Another day means another round of revelations surrounding the NSA’s horrifyingly large-scale surveillance of Americans and indeed most everybody else. The day started with a report from Declan McCullagh saying that, in absence of more evidence to the contrary, there was no reason to believe the NSA had “direct access” to the PRISM companies’ servers.
Like most expressions of optimism or at least hope that our worst fears aren’t being realized, within hours the Guardian leaked another piece of the puzzle, an additional capture from the “top secret” Powerpoint presentation on PRISM that confirmed that not only was direct access the whole point of the scheme, but that all of those hopes that it was “limited” to indirect access was actually a whole separate system of additional surveillance that the NSA also has. In effect, they are having their cake and mercilessly spying on it too.
Then there’s “Boundless Informant,” the latest dystopian name in a growing collection of NSA “services.” The whole point of this one is to keep track of just how much data the NSA is sweeping up in its growing war on privacy.
The answer is, as usually, frighteningly grim, with the data leaked by the Guardian about this revealing that the NSA collected, in one single 30 day period in March, 97 billion pieces of “intelligence” worldwide, including several billion culled directly from the United States.
All of this reveals several things, including that Google, Facebook et al. flat out lied about not giving the NSA “direct access,” that the Obama Administration has been and is continuing to lie about not systematically spying on hundreds of millions of Americans as a matter of course, and that there is no speculation about government intrusion into our personal lives that doesn’t seem to pale in comparison to the reality.
The whole thing seems very much beside the point for the Obama Administration, comfortable that their secret laws and positions of unchecked power are entirely secure even now that the public is aware of how badly their privacy and common decency is being violated. Instead, officials are focused on shaking their fists at the press for wising people up to the truth, and threatening to prosecute the whistleblowers who, in contrast to the many public officials who seemed aware of this terrible policy, actually felt the need to speak up.
Where are the angry peasants with their torches, pitchforks, and white hot anger when we really need them to deal with bad "gubmint" ? I would rather have Frankenstein for a President.
Anyone can come up with an illusion of good to hide an evil intent, so to expose the corruption point out that the liar is doing nothing but enriching himself upon the misery of society.
For example, here we have Empire USA engaged in the greatest money maker the world has ever known, trading war materials for Middle-East oil, which causes a massive amount of vengeance because of all the death and destruction of the war materials that must be expended on a daily bases.
So, to kill off the leaders of freedom fighters using killer drones and Special Forces midnight killers, they need the NSA spy program to identify who is communicating the most with freedom fighters, which tells them who is leading the most.
This is when a system as the US vulture capitalism with a non functioning democracy goes weary and everything becomes blurry, unable to see nor have any feeling. Is a desperate masseur to find an enemy thats been created by the system, feed by the system and still paid by the system.., here is where all of the sudden everyone is the enemy of the state and therefore everyone (300million Americans and beyond) needs to be looked at, wasting all that energy and money while closing public schools in NY and other cities in USA.
It appears that Obama is nothing more than George W. Bush on his 4th term. This illegal NSA/STRATCOM spying and hacking of Americans has been going on since 2004. STRATCOM hacked the Army's MWR website in 2005 and hacked Yahoo, Facebook, Google and Craigslist from 2004-present. STRATCOM and NSA commanders Kehler and Alexander should be put in Leavenworth federal prison for at least 20 years.
What's that I hear? The impeachment proceedings are NOT yet in the mail? Gitmo is NOT yet opening its door for admission of the glitterati? The Fletcher Memorial Home, NOW!
Additionally, suspicions about backdoors in Well-Known Companies' Operating Systems (and maybe even in independent efforts like Linux and BSD) may actually turn out to be true…
You just described the viscious circle of tyranny which must be broken
As I said yesterday, it's cognitive dissonance. People don't want to know how badly the government is spying on them – so they refuse to believe it. Thus all the media reports – including Declan McCoullagh, which is disappointing – that sought to minimize the PRISM program – as well as all the denials from the corporations listed. Big surprise that all these corporations lied – not. Also, if they did not lie, it means they DON'T EVEN KNOW that their servers are being directly accessed – which is no surprise to anyone who knows anything about computer security in US corporations – it's basically non-existent.