Obama has cancelled his meeting with Putin (formerly scheduled for September), presumably in retaliation for Russia granting asylum to Edward Snowden. Obama says he is “disappointed” with Russia’s decision.
But Russia is still managing to make us look bad. All they had to do is point out that the US has repeatedly refused to extradite people who committed similar “crimes” against Russia, and has not signed an extradition agreement with Russia.
In fact, under international law Russia had no legal, political, or moral duty extradite Snowden and every reason to grant him asylum. Imagine what we had done if a Russian version of Snowden had revealed Russians were listening in on our secret government deliberations and was seeking asylum in the US.
At the same time, more and more evidence is coming out that the NSA violated the constitution and lied to both Congress and the American people. But Obama’s only response is belligerence, claiming that “we don’t have a domestic spying program“. Where is the Obama who campaigned for openness and for the protection of whistleblowers?
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May be NSA got something on Obama first before moving to rest of the country
The panels in the middle row really got me. The problem with PRISM, apparently, is that Americans are getting nothing in return for the surveillance. Yet they have absolutely no problem with companies like Facebook and Google from amassing data collections that would give PRISM a run for its money. The difference is that they think they are getting a free service from Facebook and Google. One of my favorite quotes (not mine…I don’t remember where I first heard it) to describe this concept: If you are not paying for the product (e.g., email or social networking), then YOU are the product.
The cloud is nothing but voluntary pervasive surveillance.
I don’t know why Obama cancelled his meeting with Putin – Snowden getting asylum in Russia is actually good for the Obama administration. One of Putin’s preconditions for granting asylum in Russia was that Snowden stop leaking US secrets. As long as Snowden is in Russia he shouldn’t be leaking any more secrets, buying time for the US.
NSA and DEA and FBI share data, on Americans, and have full access to the data stored on internet servers like Facebook. I am not paranoid. The last part of this network became public last week. See links below.
Last September every picture on Facebook was given to the FBI who ran it through the NSA developed facial recognition software. They have your pictures, tagged with your ID and name, in a database so they can take any picture of people and identify most of the people in the picture if the face is clear. If they have both front and profile shots they are way ahead in matching pictures to names.
What most of the media is not telling you is the NSA/DEA/FBI are spying on us, and this data is now being used to target arrests in the USA, but a fake story of how they got to the people is created to hide the use of the spy data.
To quote one of the following links, the fancy law enforcement parlance for obscuring the original source of intelligence or electronic intercepts is called “parallel construction” — i.e., you construct an entirely new evidentiary trail that takes you exactly where you want to go without revealing what brought the individual to your attention in the first place.
I have personal knowledge of the above statement being true. I am glad this is coming to light.
Read the links below. They are not from the tin-foil-hat crowed. The first link is from Voice of America, run by the US government, it gives you a white washed taste, the other links will fill you in a bit more, and probably make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
http://www.voanews.com/content/dea-program-differes-from-recent-nsa-revelations/1723767.html
http://rt.com/usa/dea-agents-nsa-evidence-067/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/us-dea-irs-idUSBRE9761AZ20130807
http://www.wageagainstthemachine.net/2013/08/07/dea-uses-nsa-intercepts-to-nab-people-directs-officersdas-to-launder-the-information/
James, I already reported on the DEA using NSA intel in criminal investigations, and the use of “parallel construction” to hide this fact during trials. See https://www.politicalirony.com/2013/08/07/the-other-shoe-drops/
But thanks for the further links.