NSA collecting records from millions of phones daily

And did courts approve this? And thank you Verizon and others who simply rolled over and didn't ever inform their customers we are being bugged. Didn't Obama fight this over-reach when he was running for POTUS? He has met the enemy and Cheney assimilated poor Barack.

Why yes... It was called Bush's "TSP" (Terrorist Surveillance Program), and reporters almost went to jail for leaking the fact that it existed...

The Bush Administration's "Terrorist Surveillance Program"

It is still unclear which telecoms have cooperated with the NSA program. On May 11, 2006, USA Today reported that the NSA was collecting Americans' phone calls into a massive database and was getting the data directly from AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth; BellSouth and Verizon both disputed the report. In February 2006, the online publication CNET asked large telecommunications and Internet companies about their involvement in the NSA. Fifteen denied involvement and 12, including AT&T, chose not to reply.

Only one major company, Qwest, announced its refusal to turn over any communications to NSA. The attorney of then-CEO Joseph N. Nacchio issued a statement. "In the fall of 2001 … Qwest was approached to permit the government access to the private telephone records of Qwest customers. Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request. When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the special court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommications Act. Accordingly, Mr. Nacchio issued instructions to refuse to comply with these requests."

The issue is being brought to a head by the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T, which is the first of its kind. In response to the suit, AT&T issued a statement saying "the law does not permit" comment on the NSA allegations. In July 2006, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker denied motions from the government and AT&T to dismiss the case. "AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal," Walker wrote. The case is now on appeal before the 9th Circuit.

The NSA and the Telecoms

In 2004, veteran AT&T communications technician Mark Klein ran into problems with the Internet circuit he was responsible for maintaining. He believed the problem was emanating from a secret room in the company's San Francisco operations center. So Klein asked for help from the only co-worker cleared to work in the room.

Klein's colleague led him down to the sixth floor to an orange door labeled 641A -- a room within another room -- where he punched a code into a special lock and opened the doors. Klein peered over rows of servers and high-tech equipment; he later went public with his suspicions that the room was operated by the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA) and that AT&T was diverting the whole flow of Internet traffic in several of its operations centers to the NSA.

Klein's job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.

"While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein wrote.

The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... ecoms.html

How soon we forget.... Of course, most of us (at least on THIS side) screamed about it at the time, and were told that we were "over-reacting" and "unpatriotic" to question it...

"FACTS are stubborn things." -- John Adams

Insert standard "Obama should have shut it down and done something about it" here: ______________________________

(Which, of course, has been tried, and has been blocked by the Courts and Law Enforcement agencies like the FBI and NSA...)

Bad idea when W does it but OK when Obama does it? Especially after the hypocrisy of running against it? Liar! Liar! LIAR!

Fred... You need some new material... This constant need to blame Obama for the sinking of the Titanic is getting tiresome....again. :smurf:

And you don't even bother defending him anymore for his attacks on our civil liberties. Or his lies...

I know... You invent them faster than it's worth denying them...

That darn Bush...He ran on "Privatizing Social Security"... Liar! Liar! LIAR!

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/i ... ge-w-bush/

http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... le6684.htm

Oh, and speaking of "broken promises"... Do you remember the one about: "NO NEW TAXES!"...? Liar! Liar! LIAR!

But, do continue.... :smurf:

Deflect much?

It's a b*tch, ain't it?

I didn't like it when Bush did it... I don't like it now...

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.

http://m.guardiannews.com/world/2013/ju ... ourt-order

Former Vice President Al Gore also criticized the move. "In the digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?" he said in a post on Twitter.

"It's a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director, said.

"It is beyond Orwellian, 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."

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/05/politics/ ... index.html

ACLU is bothered by this... Al Gore is bothered by this... but it's ok with Lady Jazzer... since Bush did it. I don't know Lady Jazzer was a closet Bush fan.

And coming to a communication source nearest you...

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

(read it all... long article in Wired)

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/0 ... atacenter/

Maybe it should be nicknamed The Ministry of Truth?