March, James Clapper, the director of the Office
of National Intelligence, the top intelligence official in the country,
testified that the NSA does “not wittingly” collect data on Americans. After
the Snowden leaks he sent a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, apologizing for
his “clearly erroneous” testimony, because he “simply didn’t think” of a major
provision of the Patriot Act.
Officials had even told the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, the legal entity set up to oversee it, that the NSA
gathered no communications between people in the U.S.
In a declassified FIS Court filing last week, the court said
it had since learned that was not the case. “There is no question that the
government is knowingly acquiring Internet transactions that contain wholly
domestic communications through its upstream collection,” the ruling found.
The NSA gathers intelligence under Section 702 of the FISA
Amendment Act, which allows the NSA to gather data on non-U.S. citizens outside
the U.S. It also gathers tens of thousands of “domestic communications” by and
from Americans in its normal gathering of foreign surveillance, according to
Wednesday’s declassified court finding.
According to documents leaked by former NSA contractor
Edward Snowden, the government has also been collecting Americans’ phone
records in bulk, and scooping up their emails, browsing history and
social-media activity.
Since 2011, the NSA has determined on its own that it has
the legal authority to search within the data it collects using U.S. citizen
names and other identifying information, according to an Aug. 9 report by the
Guardian, citing a document from Snowden. The document said analysts wouldn’t
be able to start those searches until the NSA developed an oversight process,
but it’s unclear when or whether it did so.
In the wake of Snowden’s leaks, the Obama administration has
set up a review board to examine the NSA’s policies that is mostly composed of
former Obama administration officials. It will provide an interim report in 60
days and a final report by the end of the year.
These actions ought to frighten and outrage all of us. Let's stand up to this. Let's fight this. This is wrong.
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