Yesterday the Director of US National Intelligence James Clapper issued a statement denouncing the leak which earlier this week revealed that a US secret court had given the FBI and NSA, full legal rights to demand the call records of every call made either in from or to the United States, from a major American telecommunications company.
Written by Chris White
The National Intelligence Director James Clapper issued the statement late last night as both commercial and state sources refused to comment on the matter.
In the bullet-point statement Clapper wrote: “There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which ensures that those activities comply with the Constitution and laws and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties. The program at issue here is conducted under authority granted by Congress and is authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). By statute, the Court is empowered to determine the legality of the program.”
Defending the written statement Clapper later told reporters that the original article (originally published in The Guardian), created a “misleading impression” and posed a “long-lasting and irreversible harm to US national security”.
Clapper then went on to claim that the ruling contained “numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties”, pointing out the fact that the Patriot Act regulated mass state surveillance by requiring all such activities to be approved of by a [secret] Court Judge, before being cleared. However, as was pointed out in The Guardian this morning virtually every single surveillance request passed before a Fisa Court in its 35-year existence has been approved.
Attempting to justify the indiscriminate mass harvesting of the public’s call data Clapper wrote in the statement: “The collection is broad in scope, because more narrow collection would limit our ability to protect the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it may assist counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities.” – However, failed to specify on what basis “suspected terrorists” were to be defined by authorities.
This failure to specify or to even apparently provide exact grounds for defining “suspected terrorists” was picked up on by concerned Democratic Senator, Jeff Merkley yesterday, when shortly after the official statement he told Guardian reporters that the scope of the Obama regime’s surveillance activities were themselves in apparent violation of the provisions cited in the Patriot Act. Speaking to Guardian reporters Merkley summed it up when he said: “We can’t really propose changes to the law unless we know what the words mean as interpreted by the Court.”
This morning Senate Intelligence Chairman Senator Feinstein (real name Dianne Emiel Goldman), the famous gun control advocate and immigration amnesty lobbyist, came to the aid of Clapper declaring the NSA spying program was essential in averting a “significant domestic terrorist attack”.
The revelations are of particular concern to large numbers of American civil lobbyists who are especially concerned by the revealed mass collections of so called “metadata” by US security services, which enable the Obama regime to record and collate individual phone numbers, call times, call durations, call locations and other specific data which when viewed in combination may allow American secret police to track down and ascertain the personal identity, affairs and whereabouts of specific individuals.
Asked before a congressional hearing in March as to whether or not “millions” of US Citizens had had their call data mass-surveilled in detail by the state, Clapper answered: “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”
The shocking revelations continue to the backdrop of yet more revelations disclosed by The Guardian today which have exposed the existence of an NSA mass surveillance operation codenamed “PRISM”, which allegedly involves the mass collection of “communications content”, provided through the social media & software giants Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, Yahoo and YouTube.
Today the internet is abuzz with mass panic and alarm, as various online sources now report that the scope of the Obama regime’s alleged web of mass spying on the population extends to scores of US companies, ranging from multiple credit ratings agencies & credit card companies to internet service providers, with one prominent Washington news source alleging that the credit card details and financial transactions of millions of Americans had been systematically hovered up by out-of-control security services, operating under Obama’s directives.
Daily Sun Headlines: Have a small business using antiquated technology? Please go to this website and learn more about how technology innovation is improving small businesses everywhere. Learn more at the website.
