Am I the only person who knows that the government has been doing this for decades, since the advent of mass communications?

Snail mail opened from overseas when immigrant families corresponded with relatives in other countries. Hubby's mother, who was from Egypt, would get letters from there that had been opened, in the 60's (and probably before, but he was born in '59)

Ham radio. CB radio. Phones, especially overseas calls. I know that operators could listen in since my Grandmother was one. No reason to think the government didn't plant agents to do just that.

The military has done this forever with communications from troops.

What I'm getting at is the outrage surprises me. The only difference is the internet and cell phones now, but it's happened for a long time. There is no way in hell that they have enough people to scrutinize every call, tweet or FB post. They most likely have a program or programs that search for key words and then have a few people who look at those more closely. I really don't think they are checking whether you are "single and looking" or "in a relationship" unless your relationship is with someone on a watch list somewhere, lol.

Please explain to me what it's such a big deal now, but wasn't then. I am truly puzzled.

It was a big deal then too. When you are in the military, you give up your privacy to the government. But here at home, we have always valued our freedom, until the Patriot Act was adopted.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and ... lenty-hide

I wouldn't put the word "spying" in quotation marks in the thread title, as that implies that it is not true spying, just a facsimile of spying. I would take out those quotation marks and call it what it is: SPYING!

This is a very troubling development. It is a violation of the 4th Amendment which protects citizens from unreasonable searches.

The government's spying on everyone -- including people who are not suspected of having committed a crime nor of being a security risk -- is obscene and a real threat to our freedom and liberty.

When Obama ran for President the first time, he said he was opposed to Bush's policies of eavesdropping on telephone calls and would end the practice. Instead, Obama expanded the practice.

Even the liberal Huffington Post has been extremely critical of Obama for this. They had a front page cartoon that showed a morphed George W. Bush and Barack Obama:

I just posted a long [and, in my view, excellent] commentary in our Something else I don't understand thread ~ as I'm guessing every prez learns, governing requires personal mindset adjustments to fit each scenario ~ but let's get real ~ data-mining is a fact of life today ~ from our internet habits to our credit cards to our grocery-store "club discount" cards ~ this specific data-mining exercise just might save untold numbers of lives ~

Sooz

Google knows more about you than the NSA under the current practice to collect phone numbers ever will.

Exactly, Jab ~ as does Facebook and your local grocery store ~

Sooz

i am pretty upset by all of this. esp the PRISM program. that is all i am going to say for now.

Dang it, lol. I WAS going to stay in the other thread, but you just lured me in here again. Hopefully, these are true statements.

Is the U.S. government tracking Internet users? What Apple, Facebook, Google have to say

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/is-the-u ... z2VdpDH37H


After it was revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency and the FBI secretly scour Internet usage data, several tech companies were asked to respond to questions about whether they participate and hand over information.

Here is what some of the reportedly involved companies had to say:

Apple

"We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order."

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told Bloomberg

AOL

"We do not have any knowledge of the Prism program. We do not disclose user information to government agencies without a court order, subpoena or formal legal process, nor do we provide any government agency with access to our servers."

AOL statement provided to The Next Web

Facebook

"When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."

Facebook's chief security officer told The Guardian

Google

"First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers....Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process."

Part of a statement by Google CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond

Microsoft

"We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it."

Statement posted by Microsoft Corporation on Customer Privacy

Yahoo!

"We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network."

Statement from Yahoo provided to Mashable

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/is-the-u ... z2Vdp63wGB

There is much more I'd like to say, but have a hard time articulating it, so I will just say this:

The Reps/Tparty/conservatives have looked high and low for an Obama scandal. They finally hit on one that they knew would stir up Dems/liberals. I am quite puzzled at the amount of anger coming from the left, to be honest. From the many posts/articles and tweets that I've read, the liberals are fast becoming the conspiracy theorists they once accused the Right of being.

I will post more if I can think of how to word it and I certainly don't mean any offense to those who are angry about this.

I found another good article about the internet and privacy. I also realized that when I signed up for my library card today, they have tons of info about me. Name, address, drivers license number, phone number and email account (for hold notifications). Sheesh, we wonder why we've lost privacy. We give it up easily most of the time.

Privacy is not dead
By Jack Cheng, Special to CNN

CNN) -- I live my life in the open: I'm easily googleable, emailable, and you can figure out from my Twitter and Instagram accounts what I've been doing. For a while my phone number was posted publicly on my Facebook profile.

I'm aware that these sites and services are tracking me. I know they're collecting my data, crunching it and selling it to advertisers, who in turn try to sell me things, and I am OK with this.

It's the cost of admission. These services help me stay connected with my friends and interact with strangers, and in turn I grant them permission to analyze my tweets and profile my Facebook interests for profit.

The revelation that the government is snooping on our communications in the interest of national security is nothing new. This latest incident doesn't come as a shocker.

You might guess that I reacted with mild surprise followed by general indifference, because young people are already sharing everything anyway. Besides, privacy is dead, right?

Privacy is not dead. The phone snooping is on a different level than that of companies selling my data to advertisers. Such behavior is unsettling, and is perhaps a true threat to privacy.

There are some in Silicon Valley who regard privacy as a relic of the past, something that falls off the back of the truck of progress as it rumbles into the future. It reminds me of sci-fi author Rudy Rucker's novel, "Postsingular," in which entrepreneurs unleash nanobots that virtually overnight blanket the earth and create an Internet-on-steroids instantly connecting everything on the planet, letting humans peer into any part of the world.

The novel is a thought experiment on the obliteration of privacy, and Rucker imagines dumpster-diving as routine — everyone can peer into the trash can at McDonald's and find discarded but perfectly edible griddle cakes. Crime basically disappears as everyone knows where everyone else is and what they are doing. Even clothing is a mere formality.

But even in the book there are blind spots, places the nanobots can't reach. In our real world, privacy isn't anywhere close to dead. Privacy today is just more nuanced and exists in different ways than 10, 50, 100 years ago.

It is not simply a matter of sharing more or less; not merely how much but in what way and with whom. Privacy is contingent on who we're trying to keep something private from -- family, friends, acquaintances, employers, strangers.

With more services and apps and greater degrees of control in which we can use them, we find ourselves having to make more decisions about where to draw the lines.

Friends of mine will untag themselves from Facebook photos to hide more unflattering images of themselves if they are "friends" with their employers. Some refrain from posting to Facebook things they don't want their parents to see, opting for Twitter instead, where their parents don't have accounts. Snapchat is built around a privacy-minded constraint: Mission Impossible-esque messages that self-destruct shortly after opening.

The nature of social media also makes room for subterfuge, and an illusory openness is another form of privacy. The Internet allows for masks, false identities and misrepresentation. It's prevalent enough in online dating, for instance, that MTV has a show devoted to it. There may be new spotlights illuminating our lives, but these lights also cast shadows, and these shadows become new places where we can hide ourselves from the world.

The kind privacy that is becoming more of the norm is dependent on our ability to move freely among the myriad services and apps, and to opt in selectively, both in what we use and how we choose to use them.

I'm not about to disable all my accounts. But I do wonder if we're heading into a future where we have to be constantly mindful of when our privacy might just slip through the cracks.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/08/opinion/c ... Stories%29

Google is doing it with the intention of wanting to sell ads.

The government is doing it with the intention of arresting people and keeping the population "in line".

Big difference.

they might be, but they are not really saying anything. for example, let's look at Zuckerburg's statement. he said they don't comply with any requests for data on individuals.

but what if i were to say that the NSA asked them for data on user statistics: specifically, how many times facebook users used the word "terrorism", "bomb" or "allah" during a given day. and then, let's say that the NSA asked facebook for information about sites that were accessed by users that used those words. would that be giving away individual users? no. it wouldn't.

i think these carefully worded denials indicate nothing whatsoever. and i am not alone in that respect.

I also wanted to add that when we use Google, or other Internet services, we give our CONSENT to be tracked. We do this when we click the button saying we have read their terms and we AGREE. We can also opt out of being tracked. For example, if we use Google Maps, we can allow our friends to know our location, or keep our location private. Same thing with Facebook. We can allow our friends to know where we are posting from (a little map appears showing where we are), or we can keep our location private.

We have not given our consent to the United States government to track us via our telephone calls or Internet usage.

Obama seems to think so. W did too. the problem, of course, is that nobody ultimately says NO to these guys.

here is something else to think about, for everyone. i am not getting all conspiratorial, here, but just ponder it.

let's say the NSA came to Zuckerburg and said "we want to mine your site for data for security purposes. if you refuse, we will have the FISA court gag you, and do it anyway. if you cooperate, we will provide you a defensible line of PR which we will back you to the hilt on. your choice".

what are you going to do? seriously?

We have not given our consent to the United States government to track us via our telephone calls or Internet usage.[/quote]


What makes you think consent has anything to do with this?

Choas asks:


My comment was in response to Jabra's comment:



I was pointing out that Google discloses what it will be doing (tracking us and so forth) and we've given our consent when we clicked the box that we've read the agreement or pressed the "AGREE" button. Even when we download an app to our phone, it tells us what it will be doing and we press the "AGREE" button.

The United States government has not disclosed to us that it will be tracking us, nor asked for our consent.

So the comparison with Google is comparing apples and oranges. It's all about full disclosure and consent.

What makes you think consent has anything to do with this? [/quote]

sadly, i think consent has SOMETHING to do with it. i just don't know what, yet.

That it is done as a matter of course doesn't make it legal, even for a nation as completely paranoid and scared shitless as the US.

I'm generally in agreement with Chaos on this ~ I'm not happy with the broad mandate, but I see this as a textbook "damned if you do, damned if you don't" example ~

Sooz

the language of the Patriot Act is so broad, they could probably justify removing your kneecaps with it.

it is legal until a court rules it illegal.

i fervently disagree that we "knew" that the NSA was tracking our internet activity. phone stuff? sure. we knew that. could it have been REASONABLY ASSUMED? yes. but it was not KNOWN.

Phone *and* internet surveillance authority were known.


One of the most significant provisions of the Patriot Act makes it far easier for the authorities to gain access to records of citizens' activities being held by a third party. At a time when computerization is leading to the creation of more and more such records, Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the FBI to force anyone at all - including doctors, libraries, bookstores, universities, and Internet service providers - to turn over records on their clients or customers.

Unchecked power
The result is unchecked government power to rifle through individuals' financial records, medical histories, Internet usage, bookstore purchases, library usage, travel patterns, or any other activity that leaves a record.

http://www.aclu.org/national-security/s ... atriot-act

Of course, the rabid right was compelled to disagree with anything the ACLU raised red flags about.