Tag Archives: nsa
Lindsey Graham ♥’s Justin Amash
Every libertarian and blogger’s favorite Senator, Lindsey Graham, is back with another memorable tweet that should be chronicled the annals of his greatest misses. Graham, who isn’t sure bloggers have First Amendment protection, and who thinks free speech is a great idea, except that we’re in a war and you can’t have free speech in war, tweeted the following about the Amash Amendment:
Good read in today’s WSJ Editorial about problems with the Smith-Amash NDAA Amendment in the House of Reps. http://t.co/4dbSTQNz
The Wall Street Journal, standing as it does for unrestrained liberty for big banks, takes issue with the Tea Party Terror Flakeout (that’s the actual title of the editorial), arguing that it gives political cover to the ACLU. Well, it also stands for a reinvigorated and meaningful Fourth Amendment limitation on government power. The Journal, and its sycophant Senator Lindsey Graham, seek to undermine any notion that the NSA’s spying was illegal, unconstitutional, or unnecessary. No, no, no…our Founders would have chosen security over liberty, which is why they didn’t revolt against the Crown…oh, wait.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Gets a Tea Party Primary
Good start.
Freedomworks President and CEO Matt Kibbe is known for saying “sometimes you have to beat the republicans before you beat the democrats.” Truer words have never been spoken.
Since John Boehner’s close call, nearly losing his speakership after a revolt by a number of Tea Party affiliated Congressmen, I’ve been hoping that Liberty minded grassroots challengers would emerge for key Republican “leaders”.
Today Mitch McConnell got just such a challenge from Matt Bevin, a self-made multimillionaire businessman and Tea Party Activist.
Dick Cheney, Pre-9/11 NSA Spying, and Retaliation
“Now, as everybody has been associated with the program said if we had this before 9/11, when there were two terrorists in San Diego, two hijackers able to use that program, that capability against the target, we might have been able to prevent 9/11. If we had been able to read their mail and intercept those communications and pick up from the calls overseas the numbers here that they were using in the United States, we would than probably have been able to thwart that attack.”
Truth Up: NSA Edition
It’s your daily re-truthing, and today we’re focused on the ever-evolving NSA spying stories. The First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles has joined forces with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Human Rights Watch, People for the American Way, and other organizations to sue the NSA for violating their First Amendment right of association by illegally collecting their phone records. Represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the plaintiffs are suing the NSA over its bulk telephone records collection program, the same program that the New York Times characterized as criminal.
Revelations continue to come about the NSA’s spying programs, particularly the existence of an NSA program named FAIRVIEW, which is an “upstream” program designed to collect information before it even reaches the Internet. According to NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, FAIRVIEW is intended to “own the Internet.” FAIRVIEW, according to Drake, is “just a name, that at the highest level means to own the Internet” by enabling the NSA to tap fiber optic cables to access information securely before it even reaches the Internet.
Truthing Up: News from Around the Web
Welcome to Truthing Up, your re-truthing stop for the truth of government overreach, abuse, and civil liberties violations from around the web. Truth Up will be a regular feature here on Liberty Pulse, and a reliable means for you to get an overview of the government’s advances against your liberties and your bottom line.
Zero Hedge has detailed the NSA’s efforts to include its code into Google’s Android OS, which runs three-quarters of the world’s smartphones. The code, which has been christened Security Enhancements for Android, was created by the NSA to prevent hackers and marketers from gaining access to personal or corporate data on a smartphone. Agency spokesman Vanee Vines outlined the NSA’s plans to include the code on every device that runs Android, from phones, tablets, televisions, cars, and other devices. Vines would neither confirm nor deny the code’s role in the NSA’s PRISM program.
They Know You’re Reading This!
“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or even your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal e-mail,” Snowden said, revealing himself to be the source of recent leaks exposing the extent of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program.
Snowden has been employed by the NSA and the CIA. More recently, as an employee of a corporation that contracted with the CIA, he has had “privileged access” to information that these law enforcement agencies have culled from e-mails, mobile phones, and other technologies. During his career, he found that the NSA’s mission was to gather any information – including domestic communications – that it could.
Snowden proved what many believers in liberty already knew: that if government is unchecked, it will continue to grab more and more power for itself. Knowledge, after all, is power. That includes the knowledge of which websites you have visited, who you call regularly, and what you told your friends in an e-mail. The NSA “is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible,” said Snowden; and while that used to be “narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas,” that has changed.
