NSA Needs No Warrants
Sunday, June 16, 2013 at 7:07 AM in Holiday, Politics, Technology, Thoughts Rep. Jerrold Nadler has blown the lid off of something big.
Not that I didn't already know this was happening, but now there's confirmation. Naive Americans, oh-so-trusting of big government, believed that there's nothing to worry about — we're just being paranoid. Understand this:
The NSA can listen to your calls, read your email or text messages in secret, without a warrant, and that data is being stored on servers.
Also, President Obama could be fucking your liberty. Do you remember that movie Enemy of the State starring Will Smith? Unfortunately, this isn't a movie.
Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell indicated during a House Intelligence hearing in 2007 that the NSA's surveillance process involves "billions" of bulk communications being intercepted, analyzed, and incorporated into a database.
They can be accessed by an analyst who's part of the NSA's "workforce of thousands of people" who are "trained" annually in minimization procedures, he said. (McConnell, who had previously worked as the director of the NSA, is now vice chairman at Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden's former employer.)
If it were "a U.S. person inside the United States, now that would stimulate the system to get a warrant," McConnell told the committee. "And that is how the process would work. Now, if you have foreign intelligence data, you publish it [inside the federal government]. Because it has foreign intelligence value."
McConnell said during a separate congressional appearance around the same time that he believed the president had the constitutional authority, no matter what the law actually says, to order domestic spying without warrants.
Read the full details at CNET. Be upset. Share it with friends and family. No matter what the law actually says?! It's not that surprising. However, it is horrendous and people should be pissed.
The technology exists, why wouldn't they use it? Why wouldn't someone abuse it?
People are fallible; is it unreasonable to assume that some analyst with an axe to grind would use his power illegally? Maybe about as unreasonable as the IRS selectively targeting Conservative groups (based, in part, on keywords in the organizations' names) for audits and denying these groups tax exempt status, bankrupting law-abiding, taxpaying citizens and costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Happy Father's Day.
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