Free Republic

As NSA data collection from Verizon Wireless is defended this morning by no less than the office of the President of the United States, actor Wil Wheaton and top Android hacker/developer Koushik Dutta have announced their departure from the carrier. The order in question was revealed yesterday, having originated from the FBI and passed down to the public media by an anonymous source. The order shows how the National Security Agency uses Verizon specifically to mine records of phone calls, numbers, and everything in-between for data. Data such as “unique identifiers”—unspecified beyond that, call length, number of individuals on each...

It's eerie. Absolutely eerie. It's like Nolan knew. It's called PRISM. In the TV show, it's called The Machine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvpYO8ldP-0Revelations are erupting faster than can be kept count. All your data belong to us. Facebook, Google, Apple. Obama gets it all. The National Security Agency 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...

<p>WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- President Barack Obama should explain to Americans why the U.S. government's collection of phone records from Verizon customers is necessary, House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday.</p>

Snip: What it suggests is that America is facing a constitutional crisis in which government is moving to be master of the American people rather than their servant. But there’s another aspect of this Big Brother-style trend that has not yet captured the imagination of the public and press: While this spying scandal certainly ranks right up there with Fast and Furious, Benghazi-gate, Reportergate and IRS-gate in what it portends for the future of the American republic, few have noticed how government’s thirst of information about the activities of the people also provide a potential solution to the search for...

As details of President Obama’s massive domestic spying operation continue to dribble out into the public domain, the Left for the most part is quiet and content. Left-wingers are unable even to entertain the idea that Obama, who billed himself on the campaign trail as a champion of civil liberties, is a power-mad authoritarian who views the Constitution as worthless parchment. Obama promised: “no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No...

A stunning report by the Guardian newspaper published late Wednesday evening reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting the phone records of millions of Americans who are customers of Verizon, one of the nation’s largest telecom companies. The top-secret order, obtained by the paper, requires Verizon to submit to the NSA, “on an ongoing daily basis…all call details or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” Moreover, the paper reports that Americans’ communication records “are being collected indiscriminately...

Biometric Database tucked inside Gang of Eight immigration bill by Conservative Action Alerts on May 31, 2013 ALERT: The Gang of Eight’s comprehensive immigration plan will destroy individual privacy via biometric database. American Conservative, Last Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed their markup of the Gang of Eight’s “immigration reform” bill – a version that not only preserves most of the bill’s original problems, but also contains 233 additional pages of rules. Senator Ted Cruz says that the bill only makes our current immigration problems “worse.” Sadly, he holds the minority opinion as he was one of only five Senate...

The outrage over President Barack Obama’s authorization of a nearly limitless federal dive into Americans’ phone records obscures a hiding-in-plain-sight truth about the 44th president many of his supporters have overlooked for years: For all his campaign-trail talk of running the “most transparent administration” in U.S history, Obama never promised to reverse the 43rd president’s policies on domestic anti-terrorism surveillance — and he’s been good on his word. Obama’s effort to strike what he’s repeatedly called “a balance” between personal liberty and homeland security has exposed what amounts to a split political personality: Candidate Obama often spoke about personal freedom...

The National Security Agency's monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency's activities. The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S. court for Verizon Communications Inc.'s phone records set off the latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA's operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp., records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers. The agency is using...

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights. Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants...

"I'm sure Rob will have more to say on this later today, and I will be out much of the day celebrating my wedding anniversary, but in light of this morning's report that the administration is collecting phone data on all Verizon customers - from terror suspects to ordinary citizens like you and me (and yes, I am a Verizon customer) - I thought it would be instructive to hear from a certain presidential candidate who held forth on this issue back in 2008. (Hat tip to Mary Katharine Ham for this one.)"

This is a follow up to this post.

Those crazy American conspiracy theorists who live up trees with guns and drink their own pee don’t seem quite so crazy anymore. It turns out that a “secret court order” has empowered the US government to collect the phone records of millions of users of Verizon, one of the most popular telephone providers – a massive domestic surveillance programme and a shocking intrusion into the lives of others. For the first time in history, being an AT&T customer doesn’t seem such a bad thing after all. Of course, it isn't the first time that a US administration has spied on...

People are upset (or scared or confused or ambivalent) about the revelation that the National Security Agency is collecting information from Verizon concerning telephone calls made on its network. What does it all mean??? Let’s dive right in. So the government is listening to all my Verizon calls, right? No. Well, not according to this report that’s been dug up by The Guardian. What’s happening, then? Verizon is handing over “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad; or wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” They’re handing...

Sen. Rand Paul today released the following statement in response to news of the NSA extensive seizure and surveillance of Americans' Verizon phone records. "The National Security Agency's seizure and surveillance of virtually all of Verizon's phone customers is an astounding assault on the Constitution. After revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political dissidents and the Department of Justice seized reporters' phone records, it would appear that this Administration has now sunk to a new low. When Sen. Mike Lee and I offered an amendment that would attach Fourth Amendment protections to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last year,...

Washington is reeling after a court order was uncovered last night showing Verizon has secretly been handing over reams of customer phone records to the National Security Agency on a daily basis. The records don’t contain the content of phone calls—so, just to be clear, this isn’t wiretapping—but they do contain information such as phone numbers, the location and duration of calls, and subscriber and handset ID numbers, all of which fall under the category of “telephony metadata.”

For years I've been thinking and saying that Democrats have are only outraged by their perceptions that Bush trampled civil liberties because they were jealous and chomping at the bit to get into power and show us how it's really done.

Sen. Lindsey Graham said he doesn’t care about the federal government collecting his Verizon phone records because he’s not “talking to terrorists.”

Senators on both sides of the political aisle moved to defend the National Security Agency's collection of data from millions of Americans' phone records, saying it has been an ongoing practice that has kept the United States safe. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told reporters on Thursday that The Guardian's revelation of the court order that compels Verizon to give data on millions of Americans' calls is a standard three-month renewal of a practice that has been ongoing for about seven years. Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence committee, also defended the practice. "It's called protecting America," she said, according...

The White House admitted this morning that the Guardian story last night was accurate — the NSA has been collecting metadata on Verizon’s phone calls for the last couple of months. Thanks to a secret court order, the phone records and location of calls by over 121 million customers now rest within the vaults of the NSA. And according to the Associated Press’ White House source, that’s no problem, because we can totally trust them to only do nice things with them, and not be evil and rotten like the previous administration who did pretty much the same thing: The...