U.S. Government spying on entire U.S., to nobody's surprise

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/nsa-whistleblowers_n_3398618.html

What will it take to convince the sleepwalking MORONS in this country that our government is thoroughly, irreparably corrupt? Do we have to build ovens and incinerate a few million people before people realize the country has been taken over by ...*edited*...

Summary of what we have learned today: for 12+ years the government has been intercepting phone calls and communications of EVERYBODY IN THE UNITED STATES. Not just criminals, or terrorists, or foreigners. EVERYONE.

The following criminal organizations have conspired with the NSA/FBI to give them direct access to their computer servers and data for the purpose of illegal monitoring:

* Microsoft
* Google (and Youtube)
* Facebook
* Skype
* Yahoo
* Dropbox

among others.

ALL major telephone and communications companies are complicit. Verizon is the big one in the news, but AT&T and others are equally guilty.

The CREDIT CARD companies are complicit.

This rabbit hole goes deep.

The following people--along with ANY other politician who has the nerve to publicly defend these ILLEGAL and IMMORAL actions-- deserve to be tried, convicted, and HUNG FROM THE NECK UNTIL DEAD as TRAITORS to this formerly great nation:

* Barack Obama
* Eric Holder
* Bloomberg
* Dianne Feinstein
* Harry Reid

Not news to me

It just feels like that anyways

So it might as well be happening - which it is!



I just hope I'm alive to see the climax!

Not there yet guys, be well.

In best Alec Baldwin voice:" patriot act patriot act"...
Frito I'm sure your list of politicians should be longer and could prob include some from the side of the aisle more avid to trounce our rights..and more responsible for what we talking about today....just say in...

people need to better understand constitutional protection.
the government has not compelled these companies to share information. you are not protected from what a company you choose to do business with chooses to do with your information.
the constitution does not protect you from verizon or google.

Vote with your dollars ppl.

damn, even in North Korea they don't spy on your phone communications like that

[Edit] technicality: they don't have phones

A Break Down....

A Break Down....



[YOUTUBEIF]mo1MzQ8U7Zs[/YOUTUBEIF]

dagnabit said:

people need to better understand constitutional protection.
the government has not compelled these companies to share information. you are not protected from what a company you choose to do business with chooses to do with your information.
the constitution does not protect you from verizon or google.

Click to expand...

true that.

hence why one must be aware of the 'terms of use' that one agrees to before being able to enjoy any given service, specially free ones, like e-mail, google and skype.

what product do these free services end up with in order to be in business? information.

I dunno if this is so bad though... sure, we are cannabis lovers and since cannabis is unreasonably prohibited, we worry about our safety for doing no crime at all; but child pornographers, actual terrorists, etc... do indeed need to be monitored.

More information comes out..
There WAS compulsion!
Highly illegal. Unconstitutional potus needs to be removed.

LOL this has been going on for 12 years.


Now its a "scandal" lol






Where have you guys been?

Interesting comment this morning on TPM.

Josh Marshall June 7, 2013, 7:57 AM

I want to stress this is a reader email, not TPM reporting. But I’m sharing it because after reading it through and doing some googling of my own there’s little doubt that Palantir is doing stuff like what the government is doing with those tech companies, even if they’re not part of ‘prism’ itself. Give this a read.

From an anonymous reader …

I don’t see anyone out there with this theory, and TPM is my favorite news source, so here goes:

“PRISM” is the government’s name for a program that uses technology from Palantir. Palantir is a Silicon Valley start-up that’s now valued at well over $1B, that focuses on data analysis for the government. Here’s how Palantir describes themselves:

“We build software that allows organizations to make sense of massive amounts of disparate data. We solve the technical problems, so they can solve the human ones. Combating terrorism. Prosecuting crimes. Fighting fraud. Eliminating waste. From Silicon Valley to your doorstep, we deploy our data fusion platforms against the hardest problems we can find, wherever we are needed most.” http://www.palantir.com/what-we-do/

They’re generally not public about who their clients are, but their first client was famously the CIA, who is also an early investor.

With my theory in mind, re-read the denials from the tech companies in the WSJ (emphasis mine):
Apple: “We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers…”
Google: “… does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data…”
Facebook: “… not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers…”
Yahoo: “We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network…”


These denials could all still be technically true if the government is accessing the data through a government contractor, such as Palantir, rather than having direct access.

I just did a quick Google search of “Palantir PRISM” to see if anyone else had this theory, and the top results were these pages:
https://docs.palantir.com/metropolisdev/prism-overview.html
https://docs.palantir.com/metropolisdev/prism-examples.html

Apparently, Palantir has a software package called “Prism”: “Prism is a software component that lets you quickly integrate external databases into Palantir.” That sounds like exactly the tool you’d want if you were trying to find patterns in data from multiple companies.

So the obvious follow-up questions are of the “am I right?” variety, but if I am, here’s what I really want to know: which Palantir clients have access to this data? Just CIA & NSA? FBI? What about municipalities, such as the NYC police department? What about the governments of other countries?

What do you think?

FWIW, I know a guy who works at Palantir. I asked him what he/they did once, and he was more secretive than my friends at Apple.

David

PS, please don’t use my name if you decide to publish any of this — it’s a small town/industry. Let them Prism me instead.

Click to expand...

The 4th is protection against unreasonable search or seizure.

Since 2001, we've had no "4th." A lot of sheeple I have told this to prior, NOW care..because it's on the news.

I kind of just assumed the government would be doing this anyway.

I've read 1984.

I will take hash bars - as part of the pavlovian-programmed "government love."

Green lung said:

LOL this has been going on for 12 years.


Now its a "scandal" lol






Where have you guys been?

Click to expand...

railing against it for 20 years...

I've been talking about this for 7+ years. Nice to see people are finally pulling their heads out of the sand.

The US Government intercepts 1.8 BILLION communications per day from the US people. They are not telling the truth as they intercept all of your emails, all of your phone calls, all of your cell calls, etc... If you believe them about "data mining" setup an email address with a middle eastern name, and start emailing about doing things to a building, or person. See h ow long it takes for someone to show up at your door.

6 years ago one of my kids teachers had the "feds" show up at his home because of his emails. He was corresponding with a student about a book which was based around wwII and Hitler. I was a believer after that.

This has been going on since at least 2006.
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A


www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619

Secret Government Surveillance

Secret Government Surveillance


An aerial view of the NSA's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah, Thursday, June 6, 2013. The government is secretly collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order, according to the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.



SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- With every phone call they make and every Web excursion they take, people are leaving a digital trail of revealing data that can be tracked by profit-seeking companies and terrorist-hunting government officials.


The revelations that the National Security Agency is perusing millions of U.S. customer phone records at Verizon Communications and snooping on the digital communications stored by nine major Internet services illustrate how aggressively personal data is being collected and analyzed.


Verizon is handing over so-called metadata, excerpts from millions of U.S. customer records, to the NSA under an order issued by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian. The report was confirmed Thursday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.


Former NSA employee William Binney told the Associated Press that he estimates the agency collects records on 3 billion phone calls each day.


The NSA and FBI appear to be casting an even wider net under a clandestine program code-named "PRISM" that came to light in a story posted late Thursday by The Washington Post. PRISM gives the U.S. government access to email, documents, audio, video, photographs and other data that people entrust to some of the world's best known companies, according to The Washington Post.



The newspaper said it reviewed a confidential roster of companies and services participating in PRISM. The companies included AOL Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Skype, YouTube and Paltalk.


In statements, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo said they only provide the government with user data required under the law. (Google runs YouTube and Microsoft owns Skype.) AOL and Paltalk didn't immediately respond to inquiries from The Associated Press.


The NSA isn't getting customer names or the content of phone conversations under the Verizon court order, but that doesn't mean the information can't be tied to other data coming in through the PRISM program to look into people's lives, according to experts.


Like pieces of a puzzle, the bits and bytes left behind from citizens' electronic interactions can be cobbled together to draw conclusions about their habits, friendships and preferences using data-mining formulas and increasingly powerful computers.


It's all part of a phenomenon known as a "Big Data," a catchphrase increasingly used to describe the science of analyzing the vast amount of information collected through mobile devices, Web browsers and check-out stands. Analysts use powerful computers to detect trends and create digital dossiers about people.


The Obama administration and lawmakers privy to the NSA's surveillance aren't saying anything about the collection of the Verizon customers' records beyond that it's in the interest of national security. The sweeping court order covers the Verizon records of every mobile and landline phone call from April 25 through July 19, according to The Guardian.


It's likely the Verizon phone records are being matched with an even broader set of data, said Forrester Research analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo.
"My sense is they are looking for network patterns," she said. "They are looking for who is connected to whom and whether they can put any timelines together. They are also probably trying to identify locations where people are calling from."
Under the court order, the Verizon records include the duration of every call and the locations of mobile calls, according to The Guardian.


The location information is particularly valuable for cloak-and-dagger operations like the one the NSA is running, said Cindy Cohn, a legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group that has been fighting the government's collection of personal phone records since 2006. The foundation is currently suing over the government's collection of U.S. citizens' communications in a case that dates back to the administration of President George W. Bush.
"It's incredibly invasive," Cohn said. "This is a consequence of the fact that we have so many third parties that have accumulated significant information about our everyday lives."


It's such a rich vein of information that U.S. companies and other organizations now spend more than $2 billion each year to obtain third-party data about individuals, according to Forrester Research. The data helps businesses target potential customers. Much of this information is sold by so-called data brokers such as Acxiom Corp., a Little Rock, Ark. company that maintains extensive files about the online and offline activities of more than 500 million consumers worldwide.


The digital floodgates have opened during the past decade as the convenience and allure of the Internet -and sleek smartphones- have made it easier and more enjoyable for people to stay connected wherever they go.


"I don't think there has been a sea change in analytical methods as much as there has been a change in the volume, velocity and variety of information and the computing power to process it all," said Gartner analyst Douglas Laney.


In a sign of the NSA's determination to vacuum up as much data as possible, the agency has built a data center in Bluffdale, Utah that is five times larger than the U.S. Capitol -all to sift through Big Data. The $2 billion center has fed perceptions that some factions of the U.S. government are determined to build a database of all phone calls, Internet searches and emails under the guise of national security. The Washington Post's disclosure that both the NSA and FBI have the ability to burrow into computers of major Internet services will likely heighten fears that U.S. government's Big Data is creating something akin to the ever-watchful Big Brother in George Orwell's "1984" novel.


"The fact that the government can tell all the phone carriers and Internet service providers to hand over all this data sort of gives them carte blanche to build profiles of people they are targeting in a very different way than any company can," Khatibloo said.


In most instances, Internet companies such as Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are taking what they learn from search requests, clicks on "like" buttons, Web surfing activity and location tracking on mobile devices to figure out what each of their users like and divine where they are. It's all in aid of showing users ads about products likely to pique their interest at the right time. The companies defend this kind of data mining as a consumer benefit.


Google is trying to take things a step further. It is honing its data analysis and search formulas in an attempt to anticipate what an individual might be wondering about or wanting.
Other Internet companies also use Big Data to improve their services. Video subscription service Netflix takes what it learns from each viewer's preferences to recommend movies and TV shows. Amazon.com Inc. does something similar when it highlights specific products to different shoppers visiting its site.


The federal government has the potential to know even more about people because it controls the world's biggest data bank, said David Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor who recently stepped down as the Federal Trade Commission's consumer protection director.


Before leaving the FTC last year, Vladeck opened an inquiry into the practices of Acxiom and other data brokers because he feared that information was being misinterpreted in ways that unfairly stereotyped people. For instance, someone might be classified as a potential health risk just because they bought products linked to an increased chance of heart attack. The FTC inquiry into data brokers is still open.
"We had real concerns about the reliability of the data and unfair treatment by algorithm," Vladeck said.


Vladeck stressed he had no reason to believe that the NSA is misinterpreting the data it collects about private citizens. He finds some comfort in The Guardian report that said the Verizon order had been signed by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Ronald Vinson.


The NSA "differs from a commercial enterprise in the sense that there are checks in the judicial system and in Congress," Vladeck said. "If you believe in the way our government is supposed to work, then you should have some faith that those checks are meaningful. If you are skeptical about government, then you probably don't think that kind of oversight means anything."


The sick dictator bastards are honing their slavery software....