Former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas praised NSA leaker Edward Snowden for his part in exposing how much information the government has been collecting from private citizens.
“We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk,” Paul said in a statement posted on the website of Campaign for Liberty, a nonprofit political organization which focuses on educating about constitutional issues, which he chairs. “They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.”
Edward Joseph Snowden, 29, knew full well the risks he had undertaken and the awesome powers that would soon be arrayed to hunt for him… Snowden was spilling some of the most sensitive secrets of a surveillance apparatus he had grown to detest. By late last month, he believed he was already “on the X” — exposure imminent.
“I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end,” he wrote in early May, before we had our first direct contact. He warned that even journalists who pursued his story were at risk until they published.
The U.S. intelligence community, he wrote, “will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information”…
I asked him, at the risk of estrangement, how he could justify exposing intelligence methods that might benefit U.S. adversaries.
“Perhaps I am naive,” he replied, “but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.” The steady expansion of surveillance powers, he wrote, is “such a direct threat to democratic governance that I have risked my life and family for it.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-10 03:07:012013-06-10 03:07:01Snowden: US Intelligence Would Have Killed to Stop Me; Greatest Danger to Freedom is our Omniscient State (+video)
As reports continue to flood in about President Obama’s massive surveillance state, media powerhouse Glenn Beck says, “There wouldn’t be a Jew alive on the planet today if Hitler had this technology.”
Binney worked at the National Security Agency for nearly four decades, and said the secret surveillance of Americans began in October 2001.
He believes the NSA is storing information on 3 billion phone calls every day.
“I’m telling you, America,” Beck cautioned, “If we don’t stop this right now, we will be remembered as the most evil nation in history of the world. We will dwarf what Germany did. And I’d say that if Mitt Romney were in office and this were happening. I would be saying exactly the same thing.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-10 03:03:022013-06-10 03:03:02Beck: If We Don’t Stop this Right Now, US Will Become the Most Evil Nation the World has Ever Known
Paul Krugman, an outspoken liberal economist known for his support of the Obama administration, today said the United States has become an ‘authoritarian surveillance state.’
Part of a panel on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Krugman offered his take on the bombshell NSA spying revelations:
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-10 02:54:142013-06-10 02:54:14Liberal Pundit: U.S. Has Become an ‘Authoritarian Surveillance State’ (+video)
Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday he wants to mount a Supreme Court challenge to the federal government logging Americans’ phone calls and Internet activities.
Paul, R-Ky., a leading voice in the Libertarian movement, told “Fox News Sunday” he wants to get enough signatures to file a class-action lawsuit before the high court and will appeal to younger Americans, who appear to be advancing the cause of less government and civil liberties.
“I’m going to be asking all the Internet providers and all of the phone companies: Ask your customers to join me in a class-action lawsuit,” he said. “If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then maybe someone will wake up and something will change in Washington.”
Paul, a first-term senator and potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, said he disagrees with President Obama’s argument that the National Security Agency collecting 3 billion calls daily and other information is a modest invasion of privacy.
“That doesn’t look like a modest invasion of privacy,” he told Fox. “I have no problem if you have probable cause … but we’re talking about trolling through a billion phone records a day.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-10 02:41:162013-06-10 02:41:16Paul Wants to Lead Supreme Court Challenge to Fed’s Tracking of Americans’ Calls, Emails (+video)
WND has received an unclassified NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) that warns airmen not to look at news stories related to the data-mining scandal.
The notice applies to users of the Air Force NIPRNET (Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network), which is the only way that many troops stationed overseas and on bases in the U.S. are able to access the Internet.
The last line of the executive summary states:
“Users are not to use AF NIPRNET systems to access the Verizon phone records collection and other related news stories because the action could constitute a Classified Message Incident.”
Cindy McGee, the mother of an airman stationed in the UAE, spoke with WND.
“The fact that our government is attempting to censor our service members from the truth of what is happening here at home is truly frightening and disheartening,” said McGee.
By Fox News. The Obama administration has taken a first step toward opening a criminal investigation into the purported leaking of classified documents related to the federal government tracking Americans’ phone calls and emails, a source familiar with the high-level discussions told Fox News on Saturday.
The source said a “criminal report has been filed,” which begins the process.
The FBI and Justice Department would likely be involved in such a probe, which is expected to focus on British and U.S. newspapers including The Guardian. The British newspaper reported late Wednesday that the U.S. government had collected the phone records of millions of Verizon customers.
On Saturday, White House spokesman Ben Rhodes said the president is reviewing the situation to see what kind of damage might have been done.
“We’re still in early stages,” he said. However, Rhodes acknowledge the Justice Department would have to be involved and that the agency will discuss the matter with intelligence officials in the coming days.
Officials: NSA mistakenly intercepted emails, phone calls of innocent Americans
By Michael Isikoff. The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.
At least some of the phone calls and emails were pulled from among the hundreds of millions stored by telecommunications companies as part of an NSA surveillance program. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Thursday night publicly acknowledged what he called “a sensitive intelligence collection program” after its existence was disclosed by the Guardian newspaper.
Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama’s DNI in 2009 and 2010, told NBC News that, in one instance in 2009, analysts entered a phone number into agency computers and “put one digit wrong,” and mined a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter was reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose judges required that all the data be destroyed, he said.
Another former senior official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed Blair’s recollection and said the incident created serious problems for the Justice Department, which represents the NSA before the federal judges on the secret court.
The judges “were really upset about this,” said the former official. As a result, Attorney General Eric Holder pledged to the judges that the intelligence agencies would take steps to correct the problem as a condition of renewing the NSA’s surveillance program. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-08 23:35:442013-06-08 23:35:44Obama Admin. Takes First Steps to Retaliate Against Leaker of Phone Surveillance Program (+video)
Fox’s Neil Cavuto confronted Democratic strategist Julian Epstein with mounting evidence of the Obama administration’s wholesale disregard of the Fourth Amendment. He suggested that the near-daily disclosures of the White House’s surveillance of US citizens amounted to a pattern:
“You see one incident after another that comes up. It all comes back to the same basic issue: privacy invaded or potentially invaded. Institutions of all sorts doing the same thing. There is a pattern.”
Epstein insisted on playing politics with the issue, suggesting that the surveillance had no direct connections to White House: “If you want to conflate and combine the issues and make the general statements you can do that. I don’t think it’s a thoughtful way to approach it.”
Cavuto retorted: “Think about what I said. Julian, don’t play the politics thing. I’m telling you, drop the liberal thing and focus on the reality thing. You have one entity after another going after American people. You have one system of government, one agency, one department after another essentially doing the same thing. You can call that conflating. I am telling you there is a pattern.”
Epstein reiterated, “You can’t conflate all these issues, you have to speak about them differently. In the case of the IRS, I agree the targeting is wrong, but there was never any connection to the White House. Nobody has proven that.”
Right before cutting off his microphone, Cavuto responded, “I’m not going to get anywhere arguing this point You are saying nothing and it’s offensive. It’s annoying how obnoxious you can be on reality.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-08 23:34:402013-06-08 23:34:40Neil Cavuto Goes Off on the Surveillance State, Shuts Down Mic of Obama Defender (+video)
Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers, two government officials familiar with the arrangements said.
Several of the companies have provided records continuously since 2006, while others have given the agency sporadic access, these officials said. These officials disclosed the number of participating companies in order to provide context for a series of disclosures about the NSA’s domestic collection policies. The officials, contacted independently, repeatedly said that “domestic collection” does not mean that the target is based in the U.S. or is a U.S. citizen; rather, it refers only to the origin of the data.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that U.S. credit card companies had also provided customer information. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies because, they said, doing so would provide U.S. enemies with a list of companies to avoid. They declined to confirm the list of participants in an internet monitoring program revealed by the Washington Post and the Guardian, but both confirmed that the program existed.
“The idea is to create a mosaic. We get a tip. We vet it. Then we mine the data for intelligence,” one of the officials said.
In a statement, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that programs collect communications “pursuant to section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, ” and “cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S person, or anyone within the United States.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-08 23:24:092013-06-08 23:24:09Sources Now Confirm NSA is Gathering Information About Americans from 50 Phone, Credit and Internet Companies
This week’s revelations about the federal government collecting massive amounts of communication data on American citizens has the country’s most-listened-to radio voice saying President Barack Obama is leading a coup against the nation.
“What everybody knows and what nobody wants to come to grips with is we are in the midst of a coup taking place,” talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said Friday afternoon. “It’s almost on a par with [when I said] ‘I hope he fails.’ How does that sound now, by the way?”
“What’s wrong with calling this a coup?” he continued. “There’s a lot here to be concerned about.”
“This is the guy, don’t forget, convincing people that this kind of stuff was never going to happen here. … This is the guy who got elected president by telling us that what is happening now was never going to happen when he was president. … He got elected warning us that what was happening now was happening in 2008. … [Now] it’s more sweeping than it’s ever been.”
He pointed out that information gathering has already been used to target political supporters of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 election cycle.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-08 02:56:492013-06-08 02:56:49Limbaugh: ‘We are in the Midst of a Coup’
Edward Joseph Snowden, 29, knew full well the risks he had undertaken and the awesome powers that would soon be arrayed to hunt for him… Snowden was spilling some of the most sensitive secrets of a surveillance apparatus he had grown to detest. By late last month, he believed he was already “on the X” — exposure imminent.
As reports continue to flood in about President Obama’s massive surveillance state, media powerhouse Glenn Beck says, “There wouldn’t be a Jew alive on the planet today if Hitler had this technology.”
