Thread: NSA is collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily, a secret order reveals

Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama
Glenn Greenwald The Guardian, Wednesday 5 June 2013

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. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/telecoms

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. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...on-court-order

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself.

"We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".

The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".

The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.

For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.

Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized.

Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion." The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration's extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance.

In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows."

"We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.

Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual's network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency's focus on domestic activities.

In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.

At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...on-court-order

‘Obscenely outrageous’: Al Gore fury over report of Obama administration blanket surveillance
Posted at 10:08 pm on June 5, 2013 by Twitchy Staff

Al Gore ✔ @algore

In digital era, privacy must be a priority.
Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?
http://ow.ly/lKS13

8:39 PM - 5 Jun 2013

Al Gore is not happy about the latest report of massive NSA snooping:

Glenn Greenwald ✔ @ggreenwald

BREAKING: NSA is collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily, a secret order reveals
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...on-court-order …

Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily [i]
Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data
shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama administration The Guardian @guardian

6:10 PM - 5 Jun 2013

Twitter users joined Gore in a rare fit of bipartisanship to bash what could be the latest addition to a growing line of Obama administration scandals:

Byron Tau @ByronTau

Verizon must be pissed if other carriers ordered to do the same by the NSA and only their order leaked.

7:43 PM - 5 Jun 2013

Allahpundit @allahpundit

If Obama had a good reason for this NSA order,
he'd have leaked it already himself to the Times

7:40 PM - 5 Jun 2013

Allahpundit @allahpundit

I wonder who'll be placed on administrative leave for this #nsa

8:18 PM - 5 Jun 2013

Cuffé @CuffyMeh

Next Obama scandal:
which Administration officials shorted the he--
out of Verizon stock yesterday? #NSA

7:45 PM - 5 Jun 2013

RB @RBPundit

Millions of moonbats are currently scratching “domestic surveillance”
off their “Things Bush did that I wailed about” list. #NSA

9:21 PM - 5 Jun 2013

More : http://twitchy.com/2013/06/05/al-gor...dministration/

Greg Gutfeld blasts Obama administration over NSA surveillance scandal

GregGutfeld ✔ @greggutfeld

[b]Regarding NSA: I, for one, cannot wait to see who gets promoted over this.1/b]

10:09 PM - 5 Jun 2013

http://twitchy.com/2013/06/05/greg-g...lance-scandal/


Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., blasts NSA surveillance program

http://twitchy.com/2013/06/06/rep-ky...privacy-rights

Aw, even David Sirota is outraged by NSA surveillance program
Posted at 12:18 am on June 6, 2013 by Twitchy Staff

http://twitchy.com/2013/06/06/aw-eve...lance-program/


Is NSA surveillance program limited to Verizon phone calls?
Posted at 12:43 am on June 6, 2013 by Twitchy Staff

Andy Vuong @andyvuong

Would be surprised if NSA is grabbing records only from Verizon.
Guessing leaks about other carriers will come soon.

10:46 PM - 5 Jun 2013

http://twitchy.com/2013/06/06/is-nsa...n-phone-calls/



http://twitchy.com/2013/06/06/is-nsa...n-phone-calls/

The White House is defending the National Security Agency's need to collect call records of U.S. citizens, calling such information "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats": http://usat.ly/14j0x2v.

Phone records 'critical tool' to fight terrorism
The National Security Agency has been harvesting records
from millions of Verizon customers since at least April.
David Jackson, USA TODAY 11:38 a.m. EDT June 6, 2013

The White House says that gathering telephone records has been a "critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats," responding to a news report that the National Security Agency has been harvesting records from millions of Verizon customers.

The information "allows counter-terrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States," said a senior administration official.

The Britain-based Guardian newspaper obtained a secret court order requiring Verizon to turn over information on all domestic and international calls. The paper reported that "the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19."

That order likely is but the latest in a continuing string. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and other lawmakers said the program has been going on for years and is regularly renewed.

"It's called protecting America," Feinstein said.

Civil libertarians blasted the program as an abuse of the Constitution.

Former Vice President Al Gore tweeted: "In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?"

Aides to President Obama declined to discuss the program in detail, saying FISA court orders are classified.

One official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the government-collected information "does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber. It relates exclusively to metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of a call."

The program also undergoes periodic congressional and judicial reviews to prevent abuse, the official said.

The activities "are subject to strict controls and procedures under oversight of the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FISA Court, to ensure that they comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties," the official said.

Verizon is prohibited from publicly disclosing the court order or the FBI's request on behalf of the NSA. "We decline comment," Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman, told The Guardian.

But the company issued an internal memo to its employees from general counsel Randy Milch, noting that it "continually takes steps to safeguard its customers' privacy."

"Nevertheless, the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply," the memo said.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a frequent critic of surveillance program, called the Obama administration to disclose more information about the program: "I think that they have an obligation to respond immediately," said Wyden, a frequent critic of government violations of privacy.

Wyden has long warned that U.S. surveillance activities are more extensive than has been reported. In a Sept. 21, 2011, letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Wyden and Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., wrote:

"Americans will eventually and inevitably come to learn about the gap that currently exists between the public's understanding of government surveillance authorities and the official, classified interpretation of these authorities. "

The two senators added: "We believe the best way to avoid a negative public reaction and an erosion in confidence in U.S. intelligence agencies is to initiate an informed public debate about these authorities today."

For his part, Udall said, "This sort of wide-scale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking."

In response, the Justice Department said such surveillance was necessary to protect Americans and pointed out that key members of Congress were apprised along the way.

"We do not believe the executive branch is operating pursuant to 'secret law' or 'secret opinions of the Department of Justice,'" said then-assistant attorney general Ronald Weich. "Rather, the intelligence community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to a public statute, with the knowledge and oversight of Congress."

The Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement that the FISA court order may be "the broadest surveillance order" ever issued. " It requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon subscribers anywhere in the U.S.," the center said. "It also contains a gag order prohibiting Verizon from disclosing information about the order to anyone other than their counsel."

The center, which has filed a lawsuit against the government over these issues, said "we will continue to challenge the surveillance of Americans."


Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal directive, said the NSA's surveillance effort "could hardly be any more alarming.''

"It is beyond Orwellian,'' Jaffer said, "and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies."

"Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate a full investigation," said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.


Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, said it appears the FISA court authorized the operation under a section of the USA PATRIOT Act that permits the government to obtain records and other "tangible things" relevant to a terrorism investigation.

Goitein and other critics said that provision should not be used to authorize a "dragnet" approach to records collection, such as with phone records.

"The fact that the FISA Court approved this strained interpretation of the Patriot Act illustrates the shortcomings of secret courts and secret law," she said.

The program also has defenders.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Republican who frequently criticizes Obama's national security policies, told Fox News that he's glad the National Security Agency "is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country."

Graham said he's a Verizon customer himself, and told the interviewer: "I don't think you're talking to the terrorists. I know you're not. I know I'm not, so we don't have anything to worry about."

In February, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against challenges to an anti-terrorism law that increases the government's ability to intercept international, rather than domestic, communications.

The law, passed in 2008 near the end of the Bush administration, essentially remains beyond normal judicial review as a result of the decision. The court's conservative justices ruled that lawyers, journalists, human rights activists and others lacked standing to challenge it.

Those plaintiffs had contended that even the potential of government snooping – which, they said, would violate the Fourth Amendment – was forcing them to change the way they communicate with clients and sources.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who is scheduled to testify later today before a Senate panel on budget matters, did not address the surveillance effort in written remarks issued in advance of his testimony. But the written testimony did acknowledge the simmering dispute about Justice's tactics in dealing with journalists as part of criminal investigations into leaks of classified information.

"While the Department of Justice must not waiver in its determination to protect our national security, we must be just as vigilant in our defense of the sacred rights and freedoms we are equally obligated to protect, including the freedom of the press,'' Holder said, adding that he had launched a review of existing Justice Department guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...?csp=fbfanpage

History lesson: The crucial differences between Bush and Obama’s NSA phone surveillance programs
By Michelle Malkin • June 6, 2013 03:17 AM

It is certainly schadenfreudelicious to see Al Gore and assorted Democratic tools going bonkers over news of President Obama’s radically expanded phone call data collection program — which he, ahem, inherited from the Bush administration and has apparently now widened far beyond anything Bush ever enacted or proposed.

But unlike Gore and company, I am not going to engage in a full, NSA-bashing freakout. Some of us have not regressed completely to a 9/10 mentality.

I will instead provide you with a sober reflection on why I supported the Bush NSA’s work and why Obama’s NSA program raises far more troubling questions about domestic spying than his predecessor.

As longtime readers know, I supported the NSA’s post-9/11 efforts to collect and connect the jihad dots during the Bush years. When left-wing civil liberties absolutists were ready to hang Bush intel officials, I exposed the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t hypocrisy of Bush-bashers who condemned the administration for not doing enough to prevent the 9/11 jihadi attacks and then condemned it for doing too much. Bush defended himself ably at a press conference in December 2005 — refresh your memories here.

The Bush NSA’s special collections program grew in early 2002 after the CIA started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah. The CIA seized the terrorists’ computers, cellphones and personal phone directories. NSA surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible. As a result of Bush NSA work,the terrorist plot involving convicted al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris was uncovered — possibly saving untold lives, not to mention New York bridges and possibly Washington, D.C. trains. I noted the Bush DOJ account of the plot at the time:

Faris has admitted traveling to a training camp in Afghanistan in late 2000, where he was introduced to Usama bin Laden. Faris admitted that during a meeting in late 2000, one of bin Laden’s men asked him about “ultralight” airplanes, and said al Qaeda was looking to procure an “escape airplane.” Faris admitted that about two months later, he performed an Internet search at a café in Karachi, Pakistan and obtained information about ultralights, which he turned over to a friend for use by al Qaeda.

Faris also admitted that during a visit to Karachi in early 2002, he was introduced to a senior operational leader in al Qaeda. A few weeks later, the operational leader asked what he could do for al Qaeda. Faris said he discussed his work as a truck driver in the United States, his trucking routes and deliveries for airport cargo planes, in which the al Qaeda leader said he was interested because cargo planes would hold “more weight and more fuel.”
According to Faris’ admission, the operational leader then told Faris that al Qaeda was planning two simultaneous attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. The al Qaeda leader spoke with Faris about destroying a bridge in New York City by severing its suspension cables, and tasked Faris with obtaining the equipment needed for that operation. The leader also explained that al Qaeda was planning to derail trains, and asked Faris to procure the tools for that plot as well.

Faris admitted that upon returning to the United States from Pakistan in April 2002, he researched “gas cutters” – the equipment for severing bridge suspension cables – and the New York City bridge on the Internet. Between April 2002 and March 2003, he sent several coded messages through another individual to his longtime friend in Pakistan, indicating he had been unsuccessful in his attempts to obtain the necessary equipment. Faris admitted to traveling to New York City in late 2002 to examine the bridge, and said he concluded that the plot to destroy the bridge by severing cables was unlikely to succeed because of the bridge’s security and structure. In early 2003, he sent a message that “the weather is too hot” – a coded message indicating that the bridge plot was unlikely to succeed.

The Bush administration argued then that the NSA program that helped uncover the Faris plot was necessary because officials needed to act quickly on large caches of information, such as the data found after the Zubaydah capture in March 2002. Normally, the government obtains court orders to monitor such information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But the window of opportunity to exploit the names, numbers, and addresses of those associated with the top terrorist leaders was obviously small.

As I asked at the time: If the Bush administration chose to pursue FISA warrants, failed to obtain them, let the information go to waste, and allowed another attack to occur as a result, is there any question the finger-waggers at the NYTimes would be the first to attack the President for failing to do everything necessary to prevent it?

I also noted then that despite the 'Get Bush' media’s best efforts to undermine effective counterterrorism measures, the American public stood with Bush.

They trusted him on national security matters.

Flashback: http://michellemalkin.com/2006/05/12...-mongers-fail/

A majority of Americans initially support a controversial National Security Agency program to collect information on telephone calls made in the United States in an effort to identify and investigate potential terrorist threats, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.

A slightly larger majority–66 percent–said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made, the poll found.

Underlying those views is the belief that the need to investigate terrorism outweighs privacy concerns. According to the poll, 65 percent of those interviewed said it was more important to investigate potential terrorist threats “even if it intrudes on privacy.” Three in 10–31 percent–said it was more important for the federal government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.

Half–51 percent–approved of the way President Bush was handling privacy matters.

I must also remind you of some wise words from fellow conservatives who defended the Bush monitoring program back in 2006:

Mark Levin:

Is not life the most important of civil liberties? These intelligence programs are trashed without any curiosity as to whether they’ve prevented any attacks and saved any lives. The hostile responses are largely knee-jerk and lack any kind of context. The arguments are abstract and descend into fear-mongering. While I’m all for philosophical debates, how about a little more reality when it comes to fighting and winning this war—a real war against a horrific enemy.

John McIntyre at Real Clear Politics:

Many of the people decrying these violations of civil liberties are the same ones who ripped the government for its inability to “connect-the-dots” prior to 9/11.

But the paranoia on the left, and in particular, the hatred for the Bush administration has become so intense there is an automatic assumption that the NSA has to be engaging in nefarious activity, spying on you and your neighbor. The idea that the agency is thinking creatively and proactively about how they can legally monitor the bad guys instead of just going about business as usual is, apparently, out of the question for some. The sad truth is it is probably going to take another devastating attack to convince many in this country that we are actually at war against Islamic jihadists..

The differences between then and now are glaring.

The new Obama order covers not only phone calls overseas with the specific goal of counterterrorism surveillance, but all domestic calls by Verizon customers over at least a three-month period. http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.c...2-739869B4C484

Timm, a digital rights analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the order “shockingly broad.”

“Not only are they intercepting call data into and out of the country, but they are intercepting all call data in the United States, which goes far beyond what the FISA Amendments Act allows,” Timm said.

“This is an abuse of the Patriot Act on a massive scale,” said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “Since the law requires that the telephone records sought be relevant to an investigation, it appears that the FBI and the NSA may have launched the broadest investigation in history because everyone’s telephone calls seem to be relevant to it.”

…The “top secret” order issued in April by a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the request of the FBI instructs the telecommunications giant Verizon to provide the NSA with daily reports of “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

[Update: Some members of Congress have characterized the Obama order as a routine, three-month renewal of Bush's program. Others believe it has overreached and that Obama's implementation is "overbroad."] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...story/2395695/

As usual, Obama was against it before he was for it:

It had not previously been confirmed that the Obama administration was conducting similar broad surveillance of calling patterns. However, in 2008 Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to give explicit legal authority to aspects of the program President George W. Bush initiated without requiring a future blessing from lawmakers.

Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama opposed the legislation during his primary battle with Hillary Clinton. However, he reversed course shortly after clinching the nomination and voted for a modified version of the bill.

Here is another key difference between the Bush and Obama administration programs.

Bush was fully engaged and committed to the war on terror when the NSA programs were first exposed in 2005, four short years after the bloody 9/11 attacks.

Obama, by contrast, immediately rejected the war on terror for “workplace violence”/”overseas contingency operations” euphemisms and officially declared last week that America’s war on terror is over.

Which makes you wonder:

What exactly prompted the Obama FBI to seek the sweeping FISA order on April 25? And why does it extend through July 19?

If it was related to the April 15 Boston terror bombing, how could Obama then stand up at National Defense University on May 23 and so publicly throw in the towel on combating Islamic jihad?

And if the catalyst for the FISA court order wasn’t the Boston bombing, then why so sweeping and so secretive? If not for the Guardian-published leak, which I must note I find as troubling now as I did during the Bush years, the document would not have been declassified until April 12, 2038.

Another fundamental difference between then and now: While Bush-bashers raised the specter of political spying abuses when the post-9/11 NSA program was exposed, there was never a shred of evidence that such abuses ever took place.

But now, the revelations about Obama’s expansive collection of domestic phone call data come amidst the still-exploding IRS witch hunt scandal, the DOJ/AP snooping scandal, and the invasive DOJ/James Rosen spying scandal — not to mention the gangrenous distrust of government fostered by the stonewalling, lies, and obstruction at the heart of the Benghazi and Fast and Furious national security debacles.

Is it possible that the Obama NSA program has a legitimate counterterrorism/national security objective?

Yes, remotely.

Is it crucially important to consider 1) the creeping, creepy surveillance-state context in which this current administration operates and 2) the naked contempt this current administration has shown for the privacy rights of its political enemies?

Hell yes, absolutely.

http://michellemalkin.com/2013/06/06...ance-programs/

http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-inf...l#post96374540


http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-inf...m-massive.html

Obama in 2007: No more spying on citizens who are not suspected of a crime

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAQlsS9diBs

Excerpt from President Obama's speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in August 2007.

This This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.

That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.

This Administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not.

JUST IN: President Obama says, 'Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.' http://bit.ly/1bdkqs2

"Trust Me ....."



VIDEO: Obama - Nobody's Spying On You - We're Just Monitoring Your Phone Usage

LIKE and SHARE to spread yet more evidence of Obama's insulting hypocrisy regarding his massive spy operation against the American people!

http://www.tpnn.com/obama-nobodys-sp...r-phone-usage/