national security

Late on Friday, with little fanfare, the government's Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reported that the secret FISA court - the "legal" administrators of the NSA's assorted domestic espionage programs - would be granted an extension of its telephone surveillance program. And while so far the US public has shown a stoic resolve in its response to learning more details about how the US government spies on its day after day, things may soon be changing. As McClatchy reports, "Congress is growing increasingly wary of controversial National Security Agency domestic surveillance programs, a concern likely to erupt during legislative debate - and perhaps prod legislative action - as early as next week." Among the measures considered are legislation to make those programs less secret, and talk of denying funding and refusing to continue authority for the snooping.

It's a strange and terrible tragedy when a culture forgets its own history and identity. It is even more tragic when that culture becomes deluded enough to think it can replace its heritage from scratch; that it can conjure political and social reformations out of thin air, and abandon the centuries upon centuries of accomplishment and failures of generations past. To think that one can live without the lessons and principles of one's ancestors is a disease – a mental disorder of the highest caliber. It is an insanity that leads to terrifying catastrophe. Loyalty is not and never has been unconditional - loyalty to government most of all. Loyalty to the system is dependent upon the nature of the system and the people who sit at its apex. For those within government today, this could mean a legacy of desperation and sadness, or a legacy of strength, truth, and enduring peace. Time is running out.

If the Government Is Going to Spy … Why Doesn’t It Do Something USEFUL?

A few days ago, Edward Snowden made even fewers friends in the corporate tech community with his Guardian disclosures that "Microsoft Helped The NSA Bypass Its Own Encryption Software, Spy On Its Clients." This promptly got the legal team the MSFT scrambling, and moments ago, the firm's General Counsel Brad Smith posted on MSFT's blog that, guess what, the world's biggest desktop OS maker doesn't give government data encryption keys or customer data. Well... what else were they going to say? Oh yes, repeat "direct acces" 6 times in a blog post, making it all too clear the whole issue is merely about semantics.

"As Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I can tell you that I believe the oversight we have conducted is strong and effective and I am doing my level best to get more information declassified. Please know that it is equally frustrating to me, as it is to you, that I cannot provide more detail on the value these programs provide and the strict limitations placed on how this information is used. I take serious my responsibility to make sure intelligence programs are effective, but I work equally hard to ensure that intelligence activities strictly comply with the Constitution and our laws and protect Americans’ privacy rights."

Former House Speaker and presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich said a then-struggling U.S. economy can't afford to spend billions of dollars overseas to buy foreign oil when there was plenty of that Texas tea at home in the United States. Gasoline prices, he said, could drop to $2.00 per gallon if drilling activity increased dramatically in the United States. A year later, nearly 90 million barrels of oil was produced worldwide and almost half of that came from new drilling operations in the United States. Gasoline is still nowhere near $2.00 per gallon even though the United States is mentioned in the same breath as Saudi Arabia...

As the mainstream American press goes after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, Germany's Spiegel note that the leakers' revelations appear to becoming an afterthought. As the Guardian's American chief noted, their competition has a "lack of skepticism on a whole" when it comes to national security. Critical scrutiny, she said, has been considered "unpatriotic" since 9/11.

Looks like everybody was in on the act with complying with the National Security Agency’s spying around the world according to secret files. The Guardian newspaper of the UK has just obtained secret fails from Edward Snowden detailing the full extent of the affair. The affair was revealed just about a month ago now, but it now seems that Prism had everybody doing their dirty work.

Edward Snowden may be America's persona most non grata in the entire world, but he has an insurance policy against "accidents": a treasure trove of supposedly damaging secrets about the US that will hit the public domain if something were to happen to the 30 year old whistleblower. A trove is so damaging that according to Glenn Greenwald, Snowden "poses more of a threat to the U.S. than anyone in the country’s history." Well, maybe a threat to the "government" which now only represents the interests of various corporations and Wall Street, but certainly not to what the US was supposed to be before it was hijacked by special interests, lobbies and the creature from Jekyll Island.

NSA Spying Is the Kind of Thing Which Caused the Revolutionary War Against King George

The global fallout from the Snowden affair continues to reverberate following the latest news that four Latin American countries - Brazil, Argentina, Urugay and Venezuela - announced on Friday they would recall their ambassadors from the countries that blocked their airspace to Bolivia's Evo Morales following false rumors he was carrying Snowden, forcing an emergency landing in Austria. The four countries said this incident violated international law. As a result of Obama's "neo-colonial" practices in Europe, as Uruguay's foreign minister Luis Almagro denounces Europe's servile compliance with pax AmericaNSA, the Mercosur ambassadors in Spain, France, Italy and Portugal will be pulled back for consultations.

With the revelation that the federal government, through the National Security Agency, has been collecting phone and Internet records of U.S. citizens in the name of preventing terrorism, Americans are wondering whether private communication exists. In the infograohic below, we explore how this surveillance works and the history of domestic spying programs (because, let’s face it, they’re not new) and how, even with broader knowledge of the government’s activities, a minority of Americans oppose such programs.

Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal; The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail; The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide; Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases; Skype, which was bought by Microsoft in October 2011, worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow Prism to collect video of conversations as well as audio; Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

Snowden Is a Traitor to the Political Elite … But a Hero to the American People

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