by Nomad
Recently many people seemed altogether mortified, shocked and angry when whistle-blower Edward Snowden, former contract employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) supplied both the Washington Post and The Guardian details about two top- secret surveillance operations.
Recently many people seemed altogether mortified, shocked and angry when whistle-blower Edward Snowden, former contract employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) supplied both the Washington Post and The Guardian details about two top- secret surveillance operations.
The Snowden evidence describes one operation which was an effort to collect data from Verizon about millions of phone calls. The other operation was called PRISM. In that operation, metadata was harvested from millions of Internet sites. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple were all apparently involved in the PRISM operation.
Although both programs seem to have been overseen by Congress and a top-secret court, the extent of the operations came as a shock to a lot of people.
One source describes PRISM like this:
“Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy.”What PRISM does is to allow the NSA and the FBI to tap directly “into the central servers of nine leading U.S.Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”
Who, the reporters and public asked, could have imagined that the United States government- for whatever reason- would engage in such violations of personal privacy? Conservative voters feel as though their worst fears about Big Government and about Barack Obama have been confirmed. Many stunned liberals are asking:Why would President Obama launch such an attack on our freedoms?
Perhaps the only truly shocking aspect of the recent whistle-blowing revelations is the fact that anybody should be shocked at all. People who have been paying attention should have known the extent of this type of surveillance.
Perhaps the only truly shocking aspect of the recent whistle-blowing revelations is the fact that anybody should be shocked at all. Everybody -those who were not sleeping- should have known the extent of this type of surveillance.
Much- but naturally not all- of the information about these operations had been made public a long ago. The American people (at those who were awake) were warned and chose to ignore the challenge to their civil liberties.. until now.
The present anger – much of it unfairly directed at the Obama administration- comes a little late in the day. The evidence of these (and even more extensive and intrusive) electronic spying operations has been right under everybody's noses for over a decade. As we shall see in this report it is especially disingenuous for Republicans to bluster now.
Much- but naturally not all- of the information about these operations had been made public a long ago. The American people (at those who were awake) were warned and chose to ignore the challenge to their civil liberties.. until now.
The present anger – much of it unfairly directed at the Obama administration- comes a little late in the day. The evidence of these (and even more extensive and intrusive) electronic spying operations has been right under everybody's noses for over a decade. As we shall see in this report it is especially disingenuous for Republicans to bluster now.
The problem of the government’s covert spying on its own citizens began long before Obama, before Bush, Reagan or even before Nixon.
