The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.
Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
But wait,there’s more!
The UK’s electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world’s biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America’s top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal. […]
The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.
Lots more at Drudge, as you might expect.
I often take a look at Sarah Palin’s speech at the ’08 RNC:
She had Obama pegged, no wonder she was ‘targeted’ by the media.
“PALIN: This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word “victory,” except when he’s talking about his own campaign.
But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away, when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot…
… when that happens, what exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet?
The answer — the answer is to make government bigger, and take more of your money, and give you more orders from Washington, and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world.
can’t they find that confounded Ford crack video?
VDH’s take on the Obama administration’s situational ethics:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350388/obamas-ethical-gymnastics-victor-davis-hanson
Jay Leno:
Heck With Big Brother –
‘With Obama We Actually Have a Brother Watching Us’
ps-
Bambi if you reading dis,
suck my wart..
Reestablishing an internet East German STASI style security apparatus to help keep the “OWE-bama-Nation(tm)” in line.
Terror ops have now become the cover story for massive government intrusion to monitor the internet lives of the populace at large…
George Orwell was merely the entrée of a much larger government surveillance program for the entire internet world. “Never Say Anything (NSA)” takes on a whole new meaning, and the PRISM program, assuming the documents are accurate, is merely an ‘electronic concentration camp’.
Your “Constitutional Freedoms” are just so much more marketing propaganda so the government can track your entire internet life by data sleuthing your every move; should there be a government party interested in making your life more difficult.
Former STASI operatives could only dream of this kind of power…controlling your internet life viss ruthless efficiency!!
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Exactly. Notice the disconnection between the rhetoric and the actuality.
VDH (Victor Davis Hanson) has a great analysis of this amoral disconnection at National Review.
VDH writes:
“One of the legacies of the Obama administration is presidential ethics as an entirely relative, abstract concept. Obama’s morality is to be judged by his professed aims, not his actual means of achieving them, thereby turning classical Aristotelian ethics on its head: Dreaming of doing the right thing becomes more important than actually doing it while awake.”
And “The problem, however, is not just that Obama’s declarations of moral intent are deemed more important than his concrete behavior, but also that his moral pieties serve as a psychological mechanism that offers exemption for his unethical conduct.”
Talk, talk, talk. Obama talks about ethics, transparency, accountability, blah blah. But he’s a totalitarian tyrant. As I’ve said repeatedly, the focus for Obama is alwas: Power. Control. Pathological control.
Obama cannot interact with the real world in its own nature, for that would require an acknowledgment that others have individual rights and freedoms – and their own power. That’s why all there is to Obama is a virtual world of Words. And, hidden, an agenda of total control.
Obama cannot deal with anyone having any ability to interact directly with him, to even have more legitimacy than him, to have any means of ‘control’ over Obama. Obama MUST control you. Or, if he can’t, then he’ll first try to destroy you or he’ll ignore you. You will cease to exist. Actually cease to exist.
That’s how Obama treats the Tea Party, conservatives, the GOP etc – he’ll try to destroy them. That’s how he used the IRS.
He’ll try to reduce individual freedoms – that’s the AP phone records and these new records. Sure, the rhetoric will be about ‘national security’. Heh. What do reporter James Rosen’s parents have to do with national security?
Oh, and didn’t Obama inform us, repeatedly, that HE has conquered Al Qaeda? That it no longer exists as a threat?
Didn’t he inform us that the Boston massacres were due to ‘two rogues’ and not to any ideology or links to Islamic fascism?
Didn’t he tell us, using his authority of his UN ambassador, that the Benghazi attacks and deaths were due to an American-produced ‘insulting video’? Didn’t he tell us that it had zilch to do with Islamic terrorism?
So, what does he need all this surveillance for? Is it just about, ah, terrorism? What about political agendas?
All those Tea Party and Conservative groups? Getting together, getting fund, to mount a protest? And Obama would know about it in advance? Hmm?
Now it’s time for Occam to juxtapose – I recall a time not to long ago when anyone who called attention to the fact the spooks were monitoring every electronic communication in the US, was branded a tin foil hat conspiracy nut – even though it was public knowledge the CIA/NSA had a Cray computer doing keyword searches of a daily audio file dump of intercepted public communications from cell, hardwire phone companies. CIA whistle blowers testified as such in congressional hearings and Michel Gratton stated thus in his tell all book on the spook culture.
Count on every keystroke on your computer being monitored and filter searched – Orwell warned you.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny;
when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is,
as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
ps
Obama,
we are now watching you..
puddin n pie
“can’t they find that confounded Ford crack video?”
The NSA can only find things that actually exist. The CIA might be a different story.
@ ET: This article dovetails your comment precisely.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-brother-barack-2/
“The NSA clearly exceeded its legal mandate. The dishonest statements of officials involved with the program indicate the government was aware of the bounds it was overstepping. But the dishonesty is dual in nature. While the Obama administration has been declaring the war on terror dead and gone, a relic of a bygone era, it has been secretly implementing extraordinary measures against Americans, and it has done so on the basis of the dire exigencies of the jihadist threat. And while posturing, as always, as a “progressive” force, this leftist administration is, once again, engaging in “Big-Brother” 1984-style tactics — revealing, in true leftist tradition, that INSIDE EVERY LIBERAL IS A TOTALITARIAN SCREAMING TO GET OUT. The scandal-ridden atmosphere has become so rotten and disturbing that even the New York Times has noted that this is an administration that has lost all credibility.”
What more needs to be said? Only your local NSA agent knows for sure…
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Terror ops have now become the cover story for massive government intrusion to monitor the internet lives of the populace at large…
BINGO, Hans!
Coincidentally at mises.org I just read a piece by the late great anarcho-capitalist/austrian economist Murray Rothbard from 1973 about the Soviet Bogeyman.
REDUX.
Gee, suddenly all those Lefty a-holes who have been calling me tinfoil hat paranoid since forever are… amazingly silent.
Toldja. Toldja. TOLDJA.
Here’s the other shoe, Lefty imbeciles. If the NSA knows literally -everything- that -everyone- does on-line, and they clearly do, explain the Boston Marathon bombing. Explain how a hundred thousand dope grow-ops can function without fear of police. Explain how any two bit felon can sell crack on the same friggin’ street corner every day for years. Explain how the US government can’t find 12 million illegal Mexicans.
Oh, can’t explain? Or won’t? Because the explanation is obvious. This capture/record/archive program isn’t about catching terrorists and criminals. Its about targeting the communications of the regime’s political enemies.
Won’t be a DemocRat president forever, will there? Are you going to be happy when the “fascist” Republicans start using this crystal ball to spy on every -progressive- in the Western world? When Planed Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center have the IRS and the EPA descend upon them like hungry vultures? Because THEY WILL.
Maybe you should think about that a little. Don’t hurt yourselves.
Wonder what the file on SDA looks like.
NSA was set up over 50 years ago, to do exactly what it is doing, Obumbles may be expanding the beast, but he sure didn’t create the sucker. The SS has been using info gathered by NSA, since it’s creation, to track threats to the president. Does any one ever wonder why the SS is often involved in what would be considered “local”, or FBI territory investigations, it’s because they have “big brother” watching you!!!!
and as an aside, the CIA has a working relationship with the Vatican on intel gathering, so be care full what you confess to:-)))
Afterthought, possibly confirming The Phantom.
If they got everything, they got nuthin’.
Intelligence is destroyed by info overload.
I like to ‘hide in plain sight’.
As the late great GK Chesterton noted:
“I believe in getting into HOT WATER, it keeps you CLEAN!”
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Um, guys, we got a young middle eastern male here who’s taking flying lessons but is not interested in learning the landing part.
Pursue? Follow up?
NAH.
Any word on whether this crap is being done by Canadian agencies?
More at Zerohedge: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-06/meet-prism-us-984xn-us-governments-internet-espionage-super-operation
Nixon bugged a couple of rooms and quit, Obama bugged the entire nation and he and the demorats are proud of it.
None of this is surprising and anyone who is paranoid assumes that statist scum are listening. I have a cell phone registered to a false name and buy phone time only with cash. I use cash for all transactions. Haven’t been encrypting my emails with PGP because 99% of the people I have email contact with don’t see the need for PGP encryption. Given the extent of totalitarian snooping, time to start running a Tor node again and use Tor again.
One of the problems one had with such promiscuous data collection is that fictional data is indistinguishable from real data. This isn’t the case if one actually has people on the ground gathering information but that requires work and it’s so much easier to snoop on the whole internet and let computers search for patterns. AFAIK, it’s not yet illegal to people to write fiction and so I propose the creation of an experimental massively parallel online novel to which anyone can contribute. The subject of the novel deals with Ahmed, a peniless Somali immigrant arriving in this country with just a koran and a bundle of khat who is dismayed by the state of the country and joins with other Somalis in a plan which would eventually result in the bombing of the white house. As a massively parallel novel, some sections would explore the subject from the standpoint of the multi-world theory of quantum mechanics and others would explore in great detail the details of how to smuggle in a bomb to the WH or the conversion of military drone pilots to the cause so that they could rain hellfire missiles on the US president.
Let’s assume such a massive online project were to take off with a few million adherents. Suddenly snooping on the internet is absolutely useless. This is similar to the “feed the spooks” blocks that we used to put into postings in the Usenet days when simpler programs just triggered on keywords and one would put a hundred or so keywords at the end of ones post to annoy the NSA.
My comment got eaten by the spam filter. NSA involvement in the process?
I have no evidence proving the RCMP/CSIS are in on this scam, but I think we would have to be naive in the extreme to believe otherwise. Plus, most of Canadian calls and packets run through US backbone and servers, so they’re definitely capturing all that.
So yeah, they have a record of what you’ve been surfing and who you’ve been talking to. No one may have looked at it yet, but given that you post here I’m sure they’ll get around to it. Conservatives are dangerous, y’know.
Obama’s America
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
Harry S Truman quotes
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
George Orwell
No one should suffer from the great delusion that any form of communism or socialism which promotes the dictatorship of the few instead of the initiative of the millions can produce a happier or more prosperous society.
Charles E Wilson
Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you
Stephen Vizinczey
“I have no evidence proving the RCMP/CSIS are in on this scam, but I think we would have to be naive in the extreme to believe otherwise. Plus, most of Canadian calls and packets run through US backbone and servers, so they’re definitely capturing all that.”
Psst…
Forget the flat-footed Mounties and CSIS. The agency you want is the Communications Security Establishment (CSEC).
Look it up on the Internet.
Perhaps it’s time you folks learned more about the Canadian intelligence community.
Your correct. I’m ashamed I don’t know more. Always assumed the USA ran our intelligence department.
I’ve always just assumed ours was pretty much the same, just smaller and meaner than the Yanks. Like the military. Picture of the Queen instead of the President, budget in the millions instead of the billions.
In fairness, we never hear jack about them, so their security is at least better than the Yanks.
Well said Hans, particularly your second line.
George W Obama
Good point, ET –
In one sentence: Obama has claimed the terror threat is gone or much diminished, yet the security apparatus snooping is ongoing and massive.
Good point, Phantom –
The security apparatus snooping apparently failed to find the Boston Marathon bombers, or your average corner drug dealer.