Here We Go Again: NSA Spying on Internet Data of Americans

June 8, 2013 at 11:08 pm

Coming at the heels of Wednesday’s news that the NSA was secretly obtaining hundreds of millions of phone records belonging to American citizens, we have new reports from the Washington Post of yet another Top Secret program targeting Internet data.  Operation code-name PRISM refers to a Top Secret partnership between the NSA and 9 of the top Internet firms in the United States including Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and Apple.  Since the news broke on Thursday officials from the companies involved have been coming forward with denials that they had any knowledge of the program or that the government has direct access to their servers, as alleged by the leaked information on PRISM. Slides released by the Washington Post that outline the program detail the types of data collected which include email, photos, video, chat with voice and video, Voice of IP (VoIP), stored data, file transfers, social networking details, and “special requests”.  Essentially your entire online life is available to the government.  Anything you post to Facebook (regardless of your privacy settings), your emails, your Google Drive files, your photos, and any phone calls or “Hangouts” you are involved in over the Internet are possibly being collected by the government. This is a […]

Verizon Handing Phone Records to NSA

June 6, 2013 at 11:57 pm

The Guardian just broke this gem yesterday.  It would seem that the National Security Administration (NSA) has obtained a top secret court order compelling Verizon to turn over “all call detail records” on an “ongoing, daily basis” for all calls “between the United States and abroad” or those “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” There you have it.  From the issuance of this court order, which took place on April 25, 2013 until its expiration on July 19, 2013 Verizon is ordered to provide the NSA with records on every single local call and call between the US and other countries to traverse the Verizon network.  Verizon is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the United States.  We are probably talking about hundreds of millions of call records.  This is unfathomable.  By way of this order the government is obtaining just about every detail related to these calls including the telephone numbers of both call participants, the duration of the call, location information, and the time and date of the call.  Essentially the only information the government is not taking as part of this is the actual telephone conversation. This is an unprecedented level of privacy intrusion. […]

The Great Debt Ceiling Crisis of 2011

August 4, 2011 at 5:54 pm

The saga of the Great Debt Ceiling Crisis of 2011 came to a disappointing end Tuesday when President Obama signed into law the lousy “compromise” that was sent to him by Congress.  Let us look back on the events that brought us to the pathetic end of the over-hyped debt ceiling “crisis”. The President addressed the nation on Monday July 25, in the hope of frightening the American people into a blind, thoughtless frenzy that would have them pressure their respective members of Congress into a “compromise”.  The days following his speech brought the introduction of several plans by various leaders in Washington DC.  The primary of those being one from House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) – who incidentally filibustered his own bill for more than 20 hours. In the President’s speech Monday he did his very best to explain the problem to the American people.  He did so by: Demonizing tax cuts as an expense to the government – as if the money belongs to the government, and the government is being inconvenienced in allowing you to have it, as their gift to you.  This money belongs to you!  The government has […]

Take Action: Congress and the Debt Ceiling

July 12, 2011 at 5:41 pm

By now everyone has heard that the United States is going to hit our current borrowing limit on August 2nd according to a US Treasury estimate.  The President has stated repeatedly that the limit must be raised or the US will default on its debt and trigger an unprecedented financial crisis that will have widespread and far-felt ramifications.  Congress is currently wrestling over how to address this most serious issue, though how much of it is genuine dissent and how much is put on to create a good show for the public is debatable. The President would like us to all think that the problem here is that the debt ceiling is not high enough.  That is not the problem.  The problem is that the debt ceiling is even an issue.  The problem is that the federal government is borrowing at such a rate that the federal debt is increasing by $40,000 per second!  That comes out to $3.456 BILLION a day.  And the President wants more. The choice here is a simple one.  We either continue down the path of reckless spending that will ultimately lead to the utter destruction of the dollar and the complete financial collapse of […]

President Obama Announces Troop Withdrawal: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

June 25, 2011 at 5:33 pm

Wednesday evening President Barack Obama appeared before the American people from the East Room of the White House to announce his plan to begin withdrawing United States armed forces from Afghanistan.  His remarks began shortly after 8pm EST and were approximately 15 minutes in length. The President began by invoking the memory of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and offering a brief recapitulation of the war in Afghanistan and the move into Iraq.  He continued by stating that the al Qaeda leaders had moved into Pakistan and that the terrorist forces had regrouped and began to move on the offensive. When Barack Obama was running for President, one of the primary stances of his campaign was that if he took office, he would seek to withdrawal our forces from the Middle East.  President Bush faced fierce criticism for refusing to reduce the number of US troops involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  So Barack Obama committed to voters to bring the troops home.  Instead, early on in his tenure as President he sent a surge of 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan.  He did not pull these troops from Iraq, and refocus them on the effort in Afghanistan.  […]