Phone Records Program Declassified After Outcry

No, Myrtle, it IS news.  You apparently don't understand what's happening and are confused.  "They" count on your confusion, and to keep insisting "this isn't news" only means you should be asking many questions and not weighing in with an opinion.

The NSA has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of Prism or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. "If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge," one said.

An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of Prism.  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20full-width-1%20bento-box:Bento%20box:Position2:sublinks

And that's just the tip of the ice berg.
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NSA Whistleblowers: Spying Operation Has Been In Place For Years, Involves All Major U.S. Phone Companies

I think that the fact that the Patriot Act was written BEFORE 9 11 invites reasonable suspicion and questions.  Questions, which, those in the know refuse to respond to.  We get talking-points' patronizing answers, more appropriate to a Chauvinistic time.  We're told it's all about terrorism, when the truth is that relatively little, if any of it, has been used to prevent terrorist acts.  From Harper's Index:

Number of delayed-notice search warrants granted by federal judges last year under the Patriot Act: 1,150


Number that were related to drug offenses and terrorism, respectively: 844, 6


Number of times between January and June that Google turned over user information to government investigators: 4,287
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Phone Records Program Declassified After Outcry

I think you're so stuck in "Democrats versus Republicans" that you've lost any reason you may have had. When "we brought it up under Bush, we got the big UnAmerican smackdown by the media and the right wing extremists(gop)", you shrug and turn a blind eye, "Big deal", out of spite?  

FWIW, there is significantly more that is "new" to what Obama's done, expanding on Bush's abuses.  But you appear mired in the tribal warfare that these party politicians want from us.  To distract that they're really not each other's enemies, but working together in concert, like two divisions within a corporation competing with each other, i.e., sales versus marketing.    

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Marcospinelli/phone-records-declassified_n_3402001_259399210.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Marcospinelli/phone-records-declassified_n_3402001_259399352.html
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Phone Records Program Declassified After Outcry

As technology advances, the distinction between data and metadata can be hard to distinguish. If a Website’s content is data, is the Website’s address metadata? The government has argued it is.
But like the list of books we check out of a library, the sites we “visit” online are really a list of things we’ve read. Not only do URLs often contain content – such as search terms embedded within them – but the very fact that we’ve visited a page with a URL such as “www.webmd.com/depression” can be every bit as revealing as the content of an email message.

For this reason, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have long appreciated the value of metadata, and the outdated view that metadata surveillance is far less invasive than eavesdropping has allowed those agencies to use powerful surveillance tools with relatively little judicial oversight.
They can do this because, decades ago, long before the Internet altered

all aspects of modern communication, the Supreme Court ruled that when we voluntarily divulge personal information to any third party, we waive our privacy rights and lose all Fourth Amendment protection over that information.

That decision would make sense if it was about, for example, why we can’t reasonably expect something to remain private when we loudly boast about it in a bar.  But the court extended that logic to phone calls. The argument was that since we “share” the phone numbers we dial with the phone company – which needs that information to connect the call – we can’t claim any constitutional protection when the government asks for that data.

After the Supreme Court took this wrong turn in the 1970s, Congress compounded in the 1980s by codifying a lesser standard of protection for metadata. But neither the court nor Congress could have foreseen that NSA supercomputers would one day be able to mine that metadata to construct comprehensive pictures of our lives.

So we shouldn’t be comforted when government officials reassure us that they’re not listening to our communications – they’re merely harvesting and mining our metadata.  In a digital world, metadata can be used to construct nuanced portraits of our social relationships and interactions.

It’s long past time for Congress to update our surveillance and privacy laws to ensure that before the government can go digging through our digital lives, it needs to demonstrate to a judge that it has good reason to believe we’ve done something wrong.
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Phone Records Program Declassified After Outcry

Any suggestion that Americans have nothing to worry about from this dragnet collection of communications metadata is wrong. Even without intercepting the content of communications, the government can use metadata to learn our most intimate secrets – anything from whether we have a drinking problem to whether we’re gay or straight. The suggestion that metadata is “no big deal” – a view that, regrettably, is still reflected in the law – is entirely out of step with the reality of modern communications.

Let's talk about metadata.  Simply, if the “data” of a communication is the content of an email or phone call, this is data about the data – the identities of the sender and recipient, and the time, date, duration and location of a communication. This information can be extraordinarily sensitive. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study a few years back found that reviewing people’s social networking contacts alone was sufficient to determine their sexual orientation. Consider, metadata from email communications was sufficient to identify the mistress of then-CIA Director David Petraeus and then  drive him out of office.

The “who,” “when” and “how frequently” of communications are often more revealing than what is said or written. Calls between a reporter and a government whistleblower, for example, may reveal a relationship that can be incriminating all on its own.

Repeated calls to Alcoholics Anonymous, hotlines for gay teens, abortion clinics or a gambling bookie may tell you all you need to know about a person’s problems. If a politician were revealed to have repeatedly called a phone sex hotline after 2:00 a.m., no one would need to know what was said on the call before drawing conclusions. In addition sophisticated data-mining technologies have compounded the privacy implications by allowing the government to analyze terabytes of metadata and reveal far more details about a person’s life than ever before.

KEEP READING
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