Obama defends US surveillance programmes

US President says "nobody is listening" to phone calls as anger grows over government tapping of communication services. Last Modified: 07 Jun 2013 19:06

President Barack Obama has staunchly defended US government programmes conducting surveillance of Americans' phone and Internet activity, insisting that they were conducted with broad safeguards to protect against abuse. "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this programme is about," Obama told reporters on a visit to California's Silicon Valley on Friday. He insisted that the surveillance programmes struck the right balance between keeping Americans safe from terrorist attack and protecting their privacy. His comments follow news that the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US internet companies to spy on foreigners. According to the Washington Post newspaper, even though US citizens were not the intended targets of surveillance, this has allowed investigators to examine emails, photos and other documents of tens of millions of Americans that can be used to track people and their contacts over time. In a statement on Thursday, James Clapper, director of national intelligence, said the Post article contains "numerous inaccuracies". Clapper said while the programme, code-named PRISM, collects information concerning "non-US" persons located outside the country, it cannot be used for any citizens or anyone within the US. "Information collected under this programme is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats," he said. "The unauthorised disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal programme is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans." The highly classified national security programme had not been disclosed publicly before.  A US government source, who was not authorised to comment publicly on the programme, confirmed its existence to the Reuters news agency late on Thursday. Clapper said PRISM, referred to as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was recently reauthorised by Congress after "extensive hearings and debate". The programme's participants, the Post said, include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Firms respond The report came on the same day that another newspaper, Britain's Guardian, revealed that the US government is collecting telephone records of millions of Americans as part of US national security efforts. In Washington, the Guardian report fuelled an ongoing debate over whether the US government is violating citizens' privacy rights while trying to protect them from attacks.  That debate is sure to escalate with the Post's report, which said the NSA and FBI are extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs to build a database involving trillions of communications by Americans. Al Jazeera's Patty Culhane, reporting from Washington, said that there have been many news stories over the years about intelligence gathering but this is the first time a particular story is leading all local newscasts. She said change is possible and the programme could end if there is a large enough outcry. In statements released late on Thursday, Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook denied that the government had "direct access" to their central servers. "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. "From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data," the company said in a statement. In a statement, Facebook's Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan said: "Protecting the privacy of our users and their data is a top priority for Facebook," "We do not provide any government organisation with direct access to Facebook servers," US Attorney General Eric Holder said on Thursday that members of Congress were fully briefed on the intelligence-gathering programme that included the daily collection of telephone records from Verizon Communications.

~http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/06/20136722756636173.html

Are we leading towards a police state? Just like the very states the west has condemned for a long time!?!

Well while I think this is awful....

it's worth noting... you're from the UK.

I mean, do you know what the process to get a wiretap in the UK is? 

It's easier then even the US and it's secret courts for terrorists.

You just need the Home Secretary to agree.  You don't even really need a justification so long as they say it's ok.  Track who you call?  If they had the manpower the UK could tap literally every phone in the UK tommorrow.  If the Home Secretary wants to, your home is wiretapped tommorrow, because fuck you that's why.

While this is awful to American sensibilties, it's worth noting this still isn't even at general Europeon level of invasion of privacy.    So it's worth noting if this worries you... you actually have a lot more to worry about at home.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/how_they_do_it/2006/02/wiretapping_europeanstyle.html

Like gun rights this is really mostly more of a US sore point.

So i guess my point is.  Police State is still a far ways off... even with this unacceptable violations of privacy.

"Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
Benjamin Franklin

Wasn't he one of the guys that wrote the constitution? Maybe he was a prophet and saw this coming.

Either way I agree with him.

I had no idea about this but why would they want to listen to everyone? Haven't they got a country to run? Oh well, it's no wonder the country is going to shit when they aren't doing their jobs properly. The world as it is, really is shit isn't it?. So many problems with the current system of government, it's hard to say where to start to fix them. Maybe, wiretapping phones made sense when the government used to own the phone companies back in the 60's and 70's but these are private companies now, why would they agree to this?

I just wished governments were honest with people, not covering up what wrong they did and just do the job they were elected to do. 

Well said. It is strange however that when the Nazis and the Soviets practice this type of "surveillance" it was considered evil and anti-western (in the soviet case).

As for Kaz's comment about the police state being a far ways off I totally disagree. All it takes is a catalyst and that event or series of events can happen at anytime in this crazy world.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” 

how would this affect x....
oh never mind.. i smell a ban or a warning

I don't think it's ever been shown that sacrificing liberty is an effective method to prevent terrorism. Even if the deaths prevented is in the tens per year (it isn't), it doesn't make sense to attack the privacy of 300 million people in exchange for that.

Generally, no one knows how to fight terrorism at all except for trying to kill them all.  
A lot of people think "just kill the leader." That doesn't work because a lot of terrorist organization has multiple people who can take over as leader, and killing the leader may only make things worse.

There are also a lot of people who think we can "transform" them or "educate" the terrorists.  There is no such thing as compromise with terrorists.  Terrorist leaders are also highly educated people.

So essentially what is being done here is trying to get every single last one of them, but obviously that is next to impossible considering the fact that new leaders and groups are born constantly.  

Also, it's just not much of a threat. 

Car accidents, cancer, and 10896 other things harm more people every day. If people just ignored it, treated it like the stats of people killed by falling coconuts, it would all be fine. But the public, media and government each work to blow it up into a big external threat of war each for their own agenda or just out of ignorance.

Such that there is a way to prevent terrorism, it is better education of young people BEFORE they become ideologically compromised.

In particular:

- Paying attention to children with mental illness. The school shootings are always done by that one quiet kid who everyone ignored or mistreated throughout their life. There needs to be early and regular intervention
- Having a functional secular school system in Islamic countries, instead of letting it all be run by the mosques and emphasising the Quran over arithmetic, science and literacy.

So yeah I propose ignoring terrorism 100% (never speak of it again) and fix society's other problems in terms of education and social support in their own right.