Under the 6-year-old program, code-named PRISM, the FBI and National Security Agency have searched for emails, videos, photographs and other documents.
The program's participants, the Washington Post reported, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley: Microsoft Corp, Yahoo Inc, Google Inc, Facebook Inc, PalTalk, AOL Inc, Skype, YouTube and Apple Inc.
Its stated purpose is to monitor potentially valuable foreign communications that might pass through US servers, but it appears that in range it was far greater.
PRISM information, according to the Post, accounts for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports. That's staggering.
The companies mentioned above (and who knows how many others) receive a
directive from the attorney general and the director of national
intelligence. They hand over access to their servers—and the tremendous
wealth of data and communiques that passes through them every day—to the
FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which in turn relays it to the
NSA.
It seems
impossible that the NSA, an agency which by law is only allowed to
monitor foreign communications, has so much access to domestic
information. And yet! There are,
as you might expect, filters in place to help handle the fire hose of
data that comes through daily, the trillions of bits and bytes that make
up our online identities and lives. Something to ensure that only the
bad guys are being tracked and not honest, everyday citizens. Actually,
there's one filter, and it's ridiculous: an NSA analyst has to have 51 % confidence that a subject is "foreign." After that, it's carte
blanche. Never mind nothing important to see here... move along! No it is very important and
dangerous! The problem is the data it does collect which according to many of these articles and news reports it collects video and audio chats, emails, photographs, connection logs and documents, Skype which can be monitored for audio, chats and file transfers. Included are Google Gmail, chat, photos / libraries, and live surveillance. This be more dangerous and aggressive than the Verizon phone scandal. Obama really losing it. He has no respect for the law and his tyranny
shows no limits. Will Obama use all this to stay in office in 2016?
Herald reporter Ryan Gallagher wrote that Raytheon had “secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and pred icting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites” like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.
Is this "Minority Report" of the future? Is this how the AC will be able to keep track of the world population?
There is specialized software for this.... The software is called RIOT, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGOgQzPMqe8
But why would all of these companies agree to this? Mostly because they have no choice. What does Obama hold over their heads ? They do receive compensation for their services; they're not doing this out of charity. There is incentive to play ball and the dollar speaks volumes.
There is a problem, Obama declared the war on terror is over. The National Journal reported that a senior State Department official has announced, “The war on terror is over.” The article itself describes the Obama administration’s new vision of foreign policy, which admits no enemies. Everyone, in this view, is a friend. Islamist , says the Obama administration, is just fine, so long as it does not openly support terrorism. This is just insanity a thousand times over! Al Qaeda is out there expanding globally and reorganizing and is stronger than ever. Islamism, “legitimate” or not, is deeply intolerant of any other modes of expression. Not only that, but Islamism works hand-in-glove with terror groups around the world. Islam and Democracy are totally incompatible. . It is a theocratic system with Allah alone at its head. Allah's law is interpreted by a ruling body of clerics. There is no room for a secular political system in which all people are treated as equals. The Qur'an has many verses supporting this.
Rush Limbaugh – America in the Midst of a Coup d’Etat
(Rush Limbaugh) – BEGIN TRANSCRIPT. RUSH: Late yesterday afternoon I was
sitting in the library at home, and I was just swamped. It seemed like
every 90 seconds somebody needed something, or somebody had a question
or somebody had a comment, requiring my response. It was during the
period of time that I generally devote to reading my tech blogs, you
know, where I abandon all of this and get away from it and start
spending time on, quote, unquote, my hobby.
But it was one of those days. I’m sure you have them. They may happen
every day, but if I had been watching a TV show I would have hit the
pause button every minute to deal with something. It would have taken me
two hours yesterday to watch a 40 minute program. So in the midst of
all of this, I hear about Prism. Not the NSA sweep of telephone records.
In fact, let me start before I heard about Prism. Even before I heard
about Prism, I am hearing from the intelligentsia in Washington that
there’s nothing to be really concerned about here with what we had
learned, the NSA demanding and getting every phone record from Verizon.
And, by the way, we now know T-Mobile and AT&T have been added to
it.
But the intelligent people were saying, “Nothing to see here. The
reaction is way overblown.” Those of us who think there’s something
worrisome here are overreacting and we’re too oriented in politics. And
the mature thinkers that weighed in and sound reason and levelheadedness
assured us that there was nothing to fear here because this was just
metadata, and in fact this is something we should all be thankful that
the government is able to do.
I have to tell you when I’m listening to all the smart people tell me
this, my mind is about to explode, and I’m saying, “Do these people not
realize what we just learned in the last three weeks?” We got the IRS
starting in 2010 taking action to suppress the political involvement and
ultimately votes of Tea Party people and conservative Republicans. This
regime, this government, on the orders of the highest level. In fact,
that investigation is ongoing. We have Fast and Furious. We have
Obamacare. The evidence of the totalitarian nature or the authoritarian
nature of this administration is on display undeniably every day and yet
in the midst of this, “Well, don’t go off half cocked on this, Rush. Be
very levelheaded. Nothing really to see,” as though there’s no context
here.
It made me once again understand, folks,
what you and I are up against here. There are just way too many people —
and I’m talking about on our side — who do not want to admit what we
face, who do not want to engage or admit or whatever what we really face
here. It matters. This kind of stuff matters because of who the people
doing it happen to be. It’s one thing if Colonel Sanders would be
collecting all this data, but it’s not Colonel Sanders. It’s Barack
Obama and everybody that works for him, and we know who they are and we
know what their goals are. We know what their intentions are.
Folks, here’s the thing, I guess, that
gets me. I mentioned Herbert Meyer. We interviewed him for the Limbaugh
Letter a few short months ago. Herbert Meyer was in the national
security apparatus during the Reagan administration. He was a good
friend of Ronald Reagan, and was instrumental in establishing Reagan
administration policies that brought down the Soviet Union. The big news
to him that’s really noteworthy, we talked about it, is that he thinks
that the world’s coming out of poverty. And it is a big story, The
Economist in London had a big story on it recently. We mentioned it to
you, and it’s a great testament to capitalism.
It’s not socialism, it’s not welfare,
it’s not compassion and it’s not the redistribution of wealth. It’s not
high taxes that are bringing people out of poverty. It’s capitalism, and
none other than a leftist publication in London had to admit it. Well,
Herb Meyer was the first to sound this notice some months ago. I also
mentioned he wrote a piece that currently is in the American Thinker
earlier this week, and it had the potential to be controversial because
he used Adolf Hitler and Nazism in it, and it was his way of explaining,
he made a point in the piece that nowhere, you know, people looking for
a smoking gun to nail Obama on all these scandals, Herb says, “Ain’t
gonna be one.”
He said whether you believe it or not,
there is not one document linking Adolf Hitler to the holocaust. Adolf
Hitler never put it on paper what he intended to do. There is no smoking
gun. And yet what happened? We know that the Nazis engaged in the
Holocaust. Herb Meyer’s point was that the people Hitler hired didn’t
have to be told. They didn’t have to be given instructions. All they had
to do was listen to what Hitler was saying. All they had to do was
listen to what his objectives were. And he said the same thing’s
happening here with this administration. He went to great pains to say:
I’m not calling this administration a bunch of Nazis. I’m just using
this as an illustration. I know people will get my point if I use
something this notorious, the Nazi regime.
It’s a point that I’ve made here about
the IRS. They say, “Well, you can’t link it in to Obama.” You don’t need
to link Obama to it. He hired these people. Lois Lerner and everybody
at the IRS who’s doing this is doing everything they can to please
Obama. There’s not gonna be a smoking gun, but you don’t need a smoking
gun to know where this administration’s doing what it’s doing.
Obama puts people in positions that
mirror him. Eric Holder, you name it, they’re doing Obama’s bidding.
Everybody. Susan Rice and Samantha Power, they are Obama, and there’s a
context for what’s happening. Herbert Meyer, if I may quote him again,
asserted that essentially what’s taking place in the United States right
now is a coup, not a violent coup, and not a million artistic coup, but
nevertheless a takeover of a government, and it’s being done by the
Obama administration.
He referred to it as a coup. I don’t
know if he used the word “peaceful,” but clearly there’s a coup d’etat
going. You know it and I know it. This is what animates us. This is why
the Tea Party exists. This country was founded on certain concepts,
principles, beliefs — and they’re under assault. Chief among them under
assault is the right to privacy, and that’s what all this is about. So
in the midst of this coup d’etat… I happen to like that formulation.
In seeking ways to persuade, for
example, the low-information voters of what’s going on, this happens.
These are the people continuing to prop Obama up with high approval
numbers. The Limbaugh Theorem. How do we reach ‘em? How do we tell them?
How do we explain what’s going on when they have, perhaps, almost an
idolatrous relationship with the president? Well, maybe you tell ‘em
there’s a coup going on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-isKhdB9jYo&feature=player_embedded
There are people attempting to take over
this country and to make it something that it wasn’t founded as; turn
it into something that it wasn’t intended to be. That is happening. You
know it and I know it. It’s peaceful, nonviolent. The military isn’t
involved. But nevertheless it’s a coup. So in the context of that and
the realization that’s happening, in the midst of learning that the
National Security Agency is literally “Hoovering,” vacuuming every
telephone record they can, what do we hear?
“Nothing to see here, Rush. Calm down!
Slow down, Rush. This is nothing to get concerned about. There’s nothing
illegal here. The Fourth Amendment’s not being violated or breached.
This is nothing whatsoever to get concerned about.” How can I…? (sigh) I
don’t know how people can look at this in context and say that. The
people doing this are what make it a big deal. Their motives and their
intentions and their clear assault on the whole notion of privacy make
it interesting.
I’m sorry for the long detour there, but
in the midst of being told that I need to be more levelheaded — and not
just me, but all of us who are a little bit concerned here about this
Verizon story. We are all being told, “Back off, back off. Nothing to
see here. We’re not really, really concerned.” It was in the midst of
that that I heard about Prism. That was a Washington Post story that
posted on their website around five or six o’clock yesterday afternoon.
The basic tenet of this story is that
somebody in the intelligence community — NSA, somewhere — is so
concerned over what he’s seeing take place that he went to the
Washington Post and took with him a little PowerPoint slide presentation
and gave it to the Post and their reporters, and they wrote a story up
and put it on their website. The story is that practically every major
tech group and company in this country is participating with the
government in allowing the government access to their servers.
E-mails, texts, phone calls,
photographs. Virtually any communication that’s taking place via the
Apple servers, the Microsoft servers, the Google servers, the NSA is
able to look at in real time. This is the story now. The guy that went
to the Washington Post said, “It was so scary. They can watch us as we
type.” The Washington Post published some of the PowerPoint slides. I’m
reading this after being told that the Verizon thing is no big deal.
“It’s nothing to get concerned about.
“Nothing to see here. Don’t get too
worried about that. Don’t go off half cocked!” Here comes the Prism
story, and then shortly after the Prism story hits, all of these tech
firms start denying it. Apple says, “I never heard of Prism. We don’t
know what this is about. We never let anybody have access to our servers
without a warrant, without a court order. We never!” Google said the
same thing. Microsoft said the same thing. Facebook said the same thing.
They’re all out there denying it. So I
thought, “Did the Washington Post get set up?” I’m asking myself, “Did
they get set up by somebody walking in and telling them something that
wasn’t true?” But then I saw that Prism reported someplace else by this
Glenn Greenwald guy at the UK Guardian. So there were two sources for
the Prism story, but the tech firms involved continue to deny it. “Nope,
it’s not happening.” Now we’ve got audio sound bites.
These guys from the tech firms like
Greenwald and some of these others, are blaming Bush for all of this,
still. Today! Still today, all of this is the fault of Bush. Bush is the
guy that got this ball rolling. So there must be something to it if the
left is circling the wagons around Obama and trying to make all of us
think that all of this is the fault of George W. Bush. I just gotta tell
you something, folks. Richard Nixon never even dreamed of this kind of
stuff, and yet most people in this country think that Nixon did 10 times
as bad as what’s happening now.
The fact is, Nixon never dreamed of this.
Whatever he wanted to cook up, he never
even came up with this. So there is clearly — somewhere, somehow, in
some form or another — a coup taking place, and there is an assault on
privacy, and there are assaults on people because of their politics and
their ideology. It is taking place; it’s undeniable. Yet many of the
people we would hope would be pushing back against this and doing their
best to join us and warning everybody say, “Nothing to see here! Don’t
get all crazy about this. We must be level headed.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So Obama’s in California. Why?
Fundraising. He’s also got a meeting with the Chinese communist premier,
but it’s fundraising. That’s why they go to California. Anyway, he got
out there to speak. There was no prompter, and he didn’t have any notes,
and he just stood there. He didn’t know what to do. Honestly, folks.
Forty-eight seconds or something. Nothing happened. He finally shouted,
“People!” and somebody on his staff brought him his notes. He was
clueless.
Now, a lot of people yesterday who were
saying, “Rush, Rush, don’t get all upset about this. There’s nothing to
see here in this NSA business and Verizon. Nothing’s going on.” Look,
one of the accusations was that people are just getting upset because it
was Obama and just trusting Obama, and it’s not reasonable enough to
get concerned about this. My point is, speaking about you and me, we’re
not all stupid out here.
We’re not all stupid about this and this
is not simply because we don’t trust Obama. I don’t want my government
doing this. I do not want my government preoccupied with paying this
close attention to what every citizen is doing every minute of the day.
This government’s already too big, it’s too damn powerful, and it’s too
unforgiving — and this doesn’t have anything to do with competent
intelligence gathering. Throwing wide nets like this is BS. It’s
assuming way too much to think that this is not a big deal. Left-wing
overreaction, my backside.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There was a time when the United
States government earned the trust of its people. There was a time when
most people believed that the United States government was protecting
them. There was a time when most people believed that the United States
government was spying on the bad guys, that the United States government
was in fact earning the trust of the people. But this current data
collection, scanning, whatever you want to call it, unfortunately has to
be judged in context: the IRS leaks, the now unquestionable,
undeniable, admitted-to-it IRS tactic of suppressing the vote of Tea
Party conservatives, denying them their First Amendment rights.
The regime and its tricks with the
Associated Press and Fox reporter James Rosen, the Benghazi cover-ups,
the Fast and Furious operation, suing the state of Arizona for simply
endorsing essentially federal immigration law. You can’t just try to be
the smartest guy in the room and say, “Well, we must be levelheaded
about this and understand that this is just metadata.” We cannot take
the motives and intelligence guided by experience watching this
administration over the last four-and-a-half, five years, and what their
express purpose is.
I was reminded this morning, we had a
sound bite of Maxine Waters back on February 3rd of this year. She was
on a TV show, some network, TV One. It was a show hosted by Roland
Martin, who used to be, may still be, a personality at CNN. He was
interviewing Maxine Waters, and every time she speaks, you know, we have
a good laugh about it because clearly she’s insane. And we nevertheless
will play the sound bites. Her natural existence is such that she gives
away the game. She will give away what the administration’s all about.
She will give away the fact that they want to nationalize all these
companies. And she did it again on this Washington Watch with Roland
Martin show back on February 3rd of 2013. He said to her, “The reality
is like anything else: You’d better get what you can while he’s there,
because, look, come 2016, that’s it.”
WATERS: Well, you know, I don’t know,
and I think some people are missing something here. The president has
put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no
one has ever seen before in life. That’s going to be very, very
powerful. That database will have information about everything on every
individual in ways that it’s never been done before.
RUSH: See, she gives it up. Now, I
remember playing that sound bite, and we made a big deal about it at the
website, Rush 24/7, and we thought, “Well, it’s just Maxine being
Maxine.” But in this case now going back, looking at it in hindsight,
what in the world was she talking about? At the time we thought she was
talking about all of his high-tech campaign advancements. But maybe she
wasn’t.
I’ll tell you, the New York Times
yesterday, this was kind of funny, too, the New York Times decided it
was time to get really mad. They wrote an editorial really ripping into
Obama over this. They called it: President Obama’s Dragnet. The editors
at the New York Times were hopping mad, or at least they’re pretending
to be. And they really got carried away. They had to change their
original editorial. They reissued it. The original editorial said: “the
administration has now lost all credibility.” They changed that in their
second issuance to: “the administration has now lost all credibility on
this issue.” But the point is they were right the first time. I don’t
know, maybe they don’t want shock their readers with so much truth. But
they went so far as to say at the New York Times, “Mr. Obama is proving
the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and
very likely abuse it.”
Now, keep in mind this was written by
people who are the loudest proponents of the expansion of government.
These are people who don’t believe the government can possibly get too
big. It’s not possible for it to get too big. It’s not possible for the
government to get too powerful. It’s not possible. And yet they are
worried at the New York Times about what is happening to it under the
guidance of the presidency and Mr. Obama. What everybody knows and
nobody wants to really come to grips with is that we are in the midst of
a coup taking place.
Now, I know what’s gonna happen. The
people on the other side of the glass, “Will you dial that coup talk
back? That’s all the headlines are gonna be.” I don’t care. In fact,
it’s almost on par with, “I hope he fails.” How does that sound now, by
the way, “I hope he fails”? I’m constantly looking for ways here to
persuade people of what I passionately believe, and I’m not in it to lie
to anybody. There’s nothing to be gained by lying to you about what I
really think. There’s nothing to be gained here by lying about facts.
There’s nothing to be gained here by gaining ground under false
pretense.
So if the Constitution exists as it is,
the country was founded as it was, and an administration comes along and
doesn’t like that and is doing everything it can to overturn that
Constitution without a convention, doing everything it can to change
direction of this country, and what’s the word, transform it, what’s
wrong with calling this a coup? “Mr. Limbaugh, a coup is when rebels
join forces with the military and start launching military attacks and
shooting people.” No, no, no. Not always. And that’s my point.
When I was a kid, my dad kept saying,
“Son, if things don’t change, the Soviets are gonna take over this
country without firing a shot.” What he was talking about was a coup.
Anyway, folks, there’s a lot here to be concerned about. And you know it
as well as I do. I get a little perplexed when people that I think see
the world as I do and are, in my opinion, on my side, want to come along
for reasons I can’t fathom to excuse things that need not be excused.
Now, Obama went out there today, he’s in Palm Springs, and he addressed
this NSA story. He defended the spy programs as legitimate because
Congress has been consistently informed about ‘em. He didn’t get mad,
but he sort of complained about all the hype over the phone data
gathering, because it’s approved by the FISA court. It’s approved by the
Congress.
He said (paraphrasing), “Nobody’s
listening to your phone calls. They’re looking at megadata,” he meant
metadata, “and tracking terrorists. Nobody’s listening to content.
Modest encroachments on privacy are worth doing. We’re gonna have to
make some choices as a society. You can’t have 100% security and have
100% privacy.” This is what he said today out in Palm Springs. This is
the guy, don’t forget, who got elected convincing people that this kind
of stuff was never gonna happen anywhere. This is the guy who got
elected mischaracterizing the kind of intelligence gathering that was
ongoing with the Bush administration.
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. This is a guy who got elected telling us
in 2007, 2008 that what’s going on now was going on then. Bush was doing
this, identical stuff, that’s what they’re trying to tell us, even now.
He got elected warning us that what’s happening now was happening in
2007, 2008, and promising us, this was not gonna happen. And everything
that was happening in 2007 has only grown. There’s only more of it. It’s
more sweeping than it’s ever been.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Have we already forgotten what
this regime has done to the donors to the Mitt Romney campaign, all of
the IRS harassment and audits and attention paid them by the EPA, if
necessary? This is clearly an administration that wants to identify its
enemies and then take action against them somehow, to intimidate them or
what have you. You can’t take that context out. The Wall Street Journal
has a story here about PRISM. You know, PRISM is a code name, too.
So when these companies like Microsoft
and Google and Apple say, “Oh, well, we never heard of it.” Well, they
may not have heard of it. It may be called something else, and they say,
“Well, we don’t let anybody have access for our servers without court
orders.” Well, maybe there have been court orders. If there is a program
like this going on, a part of it would have to be that the companies
involved would have to be able to deny it. They could not talk about it.
Put it this way: They were sworn to
secrecy. They could not broadcast their involvement in it because it’s
taking place under the guise of national security. Do you realize what a
vacuum cleaner that is? I mean, they can Hoover up everything they want
under the guise of national security. Anyway, the Wall Street Journal:
“US Collects Vast Data Trove — NSA monitoring includes three phone
companies as well as online activity,” and then there’s this:
“The National Security Agency’s
monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major
phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also
has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the
agency’s activities.” Now, would anybody who thought maybe the phone
company sweep wasn’t any big deal, maybe want to say that cataloging
credit card transactions might be news?
I’m just asking.
END TRANSCRIPThttp://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/06/07/america_in_the_midst_of_a_coup_d_etat
No comments:
Post a Comment