“Watch then-Senator Joe Biden from 2006 as he directly refutes each point made by his boss, President Obama, about the NSA surveillance program at his news conference last week.”
“Because of the efforts of President Barack Obama’s Administration to quash any release of even a smidgen of information about the government’s surveillance program, his comment today that he looked forward to a ‘debate’ on the issue was met with skepticism. Then, hours later, the Department of Justice responded to a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation trying to stop the release of a secret court opinion connected to the very surveillance program about which Obama claimed to want to debate.”
http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/07/our-open-surveillance-debate-doj-wants-t
“Hannity’s opinions on NSA surveillance differ depending on who the president is.”
“Every year, hundreds of U.S. citizens are threatened with prosecution for lying to federal agents. Former Major League baseball star Roger Clemens was threatened with a prison term over supposedly lying to Congress over his alleged steroid use. Lying to federal investigators or during Congressional testimony is thus treated as a grave criminal offense – unless, apparently, it is done by the Director of National Intelligence. Clapper’s reply was: ‘No, sir’ – a statement that is now known to be a direct, conscious lie, as he subsequently admitted. If this were a society of laws, Clapper would be prosecuted for perjury. Then again, in such a society the NSA wouldn’t exist.”
http://prolibertate.us/index.php/perjury-as-a-state-privilege?blog=7
“FATCA is … probably … coming in some form or other and hiding will do a person no good in the longer run (although truthfully, no one is truly invisible anymore thanks to technology), but allowing fear of an agency that isn’t even able to control fraud and evasion within its own borders be the driving factor behind decisions is something that might be cause for pause. It’s not new news in terms of the hysteria in the US about undocumented workers and fraud, but it puts the dilemma, at least for me, of USP’s who’ve emigrated in another context. The point of FATCA and the offshore jihad on expats is not about money. It’s about information, and information is power.”
http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2013/06/13/irs-refunds-4-billion-dollars-a-year-to-illegal-immigrants/
“US whistle-blower Edward Snowden yesterday emerged from hiding in Hong Kong and revealed to the South China Morning Post that he will stay in the city to fight likely attempts by his government to have him extradited for leaking state secrets. In an exclusive interview carried out from a secret location in the city, the former Central Intelligence Agency analyst also made explosive claims that the US government had been hacking into computers in Hong Kong and on the mainland for years.”
“Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald on Wednesday night ripped into Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and pointed out the congressman’s support of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Greenwald told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that it was ‘staggering’ to see King call for him to face criminal charges for reporting on secret information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program. ‘It’s bad enough to call for that, it is extraordinarily menacing that he did so based on a complete falsehood, the idea that I ever threatened to [disclose CIA agents],’ he said. Greenwald said he had no idea why King was making the false accusation.”
“On August 1, 2007, candidate Barack Obama sharply criticized then-President George W. Bush’s government surveillance programs. Recently, following the disclosures of Edward Snowden, President Barack Obama defended the NSA’s top-secret PRISM program. If you don’t agree with President Obama, exercise your 1st amendment rights so together we can save our 4th amendment rights before it’s too late.”
“The conservative host described the NSA’s surveillance programs as a ‘massive intrusion.’ O’Reilly warned that ‘corrupt government officials’ could leak sensitive data to hurt their political opponents. He said that keeping actual content of private conversations on file was ‘flat out unconstitutional.’ O’Reilly’s tune was far different under the Bush administration. At the time, he voiced strong support for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, which collected the telephone records of millions of Americans. In 2006, after a judge ruled the program was unconstitutional, O’Reilly speculated that she didn’t care if Americans were killed by terrorists.”
“The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-why