skiwillgee opened this issue on Jul 27, 2013 · 29 posts
Quest posted Thu, 01 August 2013 at 6:53 PM
Willie, you make some very good and valid points but as I said above and say again, I’m not proposing in any way that we dismantle the NSA. They are indeed a needed service to the country and generally I applaud the work they do. It is their constitutionally questionable methods of harvesting the vast amounts of personal information of innocent Americans that is in contention and nothing else. What’s more is that it is debatable if these covert programs, over the many years of mass collection has really detoured any terrorist attacks at all the way the administration likes to say.
Of course what I would like to know is that if all this mining of our phone records, bank records, health records, credit records and Internet data is doing such a great job in detouring all these supposed terror attacks why weren’t the Boston Marathon Bombers stopped before they caused all that carnage and mayhem and the killing of 3 people in April of this year? Especially since the Tsarnaev brothers had learned to build explosive devices from an online al-Qaeda magazine called “Inspire”.
“One person whose privacy was not invaded by U.S. intelligence was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as he repeatedly visited the al-Qaida online magazine Inspire for its recipe "Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom…
Sensenbrenner, who wrote and introduced the Patriot Act to Congress in 2001, says the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by issuing the order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans…
Now Vice President Joe Biden in 2006 during the Bush administration on the CBS’ Morning Show;
"Harry, I don't have to listen to your phone calls to know what you're doing," Biden said. "If I know every single phone call you made, I'm able to determine every single person you talk to, I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive.
And the real question here is: What do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with al-Qaida?"
In a scathing report from “right of center” RedState an online conservative news site;
The tendency by Government agencies to use “national security” as justification for intrusions into our lives and targeting of American citizens is nothing short of the beginnings of a police state. You don’t dragnet an entire nation of citizens in the hope of finding the next potential terror cell. Obviously, it didn’t work with the Tsarnaev brothers.
The recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision allowing the police to collect DNA evidence, for so much as a speeding ticket, is a page out of Orwell’s 1984. The arms of the Federal Government, from the recent IRS targeting of conservative groups to the huge national database being created by Obamacare would have appalled our Founding Fathers and the Constitution they wrote.
While some people may scoff and laugh outright at the possibility of these databases used someday to track down gun owners, or to crack down on those who write or speak what some bureaucrat has determined to be “politically incorrect” or “racist”, I would beg to differ that day is not far off. We already have seen several examples how the Federal agencies’ minions have responded, and how the “free press” has stood idly by or participated in the demonization of dissent. Already we find ourselves very careful what we say in public places, at work, at church, at the store….
… Will they buy into the meme that some freedoms need to be compromised to remain safe? Are we safer today because we take our shoes off when we go through airport security? With the chipping away, the drip, drip, drip of our freedoms, when we wake up to take back our country, we’ll find ourselves at the mercy of the bureaucratic simpletons, or thugs, depending upon your outlook, who control the databases that will bring the police or FBI to our doors. And under the guise of “national security” you may find yourself in jail, detained indefinitely.”
And in response to this author’s statement; “We already have seen several examples how the Federal agencies’ minions have responded…” I read with some trepidation this piece about an ordinary family researching pressure cookers and backpacks online got a police visit;
“A New York woman says her family's interest in the purchase of pressure cookers and backpacks led to a home visit by six police investigators demanding information about her job, her husband's ancestry and the preparation of quinoa.”
She says:”All I know is if I'm going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I'm not doing it online. I'm scared. And not of the right things.” An interesting read.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-police-terrorism-pressure-cooker
From CNN;
“Testifying before Congress …, Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, asserted that his agency's massive acquisition of U.S. phone data and the contents of overseas Internet traffic that is provided by American tech companies has helped prevent "dozens of terrorist events."
“…Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, Democrats who both serve on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and have access to the nation's most sensitive secrets, released a statement contradicting this assertion. "Gen. Alexander's testimony yesterday suggested that the NSA's bulk phone records collection program helped thwart 'dozens' of terrorist attacks, but all of the plots that he mentioned appear to have been identified using other collection methods," the two senators said.
Indeed, a survey of court documents and media accounts of all the jihadist terrorist plots in the United States since 9/11 by the New America Foundation shows that traditional law enforcement methods have overwhelmingly played the most significant role in foiling terrorist attacks.
This suggests that the NSA surveillance programs are wide-ranging fishing expeditions with little to show for them.”
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/17/opinion/bergen-nsa-spying
Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall;
“Saying ‘these programs’ have disrupted ‘dozens of terrorist plots’ is misleading if the bulk phone-records collection is actually providing little or no unique value,” said the two senators, who are both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The statement contested Obama’s claim that Congressional lawmakers fully knew about the NSA program to collect tens of millions of domestic calling records from US phone companies, as well as spy on e-mail and other Internet material from foreign targets.
The two senators went on to recommend that government agencies investigating terrorism need simply obtain “this information directly from phone companies using a regular court order.”
“In our judgment, convenience alone does not justify the collection of the personal information of huge numbers of ordinary Americans if the same or more information can be obtained using less intrusive methods,” the two senators concluded.”
http://www.infowars.com/nsa-spy-scheme-played-no-role-in-stopping-terrorists-senators/
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said he hoped to sue the government over the collection of data, calling it “an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.”
As I posted previously in regards to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA) we need to bring the NSA to the point before the FISA law was diluted to encourage warrantless collection of data and constrain the FISA definition of “relative” so as not to be applied as broadly as to encapsulate innocent people.