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Sorry, Mr. Obama, The Constitution is Not Negotiable (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox News

In the United States, we are supposed to have a government that is limited with its parameters established by our Constitution. This notion that the federal government can monitor everyone’s phone data is a major departure from how Americans have traditionally viewed the role of government.

If this is acceptable practice, as the White House and many in both parties now say it is, then there are literally no constitutional protections that can be guaranteed anymore to citizens.

In the name of security, say our leaders, the Constitution has become negotiable. This is what the White House is saying when it defends the National Security Agency’s gathering of Verizon’s client data en masse, or what President Obama calls a “modest encroachment” on our rights, as he assures us that “Nobody is listening to your phone calls.”

Perhaps he can also assure us that nobody at the Internal Revenue Service is targeting political dissidents.

Perhaps he can assure us that nobody at the Justice Department is seizing reporters’ phone records.

Read more from this story HERE.

Journalist Behind NSA Story Calls out Flip-Flopping Liberal Media Now ‘Cheerleaders’ for Domestic Spying (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the recent stories about massive NSA spying, isn’t taking kindly to a number of liberal media types who appear suddenly and oddly sympathetic to our collective lack of privacy.

Greenwald told Business Insider that the likes of Time magazine’s Joe Klein and The New Yorker‘s Jeffrey Toobin, among others, have become NSA apologists for “principle-free, hackish, and opportunistic” reasons.

“I’m not surprised,” Greenwald said in an email to Business Insider. “I’ve been amazed and disappointed for a long time at how the most slavishly partisan media Democrats who pretended to care so much about these issues when doing so helped undermine George Bush are now the loudest apologists and cheerleaders for these very same policies.

“If they started a club called Liberal Pundits to Defend the National Security State, no auditorium in the country would be large enough to accommodate them.

“To call them principle-free, hackish, and opportunistic is to be overly generous.”

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Leaker Snowden Says He’s not Avoiding Justice

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Photo Credit: Reuters

The former CIA employee who leaked top-secret information about U.S. surveillance programs said in a new interview in Hong Kong on Wednesday that he is not attempting to hide from justice here but hopes to use the city as a base to reveal wrongdoing.

Edward Snowden dropped out of sight after checking out of a Hong Kong hotel on Monday. The South China Morning Post newspaper said it was able to locate and interview him on Wednesday. It provided brief excerpts from the interview on its website…

Asked about his choice of Hong Kong to leak the information, Snowden said, “People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality.”

The newspaper quoted him as saying that he had several opportunities to flee from Hong Kong, but that he “would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law.”

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Troops ‘Targeted’ by NSA for ‘Anti-Obama’ Views

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Photo Credit: WND

The NSA is systematically monitoring the Internet posts and telephone conversations of U.S. military returning from Afghanistan, according to a civil-liberties attorney.

“The FBI and the Secret Service are showing up to request an interview to question specific Internet posts the veteran has placed on websites such as Facebook,” explained attorney John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute.

Whitehead said the agencies are looking for “anti-Obama views that can be interpreted to reflect psychological problems of sufficient seriousness to disqualify the veteran from ever owning a firearm.”

Whitehead told WND credible sources within the National Security Agency have told him the NSA is downloading 1 trillion communications on the Internet per month, including posts to various websites, emails, instant message communications and texting messages.

As WND reported last week, Whitehead and the Rutherford Institute in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Richmond, Va., are representing Marine veteran Brandon Raub, 27, who was arrested by FBI and Secret Service agents for comments he made on Facebook expressing dissatisfaction with the present direction of the U.S. government.

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Sen. Rand Paul: We Fought a Revolution Over this Kind of Tyranny

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When Americans expressed outrage last week over the seizure and surveillance of Verizon’s client data by the National Security Agency, President Obama responded: “In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother . . . but when you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.”

How many records did the NSA seize from Verizon? Hundreds of millions. We are now learning about more potential mass data collections by the government from other communications and online companies. These are the “details,” and few Americans consider this approach “balanced,” though many rightly consider it Orwellian.

These activities violate the Fourth Amendment, which says warrants must be specific—”particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” And what is the government doing with these records? The president assures us that the government is simply monitoring the origin and length of phone calls, not eavesdropping on their contents. Is this administration seriously asking us to trust the same government that admittedly targets political dissidents through the Internal Revenue Service and journalists through the Justice Department?

…Monitoring the records of as many as a billion phone calls, as some news reports have suggested, is no modest invasion of privacy. It is an extraordinary invasion of privacy. We fought a revolution over issues like generalized warrants, where soldiers would go from house to house, searching anything they liked. Our lives are now so digitized that the government going from computer to computer or phone to phone is the modern equivalent of the same type of tyranny that our Founders rebelled against.

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Ted Cruz: Obama Targeting Enemies, Can’t be Trusted

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday decried the spread of unaccountable federal agencies like the IRS and National Security Agency caught prying into American lives, charging that President Obama’s promise that his administration isn’t snooping on citizens can’t be trusted.

What’s more, Cruz said that by spreading a broad net to include average Americans in its search for terrorists via the NSA, the administration missed catching actual U.S. enemies such as the Boston Marathon bombers and the Fort Hood, Texas killer.

“It may well be that the administration is focusing more energy on casting the net wide and invading the privacy of law abiding-Americans rather than targeting the bad guys, targeting actual terrorists,” Cruz said after addressing a Federalist Society conference focused on the expansion of the executive branch.

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Obama’s Hollywood Supporters Abandoning Him Over NSA’s Unconstitutional Surveillance

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been secretly logging the phone and Internet activity of millions of Americans has caused a rift between President Obama and several of his Hollywood supporters.

Actor and liberal activist John Cusack tweaked the administration, tweeting “Prism the name for electronic prison – all have to wear lojacks,” in reference to the PRISM data mining program revealed in leaks by former NSA employee Edward Snowden last week.

Cusack also re-tweeted “Obama is becoming the next Nixon.”

Prominent writer/director Judd Apatow of “Knocked Up” fame also took to Twitter to blast the administration: “What is this, North Korea? We are so inundated with so much info and so many problems – we have given up caring”…

Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore also hopped on the bandwagon, tweeting “the administration has now lost all credibility” while spotlighting a 2007 Obama quote: “that means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more (spying) on citizens… No more tracking citizens…”

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The Perfect Leak

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Photo Credit: AP

In his dealings with the media, Edward Snowden played his hand like a pro.

Snowden, 29, was looking to disclose top-secret information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs to the world — and to do so he arranged a powerful one-two combination punch with the press that provided both mainstream credibility (Barton Gellman and The Washington Post) and someone who shared his ideological inclinations (Glenn Greenwald), according to media observers and whistleblower experts.

As more and more agenda-driven outlets, reporters and bloggers hit the media scene, leakers such as Snowden find themselves with a wealth of potential options to get their information out. It’s a seismic shift from the old media landscape, when would-be leakers had only one clear path to ensuring widespread attention for their stories: a successful pitch to a handful of national newspapers or TV networks.

But the traditional national security media heavyweights — led by The New York Times and The Washington Post — still have outsize influence on stories about intelligence gathering and potential overreach by the government.

So at the end of the day, experts told POLITICO, Snowden found a way to pull off what was in effect the perfect leak. He established parallel tracks with the MSM — The Washington Post and The Guardian — and also found a member of the media who was sympathetic to his cause. Snowden’s material was given widespread exposure and credibility in the traditional press and at the same time had the hand of a friendly journalist on the wheel for at least part of the ride.

Read more from this story HERE.

Putin May Grant Asylum to NSA Leaker Snowden

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Russia would consider granting asylum to the American who has exposed top-secret U.S. surveillance programs, if he were to ask for it, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said on Tuesday.

Spokesman Dmitry Peskov stopped short of saying Moscow would accept Edward Snowden, but pro-Kremlin lawmakers spoke out in favor of the idea, tapping into a lingering Cold War rivalry with the United States and a vein of anti-American sentiment Putin has often encouraged.

“Promising Snowden asylum, Moscow takes upon itself the defense of people persecuted for political reasons,” Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the international affairs committee in the lower house of parliament, said on Twitter.

“There will be hysteria in the United States. They recognize this as their right alone,” he said.

Putin and other Russian officials have often accused the United States of hypocrisy, saying it tries to impose standards of human rights, freedom, and democracy on other nations while falling far short of them itself.

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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Lied to Congress about NSA Surveillance in March

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Photo Credit: AP

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is under fire for statements he made before Congress that suggested he had no knowledge about federal government programs that collected data on millions of Americans’ phone calls and Internet activities.

In March, Clapper said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that he was not aware that the National Security Agency was involved in such large-scale efforts.

The questioning of Clapper’s statements follow blockbuster news last week that the federal government has since 9/11 been logging millions, perhaps billions, of calls and Internet activities and as the NSA’s top official goes before the same Senate committee for a closed-door briefing on the issue.

“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Oregon Republican Sen. Ron Wyden asked Clapper at the March 12 hearing.
“No, sir,” Clapper responded.

Read more from this story HERE.