That's far more important.

The secret laws, the secret courts, the LYING by administration officials. No doubt today's revelations are "limited hang-out."

But for too many, it's easier to fling poo at a true patriot, Edward Snowden. It's too difficult to face what this country has become.

Makes me frustrated.

Tell me again why there is nothing wrong with this. I keep forgetting the excuses.

rights; it's easy for us to come up with lame excuses that will be repeated as long as they're useful."

... and to protect us from the terrorists.

when they admit to taking an inch, they took at least a mile. They took more than this admission indicates.

meaningful control. The NSA has been in the forefront of the clampdown and there's no denying that the Constitution "is nothing but a piece of paper" to them.

The scary thing is that they are trying to roll this out as completely legal and dragging people into court/jail on the evidence they are vacuuming up.

Police state? Nah, couldn't happen here...

Unless everyone they do surveillance on "has nothing to hide", they probably have a lot of leverage on reducing oversight and expanding fisa warrants.

It seems safe to assume they don't care about the Constitution when it clashes with their vision of national security so I doubt they care much about blackmail laws if violation will expand their power (and thus improve national security in their mind). And, giving the media private details about candidates they don't approve of isn't even worth worrying about as a legal concern. If they haven't done it yet, they have at least put themselves in a position to influence our elections and get a president and congress they want.

they examine, then if their universe of primary subjects is big enough, they wind up analyzing *everyone's* data.

i don't know what mathematically 'big enough' would be, but it would be a much smaller subset than the entire universe. but nevertheless, it would lead to everyone being examined.

If done correctly should make the net wide enough to grab basically everyone.

Of course, this is just their justification- they're probably just grabbing it all and claiming they aren't. The Verizon warrant just said "everything."

So, the impact to American citizens HAS NOT changed, but let's speculate on what they COULD do. "For the sake of argument".

In other words, pretty much back to square one, but let's run with hair on fire speculation.

This whole hearing is about Americans.

we will get nowhere. Yeah the NSA is spying on you, listen to the snake oil salesmen on DU at your own peril. They work for the same people that NSA does. But of course everyone already knew that.

"Do you see a national security exemption in the Fourth Amendment? … We've abused the concept of rights in the name of national security."
Rep Ted Poe R-Tx

Nicely put Teddy my boy!

Cheers,
Agony

Enough is enough.

They really don't give a big rat's ass whether or not it is legal.

The purpose of which is not difficult to work out :-

The NSA's Mass Surveillance programs are extremely ineffective at stopping terrorist plots - see Boston.

They are VERY effective at building a surveillance dossier on EVERY American to suppress any future political dissent - see Stasi.


The terrorists and Islamic Extremists have known for many years that the US is monitoring and collecting all phone traffic.

In places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen the Islamists have switched to using walkie-talkies - NOT mobile phones.

If for any reason they do have to make a phone call about operations, like Bin Laden they will use a courier to make the call at least 100 miles away from their base of operations and be careful to avoid the code words that might alert the NSA.
Lists of code words the NSA monitors for, are widely available on the net.

Similarly the Islamic Extremists in America or Europe use anonymous Pay as You Go phones and change them every 2 or 3 months, to avoid detection and any history being collected by the NSA.

All of the Islamists know that all regular internet communications are being monitored - so they don't use them if they don't want the NSA to find out.
They use specialist sites that are not indexed by Google etc.

ALL of the data collection and phone monitoring performed by the NSA is totally ineffective against terrorists and Islamic Extremists. They already knew about the Mass Surveillance programs - at least from 2005/2006.

The only thing the NSA Mass Surveillance programs are effective for is to build a surveillance dossier on all LAW ABIDING citizens.
The NSA are collecting as much data on everyone as possible.
The purpose of which is for future blackmail and intimidation on political dissidents or people the government wants to control.

The NSA's Mass Surveillance programs are an existential threat to democracy in America.
Knowledge is power.
With knowledge they can blackmail a great number of people - politicians, judges, journalists, media pundits, business people etc.

Together with the other abuses of civil rights all the infrastructure is now in place for an authoritarian Fascist Police State in America.
Whether you think this President or some future President will use it as such is immaterial.

All law abiding citizens are also being monitored in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well - so it's a threat to democracy in those countries too.
These five countries all share the spy data collected with each other, to get around any privacy rules on spying on their own citizens.
The program is called Five Eyes.

Germany and France are also spying on their own law abiding citizens, but to a lesser extent.
NSA scandal - the Agency is out of control | James Bamford
http://dw.de/p/191FO

N.B. Organized criminals also know about all the Mass Surveillance programs too and will take steps to avoid them, so the authorities are not going to pick up anything useful on them either, by using dragnet surveillance programs.

John Roberts is the unaccountable chief justice of the surveillance state.
He appoints all of the FISA judges with no oversight from Congress

I had not heard of the Five Eyes program, thanks. I think it's a great example of how we can't believe anything they tell us. They can say they don't store content, only metadata, but they just have someone else store the content, and they use the metadata to decide which content to look at.

FISA is a joke, a rubber-stamp court, and nobody should believe that it is any real check on the rogue surveillance state. There is no such check, anywhere in the system. I think if we ever got to pull the curtain back far enough, we'd find out that the surveillance state and its benefactors are the people who really run this country, and many other countries, unelected and unaccountable to the population.

If you're new to DU and not just a new handle, welcome!

Former AF intelligence agent and whistleblower, Tice, has already said they are collecting and storing it all, including telephone, computer, and email content.

eom

Normalizing the surveillance state. I hope they don't succeed.

And I'm with you--I hope they fail miserably.