TRI In The News
Obama Spying on All Americans a Major Human Rights Violation
From Examiner.com
A report in the Guardian on Wednesday evening about the scandal of the Obama administration's National Security Agency (NSA) collecting telephone records of every Verizon customer in America followed by Friday's reports of also collecting internet data prove that the Obama administration is violating a basic human right of every American.
News of the secret dragnet, along with other recent evidence of corporate-government unwanted intrusions prompted rights advocate and former U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader to say this week that the term "American Fascism" is not too extreme.
"Federal Gestapo" is what rights defender and author John Whitehead calls today's government spy program.
Spying or stalking is a prerequisite to target individuals due to their dissent or disagreeing with corporate-government policy.
Obama's top secret dragnet, All the better to stalk you with, my dear
In a top secret order the Guardian newspaper obtained and published Wednesday evening, journalist Glenn Greenwald showed that the FBI, on the NSA’s behalf, demanded Verizon to serve as a stalking or spying accomplice.
The FBI ordered the company to give all its phone record metadata originating in the United States for three months beginning late April and ending July 19th.
Friday, the Washington Post and the Guardian published reports based on a career intelligence officer's information showing the NSA and FBI are tapping directly into central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies.
The NSA and FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time, according to the Washington Post on Friday.
"The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy."
Telephone metadata being collected includes all “non-content” data for millions of American customers’ phone calls: subscriber data, recipients, locations, times and durations of every call - a major violation of privacy rights the nation once valued and observed.
"The government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time," Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) stated in a written statement Friday.
The human right to privacy is protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of which the United States is a signatory and that the Obama administration is violating, among nine others, according to Pres. Jimmy Carter.
Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
If history is a guide to why such data are collected, one can observe it is for targeting dissenters, or suppression of dissent, or totalitarian control of the people - in direct opposition of democracy.
Today, dissent includes actively opposing or even saying on the telephone that one opposes corporate-government's abuse of human rights, such as Big Energy abusing health rights by polluting water and air.
Obama's explosive spy scandal exposed this week accounts for the number of Targeted Individuals on the rise, similar to what occurred in Nazi Germany, according to rights defender and author John W. Whitehead in an interview this week.
Whitehead, who has just released his new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, sheds light on how and why the number of Americans targeted as "Targeted Individuals" is dramatically increasing.
The NSA has a long history of justifying spying powers, arguing its charter allows surveillance on individuals outside the United States.
The latest revelation of the extent of the NSA’s surveillance, however, shows it has focused specifically on intruding into personal lives of Americans, to the degree its data collection has in at least one major spying incident, explicitly excluded individuals outside the United States.
"Aside from the sheer scope of that surveillance order, reminiscent of the warrantless wiretapping scandal under the Bush administration, the other shocking aspect of the order is its target: The order specifically states that only data regarding calls originating in America are to be handed over, not those between foreigners," Forbes reports.
EFF has so much evidence of the so-called war on terror American surveillance scandal, it created a timeline.
America first learned about the secret surveillance in a 2005 New York Times exposé that disclosed one aspect of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program.
"We learned that the Bush Administration had been illegally tapping phone lines in the U.S. without warrants or court permission immediately following the 9/11 attacks," EFF says. "President Bush himself admitted at least some of what the government was doing."
In early 2006, EFF received photos and blueprints from former AT&T technician Mark Klein.
"These undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility in San Francisco which sends copies of all AT&T customers’ emails, web browsing, and other Internet traffic to the NSA," EFF says.
Later in 2006, USA Today and other newspapers published a story disclosing the NSA had compiled a massive database of call records from American telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Verizon, and Bell South -- as confirmed by some members of Congress.
"Information has continued to trickle out over time," EFF continues.
In 2009, the New York Times reported the NSA was still collecting purely domestic communications in a "significant and systematic" way after the FISA Amendments Act was passed in 2008.
EFF says it has long suspected that the government has been using the USA PATRIOT ACT's Section 215 to conduct dragnet surveillance.
"Now we have incontrovertible evidence," EFF says. "Senator Ron Wyden has warned that 'when the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.'"
News of the dragnet has reached even small town newspapers across the nation.
"We're asking individuals to email Congress right away to tell them in the strongest possible terms that you do not consent to dragnet domestic surveillance," EFF says, urging Americans to take a stand in three actions:
1. Tell your elected officials that you object to this mass domestic spying program.
2. Demand that they initiate a full-scale, public investigation immediately with the results of the investigation made public as much as possible.
3. Demand that the public officials responsible for this program are held to account.
Click here to speak out now.
While "fascism" and "federal gestapo" are terms increasingly used to describe the Obama regime, referring to Obama's leading the practice of torture at Guantanamo this week, human rights veteran Brian S. Wilson stated this week: "In my eyes, the U.S. President is a totalitarian monster no less than the worst monarchs and dictators in world history."
