Just another of my "unfactual" opinion pieces someone tries or wishes to condemn me for.... Then again, how much of the MSM BS can anyone actually believe anymore I wonder.... perhaps it is better or maybe worse than any of us might believe...... but we're all now "suspects" under this admin and its policies, regardless how it's spun, it would seem!

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and "buddy lists" from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-collects-millions-of-e-mail-address-books-globally/2013/10/14/8e58b5be-34f9-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html?hpid=z1

Here is the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Going through your papers electronic or physical to figure out who your friends are is a basic violation of the 4th Amendment, especially without any sort of congressional or court authorization. It's indefensible.




The NSA has not been authorized by Congress or the special intelligence court that oversees foreign surveillance to collect contact lists in bulk, and senior intelligence officials said it would be illegal to do so from facilities in the United States. The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points all over the world, one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified program.None of those are on U.S. territory.

Because of the method employed, the agency is not legally required or technically able to restrict its intake to contact lists belonging to specified foreign intelligence targets, he said.

When information passes through the overseas collection apparatus,the official added,the assumption is you're not a U.S. person.

In practice, data from Americans is collected in large volumes in part because they live and work overseas, but also because data crosses international boundaries even when its American owners stay at home. Large technology companies, including Google and Facebook, maintain data centers around the world to balance loads on their servers and work around outages.

A senior U.S. intelligence official said that the privacy of Americans is protected, despite mass collection, because we have checks and balances built into our tools.


Just hope they'll eventually get so swamped with Data,it will become useless!


http://www.truecrypt.org/


http://www.christophercantwell.com/2013/10/14/how-to-encrypt-your-email-other-communications/

Problem is that they will still know where your encrypted Communication ends up!

Sen. Ron Wyden Warns of Fake Surveillance Reform and the Economic Harm of US Mass Spying


US Sen. Ron Wyden, in a Guardian article he wrote based on his speech at a Cato Institute event this week, reinforces RPI's warnings that efforts to reform the US government mass spying program "provide an excellent opportunity to make bad legislation worse" and that the spying "threatens American companies' business prospects in the international marketplace."

Wyden first warns that the "business-as-usual-brigade" will do everything it can to prevent the realization of pro-liberty curtailments of the mass spying program. Wyden comments in the Guardian article:

Says Sen. Wyden:

I know these issues will be discussed here today, so I'll start with my bottom line: the goal of our bipartisan bill is to set the bar for measuring meaningful intelligence reform. We wanted to put this marker down early because we know in the months ahead we will be up against a "business-as-usual brigade" – made up of influential members of the government's intelligence leadership, their allies in thinktanks and academia, retired government officials, and sympathetic legislators. Their game plan? Try mightily to fog up the surveillance debate and convince the Congress and the public that the real problem here is not overly intrusive, constitutionally flawed domestic surveillance, but sensationalistic media reporting. Their end game is ensuring that any surveillance reforms are only skin-deep.

Some of the "business as usual" arguments have something of an Alice in Wonderland flavor. We have heard that surveillance of Americans' phone records, aka metadata, is not actually surveillance at all – it's simply the collection of bits of information. We've been told that falsehoods aren't falsehoods – they are simply imprecise statements. We've been told that rules that have been repeatedly broken are a valuable check on government overreach. And we've been told that codifying secret surveillance laws and making them public surveillance laws is the same as actually reforming these overreaching surveillance programs. It's not.

These arguments, of course, leave the public with a distorted picture of what their government is actually up to. Those tiny bits of information, when put together, paint an illuminating picture of what the private lives of law-abiding Americans are like. Erroneous statements that are made on the public record but never corrected mislead the public and often members of Congress, as well. Privacy protections that don't actually protect privacy are not worth the paper they are printed on; and just because intelligence officials say that a particular program helps catch terrorists doesn't make it true.

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http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/congress-alert/2013/october/12/sen-ron-wyden-warns-of-fake-surveillance-reform-and-the-economic-harm-of-us-mass-spying.aspx

"Relying on the government to protect your privacy
is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds."

--John Perry Barlow--