skiwillgee opened this issue on Jul 27, 2013 · 29 posts
Quest posted Wed, 31 July 2013 at 10:34 PM
Well thank you Skiwillgee, there’s no way I would think anyone would like to be deceptively spied upon especially with this country’s ORIGINAL fourth amendment rights of search and seizure without warrant. Even if you have nothing to “hide” most everyone Internet searches for private things that concern them, their family or friends or their practices in one way or another.
I’m not saying in any way that we should do away with the NSA and their practices. They are absolutely needed for this country’s defense without doubt. But they need to be reined in as far as spying on American and other worldly citizens without proper cause.
I fully believe that there are other ways of conducting their surveillance without having to harvest vast amounts of innocent records. Except I think that they were too lazy to find the ways and decided to take the shortcut.
One of the things I’ve noticed since the Snowden affair is that this country’s elite news stations, which happen to be “left of center” politically, have made very little hay over it leading me to suspect that the government’s “left of center” over reaching arm has quieted them down as to not make waves for this administration. For a great deal of my sources I had to go outside the U.S. to get the news and in my eyes, that’s shameful in and of itself.
Nevertheless, many things have evolved since I first posting this and this is one which got my interest;
“…Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA’s first annual “Science of Security (SoS) Competition.” The competition, which aims to honor the best “scientific papers about national security” as a way to strengthen NSA collaboration with researchers in academia, honored Bonneau for his paper on the nature of passwords.”
He said;
“On a personal note, I’d be remiss not to mention my conflicted feelings about winning the award given what we know about the NSA’s widespread collection of private communications and what remains unknown about oversight over the agency’s operations…”
http://www.tikkun.org/tikdaily40091.html
Last Wednesday the House floored the Defense Appropriations Act of 2014 that would have defunded the Department of defense’s NSA over-reaching civilian spying programs and it was defeated 205-217. Why?
“The numbers tell the story — in votes and dollars. On Wednesday, the House voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/money-nsa-vote/
I guess it takes extra special pressure to get Americans to leave their “reality” shows and potato couch beer suds.
“Pew finds that "a majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts." And "an even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/29/poll-nsa-surveillance-privacy-pew?view=mobile
Republicans and Democrats agree: Fisa oversight of NSA spying doesn't work
“Americans expect their government to do the utmost to protect our country, but that cannot mean trading our Fourth Amendment right to privacy for the promise of security. Most Americans understand the need to "connect the dots" to avoid another 9/11, as long as the intelligence community has a legitimate need for the information it seeks and is no more intrusive than absolutely necessary…….FISC does more than simply review and approve individualized warrant requests. The court interprets and construes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, applying legal and constitutional principles, much like any other federal court. The difference between the FISC and every other court in the United States is that there is no opposing counsel, and their interpretation of the law is highly classified and stays that way by law for 30 years.
I didn’t mention this in my earlier posts but of interest should be; President Nixon’s Watergate caps the reason for FISA;
“The legislation was both a result of concerns over the NSA’s domestic surveillance practices of the 1970s, as well as over the findings of the Church Committee’s investigations into Richard Nixon’s abuses of federal authority to spy on his rivals.”
Senators strongly criticize intelligence chiefs over NSA data collection
“On the eve of a major US Senate hearing on the National Security Agency's bulk surveillance, two senators called for major reforms of the NSA's collection of phone records and accused US intelligence leaders of misleading the public about its impact on privacy.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/us-senate-wyden-udall-nsa
XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'
“A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals…”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data
Senate panel looking at limits on surveillance
4:33 p.m. EDT July 31, 2013
“Democratic and Republican senators pressed federal intelligence officials Wednesday on the propriety of a controversial surveillance operation that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans, less than a week after the program narrowly survived a House vote aimed at shutting it down.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/31/nsa-surveillance-senate/2601953/
I’ve always been a believer in freedom of speech and open source code compiling the way the original Internet was meant to be (I’m showing my age again). And the belief that what is private to you should remain private to you alone. So in that spirit I would like to share a few things that will help make your Internet surfing experience more private. Although I’ve been involved in privacy software before, these are a few things I’ve picked up while researching the NSA/Edward Snowden affair and how to remain “private” and let it be known I’m not being sponsored or in any way being paid for referencing these links. I would simply like to share and if anyone has more to offer…please do.
DuckDuckGo---an anonymous search engine to use instead of the others which allow you to be tracked. Using this search engine you can search the Internet anonymously.
StartPage---another good anonymous search engine. Mind you, these search engines use Google and other popular search engines as their core but strip out the metadata so that you can’t be traced.
DoNotTrackMe---Excellent plugin which prevents advertisers and social networks from tracking you while surfing the Internet.
https://www.abine.com/dntdetail.php
The Tor Project---Electronic Frontier Foundation; ”When you use the Tor software, your IP address remains hidden and it appears that your connection is coming from the IP address of a Tor exit relay, which can be anywhere in the world.” It’s onion routing software that allows you to circuit encrypt link between nodes to get to your destination site making you anonymous as you surf the Internet. This is a great program I use it all the time…for Windows just download the Tor Browser Bundle (TBB), extract to the directory where you want the browser to be and go Tor/Tor Browser/Start Tor Browser.exe but just go to the download page to download your flavor;
https://www.torproject.org/index.html.en
EFF page;
https://www.eff.org/torchallenge/what-is-tor/
Tor- Wikipedia ;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)
Happy surfing and thanks!