Codename: Prism

[unregistered]

 

[Squibbs]

Shut the fuck up you whiny old bitch.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Sean Renaud]

If true that's disgusting and Obama and everybody connected to the program should be ashamed of themselves. We don't spy on Americans, we don't just go through every bit of data either. That's not what being an American is about and it's twice as bad under Obama as it was under Bush, not just because he grew it but because he campaigned against this exact abuse of power.

Though I am curious why Vette isn't cheering Obama on for keeping Americans safe.

 

[InJest]

Y'all write about this like it's a surprise "didn't see that one coming" - really. Course it's wrong, but the US is under tyranny now.

Who wants to bet that Obama has planned for all of these "scandals" to come out at about the same time? It's called flooding the system (gearing up for some summer riots). Think the architects of America's demise are dumb?

These are trial balloons. Watch the complete non-reaction by all the sheeple. Not of course that's it's really being reported. Watch what happens next!

 

[Sean Renaud]

I can all but promise you there are no summer riots and if this is what life is like with a tyrannical dictator I'm not really sure what everybody has been bitching about. There are certainly much worse things to have happened.

 

[Liar]

Has the boy who cried wolf actually spotted a real one this time? We'll see.

 

[RobDownSouth]

if you don't like NSA phone sweep,thank your Congressman.

Congress reacted to Dubya's warrantless wiretap program by codifying it into law.

 

[InJest]

if you don't like NSA phone sweep,thank your Congressman.

Congress reacted to Dubya's warrantless wiretap program by codifying it into law.

I was thinking the same thing as you. This is all GWB's fault. Fucker

 

[MNGuy]

Kind of sounds like Codename: FACEBOOK.

 

[coastal-boy]

Internet Lesson #1:

Nothing you do online is private.



Internet Lesson #2:

Only stupid people do not understand Internet Lesson #1

 

[ChinaBandit]

Internet Lesson #1:

Nothing you do online is private.



Internet Lesson #2:

Only stupid people do not understand Internet Lesson #1

So, in your view these two "lessons" justify the federal government's massive overreach into the private lives of Americans under Obama's instruction.

You would have been a very passive German in Berlin of the 1930's too.

Thanks for playing.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Nothing justifies this over reach by Obama, but thanks to Bush it's perfectly legal it seems.

 

[coastal-boy]

Nothing justifies this over reach by Obama, but thanks to Bush it's perfectly legal it seems.

Winner...

 

[coastal-boy]

So, in your view these two "lessons" justify the federal government's massive overreach into the private lives of Americans under Obama's instruction.

You would have been a very passive German in Berlin of the 1930's too.

Thanks for playing.

Funny thing about stuff like this...there are select committees that knew this was going on. Both political parties sit on those committees. Why did the GOP sitting on those committees not speak up?

 

[Sean Renaud]

Funny thing about stuff like this...there are select committees that knew this was going on. Both political parties sit on those committees. Why did the GOP sitting on those committees not speak up?

Not that I doubt you but do you have a link?

 

[coastal-boy]

Not that I doubt you but do you have a link?

No I don't. I doubt this is anything new...it probably has been going on since 2001, if not before. What is surprising me is the way the people are shocked by it. If you don't have anything to hide...why do they care?

 

[Sean Renaud]

Because I might someday have something to hide and the last thing I want coming out when I run for PResident in 2020 is that I used to let a Muslim Midget piss on my girlfriend.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

I would like everyone to stop bitching about government tyranny for 10 fucking minutes and answer the following questions:

1. Do you have the right to hire a private investigator because you suspect your spouse of cheating, and does he have the right to follow him or her on your behalf and observe who he or she spends time with and the places he or she comes and goes?

2. Do you, as a prospective employer, have the right to contact the previous employers an applicant has listed on his or her resume as well as using publicly available information to confirm achievements or awards he or she claims as their own?

3. Do you, as a prospective (or current) employer have a right to run search engine retrievals on your employees and job applicants in order to see if they have photographically or verbally made a fool of themselves or engaged in acts that might prove embarrassing to the company?

4. Do you, as a retailer have the right to use the marketing information you have collected on your customers to improve the efficiency of your operations and/or provide sales and incentives which benefit both you AND your customers?

5. Do you, as a retailer have the right to sell that same marketing information to other companies in accordance with your privacy policies or (absent such policies) to whoever you wish?

Whatever your rights are with respect to obtaining information about other people, please explain to me why your government is tyrannical if they use the same methods when investigating you.

Not all domestic "spying" is unethical or illegal nor should it be. The hypocrisy surrounding this issue infuriates me. People have absolutely no perspective or objectivity. It's only about whether their own ox is getting gored.

 

[mercury14]

If this sort of thing has been going on since the Patriot Act and FISA court laws were passed a decade ago, why is it suddenly an Obama scandal?

Looks like every Republican voted to extend FISA courts in 2012 except three. These are powers that congress wanted Obama to have - in fact more Republicans than Democrats wanted Obama to have these powers.

Now Republicans are whining that Obama has these powers that they created. In fact it's an outright scandal that he's using them.

 

[ChinaBandit]

I would like everyone to stop bitching about government tyranny for 10 fucking minutes and answer the following questions:

1. Do you have the right to hire a private investigator because you suspect your spouse of cheating, and does he have the right to follow him or her on your behalf and observe who he or she spends time with and the places he or she comes and goes?

2. Do you, as a prospective employer, have the right to contact the previous employers an applicant has listed on his or her resume as well as using publicly available information to confirm achievements or awards he or she claims as their own?

3. Do you, as a prospective (or current) employer have a right to run search engine retrievals on your employees and job applicants in order to see if they have photographically or verbally made a fool of themselves or engaged in acts that might prove embarrassing to the company?

4. Do you, as a retailer have the right to use the marketing information you have collected on your customers to improve the efficiency of your operations and/or provide sales and incentives which benefit both you AND your customers?

5. Do you, as a retailer have the right to sell that same marketing information to other companies in accordance with your privacy policies or (absent such policies) to whoever you wish?

Whatever your rights are with respect to obtaining information about other people, please explain to me why your government is tyrannical if they use the same methods when investigating you.

Not all domestic "spying" is unethical or illegal nor should it be. The hypocrisy surrounding this issue infuriates me. People have absolutely no perspective or objectivity. It's only about whether their own ox is getting gored.

Bogus...Why? Phone conversations are far different from a FACEBOOK page. No, the private dick doesn't have the right to "listen" anymore than the Feds do. No one has that right without probable cause. An international call isn't probable cause.

 

[kbate]

Whatever your rights are with respect to obtaining information about other people, please explain to me why your government is tyrannical if they use the same methods when investigating you.

Which of the Ten Million people are they investigating? Everyone is suspect until proven innocent?

When Food Lion sends me a coupon based on my last month's shopping pattern, they are not planning to kill or imprison me without trial if I don't use it.

Comparing marketing to government law enforcement is weak at best.

 

[mercury14]

Bogus...Why? Phone conversations are far different from a FACEBOOK page. No, the private dick doesn't have the right to "listen" anymore than the Feds do. No one has that right without probable cause. An international call isn't probable cause.

What do you think FISA courts do?

 

[Busybody]

you are too smart for your own good

non of this is comparable to what the gov does

the gov can see much more then MERE PUBLIC info and the consequences of their seeing having way more impact then a supermarket sending you cupons

I would like everyone to stop bitching about government tyranny for 10 fucking minutes and answer the following questions:

1. Do you have the right to hire a private investigator because you suspect your spouse of cheating, and does he have the right to follow him or her on your behalf and observe who he or she spends time with and the places he or she comes and goes?

2. Do you, as a prospective employer, have the right to contact the previous employers an applicant has listed on his or her resume as well as using publicly available information to confirm achievements or awards he or she claims as their own?

3. Do you, as a prospective (or current) employer have a right to run search engine retrievals on your employees and job applicants in order to see if they have photographically or verbally made a fool of themselves or engaged in acts that might prove embarrassing to the company?

4. Do you, as a retailer have the right to use the marketing information you have collected on your customers to improve the efficiency of your operations and/or provide sales and incentives which benefit both you AND your customers?

5. Do you, as a retailer have the right to sell that same marketing information to other companies in accordance with your privacy policies or (absent such policies) to whoever you wish?

Whatever your rights are with respect to obtaining information about other people, please explain to me why your government is tyrannical if they use the same methods when investigating you.

Not all domestic "spying" is unethical or illegal nor should it be. The hypocrisy surrounding this issue infuriates me. People have absolutely no perspective or objectivity. It's only about whether their own ox is getting gored.

 

[Busybody]

What do you think FISA courts do?

a fig leaf

a tool for Obamaco


Also Revealed by Verizon Leak: How the NSA and FBI Lie With Numbers

By Kevin Poulsen
06.06.13
4:53 PM









NSA’s Utah data center under construction. Image: Phil Windley/Flickr


Here’s a seemingly comforting statistic: In all of 2012, the Obama administration went to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only 200 times to ask for Americans’ “business records” under the USA Patriot Act.

Every year, the Justice Department gives Congress a tally of the classified wiretap orders sought and issued in terrorist and spy cases – it was 1,789 last year. At the same time, it reports the number of demands for “business records” in such cases, issued under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. And while the number of such orders has generally grown over the years, it has always managed to stay relatively low. In 2011, it was 205. There were 96 orders in 2010, and only 21 in 2009.

Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.

The public numbers are the one bit of accountability around the surveillance court, and the Justice Department used them to misdirect the public away from a massive domestic NSA spying operation that, as several Senators approvingly noted today, has been running for seven years.

In 2011, Acting Assistant Attorney General Todd Hinnen relied on the same misleading numbers when he told the House Judiciary Committee that “on average, we seek and obtain section 215 orders less than 40 times per year.” Congressman James Sensenbrenner rightly took Hinnen to task today for juking the stats. “The Department’s testimony left the Committee with the impression that the Administration was using the business records provision sparingly and for specific materials,” Sensenbrenner writes (.pdf). “The recently released FISA order, however, could not have been drafted more broadly.”

Leaks reveal the truth in small slices. In 2006, a technician at an AT&T switching center in San Francisco followed some fiber optic splices straight into an NSA wiretapping program parked on the backbones of the internet. Now someone with access to a single Patriot Act order served on Verizon Business Solutions leaked it to the Guardian, so today’s news is that the FBI and the NSA are engaged in wholesale spying on Verizon customers. But the whole pie is certainly bigger than that.

There are hints of broader surveillance in the Verizon order. In addition to call records, the order demands cell phone data, like customers’ IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) number and another identifier that reveals the make and model of the phone. The mobile data is a non sequitur in that particular order, because Verizon Business Services isn’t a mobile carrier; it’s the long distance and landline business Verizon acquired as MCI in 2005.

The obvious conclusion is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court uses the same catchall boilerplate order over and over again, just changing the company name and the date. The court that’s supposed to be protecting Americans from abusive domestic surveillance is not only failing in that duty, it’s also lazy.

Thanks to that laziness, we can fairly surmise that the orders are routine, and they are served on other carriers. Probably all of them. And probably continuously, renewed every three months for the last seven years.

That means the Administration has a database of every call to suicide prevention, every tip to a government fraud whistleblowing hotline, every call to the “find a meeting” number for every Alcoholics Anonymous chapter. And all it told us was that it uses the USA Patriot Act every now and then.