President Obama came out to publicly endorse PRISM because
it promotes public safety and protects of civil liberties.
Obama said that
this “modest encroachment on privacy . . . helps us prevent terrorist attacks.”
According to the president Americans must accept this
“trade-off” that creates balance between privacy and safety. He said: “Nobody
is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about. In
the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential
program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we’ve
struck the right balance. There are trade-offs involved.”
In defense of unnecessary government surveillance on all
Americans, Obama said: “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have
100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some
choices as a society.”
Simply put, Obama explained that
“if the intelligence community actually wants to listen to a phone call,
they’ve got to go back to a federal judge.”
Disclosure of the PRISM program in mainstream media has alerted the
general public to the fact that the US government has been collecting
information on US citizens for national security purposes over several
presidencies.
The revelation that the US government has been spying on all
Americans is nothing new.
McCarthy continues to explain: “Understand: the phone record
information at issue here is very different from the content of telephone
conversations. Because the latter involve higher privacy expectations, they are
heavily regulated under not only the Fourth Amendment but both Title III of the
federal penal code and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Under
these laws, the government is not permitted to access communications content
absent court authorization based on probable cause either that a crime has been
committed or that the surveillance target is an agent of a foreign power (such
as a terrorist organization or a hostile government).”
House Representative C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger stated that
PRISM has “thwarted” domestic terrorist plots going back several years.
House Representative Mike Rogers, chair of the House
Intelligence Committee (HIC) supports the use of spying on American citizens
through digital communications for the sake of discovering terroristic
activities.
Rogers said :
“I can tell you why this program is important, that within the last few years
this program was used to stop a terrorist attack in the United States. We know
that. It’s important. It fills in a little seam that we have, and it’s used to
make sure that there is not an international nexus to any terrorism event that
they may believe is ongoing in the United States.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence
Committee (SIC) explained that the surveillance program in question is reviewed
every 3 months and confirmed that it has been in place for many years.
Feinstein said: “Terrorists will come after us if they can,
and the only thing we have to deter this is good intelligence. It’s called
protecting America.”
When the surveillance program was uncloaked the SIC held a classified
meeting with national security officials to “debate about security and
freedom.”
Outraged ,
James Clapper, director of National Intelligence (NI) said: “The unauthorized
disclosure of a top secret US court document threatens potentially long-lasting
and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many
threats facing our nation.”
Clapper went on to say: “Information collected under this
program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence
information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety
of threats.”
Billions of cell phone calls are monitored by computer
software that searches for patterns to spot terrorists faster.
Acquiring phone records is necessary for this endeavor and
stop terror plots before they are enacted.
The mainstream media asserts that
the National Security Agency (NSA) “receives only numerical information, known
as metadata, about phone calls: the originating and receiving phone numbers,
calling-card numbers, the duration of a call and identifying information about
mobile phones.”
Josh Earnest, spokesman for the White House said: “The
information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the
name of any subscriber. It relates exclusively to call details, such as a
telephone number or the length of a telephone call.”
The NSA has a secret
court order to syphon telephone records from millions of Verizon US
customers.
In April of this year, the court order was allegedly issued
and will continue through July 19th. The order states that Verizon will
“ongoing” and on a “daily basis” hand over data on customers to the NSA that
pertain to calls made by US customers within the country and outbound calls to
other countries.
The order was initiated by an application provided by the
Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to have Verizon “produce” records to the
NSA “and continue production.”
Telephony metadata, which Verizon is ordered to give to the
NSA, is defined as “comprehensive communications routing information . . .
session identifying information, trunk identifier, telephone calling card
numbers and time and duration of call.”
Verizon is bound to secrecy as the order states: “It is
further ordered that no person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI
or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this Order.”
The Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) granted the order. FISA was
created in 1978 to “designate seven federal district court judges to review
applications for warrants related to national security investigations.”
Interestingly, “warrant applications under the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act are drafted by attorneys in the General Counsel’s
Office at the National Security Agency” because of the necessity of a judicial
warrant to “conduct national security related investigations.”
*Reposted from Occupy Corporatism with permission - Be sure to visit OccupyCorporatism for more of Suzanne Posel's writings and insights
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