International Human Rights Group: NSA Surveillance Undermining US Democracy

Photo Credit: WNDBy F. Michael Maloof. The National Security Agency, probably the most secretive of the U.S. intelligence branches, has very limited congressional oversight, and those privileged few – generally the chairmen of the respective intelligence committees in the House and Senate – cannot divulge information to other members.

Supporters say it’s needed for national security.

But a human rights organization is warning that such “national security” efforts may, in fact, be undermining the democracy on which America was built, or worse.

“A system of secret surveillance for the protection of national security many undermine or even destroy democracy, under the cloak of defending it,” warns the European Court of Human Rights, a part of the European Union’s European Council.

The issue of secret spying on Americans has been flooding the headlines since whistleblower Edward Snowden grabbed as many classified surveillance secrets from the government as he could, then took off on a globe-trotting trip and started spilling secrets about the tentacles Washington is using to spy on individual Americans. Read more from this story HERE.

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Government tapping into underseas cables for surveillance?

By Fox News. Not only is the U.S. government gathering information from tech companies on global Internet traffic — according to new reports, the NSA is also siphoning off data from underseas cables that criss-cross the world.

The Washington Post on Wednesday published a classified NSA slide that provided side-by-side guidance on the two surveillance programs.

“You Should Use Both,” the slide said, in an apparent message to NSA personnel. Read more from this story HERE.

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The NSA slide you haven’t seen

Photo Credit: Washington Post

By Craig Timberg. Recent debate over U.S. government surveillance has focused on the information that American technology companies secretly provide to the National Security Agency. But that is only one of the ways the NSA eavesdrops on international communications.

A classified NSA slide obtained by The Washington Post lists “Two Types of Collection.”

One is PRISM, the NSA program that collects information from technology companies, which was first revealed in reports by the Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper last month…

The slide also shows a crude map of the undersea cable network that carries data from either side of North America on to the rest of the world. As a story in Sunday’s Post made clear, these undersea cables are essential to worldwide data flows and to the surveillance capabilities of the U.S. government and its allies…

Both slides have circles attached to arrows suggesting possible collection points, but they cover areas too broad to discern where NSA accesses fiber-optic cable networks. The slides also list code names under the Upstream program. Read more from this story HERE.