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A former employee with the NSA who after over 30 years with the agency quit and became a whistleblower, bringing to light many of their illegal activities and mass surveillance of American citizens.
Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama.
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. Court order found here: Please Login or Register to see this Hidden Content
Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman, declined comment when asked about the whole ordeal. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The whistle-blower offered up likely motives of the recent court order by the Obama administration stating:
"Well, because they wanted to have leverage on everybody in the country, okay? That’s what Cheney wanted to do. I’m sure that was the issue. Do you want to know who’s in the tea party, and then tell the IRS who to target? Or things like that. Those are all possible things using these programs."
Revelations in recent days about the actions of the US National Security Agency seem to have shocked us awake to find that we are already living within a mature, widely embedded Orwellian nightmare.
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Organizations within the spotlight include but are not limited to: Google, Verizon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Twitter, Yahoo & ATT. Several of these technology giants have been battling to maintain their credibility on privacy issues over the weekend as further details emerged of their co-operation with US spy agencies. Apple, Facebook and Google issued strongly-worded denials that they had knowingly participated in Prism, a top-secret system at the National Security Agency that collects emails, documents, photos and other material for agents to review.
The Obama administration officials held 22 separate briefings or meetings for members of Congress on the law that has been used to justify the National Security Agency's controversial email monitoring program, according to data provided by a senior administration official. According to the official, the sessions that took place over the course of 14 months starting in October 2011. Sen. John Thune told MSNBC on Monday that he didn't believe "that most members of Congress, perhaps, going into this were fully aware of how broad this program was."
Google CEO,Larry Page, had the following to say this past Friday:
"..First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday." Full post found here:
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Each company mentioned not giving "direct access" to the government through the NSA Prism. The phrase comes from a Prism presentation slide that states: "Collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.". The repeated, identical phrasing of the term "direct access" adds another layer to each company's response. Using "direct access" in their response may be a roundabout way of saying "NSA Prism doesn't have direct access to our servers, but we're still giving the government all your data.
According to the New York Times, some companies, including Google and Facebook, discussed setting up secure online "rooms" where requested information could be sent and accessed by the NSA. Such systems would allow them to dispute the idea of direct access. According to a report in the Washington Post on Sunday, Prism was created after extensive negotiations between the tech companies and federal authorities "who had pressed for easier access to data they were entitled to under previous orders granted by the secret Fisa court".
On Saturday, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, acknowledged the existence of Prism but insisted it was only used under court supervision. He said: "The United States government does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of US electronic communication service providers. All such information is obtained with Fisa court approval and with the knowledge of the provider based upon a written directive from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence."
But the Washington Post reported that the secret court orders, made under section 702 of Fisa, served as "one-time blanket approvals for data acquisition and surveillance on selected foreign targets for periods of as long as a year". The Prism system allows agents at the NSA to send queries "directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations", rather than directly to company servers.
These companies are denying that they give direct access to their servers, but what they have created is a complex legal and technological mechanism that amounts to the same thing.
The topic of US Surveillance has gone viral in just a matter of a couple days giving rise to several humorous meme's. In these, President Obama can be found directly listening in on our phone calls.
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On Sunday senator Mark Udall, a Senate intelligence committee member, told ABC's This Week: "My main concern is that Americans don't know the extent to which they are being surveilled."
He said: "We here this term metadata which has to do with where you make calls, when you make calls, who you are talking to. I think that's private information."
Udall called for greater transparency: "Let's have the debate, let's be transparent. Let's open this up."
Here
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is a great guide breaking down a lot of the current laws, terms, and lingo surrounding government surveillance
Via:
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