Damning Report from the Washington Post Proves that the NSA Really is Spying on Us!
By Onan Coca / 16 July 2015 / 14 Comments
For years, many of us conservatives who care about our Bill of Rights have been warning you that the war on terror was severely hurting our essential and God-given liberties. In return, we received many scoffing emails and rude messages about our tinfoil hats and other such nonsense. However, this past week the Washington Post reported on the latest bombshell leaks from the exiled Edward Snowden that have finally proven us correct.
In Snowden’s most recent release, he offers evidence that most of the people caught in the NSA’s net of surveillance are simple, innocent American citizens. In fact, more than 9 out of every 10 people caught up by the NSA were not the intended targets of the data collection! While the NSA was supposed to be focusing on possible terrorists operating internationally, a terrifyingly high proportion of the surveillance files “contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents.”
And it only gets worse from there…
From the Washington Post:
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless…
The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts…
Among the latter are medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.
image:
http://cdn1.eaglerising.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/nsa-spying2-e1377574768881-300x208.jpgnsa spying2Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops…
In Snowden’s view, the PRISM and Upstream programs have “crossed the line of proportionality.”
“Even if one could conceivably justify the initial, inadvertent interception of baby pictures and love letters of innocent bystanders,” he added, “their continued storage in government databases is both troubling and dangerous. Who knows how that information will be used in the future?”
Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic dug deeper into the Washington Post’s reporting to try and help readers make sense of what was really happening here.
The National Security Agency's defenders would have us believe that Snowden is a thief and a criminal at best, and perhaps a traitorous Russian spy. In their telling, the NSA carries out its mission lawfully, honorably, and without unduly compromising the privacy of innocents. For that reason, they regard Snowden's actions as a wrongheaded slur campaign premised on lies and exaggerations.
But their narrative now contradicts itself…
image:
http://cdn1.eaglerising.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/nSA-unchained-300x200.jpgnSA unchainedI never thought I'd see this day: The founder of Lawfare has finally declared that a national-security-state employee perpetrated a huge civil-liberties violation! Remember this if he ever again claims that NSA critics can't point to a single serious abuse at the agency. Wittes himself now says there's been a serious abuse…
The NSA collects and stores the full content of extremely sensitive photographs, emails, chat transcripts, and other documents belong to Americans, itself a violation of the Constitution—but even if you disagree that it's illegal, there's no disputing the fact that the NSA has been proven incapable of safeguarding that data. There is not the chance the data could leak at sometime in the future. It has already been taken and given to reporters. The necessary reform is clear. Unable to safeguard this sensitive data, the NSA shouldn't be allowed to collect and store it.
I concur with Friedersdorf’s assessment. What the NSA has done is unconstitutional (a simple reading of the 4th and 5th Amendment should be sufficient to understand this). Their decision to illegally vacuum up our private information and correspondence should be met with harsh (and swift) action. Instead, Republican and Democrat moderates have united to defend the illegal practice and have decided that the government’s power is more important than the people’s freedom.
We must respond. Tell these usurpers of liberty that our freedom is not theirs to infringe upon. Tell these immoral political vipers that they cannot take our freedom simply because they believe the government should have more power. They tell us that it is for our own safety, but the truth is that it is for their own political machinations. We must make it stop. If not for ourselves then for our children who deserve to know the beauty of living in a free society as a free people.
Read more at
http://eaglerising.com/21026/damning-report-from-the-washington-post-proves-that-the-nsa-really-is-spying-on-us/#QJgQEiihMqxWT8is.99
