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‘Who Can Possibly Stand Against Them?’: Buck Sexton Highlights ‘Chilling Effects of NSA Domestic Surveillance Programs

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Photo Credit: TheBlaze TVTheBlaze’s national security expert Buck Sexton appeared on The Glenn Beck Program Monday to discuss the alarming quantities of information the U.S. government is gathering on its citizens, and the ramifications it may have on the future of the country.

Sexton began by referencing a Wall Street Journal report that he says highlights how “NSA-derived data has officially been used in a criminal prosecution.”

“This was against a suspected would-be terrorist, somebody who was going to travel overseas allegedly to join the fighting in Syria,” Sexton said. “But in the court documents given over to his lawyer, it’s become clear that some of the knowledge that the government had derived from the NSA.”

“This was not with some special warrant,” he continued. “This was just – the NSA had this stuff, they decided to give it to criminal authorities.”

Sexton said that the government always starts with using information against “the worst of the worst,” but that it’s only a matter of time before the government starts using “this massive trove of data that’s just at its fingertips” in other ways.

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John Kerry: Damage To U.S. Image Abroad Due To Shutdown; Fails To Mention NSA Spy Scandal (+video)

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Photo Credit: AFPJohn Kerry told a liberal think tank Thursday that the recent government shutdown has hurt America’s image abroad. He failed to mention the NSA spy scandal, which at least 21 countries have condemned.

Ironically, as reported by cnsnews.com, Kerry’s appearance at a Center for American Progress conference came on the same day that German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle summoned the U.S. ambassador to warn friendship was at stake over the alleged bugging of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone.

Also on Thursday, European Union leaders meeting in Brussels discussed allegations of widespread NSA spying, and said afterwards that “a lack of trust [between the U.S. and E.U.] would prejudice the necessary cooperation in the field of intelligence gathering.”

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Protestors Swarm Capitol to Rally Against NSA’s Mass Surveillance

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Nearly a thousand protestors, sponsored by one hundred public advocacy groups, marched on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. to rally against the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance sweeps on Saturday.

“Why are we here?” former NSA executive and whistleblower Thomas Drake asked the gathered crowd. “We’re against mass surveillance!”

Drake, who was prosecuted by the Department of Justice under the Espionage Act for leaking unclassified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter, declared that the government “tried to bankrupt me, silence me and imprison me,” and that he was fortunate not to end up in prison.

“We cannot let this happen to future whistleblowers,” he said, adding that reform efforts must include whistleblower protection and not rely on an “NSA honor system” that was dependent on the agency admitting to rights violations.

“The NSA does not have an honorable track record of telling the truth when tracking us without our consent,” he said.

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A Government of Secrecy and Fear

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Photo Credit: APEvery American who values the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, every American who enjoys the right to be different and the right to be left alone, and every American who believes that the government works for us and we don’t work for the government should thank Edward Snowden for his courageous and heroic revelations of the National Security Agency’s gargantuan spying operations. Without Snowden’s revelations, we would be ignorant children to a paternalistic government and completely in the dark about what the government sees of us and knows about us. And we would not know that it has stolen our freedoms.

When I saw Snowden’s initial revelation — a two-page order signed by a federal judge on the FISA court — I knew immediately that Snowden had a copy of a genuine top-secret document that even the judge who signed it did not have. The NSA reluctantly acknowledged that the document was genuine and claimed that all its snooping on the 113,000,000 Verizon customers covered by that order was lawful because it had been authorized by that federal judge. The NSA also claims that as a result of its spying, it has kept us safe.

I reject the argument that the government is empowered to take our liberties — here, the right to privacy — by majority vote or by secret fiat as part of an involuntary collective bargain that it needs to monitor us in private in order to protect us in public. The government’s job is to keep us free and safe. If it keeps us safe but not free, it is not doing its job.

Since the revelations about Verizon, we have learned that the NSA has captured and stored in its Utah computers the emails, texts, telephone conversations, utility bills, bank statements, credit card statements and digital phone books of everyone in America for the past two and a half years. It also has captured hundreds of millions of phone records in Brazil, France, Germany and Mexico — all U.S. allies — and it has shared much of the seized raw American data with intelligence agencies in Great Britain and Israel. Its agents have spied on their girlfriends and boyfriends literally thousands of times, and they have combed the collected raw data and selectively revealed some of it to law enforcement. All of this directly contradicts the Constitution.

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NSA Monitored Calls of 35 World Leaders after US Official Handed Over Contacts

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Photo Credit: Guardian The National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another US government department, according to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The confidential memo reveals that the NSA encourages senior officials in its “customer” departments, such the White House, State and the Pentagon, to share their “Rolodexes” so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems.

The document notes that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately “tasked” for monitoring by the NSA.

The revelation is set to add to mounting diplomatic tensions between the US and its allies, after the German chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday accused the US of tapping her mobile phone.

After Merkel’s allegations became public, White House press secretary Jay Carney issued a statement that said the US “is not monitoring and will not monitor” the German chancellor’s communications. But that failed to quell the row, as officials in Berlin quickly pointed out that the US did not deny monitoring the phone in the past.

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Report: NSA Spied on 124 Billion Phone Calls in One Month

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The National Security Agency recorded information about more than 124 billion phone calls during a 30-day period earlier this year, including around 3 billion calls from U.S. sources, according to a tally from top-secret documents released by multiple news outlets.

Documents revealing details about the NSA’s Boundless Informant program show that information regarding billions of phone calls and computer communications was collected by the agency from across the world.

Boundless Informant “allows users to select a country on a map and view the meta data volume and select details about the collections against that country,” according to the Guardian, which first reported on the top secret program earlier this year.

Multiple leaked screenshots of the Boundless Informant program show that information on around 124.8 billion phone calls were collected in just 30-days this year, according to documents released by the Guardian and other news sites.

The documents provide a window into the sheer volume of data being collected by the NSA as late as March of this year, according to the Guardian.

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Russian Spy Agency Seeks To Expand NSA-Style Internet Surveillance

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Photo Credit: The Guardian Russian authorities are moving to expand surveillance of the Internet by requiring service providers to store all traffic temporarily and make it available to the top domestic intelligence agency.

Under an order drafted by the Communications Ministry, providers would have to install equipment that would record and save all Internet traffic for at least 12 hours and grant the security services exclusive access to the data.

President Vladimir Putin has tightened his grip over Russia since his election to a third term in March 2012 amid a wave of opposition protests, and security is being stepped up further before the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

The draft order, made public on Monday, is likely to deepen concerns over tighter surveillance of the Internet, where debate is much freer than in Russia’s conventional media and which security officials have said should be better controlled.

Russia drew global attention concerning a similar spying program in the United States and Britain after granting former U.S. intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden temporary asylum.

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French President Hollande Berates US Over Spying Claims

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Photo Credit: BBCFrench President Francois Hollande has expressed “deep disapproval” over claims the US National Security Agency secretly tapped phone calls in France.

In a phone conversation with US President Barack Obama, he said this was “unacceptable between friends and allies”, demanding an explanation.

The White House said the claims “raise legitimate questions”, seeking to ease French concerns.

The NSA has recently spied on 70.3m phone calls in France, it is claimed.

Officials, businesses and terror suspects are believed to have been tracked in just 30 days between 10 December last year and 8 January 2013.

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Fresh Leak on US Spying: NSA Accessed Mexican President’s Email

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Photo Credit: SpiegelThe NSA has been systematically eavesdropping on the Mexican government for years. It hacked into the president’s public email account and gained deep insight into policymaking and the political system. The news is likely to hurt ties between the US and Mexico.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has a division for particularly difficult missions. Called “Tailored Access Operations” (TAO), this department devises special methods for special targets.

That category includes surveillance of neighboring Mexico, and in May 2010, the division reported its mission accomplished. A report classified as “top secret” said: “TAO successfully exploited a key mail server in the Mexican Presidencia domain within the Mexican Presidential network to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon’s public email account.”

According to the NSA, this email domain was also used by cabinet members, and contained “diplomatic, economic and leadership communications which continue to provide insight into Mexico’s political system and internal stability.” The president’s office, the NSA reported, was now “a lucrative source.”

This operation, dubbed “Flatliquid,” is described in a document leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, which SPIEGEL has now had the opportunity to analyze. The case is likely to cause further strain on relations between Mexico and the United States, which have been tense since Brazilian television network TV Globo revealed in September that the NSA monitored then-presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto and others around him in the summer of 2012. Peña Nieto, now Mexico’s president, summoned the US ambassador in the wake of that news, but confined his reaction to demanding an investigation into the matter.

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NSA Collects Millions of E-mail Address Books Globally

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Photo Credit: Social BIz SolutionsThe National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.

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