Change You Can't Believe In

Showtime!  Pay no attention to those little men behind the curtains . . .

In the wake of the Verizon phone-trawling revelations, coming hot on the heels of other privacy and civil-liberties scandals in recent weeks, the New York Times today said in a scathing editorial that Obama "has now lost all credibility."  Do you agree?

Excerpt:

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive—whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls. . . .

Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance—with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power—fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

My question is, Who says the feds aren't also listening to every call, with some kind of futuristic, top-secret, voice-recognition software?

But if the Verizon revelation doesn't make you jump out of your socks, maybe this will, as reported by Amy Davidson today in the New Yorker - emphasis mine:

“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” an unnamed intelligence officer told Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras of the Washington Post. “They” are the National Security Agency, and the Post report reveals that an N.S.A. program called PRISM has, for the past six years, been “tapping 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.”

These were not occasional, extraordinary incursions: the Post, in addition to talking to the intelligence officer—who decided to speak out of a concern for civil liberties that seems to have been distinctly lacking at higher levels—obtained PowerPoint slides from an internal N.S.A. briefing. One of the slides explains that “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” for close to one in seven of its intelligence reports, and the program, which began in 2007, is said to be growing rapidly. The history of PRISM, Gellman and Poitras write, “shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.”

This is the second story in the past twenty-four hours with deeply troubling constitutional and privacy implications—the first was the news, reported in the Guardian, of a secret court order compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call records to the N.S.A. (It is increasingly clear that the order went well beyond Verizon.) We have gone through the day with Administration spokesmen and friendly senators telling us that we shouldn’t worry so much about the Verizon case because of the supposedly abstract quality of metadata. That was always a hollow defense—metadata reveals a great deal that is properly private—but it is especially meaningless now, in the face of what appears to be a sprawling effort to look over the shoulders of Internet users.

The N.S.A.-briefing slides mix corporate cheer and disturbing revelations. There are the logos of the nine companies involved: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. That is the order in which they joined PRISM. The Post describes Apple as a holdout (it acquiesced, coincidentally or not, after Steve Jobs’s death).

In other words, boys:  Everything you've ever done online in the last six years or so is recorded and stored in a government database. Everything.  Just stop and sit with that thought awhile.

I don't know about you fellas, but one reason I voted for Obama in 2008 was to prune the rot from the governmental tree that Dubya and Co. introduced, and to try to preserve constitutional government in this country.

Now it appears I was misinformed. Somebody, please tell me it's not so.


Update, 9:45 p.m.: The Guardian reports that chiefs of the Silicon Valley companies named as collaborators in the PRISM program are shocked, shocked! that gambling is going on in this establishment to hear this story and deny they have any connection with it. Of course.

Round up the usual suspects.


Update, 6/7/13, 11:40 p.m.:   Via Daily Kos, Rick Perlstein in The Nation reports that our government has been massively spying on its citizens by the millions since the 1930's - receiving daily bulk data from telephone and telegraph companies in the pre-internet days - as was revealed in the Abzug/Church congressional hearings in 1975, something your Head Trucker doesn't remember hearing about back then. But then, Perlstein says the mainstream media downplayed the story and buried it in the back pages.

Your Tax Dollars at Work.

Rachel reports on a story that originally broke in 2006, but nobody paid much attention: "They're sending the entire Internet to the secret room" - and has more on this week's stories.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

But not to worry. The Prez says, "Chill, people. Nobody is listening to your damn phone calls."

 

Anyway, it's all cool because all of your elected Congresspeeps, Democrat and Republican alike, have known all about this shit since like Day 1. So chillax already! And once again, pay no attention to what's going on over there with that funny little man behind the curtains. And call off your damn dog too.