This thread is for people to discuss government spying SERIOUSLY so that light can be shed on why the government and various corporation spy and what they are looking for.

to start here is an article i found



Beyond the NSA: Other Agencies Spy on You, Too


The latest discoveries about NSA spying revealed that the agency has collected 27 terrabytes of information about cellphone locations to track its targets not only in cyberspace, but also real space. The Panopticon is real. It siphons billions of dollars each year from a federal budget in crisis. And it is watching you and your children.

Lost in the debate about NSA spying, however, have been the dozens of other federal agencies also complicit in Fourth Amendment abuses.

Leading the Charge: The FBI

The FBI is among the federal agencies leading the assault on the Constitution. The FBI runs its own intelligence databases, has long abused the very same sections of the PATRIOT Act for which the NSA has recently come under fire and has the further distinction of having infiltrated First Amendment-protected activist groups and religious institutions all over the country.

Nor are these new issues. Unfortunately, the FBI's abuses are well established: For at least a quarter century, the bureau deployed a series of domestic "counterintelligence programs" that were discovered by activists in the 1970s and then investigated by Congressional oversight committees. Summarized as a "sophisticated vigilante operation" in 1976 by the Senate, CoIntelPro presaged the recurrence of similar abuses under the Bush administration and continuing into the Obama administration.

In 2008, I sued the FBI to seek public disclosure of its secret policy authorizing undercover infiltration. Our FOIA case did force the bureau to disclose the document, but the FBI redacted the entire chapter on what it calls "undisclosed participation."

A bizarre - and widely overlooked - exchange in a 2010 Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing revealed what little we know. When asked by Senators under what legal standard the FBI Infiltrates activist groups, the then-director of the FBI assured them that “reasonable suspicion of criminal activity” was first required, only to repudiate his statement before the sun had set.

As it turns out, even reasonable suspicion of criminal activity is not required, as the FBI admitted in a letter sent to the Hill that evening, after the cameras and microphones were off. According to the FBI, any "proper purpose" can justify infiltrating an activist group, however untethered the means toward that purpose might become.

Congress: Years Late and Billions Short

After a decade of sitting on its hands and enabling the dangerous entrenchment of executive power at nearly every opportunity, Congress is finally beginning to pay attention. But even measures that purport to restrain the NSA’s dragnet spying settle for scratching at the surface.

The USA FREEDOM act was thoughtfully engineered by the authors of the PATRIOT act to restrain executive agencies including the NSA and FBI from abusing their approval of expanding powers over the past decade. Even their bill, however, fails to address most of the FBI’s recurring problems.

One measure, introduced by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), would do more. Holt is not your average member of Congress. Having taught physics at Princeton (making him the only rocket scientist among his four hundred colleagues), he’s arguably the smartest member of the chamber. He’s also the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, the successor to the Pike committee that in the 1970s famously investigated decades of FBI crimes.

Rep. Holt’s bill, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, would rescind the PATRIOT Act entirely, as well as the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It is the only pending bill that would force the intelligence agencies to justify their powers from a pre-9/11 baseline, as they should.

Unfortunately, most members of Congress who talk about privacy have yet to walk their talk. And with leading Democrats carrying the Bush administration’s water now that President Obama is holding the glass, it will take continued collaboration across the aisle, along with creative public displays of dissent to rein in the surveillance state.


http://www.blacklistednews.com/Beyond_the_NSA:_Other_Agencies_Spy_on_You,_Too/31216/0/0/0/Y/M.html

 

By Pete Williams, NBC News justice correspondent
A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency’s gathering of data on all telephone calls made in the United States appears to violate the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches.

The judge, Richard Leon of U.S. District Court in Washington, said that the NSA relied on “almost-Orwellian technology” that would have been unimaginable a generation ago, at the time of a landmark Supreme Court decision on phone records.

Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, ruled in favor of two Americans who challenged the NSA program and wanted their data removed from NSA records. The judge found that the two were likely to prevail under the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The judge put his ruling on hold to allow the government to appeal. White House press secretary Jay Carney was asked about the ruling at a briefing shortly after it became public and said that he was not yet aware of it.

Leon said that the government was acting in an “understandable zeal to protect our homeland,” and acknowledged that there were national security interests and new constitutional issues in play.

He batted away the government’s argument that removing certain people from the NSA database would degrade the program.

“I am not convinced at this point in the litigation that the NSA’s database has ever truly served the purpose of rapidly identifying terrorists in time-sensitive investigations,” he wrote, “and so I am certainly not convinced that the removal of two individuals from the database will ‘degrade’ the program in any meaningful sense.

“I will leave it to other judges to decide how to handle any future litigation in their courts,” he added.

Leon wrote that the government was justifying its counterterrorism program based on a 34-year-old Supreme Court precedent that has been eclipsed by “technological advances and a cell phone-centric lifestyle heretofore inconceivable.”

That Supreme Court precedent held that Americans had no privacy interest to keep the government from accessing records stored by phone companies.

“The relationship between the police and the phone company” a generation ago, the judge said, “is nothing compared to the relationship that has apparently evolved over the last seven years between the government and telecom companies.”

The White House reaffirmed its long-held position: no amnesty for accused NSA leaker Edward Snowden. NBC's Michael Isikoff discusses a federal judge's ruling Monday that the NSA's telephone data gathering program is unconstitutional.
“It’s one thing to say that people expect phone companies to occasionally provide informaiton to law enforcement; it is quite another to suggest that our citizens expect all phone companies to operate what is effectively a joint intelligence-gathering operation with the government,“ the judge wrote.

The plaintiffs brought their case June 6, one day after the British newspaper The Guardian published the first revelations from Edward Snowden, the former federal contractor who exposed details of massive government surveillance programs.

Snowden has been granted temporary asylum by Russia.

President Barack Obama will address “national security and the economic impacts of unauthorized intelligence disclosures” in a meeting with executives from 15 leading tech companies on Tuesday, the White House said. The meeting will also cover technical issues with HealthCare.gov and ways the government can partner with the technology industry
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/201...s-nsa-program-appears-to-violate-constitution

 

Peek a boo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PjUY8IXvnA

 

Clearly we don't need the government spying on us. On the other hand, from what I've read about this in other than sensationalist news outlets, while it is accurate to say the NSA has captured terabytes of cell phone data, it is impossible to do much with it and it "can't" be used to track citizens unless there is a basis to suspect they are involved in terrorist activities. The issue I have with this is that those deciding who are suspects in terrorist activities may not always get it right.

That said, since I discovered how easy it is to actually track someone (I.E. my daughter when she started driving) I have acted with the premise that someone somewhere is watching me. The result, as it was when my daughter realized I knew every time she wasn't where she was supposed to be, is that I don't do anything I'd be embarrassed to have made public. And that includes my internet and cell phone traffic.

 

This post did not officially happen

NSA is comming to town (Christmas Spoof):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pcWlyUu8U4

from:
http://rt.com/usa/aclu-nsa-santa-claus-328/

 

But shooter you kind of missed the point, they have no reason to spy on or record you do they? Probably not.... so with that being said, if you have done nothing wrong, the government has zero probable cause to want to record you, when that's the case no judge will issue a search warrant for the tapping of your phone, in this case they bypassed all that and violated everyone's rights.

Also all this info is being compiled to build a profile to use against you and your daughter at a later date.
How would you like it if a pervert at the nsa was using your daughters cellphone camera to take video and pictures of her for his own fetish?

 

I hate to say it but they have been doing this even longer then you think. The government has always watched us some way or another. One of their favorites is to watch how we spend our money. That is why they wanted access to Google's databases the did all the work for them. It tells them several things. One by what people are reading they can gage people's views on issues. Two by how people are spending their money they can tell who would rebel against them and potential terrorists you know Tea Party types and such.

 

they can spy all the hell they want they will never break my encryption codes
the idea of tracking you online and through retail outlets is nothing new, this has been a systematic tracking since the 50s
things like stores asking for customer info for advertising reasons, store loyalty cards, discounts and memberships
its all just a huge part of the same global scheme

open any main source web-browser and search for a hotel and then another
the next several ads you get on any other page will be ads for those hotels
its a cookie based world and if you arent smart enough to avoid their eyes even the 12 year old hackers can see your knickers

 

Who cares? Conform and you don't have a problem!

 

Judge deals blow to NSA phone data program

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...t-on-bulk-phone-collection/?intcmp=latestnews

 

LOL so what's new ?
absolutely nothing.
Phaeros had spies , emperors and leaders , despots and dictators , kings and queens , presidents and prime ministers, right throughout history , they all had spies. [were spying]

Damn good job you have plenty of spies in the US , or you no doubt would have had many more 9/11's , bombings and masacres etc.
You'd be up to your ears in drugs , and elbowing your way through pedophiles to get your kids to school.

Got a better way ?

Nothin t hide , nothin t fear

 

Its not hard to spy on us and it can be done at any point. With the use of cell phones, debit/credit cards, transit cards, etc. The government or anyone else with the means to get the information can track your every movement.

 

Why no, I didn't miss the point at all. We agree; the gummit has no basis to spy on me, or my daughter or 99.9% of citizens. What they do is "grab" all that data floating around out there; cell phone signals, wireless signals, and so on. Terabytes of the stuff. Then, they have a super computer sort through all of it, looking for key tags; like calls to known terrorist cells, or who knows what. When the computer says "hey, here's something" they scrutinize it and decide if it's just Grandma mis dialing, or a mad terrorist ordering C-4.

All the rest of those terabytes? They just sit there, loading down the computer, or whatever it is they use to analyze mountains of data. Including my call to my daughter, and her call to her boy friend, that may or may not include some racy stuff.

So, while it's absolutely, technically true that the gummit is "spying" on citizens, it is incorrect to think that big brother is building some profile on me, or my daughter; they don't care. They just have no way of sorting out the nonsense from the important stuff until they analyze it.

And some pervert at the NSA? Isn't that somewhat of an oxymoron? I mean, I love my daughter and she is truly beautiful, but cmon; there's gotta be much better pron out there, you know, like on XNXX.

Now, I was in the NSA and I was a pervert and I wanted to go looking, I'd start with Emma Watson, or maybe Kaley Cuoco. (Shooter imagines racy pix of Emma and Kaley, doing naked things, like taking a bath, or house work in the nude, or *gasp* having sex)

But Shooter and his daughter?? Nah. Boring.

But, we agree; the gummit needs to stop doing that.

 

Does anyone really think the govt. is going to slow down on their spying efforts?
No matter what the people think, no matter what the constitution says, no matter what the law says, they will just increase their work.
There is tons of money in spying. Does anyone really think any type of govt. program is going to turn down cash?
Then you have some people in power who think they have a right to do what they please.

 

They are not going to stop. Its too easy.

 

When the constitution, which you profess such profound knowledge of, was signed by our founders who then could have imagined cellphones, computers, radiation, lasers, missiles, high capacity semi automatic combat weapons, any weapon of mass destruction and on and on and on.....Now we have terrorists who are willing to die and collect their virgins for Allah. The Constitution is a good reference but modern interpretations must apply to work with today's world. The efforts to thwart more attacks with loss of life is for all our protection and necessary in this new world. Like it or lump it, it is necessary.

 

I work with a agency I will leave unnamed. Yes we spy on everyone with a computer or cell phone. It gets run through a computer that filters for key words and then everything is stored in a file corresponding to that computer, email, phone, credit card, bank account, social security number or all of them.

Not many humans actually read the information however we can pull up any file at any time. If it is a non English language then it gets translated by a actual person a computer could do it however humans are better at it.

I am against it, I like the perks that come with the work. It gives me a advantage knowing what is behind the curtain.

Technically speaking I am a contractor it makes it easier for them to "burn" me which just means they deny any knowledge of me.

 

The NSA has not stopped even one terror attack.
You are more likely to be killed by your own toaster than a terror attack.
We(intelligence agency employees) have no reason to spy on American Citizens.

You know who stops terror attacks? Operators on the ground SEALs, MARSOC, Delta, Joint Operations, SOCOM, SOG. The data they collect in raids is really the only data that is worth anything. The terrorists know all too well that electronics are tracked and they do not use them most of the time. It is all on paper.

 

Quite a bold statement. Nothing is 100% secure that's an illusion. Unless your system is stripped of ports and optical media and can't connect to the internet then you can say it is secure. Humans are prone to fuck ups and it only takes one mistake to compromise your system.

 

Ever heard of Wind Talkers?