Newsflash to James Clapper, Gen Keith B Alexander and other lying NSA rats: Ed Snowden is NOT a "traitor" but a 4th Amendment HERO for exposing YOUR Transgressions against the Constitution.
"I don’t understand this being bamboozled into thinking that you have to do this to find bad guys. That’s false. There’s very simple principles you can use to find out who is the bad guy and who isn’t and you can do this without violating anybody’s privacy”. - Bill Binney, former NSA code breaker on CBS Early Show, June 19
Following the eruption of outrage against Spook Central, aka the NSA, with the spying on major allies (and their lying rot that "they do it too" and "they gave us the data" - which German friends have assured me are LIES) we now see these lying rat fuckers accusing Ed Snowden of being a "traitor" even as major American tech businesses express their own brand of outrage at learning of new NSA interventions into their Cloud sites (mainly overseas) to collect millions of data files.
Make no mistake this agency is out of control and needs to be reined in, big time. And congress needs to shut them up and reprimand them when they get in front of the lawmakers and lie their asses off. But this isn't new. Clapper already showed the lying rot he's made of, lying to a Senate Committee several months ago, and he has the gall to call Snowden a "traitor"? He is - a traitor to the 4th amendment!
Patriot Act co-author James Sensenbrenner agreed with Snowden's take on the damage done by this indiscriminate mass spy shtick as he was quoted in a UK Guardian piece ten days ago:
"Oversight only works when the agency that oversight is directed at tells the truth, and having Mr Clapper say he gave the least untruthful answer should, in my opinion, have resulted in a firing and a prosecution,"
Which is sad, because it means the principles of our nation have been stood on their head: the bad guys prosper while the good guys and heroes are turned into refugees or outcasts.
Now, let's move to the latest outrage as reported in The Washington Post, as well as The Denver Post yesterday (p. 1A) and numerous other outlets. According to the Denver Post's report, mainly taken from the WaPo's original account:
"The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, The Washington Post reported Wednesday, citing documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
A secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, indicates that NSA sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters. In the last 30 days, field collectors had processed and sent back more than 180 million new records—ranging from "metadata," which would indicate who sent or received emails and when, to content such as text, audio and video, the Post reported Wednesday on its website.
The latest revelations were met with outrage from Google, and triggered legal questions, including whether the NSA may be violating federal wiretap laws. "
"the fact that it was directed apparently to Google's cloud and Yahoo's cloud, and that there was no legal order as best we can tell to permit the interception, there is a good argument to make that the NSA has engaged in unlawful surveillance,"
When is enough, enough to warrant action on these clowns? How much longer are our lawmakers going to sit on their fat asses and wait before dropping the hammer and bringing them to heel? Isn't it enough they've gutted the 4th amendment for U.S. citizens with their dishonest cant about "protecting us" - and have now outraged most American allies, who've called it a crime in their own right?
The Post goes on to expose the new "tool' used by the NSAssers in addition to PRISM, and XKeyscore":"The NSA's principal tool to exploit the Google and Yahoo data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency's British counterpart, GCHQ. The Post said NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.
The Post, incidentally, stands by its account and the sources - never mind how the top two lying NSA pricks have called the accounts "lies" or misrepresentation or "not occurring to the best of their knowledge". I mean, these people - if that's what they are, as opposed to alien cyber-bots operating from a "mother ship"- can't even get their own stories straight! Keith Alexander, interviewed by Bloomberg News asserted that "We are not authorized to go into a U.S. company's server and take data. We are not authorized to do that." Meanwhile, NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines insisted the NSA "had multiple authorities to accomplish its mission".
Yeah, right, Vanee! All "authorities" that the original authors of the legislation never intended you to expand to the levels you did! As the UK Guardian (ibid.) reported, the author of the Patriot Act, James Sensenbrenner, was up in arms and outraged at how NSA expanded the language in the original act to expand the FISA basis for searches. So the "authorities" Vines claims are obviously based on an unwarranted extrapolation of language never intended by the original author(s). Vines also claimed, dishonestly, that "the assertion we collect vast amounts of data from this type of collection is also not true."
And yet, as the Post has noted, the NSA "was breaking into data centers world wide", and also none of the NSA spooks has denied the MUSCULAR program to do so. Further, if they were telling us the truth why is the techie business bunch, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook, now ready to chew plutonium as they ream the spooks' overstretch out? According to the (Denver) Post account again:
"David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer said the company has "long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping."
"We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems," said Drummond. "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform."
Google, which is known for its data security, noted that it has been trying to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links. "
And as the New York Times noted yesterday:
"Google has spent months and millions of dollars encrypting email, search queries and other information flowing among its data centers worldwide. Facebook’s chief executive said at a conference this fall that the government “blew it.” And though it has not been announced publicly, Twitter plans to set up new types of encryption to protect messages from snoops."
Further we learn:
"What began as a public relations predicament for America’s technology companies has evolved into a moral and business crisis that threatens the foundation of their businesses, which rests on consumers and companies trusting them with their digital lives."
So they are pushing back in various ways — from cosmetic tactics like publishing the numbers of government requests they receive to political ones including tense conversations with officials behind closed doors. And companies are building technical fortresses intended to make the private information in which they trade inaccessible to the government and other suspected spies. "
Additionally,
"as details of the scope of spying emerge, frustration has turned to outrage, and cooperation has turned to war. The industry has learned that it knew of only a fraction of the spying, and it is grappling with the risks of being viewed as an enabler of surveillance of foreigners and American citizens. Even before June, Google executives worried about infiltration of their networks. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the N.S.A. was tapping into the links between data centers, the beating heart of tech companies housing user information, confirmed that their suspicions were not just paranoia."
Much of the ability to lie is predicated on the loose language in the existing laws and hence the capacity to parse and split meanings at will - for example, in the differences between the geographical domains covered by PRISM and MUSCULAR. Thus, in order to rein in the NSA a better, more rigorous law is needed to cover more loopholes, bases and technology.....not to mention tighten language loose enough to drive a Mack truck through, as the NSA has. Merely because these troglodytes possess the technology doesn't mean they have any god-given right under whatever protective ruse, to use it. This is why U.S. citizens as well as the Tech giants, all need to press and put the heat on congress to pass the new USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Sensenbrenner and Pat Leahy.
To see more go to: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-31/usa-freedom-act-would-leash-the-national-security-agency
Americans need to work like holy hell, contacting their reps, to get this law passed to bring this rogue Agency under control, unless we soon wish to end up in a Gestapo- Stasi state that none of us will wish to contemplate! ACT NOW! If you've got weak knees or are in doubt, just recall the words of Sen. Frank Church from 1975:
I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America
See also: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-lindorff/52437/what-s-done-abroad-can-be-done-at-home-too-is-nsa-spying-really-about-blackmail
See also: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-lindorff/52437/what-s-done-abroad-can-be-done-at-home-too-is-nsa-spying-really-about-blackmail
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