Aandacht voor de NSA

Snowden’s revelations are not merely about privacy, nor civil liberty, nor even mass spying. They are about the unmentionable: that the democratic facades of the United States now barely conceal a systematic gangsterism historically identified with if not necessarily the same as fascism. On Tuesday, a US drone killed 16 people in North Waziristan, “where many of the world’s most dangerous militants live”, said the few paragraphs I read. That by far the world’s most dangerous militants had hurled the drones was not a consideration. President Obama personally sends them every Tuesday.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, Harold Pinter referred to “a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed”. He asked why “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities” of the Soviet Union were well known in the West while America’s crimes were “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged”. The most enduring silence of the modern era covered the extinction and dispossession of countless human beings by a rampant America and its agents. “But you wouldn’t know it,” said Pinter. “It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

This hidden history – not really hidden, of course, but excluded from the consciousness of societies drilled in American myths and priorities – has never been more vulnerable to exposure. Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, like that of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, threatens to break the silence Pinter described. In revealing a vast Orwellian police state apparatus servicing history’s greatest war-making machine, they illuminate the true extremism of the 21st century. Unprecedented, Germany’s Der Spiegel has described the Obama administration as “soft totalitarianism”. If the penny is finally falling, we might all look closer to home.

Natuurlijk is het meer dan welkom om meer relevante berichten hieronder te verzamelen. Ik nodig u allen hierbij uit! :-)

Obama considers ending NSA surveillance programs, Democratic senator says
“I have a feeling that the administration is getting concerned about the bulk phone records collection, and that they are thinking about whether to move administratively to stop it,” Sen. Wyden told the paper.

“I think we are making a comeback,” he said.
http://rt.com/usa/nsa-surveillance-wyden-snowden-021/

Merkel justifies NSA eavesdropping surveillance
Despite “justified questions” to the American intelligence community regarding eavesdropping on German networks, the US remains Berlin’s “most loyal ally”, announced Chancellor Angela Merkel in interview to Die Zeit weekly.
(...)
Merkel declared that she herself has learnt about the US surveillance programs, such as the NSA’s PRISM spy program, "through the current reporting" in the media.
http://rt.com/news/merkel-nsa-scandal-zeit-931/

Merkel Appears to Weather Anger Among German Voters Over N.S.A. Spying
“The work of intelligence agencies in democratic states was always vital to the safety of citizens and will remain so in the future,” Ms. Merkel was quoted as saying in an interview published Thursday in the newspaper Die Zeit. “For me, there is absolutely no comparison between the Stasi in East Germany and the work of intelligence services in democratic states,” she added, calling the programs “two totally different things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/world/europe/merkel-seems-to-weather-german-anger-over-nsa-spying.html?_r=0

The Russian Senate is also proposing the creation of a United Nations agency to monitor collection and use of personal data, akin to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which oversees nuclear materials, to keep tabs on firms like Facebook and Google that harvest personal data.

“For me, there is absolutely no comparison between the Stasi in East Germany and the work of intelligence services in democratic states,” Merkel added

In één klap op de hoogte, dank @paul en censuur

NSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope
The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.

John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform "a second or third hop query" through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.

"Hops" refers to a technical term indicating connections between people. A three-hop query means that the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone that suspect communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with.

Meer:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/17/nsa-surveillance-house-hearing

Think of it this way. Let's say the government suspects you are a terrorist and it has access to your Facebook account. If you're an American citizen, it can't do that currently (with certain exceptions)—but for the sake of argument. So all of your friends, that's one hop. Your friends' friends, whether you know them or not—two hops. Your friends' friends' friends, whoever they happen to be, are that third hop. That's a massive group of people that the NSA apparently considers fair game.

For a sense of scale, researchers at the University of Milan found in 2011 that everyone on the Internet was, on average, 4.74 steps away from anyone else. The NSA explores relationships up to three of those steps.

Meer:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/07/nsa-admits-it-analyzes-more-peoples-data-previously-revealed/67287/