Surveillance USA

From the guardian.co.uk (June 5):

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing. [read more]

Keep in mind that the gov’t is looking at all Verizon customer records not just some. If the NSA can look at records of Verizon what’s going to stop them from looking at the records of other cell phone company records?

The Obama administration justifies this surveillance on “national security” reasons. So, I guess all terrorists use Verizon phones, huh?

A NSA whistleblower William Binney told Glenn Beck on his radio show Friday that the NSA has been snooping on Americans for more than a decade and that they are not just looking at the records of the phone calls but the content of the phone calls and emails. Binney said that “the NSA is collecting data on 3 billion phone calls every single day.”

Well, it’s not like the NSA is tapping directly into servers of nine major American Internet companies (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple).  Oh, wait. It is. Not only them but so is the FBI. The agencies are not only looking at the content of emails, but almost everything else including video chat.

At least the Post Office is not photographing every mail it receives. Wouldn’t it be funny if the Post Office did that? The jokes on America. It does. That’s how the ricin suspect was tracked. As The Washington Post.com states:

According to FBI Agent James Spiropoulos, investigators accessed a Postal Service computer system that “incorporates a Mail Isolation Control and Tracking (MICT) program which photographs and captures an image of every mail piece that is processed.” Agents were able to obtain front and back images of about 20 mail pieces that had been processed “immediately before the mail piece addressed to Mayor Bloomberg.”