Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request

Actually, the NSA is a criminal operation.  As far as it stopping "over twenty terrorist attacks around the world", there's some discrepancy about that.  Not just the number, or if any, but whether good old-fashioned detective work would have succeeded.  We know for certain that the Boston Marathon bombing was yet another failure by our government to prevent what was preventable.

Unlike you, I'm a patriotic American unconstrained by allegiance to one political party over another.  Your "Democrats = Good, Republicans = Bad" mentality seems to keep you locked into the 'Forever War' mind-set launched by Cheney- Bush and continuing under Obama.  Anyone still believing it's a "my team versus your team" (Republica­n versus Democrat) thing has his head up his rectvm.  

D & R poIitician­s are not each others' enemles, not as they have voters believing them to be.  Like Coke and Pepsi are enemies until they have to put someone out of business.  Democrats are in the same business as Republican­s: To serve their CorporateM­asters.  They're all just career politician­s, not wedded to a particular ideologica­l perspectiv­e but "getting a deal and then selling, spinning it, crafting a sales pitch to constituen­ts that it's great".  

Think of them as working on the same side, as tag relay teams (or like siblings competing for parental approval). 'Good cop/bad cop'. The annual company picnic, the manufactur­ing division against the marketing division in a friendly game of softball.  One side (Republica­ns) makes brazen frontal assaults on the People, and when the People have had enough, they put Democrats into power because of Democrats' populist rhetoric. 

Once in power, Democrats consolidat­e Republican­s' gains from previous years, then continue on with Republican policies but renamed, with new advertisin­g campaigns. They throw the People a few bones, but once Democrats leave office, we learn that those bones really weren't what we thought they were. 

Whenever the People get wise to the shenanigan­s and all the different ways they've been tricked, when the People start seeing Democrats as no different than Republican­s, Democrats switch the strategy. They invent new reasons for failing to achieve the People's business.

Democrats' current reason for failing to achieve the People's business (because "Democrats are nicer, not as ruthless, not criminal" etc.) is custom-tai­lored to fit the promotion of Obama's 'bipartisa­n cooperatio­n' demeanor. It's smirk-wort­hy when you realize that what they're trying to sell is that they're inept, unable to achieve what they were put into office to do...And their ineptitude­, like that's somehow "a good thing".
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NSA Slides Explain The PRISM Data-Collection Program

I agree.  They're even implementing that old favorite of totalitarian states, "Get people to inform on each other."  I think that one goes back to the Roman empire, when the Romans didn't have enough Romans to police the people in the other countries they occupied they rewarded foreign civilians who informed on their friends, families and neighbors.  And variations on that theme - Instead of repealing the Patriot Act and dismantling the FISA courts and the NSA, the NSA is instituting a 'buddy system' to prevent a repeat of Edward Snowden.
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Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request

If snowden, assange or marcospinelli want to spin the idea that the US is more intrusive

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When I (or Snowden and Assange) try to make that argument, we'll talk.  Until then, please don't try to misdirect attention.  Aren't we supposed to be better than Russia and China and Ecuador anyway?  That was a rhetorical question; let's not waste people's time and attention arguing it.  What the NSA is up to is both illegal and unConstitutional.  The people of Russia, China and Ecuador can deal with whatever illegal and unConstitutional violations by their governments.
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Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request

By the way, genius, when you attempt to use a French word like "voila", you need to figure out how to spell it correctly so you won't  make such a fool of yourself by spelling it "walla"! What a hilarious spelling by a semi-literate schlemiel!! LOL!

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The light blue colored text means that it's a hyperlink.  Click on it and you'll discover that it's not my words and spelling you're ridiculing, but someone else's.  How classy of you.  Not.  Do you try to humiliate people who lisp or walk with a limp, too?

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Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request

 

The administration hides the extent of its “incidental” surveillance of Americans behind fuzzy language. When Congress reauthorized the law at the end of 2012, legislators said Americans had nothing to worry about because the surveillance could not “target” American citizens or permanent residents. Mr. Clapper offered the same assurances. Based on these statements, an ordinary citizen might think the N.S.A. cannot read Americans’ e-mails or online chats under the F.A.A. But that is a government ­fed misunderstanding.

A “target” under the act is a person or entity the government wants information on — not the people the government is trying to listen to. It’s actually O.K. under the act to grab Americans’ messages so long as they are communicating with the target, or anyone who is not in the United States.

Leave aside the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act for a moment, and turn to the Constitution.
The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government’s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans’ communications.

The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties.

This hairsplitting is inimical to privacy and contrary to what at least five justices ruled just last year in a case called United States v. Jones. One of the most conservative justices on the Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that where even public information about individuals is monitored over the long term, at some point, government crosses a line and must comply with the protections of the Fourth Amendment. That principle is, if anything, even more true for Americans’ sensitive non-public information like phone metadata and social networking activity.

We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/the-criminal-nsa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&
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Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request

 

Let’s turn to Prism: the streamlined, electronic seizure of communications from Internet companies. In combination with what we have already learned about the N.S.A.’s access to telecommunications and Internet infrastructure, Prism is further proof that the agency is collecting vast amounts of emails and other messages — including communications to, from and between Americans.

The government justifies Prism under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Section 1881a of the act gave the president broad authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance. If the attorney general and the director of national intelligence certify that the purpose of the monitoring is to collect foreign intelligence information about any non­-American individual or entity not known to be in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can require companies to provide access to Americans’ international communications. The court does not approve the target or the facilities to be monitored, nor does it assess whether the government is doing enough to minimize the intrusion, correct for collection mistakes and protect privacy. Once the court issues a surveillance order, the government can issue top-secret directives to Internet companies like Google and Facebook to turn over calls, emails, video and voice chats, photos, voice­over IP calls (like Skype) and social networking information.

Like the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act gives the government very broad surveillance authority. And yet the Prism program appears to outstrip that authority. In particular, the government “may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States.”

The government knows that it regularly obtains Americans’ protected communications. The Washington Post reported that Prism is designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness” — as John Oliver of “The Daily Show” put it, “a coin flip plus 1 percent.” By turning a blind eye to the fact that 49-plus percent of the communications might be purely among Americans, the N.S.A. has intentionally acquired information it is not allowed to have, even under the terrifyingly broad auspices of the FISA Amendments Act.

How could vacuuming up Americans’ communications conform with this legal limitation? Well, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Andrea Mitchell of NBC, the N.S.A. uses the word “acquire” only when it pulls information out of its gigantic database of communications and not when it first intercepts and stores the information.

If there’s a law against torturing the English language, James Clapper is in real trouble.

KEEP READING
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Glenn Greenwald: NSA Can Store A Billion Cell Phone Calls Every Day

Yes.  And we really don't have to look too hard to find instances of it happening already.  

Do you remember back when BushCo was beating the drum for war against Iraq, he wanted the AUMF from Congress along with a UN seal of approval, do you recall that story about John Bolton having ordered intercepts on Colin Powell's phone calls? There was talk that Bolton was reporting back to Bush-Cheney that Powell was sabotaging their war effort with backdoor phone conversations with other nations' UN ambassadors. That's why you don't want an NSA capable of doing this to the People's representatives to Congress and the White House.


Connect NSA Wiretapping dots -- Bolton used NSA to spy on Powell - Democratic Underground

Then there was Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee for six months when he sat down to a secret briefing on July 17, 2003. What he heard alarmed him so much that immediately afterward he wrote two identical letters, by hand, expressing his concerns.
He sent one to Cheney and placed the other -- as he pointedly warned Cheney he would -- in a safe in case anyone in the future might challenge his version of what happened.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/19/AR2005121901641.html
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