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Originally posted by naynay
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When in doubt, pull the race card. It's oh so easy. -
Originally posted by Trip McNeely View Post
Is this guy for real? WTF did you think was going to happen shit for brains?Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the Republican author of the Patriot Act, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder that says he is “extremely disturbed” by reports that the National Security Agency collected phone records from Verizon customers and insists it violates the law.
“These reports are deeply concerning and raise questions about whether our constitutional rights are secure,” the Wisconsin Republican said in the letter, sent Thursday.
Sensenbrenner, who chaired the Judiciary Committee, cited testimony from the Department of Justice from 2011, in which an assistant attorney general said they obtain so-called business records fewer than 40 times each year.
“I do not believe the released FISA order is consistent with the requirement of the Patriot Act,” Sensenbrenner wrote. “How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation as required by the Act?”Comment
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Of course he doesn't! He's the one at the forefront of the people trying to erase the fourth amendment!Originally posted by jw33 View PostZOMBIE REAGAN FOR PRESIDENT 2016!!! hehComment
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iPhone acting up?Originally posted by Trip McNeely View PostOriginally posted by davbrucasComment
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whoops I added an apostrophe. Thanks for the correction.Originally posted by slow99 View PostComment
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[ ] Surprised
[x] Not surprisedOriginally posted by Buzzo
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The National Security Agency and FBI are interested in more than just your phone records — they are also interested in your audio, video, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs, according to a bombshell report from The Washington Post.
Although the massive Internet surveillance program, code-named “PRISM,” reportedly began in 2007, we are only now learning about it because an anonymous intelligence officer apparently leaked the information to the press.
“Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials,” the report notes, “in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy.”
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
PRISM collects data from nine tech companies. Here’s a slide from the leaked PowerPoint presentation. (WaPo)
But how, exactly, are the feds tapping directly into the central servers and getting their hands on online users’ information? With the assistance of major technology companies, of course:
The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
For some of these companies, they had no choice but to comply with the feds.
“Formally, in exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies like Yahoo and AOL are obliged accept a ‘directive’ from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA,” the Post reports.
“In 2008, Congress gave the Justice Department authority … for a secret order from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court to compel a reluctant company ‘to comply,’” it adds.
In short, the feds have strong-armed a few reluctant tech companies into playing along with the program.
“In practice, there is room for a company to maneuver, delay or resist. When a clandestine intelligence program meets a highly regulated industry,” the report continues, “neither side wants to risk a public fight.”
“The engineering problems are so immense, in systems of such complexity and frequent change, that the FBI and NSA would be hard pressed to build in back doors without active help from each company.”
Microsoft became PRISM’s first corporate partner in 2007, according to the leaked 41-slide PowerPoint presentation, followed shortly by Yahoo, Google, and Facebook. Apple didn’t join until after the death of Steve Jobs, five years after the start of PRISM.
Unsurprisingly, spokesmen for the major tech companies deny any knowledge of PRISM.
Here’s what Google said:
Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government “back door” into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Apple told The Guardian that he had “never heard” of PRISM.
An official statement released by Facebook claims the social networking sight has never given the feds “direct” access to its servers (the word “direct” may be key here).
This slide shows the timeline of tech giants signing on with the PRISM surveillance program. (WaPo)
The program is so secretive that the members of Congress who do know about it are apparently unable comment on it due to their oaths of office.
Here’s how The Washington Post reports the story:
An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.
Under President Obama, the program has allegedly enjoyed “exponential growth” since its founding in 2007 when then-Senator Obama routinely criticized President George W. Bush’s surveillance programs.
“The PRISM program is not a dragnet, exactly. From inside a company’s data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes, but under current rules the agency does not try to collect it all,” the report notes.
“Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in ‘selectors,’ or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s ‘foreignness.’”
“That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, ‘but it’s nothing to worry about,’” it adds.
WaPo.
But here are some really frightening details:
Even when the system works just as advertised, with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content. That is described as “incidental,” and it is inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade. To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases “incidental collection” exponentially.
Click here to read the full report and here to see portions of the leaked PowerPoint presentation.
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Another dipshit who is surprised all of a sudden....
Addressing the NSA’s phone data grab on Bill O’Reilly’s show Thursday night, Laura Ingraham strayed into rethinking the haste with which the Patriot Act was passed in 2001.
“To be fair on the surveillance deal,” O’Reilly admitted, “it started under the Bush administration, apparently. It has continued and expanded under President Obama, with 121 million Americans being a part of Verizon deal. All our records are in the hands of the government. As we see in the IRS, anything can be leaked out to anybody. So maybe they didn’t listen to the calls, but they know who you called and how long you were on the phone with that person. That could be put out to any website any time they want.”
“It all started courtesy the Patriot Act,” Ingraham said. “A lot of civil libertarians at the time raised red flags, and they were laughed off. I didn’t focus that much, to tell you the truth, about the Patriot Act. I wish I had. I think that was a mistake.”
O’Reilly was quick to separate his support of the Patriot Act, which covers the NSA’s data grab revealed yesterday, from the Obama’s administration’s use of it. “I supported the Patriot Act, but I never thought that a warrant could cover every single American,” he said.
“We never think,” Igraham said. “The key thing is the FISA court is the Foreign Intelligence Act. Now it’s domestic.”
“You can go get the records of everybody!” O’Reilly said. “That I never even thought to be possible.”
“And there was no specific reason to target people,” Ingrahma said. “I believe that’s different from how the Bush administration approached it. We’ll see.”Comment
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everyone should make 100 calls a day and say bomb and email pictures of brett farves dongwww.hppmotorsports.com
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You may want to sit down for this.
It appears that along with online information, the U.S. government has tracked credit card purchases and, in some cases, shared phone data with the U.K., according to The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Beast.
It was revealed earlier this week that the feds have been monitoring Verizon, Sprint Nextel, and AT&T customers and that the National Security Administration had established a massive program, code-named PRISM, that indicates the monitoring of Americans.
Now the Wall Street Journal’s sources claim NSA operations also encompass purchase information from credit-card providers.
“It couldn’t be determined if any of the Internet or credit-card arrangements are ongoing, as are the phone company efforts, or one-shot collection efforts,” the WSJ notes.
What is known at this time, however, is that the NSA has established with credit-card companies the same type of relationship it has established with tech companies. That is, the NSA asks for the data and they get it.
Also, according to The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake, at least “one foreign government has gained access to sensitive data collected by the National Security Agency from U.S. telecommunications companies in dragnet court warrants demanding the secret transfer of U.S. customers’ calling records.”
The collected information, referred to as “metadata,” does not include conversation content or the names of people associated with accounts. It does, however, record when and where calls are made and for how long.
And in a few “discreet cases,” as Lake puts it, “the NSA has shared unedited analysis of these records with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters.”
Furthermore, in 2010, GCHQ actually gained access to the NSA’s PRISM program, The Guardian reports.
“The documents showed the British generated 197 intelligence reports from access to the system in 2012,” Lake notes.
“With advances in computer science, intelligence services can now mine vast amounts of data collected by telecom companies, Internet service providers, and social-media sites for patterns that can illuminate terrorist networks and help solve crimes,” he adds, citing intelligence officers.
“These metadata … reside in vast hard drives that belong to the NSA. Analysts there can then take a phone number or email address and uncover suspected terrorists’ associates, find their locations, and even learn clues about their possible targets.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast, “My understanding is if the British had a phone number, we might run the number through the database for them and provide them with the results.”
“I do not know of cases where the U.S. government has shared this kind of metadata with the United Kingdom, but I would be surprised if this never happened,” Peter Wood, the CEO of First Base Technologies, said in the same report. “Both countries cooperate very closely on counterterrorism.”
I wear a Fez. Fez-es are coolComment
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