FROM THE FEDERALIST BLOG - VERIZON BUILT A DEDICATED LINE FOR GOVERNMENT SPYING

Verizon built a dedicated line for government spying Posted: 17 Jun 2013 12:30 AM PDT "If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom." General Dwight Eisenhower ________________________________ Verizon allegedly built a fiber optic cable to give the Feds direct access to communications The information dam of the Big Brother Surveillance State has burst.  The real question is do the American Sheeple care? or do they want a Police State to "protect" them? Business Insider reports that James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times — who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for this story on the NSA gaining the cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to customer data — mentioned a detail from 2007 (emphasis ours): In Virginia, a telecommunications consultant reported, Verizon had set up a dedicated fiber-optic line running from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center. Busiess Insider recently wrote about a 2006 report by James Bamford of Wired — who wrote a book on the nation's premier covert intelligence gathering organization — which detailed how the NSA hired two companies with ties to Israeli intelligence to bug the communications of AT&T. Asshole Alert! Neo-Fascist Rep. Mike Rogers (Socialist Republican - Mich.) refuted what he called “misleading rhetoric,” including reports that the NSA was listening to phone calls, calling the program a “lockbox” with “lots of protections.”  He says the unconstitutional program has stopped “dozens” of terrorist attacks.  But naturally those "attacks" are classified and we aren't allowed to see the details.  As for the courts protecting us, he forgets to mention that FISA courts rubber stamp 99.97% of search warrants. The news about the Verizon-NSA fiber optic connection came from a class action lawsuit brought by a former AT&T engineer who worked on a proposal to give the the NSA access to all the global phone and email traffic that ran through an AT&T network center in Bedminster, N.J. The Israeli hardware, which can record data that comes through an internet protocol network, was discovered by a former AT&T engineer named Mark Klein and confirmed by former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake. Another former NSA employee named William Binney, who, like Snowden, believes the NSA's surveillance has gone too far, says that ever since 9/11 the NSA has been hoarding electronic data — phone calls, GPS information, emails, social media, banking and travel records, entire government databases — and analyzes, in real time, "all of the attributes that any individual has" in addition to making networks of connections between individuals. Binney, one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history, quit after 32 years in late 2001 because, in his view, he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." Read more at Business Insider.

Obama joins Islamists to back Islamist rebels in Syria Posted: 17 Jun 2013 06:25 AM PDT Holy War Comrade Obama urges UK and France to join with Islamist Saudi Arabia and Turkey in supplying arms to Syrian rebels Thousands of Islamists rallied in the Egyptian capital on Friday in support of calls by Sunni Muslim clerics for a holy war against the secular regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The demonstration took place outside a Cairo mosque where Saudi preacher Mohammed al-Oreifi called in a sermon for a "jihad in the cause of Allah in Syria." Oreifi urged worshippers to "unite against their enemy," reports France 24 News. Saudi Arabia, like Egypt, is an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country, and Sunnis are the backbone of the revolt against Assad, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Bottom Line  -  A world gone mad! Islamist Turkey supports the Syrian rebels. Islamist Saudi Arabia supports the Syrian rebels. Islamist Egypt supports the Syrian rebels. Now Comrade Obama is running guns to the Islamist rebels of Syria in yet another unconstitutional war. Democrats and Republicans are using the Constitution as toilet paper.  Members of Congress either hide under their desks in fear or act as brainless cheerleaders for an Imperial Presidency. (UK Independent) Egyptian Islamists demand Holy War against secular, pro-Russian Syria. An Egyptian man holds the old Syrian flag, now used by the opposition, during a gathering in support of the Syrian Revolution outside the Amr ibn al-As Mosque on June 14, 2013 in Cairo.

Democrat: "NSA taps phones without a warrant" Posted: 17 Jun 2013 12:05 AM PDT What Bill of Rights? NSA admits they will spy on you without a search warrant C/Net News reports that the National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that." If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.  Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls. Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, being able to listen to phone calls would mean the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval. Nadler's initial statement appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii "wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president." There are serious "constitutional problems" with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. "It epitomizes the problem of secret laws." The Washington Post disclosed Saturday that the existence of a top-secret NSA program called NUCLEON, which "intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words" to a database. Top intelligence officials in the Obama administration, the Post said, "have resolutely refused to offer an estimate of the number of Americans whose calls or e-mails have thus made their way into content databases such as ­NUCLEON." For the full article go to C/Net News